While Diana had been rusticating at Bognor, the war had taken a decisive turn, with Hitler’s attack on Russia. There were many of her class who viewed Communism with such loathing that they would almost have made common cause with Nazi Germany rather than welcome Russia as an ally. Diana had no such inhibitions. ‘People hate Russians because they are Communists,’ she explained to John Julius, ‘and have done atrocious things to their own people and would like to convert us all to their highly unsuccessful ways, but I prefer Russians infinitely to Huns and fear their creed so much less than Nazism that I have no swallowing trouble over fighting on their side. Communism has at least an idealist aim – men are equals, no nations, all races are brothers, share your cow with your neighbour. Never be caught by people who say that Russia is worse than Germany – just consider if they are rich or poor.’
Now another extension of the war was threatening. It seemed inevitable that Japan would soon be fighting against us, and Duff’s new mission was therefore overdue if not already too late. It never occurred to Diana that she should not accompany him: if her husband were going into any sort of danger, then of course she must go too. Anyway, she had never visited the East and greatly looked forward to the experience. There was less enthusiasm among officials and military. A single VIP could be shuttled to and fro with comparative ease; accompanied by a wife the problems were worse than doubled. ‘That is bad,’ commented Oliver Harvey severely, when he heard Diana was to join the trip. ‘It will create the worst impression among the poor soldiers and sailors who cannot have their wives.’ Duff must have been aware of such feelings, but he seems to have made no attempt to dissuade Diana. He probably thought the objections nonsensical – knowing as he did that Diana would not expect anything in the way of special treatment – and reckoned that, anyway, once she had made her mind up it would take more than her husband and the combined Chiefs of Staff to stop her.
For Diana the only real deterrents were her affection for her animals and her horror of flying. The previous year in Texas she had for the first time been coaxed into the air. The weather was perfect, the aircraft both luxurious and secure, the pilot skilled and sympathetic, the country flat as a pancake, and Diana hated it more than anything she had done in her life before. ‘Your mother is a shuddering funky, old mouse and you must make the best of it,’ she wrote dolefully to John Julius. Now she was confronted by a vista of almost endless travel, much of it in dangerous conditions and under threat of enemy attack. Crowning offence, Imperial Airways had just been rechristened BOAC, removing any tincture of romance that might otherwise have flavoured the projected flight.
At least the first leg of the journey took her to New York and a brief reunion with her son. Her presence was needed. Mrs Paley had advanced ideas about education and brought up her own children at arms’ length with the help of stiff Austrian nurses in white coats who were regularly changed in case the children became attached to them and a psychiatrist to oversee their playpen. John Julius had arrived with a nanny to whom he was devoted. Mrs Paley was dismayed by this and blamed on it every defect in her English visitor, even down to his occasional car-sickness. Nanny must go. Diana pleaded that in England middle-aged men still loved their nannies and would confide in them. This confirmed Mrs Paley’s worst suspicions. ‘Although I like her and admire her enormously,’ Diana told Conrad, ‘I had to refrain from saying that anyway the result was a brave race, not a cissy lot screaming “Don’t send the boys over!”’ Eventually compromise was reached: Nanny was exiled, but only to the secretary’s house at the bottom of the garden.
All too soon for Diana they moved on. The last lap took fourteen hours, and Claire Booth Luce, a fellow-passenger, brightly announced that typhoons were predicted. She also reported that all white women were being evacuated from Singapore. Duff was reading War and Peace and was entirely happy throughout the flight, but Diana was reading Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and found it insufficiently gripping to distract her from the horrors ahead. In the event both Mrs Luce’s predictions proved false and the Coopers arrived safely in Singapore in early September.
It was the city of her dreams: ‘no trams, nothing of Birmingham or Kansas City or smoke and squalor of ports’. It was full of character and charm, with endless fascinating streets of indefinable period crumbling under her eyes. The street-restaurants smelt better than Prunier’s, with succulent little baked crabs and delicacies in sang-de-boeuf bowls. The atmosphere was Sino-Monte-Carlo with flashes and whiffs of Venice ‘most frail, tarty and peasant-pompous – there is the working life of the Chinks going on before your eyes down every street – coffin-making, lantern-painting, a tremendous lot of shaving. I never tire of strolling and peering and savouring.’
She settled down to learn Malay, so as to be able to communicate with the servants, but since most of them were Indians or Chinese, the incentive to study hard was limited. Ah-hem, the amah, could not speak to the cook, who in turn had no language in common with the gardener. A police chauffeur called George, who looked like Genghis Khan and wore a red badge meaning that he could speak English, was the only link with the household. Sen Toy, the butler, was particularly hard to make contact with: once Duff asked for his driver and got a bottle of crème de menthe. Diana had elegant lanterns painted with Chinese characters and hung round her bedroom, but had no idea whether she was ‘advertising trusses, or aphrodisiacs, or the price of a roger for all I know’. The house was delightful, a villa but open to the winds with a rough garden of flowering forest trees and neatly clipped cypress and hibiscus hedges. All the walls seemed to fold back and there was only a minimum of furniture. To complete the décor she bought a jade-green parakeet with scarlet cheek and nose. Diana would slip the ring of his chain on to a long bough of hibiscus and perch him on a flower-vase, where he glowed like a rare jewel.
As a holiday home it would have been idyllic. Unfortunately Duff had a job to do, and a job that led inevitably to irritation and frustration. His powers were no more than inquisitorial; enough to cause suspicion and alarm, yet too little to do anything about the deficiencies in Singapore’s defences. Sir Shenton Thomas, the Governor, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, the Commander-in-Chief, considered him an ignorant mischief-maker; he felt them to be complacent and negligent. To add to his problems, Anthony Eden was sniping at him from London, sending offensive telegrams urging him not to interfere in matters beyond his sphere. Duff replied in a fury, saying that he would return at once if the Government’s confidence in him was anything less than complete. ‘Anthony has always been Duff’s thorn,’ commented Diana. ‘He’s a shit!’ His outburst temporarily soothed Duff, but he was worried and fretful and for once in his life slept badly. One fearful night a ‘brain-fever bird’, whose speciality was uttering a single gloomy note at two-second intervals, perched on the tree outside their bedroom window. Duff was quickly hysterical with rage and soon Diana, half in tears, was imploring him not to bombard the darkness with the Ming pieces which she had lovingly acquired.
Though she knew that he was delighted she was there, Diana was uneasily aware that her presence in some ways made things more difficult for Duff. Thomas and Brooke-Popham, who insisted on regarding his visit as a fleeting one, took the fact that she had accompanied him as proof of the Coopers’ frivolity and amateurishness. It was still worse when Diana made it clear that she expected to accompany her husband on his journeys around the area. A brief trip across the straits to Johore was considered in order, though even that almost ended in disaster when the Sultan’s baby elephant reached out affectionately with its trunk and tried to rip her skirt off, but things were different when it came to flying to Java in a Hudson bomber. No place for a woman, said Brooke-Popham firmly; no time for joy-riding either, his attitude implied. Duff concurred. Diana fought the decision and, at midnight on the eve of his departure, Duff decided that peace at home was more important than a sense of injury among his colleagues and ruled that she should come after all. She almost rued her victory when the Dutch Governor held forth about the variety and venom of the local snakes. ‘Do they come into the house?’ she gibbered. ‘Not into this house,’ said the Governor consolingly, ‘but into the guest house many times.’ She would be ill-advised to pick up anything unless quite sure that it was not going to move.
The same battle took place when Duff was to visit Kuala Lumpur by train. Urged by his staff he turned on her. ‘I make everything more difficult – don’t I know that I’m only here on sufferance? I mustn’t lose face everywhere by not giving warning of my visit.’ Diana sulked and once again ‘sweet Duff showed remorse and said I could do what I liked always’. So along she went in the imperial train – yellow and chocolate with crowns all over it. Joe Alsop boarded the train at 5.30 a.m. at a wayside stop, having no idea she was aboard, and blundered into her cabin to find a chalk-white-faced mummy swathed in netting and not at all in a mood for visitors.
After this it was taken for granted by everyone that she would accompany Duff on all his journeys. Burma and India were next. In Rangoon Diana caused deep offence by removing her shoes and stockings and paddling off into the Shwe Dagon pagoda while Duff and the other dignitaries hovered nervously outside. Such conduct, the Governor explained, was most improper for a sahib, let alone a memsahib, and could well lead directly to the loss of Burma. Diana was unimpressed. Even her spirits, however, were somewhat daunted by the pomp of vice-regal Simla. It was the combination of grandeur and discomfort which most disconcerted her; regiments of servants in sumptuous uniforms, yet nobody prepared to clean a pair of shoes. Nor was the Viceroy’s idea of camping quite what she approved of, though Duff liked it exceedingly. ‘It was what a camp should be,’ he told Venetia Montagu. ‘Dozens of servants, a hot bath in your tent, and an observant orderly ever at your elbow with a gimlet or a chotah peg.’ Lord Linlithgow advised speaking to a visiting maharajah ‘as you would to a very nice local parson’; which seemed to Duff sound counsel. But Duff was preoccupied by his future and the problems of his job. To him, too, Eden seemed a perpetual threat: ‘I sometimes feel, probably without cause, that certain people will try to do me down in my absence. A.E. is the worst.’
Soon after their return from India, Duff prepared and despatched his report for the Cabinet. His chief recommendation was that a Commissioner General should be appointed, to co-ordinate all British policy in the East. To Diana it seemed alarmingly likely that such an office would be created and Duff picked to fill it; an appointment that would condemn them to exile for the duration of the war and perhaps longer. Only when faced by such a possibility did she realize how much she hankered after England, her friends, her cow. ‘The future is made of terror this morning,’ she told Conrad. ‘Soon our fate will be in the balance at 10 Downing Street.’
Meanwhile they planned their longest visit, to Australia and New Zealand. Diana was apprehensive about Australia. A lady from the Sydney Post had been to see her and had warned her that she should expect a rough reception. Noel Coward had been there recently and had been asked in so many words whether he was a bugger. ‘You’re nothing but a bloody queen,’ another journalist had told him. The Australians, Diana had been assured, were labouring under an inferiority complex; were determined to be high-hatted and Ritzed, and even called their farmers ‘graziers’. She was in dismay as their aircraft neared its destination:
What is there as a reward for the flight? No pagodas, no anthropophagi, nothing but ugliness and discomfort. I am writing now with Australia laid out beneath me for seven and half hours. I have not seen one human habitation. Nothing but utterly arid plain without tree or river. Perhaps it is seasonal. One can only hope so – but the lack of humans can’t be.’
Her sourness did not survive the beauty of the country and the warmth of their reception. ‘Papa and I have had a triumphal procession through Australia,’ she told John Julius. ‘They were crazy about us; don’t ask me why.’ Everywhere she met people who had crossed her path in England: at Belvoir, at Rowsley, at Bognor; filled with questions, goodwill, warmly inaccurate remembrances of the past. Robert Menzies particularly impressed her; bone-idle, she was told, but head-and-shoulders above the other politicians. Diana had met him in London with Chips Channon and had been delighted at his amiable mockery of their host. ‘Never knew such a fellow for royalty,’ he said. ‘He’s like a water-diviner. He’d smell out a prince anywhere.’ As Channon laughed rather hollowly the butler arrived to announce that the Duke of Kent was on the phone. In Australia Menzies was quite as refreshing. Best of all, when Duff sounded him out about the possibility, he made it obvious that he would relish the post of Commissioner General if it were offered him.
New Zealand was another matter. It seemed to her to exemplify every English attribute which she most disliked – smug, insular, mediocre. ‘The blood of New Zealand is so stale that they are reverting to type,’ she told Marjorie Anglesey; ‘Maori-type – growing longer torsos and weeny legs, and you can’t get a bed in a loony bin.’ They had imported all the English pests so as to feel at home – sparrows and starlings and gorse and newspapers that looked like The Times of forty years before; their houses were smothered in roses; their patriotism was touching; their gentility painful; oh, for a little honest vulgarity: ‘I suppose they are happy. I couldn’t bear it.’ The Governor General epitomized the mediocrity of the country, and his wife was embarrassingly arch. ‘What book are you going to write next, Mr Cooper?’ she asked. ‘Do make it about a lady next time.’ And then, more daringly, ‘Do you and Mr Eden play much Chinese chequers together?’
Back in Singapore it was clear that war was imminent. ‘There seems to me no defence at all,’ wrote Diana, ‘but I expect I’m wrong. Today a little fleet arrived to help.’ The ‘little fleet’ included the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Six days after she wrote, the Japanese landed in the north of Malaya. A few hours later Singapore was bombed. Three days later the two great British ships were sunk. It was not to be much longer before Diana’s view of Singapore’s defences was proved tragically correct.
The next few weeks were rich with muddle and alarm. The Japanese attack came before Duff’s report had been properly considered, long before it had been acted on, and Churchill’s decision to appoint him Resident Cabinet Minister with authority to form and preside over a War Cabinet was a belated emergency measure, not a piece of considered policy. Duff tried hard, but there was precious little to be done. Diana’s main fear was that there would be evacuation of women and children. If this were ordered, she resolved, she would not argue about it, merely wait until the last minute and then hide. Short of being carried forcibly up the gangway, she knew that the only thing that would get her aboard was a reasoned appeal from Duff to her love and loyalty. If she were in hiding, such an appeal could never be delivered. In the meantime she launched a campaign for blood-donors and settled down in Duff’s office to help with the secret work of some of the female secretaries who had left for Australia. ‘I hate being behind the scenes,’ she told Conrad on 28 December.
Office mismanagement plus Whitehall muddle breaks one’s faith, and the waste of money in cabling and decyphering! No private business would dream of such squandermania. And O, bless me! The flaps from Ambassadors! They are always in a flat spin, and ne’er a decisive thought. A scream of ‘While not…’, a yell of ‘At the same time we agree …’ The Governor and Colonial Secretary grow daily in black, obstructive defeatism plus foxy eelishness. They are violently anti-Duff and do all they can to undermine his powers and push, but the country, the towns, the press and business are against them and the Services are leaning that way, so I think all will soon work with greater dispatch.
Early in 1942 Diana deciphered the telegram which informed Duff that Wavell was appointed Supreme Commander in the South West Pacific and that his work was therefore at an end. A few days later Wavell arrived. Diana was disconcerted by his silences, but struck by his obvious courage and integrity. ‘The impression he gives is not brightened by his being very deaf and by having one wall-eye drooping and sightless. I suppose he can smell and feel still.’ At least his presence gave her a chance to be indiscreet about the leadership in Singapore, while Duff looked on, half disapproving yet relieved to have the story told in terms more crude than he would have cared to use himself.
Diana had no illusions that Singapore would long survive their departure. ‘The Germans don’t look too healthy,’ she told John Julius, ‘and we don’t worry about the Wops, but those slit-eyed dwarfs from Japan are a pest.’ The inhabitants would undoubtedly desert at the first bomb and who was to blame them? ‘These poor natives have no traditions and not much understanding, no Nelson to turn in his grave, nor a flag that generations have died to hold high, nor anything to make them face up to fear and sacrifice.’ Nor, she admitted, much reason to risk their lives to defend their white masters. She told herself that she was sad to be deserting the city at its most perilous moment. So she was; she would have been insensitive indeed if she had not felt regret, even guilt, at leaving behind so many people whom she had grown to like. Her servants were touchingly sad to see her go. And yet her main sensation was relief, tinged with exhilaration at being on the move again. Her sensations were, in fact, blurred at the moment of departure. ‘A last gin-sling,’ she demanded, as the cars waited. The Chinese butler thought she said ‘a large gin-sling’. Diana’s gin-slings were always large, this one was enormous.
It was a protracted return, including in the itinerary a stop-over in the penal settlement of Port Blair, in the Andaman Islands. Surrounded by ‘surly filthy Indians and bad Burmen, criminals to a man’, in a house without light or mosquito nets, deprived of sleep and with no hope of breakfast, Diana passed a night of exquisite discomfort. Then it was on to New Delhi – ‘In our passage we are asphyxiated by the smell of elephant. It may be a dead one in our wing somewhere; it may be dead Viceroy’ – and endless delays at Cairo. Duff was depressed by the fate of Malaya and his own association with it. ‘Papa did an amazingly good job against obstruction from all sides,’ Diana wrote loyally to John Julius, but failure was failure and she knew that it could do no good to his career. ‘It may after all be that the home Government think he has made an appalling balls of it.’ Would he be offered another job or left to fret in semi-retirement? They would find out only in London and they could not get there quickly enough for Diana. On 16 February she stepped from the train at Paddington in white fur coat and Royal Yacht Squadron cap. It was cold, it was drizzling, no one of consequence was there to meet them, but they were home.
*
Duff did not find himself in disgrace, but nor did he return in triumph. ‘You were the man in charge,’ Churchill told him reproachfully. ‘Why did you not warn me what was about to happen?’ Duff’s resultant explosion did something to clear the air, but it was several months before he was employed again and then only in a secret, backroom job that kept him well out of the public eye. Ministry of Information followed by Singapore; he knew that the stigma of failure was marked on his career. Diana resented the unfairness more than he did, and did not scruple to plead with Churchill that her husband should have some more dignified employment. At one point it was suggested that Duff should succeed Oliver Lyttelton in Cairo, but the idea died young – mercifully, in Diana’s view, since the three weeks she spent in Egypt on the way back from Singapore had been more than enough for a lifetime.
For a few months they lived in London, squatting in a flat lent them by the novelist A. E. W. Mason. ‘It smells dreadfully, and artistically it leaves me low, but it is free – Freemason – so we are lucky, as ends simply won’t meet.’ Diana worked by day making camouflage-nets on the top floor of the Army & Navy Stores. The task kept her hands occupied, no doubt to the benefit of the war-effort, but it left her mind idle and even the physical demands were limited. She hankered for the farm at Bognor and soon was there again, restocking with rabbits and goats and gradually annexing nearby building sites on which she grew illicit crops of kale and mangolds. Chips Channon visited her and was recruited to drive the pigs, still wearing his Lobb shoes and his Leslie and Roberts suit. They walked to the water’s edge and surveyed the formidable array of barbed wire and spiked ramparts. ‘If only Singapore had been like that,’ said Diana sadly. Then they moved on to admire the latest boiling of pig-swill. ‘To think,’ gushed Channon, ‘the world’s most beautiful woman showing off her swill.’
John Julius returned from the United States in the summer of that year. The temptation to keep him in safety across the Atlantic was a real one, but Diana had no doubt that it must be resisted. When Kommer protested she replied firmly: ‘For his character and his fame he must be in his country now he is no longer in his babyhood … to be part of it all, to breathe the same air as his people and generation have to breathe, to fight the same fight and not be in Canadian cotton-wool.’
She was literally ill with apprehension while he was crossing the Atlantic, but a warship delivered him safely and he was despatched at once to Eton. Her fears were by no means at rest, however. She was haunted by the memory of two Eton boys who had been burnt to death forty years before. Lord Wimborne, a man terrified by fire, used always to take with him a Gladstone bag containing a long rope with a hook at one end. This seemed to Diana a sage precaution, and John Julius was thus equipped when he arrived at Eton. His house master was not amused and returned the paraphernalia next day. Elaborate plans were made on this and similar occasions to avoid his travelling by way of London, but she was determined that her son should not be cosseted. ‘I like him to have as much discomfort as possible,’ she told her sister Marjorie, when he was going to stay at Plas Newydd. ‘No feather-beds or painted rooms. Give him a soldier’s bed in a loft or basement or under the wide and starry.’
In August 1942 Diana had her fiftieth birthday. She did not look her age. The lines of her face were a little sharper, more rigidly defined, but they had lost nothing of their arresting splendour, the love-in-the-mist blue eyes struck home as forcibly as ever; the radiance, the inner glow still burnt fiercely. Nor did she feel fifty. All the old vitality was there, the hunger for new experience, the determination to turn every expedition into an adventure, every meeting into a joyous party. Yet in some ways she had changed. She was more tolerant than thirty years before; no more ready to suffer fools gladly, yet less ready to dismiss a person as a fool merely because he differed from her. She accepted people for what they were, rather than condemned them because they were not what she felt they ought to be. She was less egocentric, still single-minded in pursuit of her ends but more apt now to pursue those ends in the interests of Duff, of John Julius, of one of her multitude of friends. She admitted a wider responsibility towards the world: in the past there had been an inner élite of those she loved and the rest for whom she cared nothing; she still cherished her friends above all things, but she now admitted that the rest too had a right to exist, even that she had a duty to help them on their way. She was wiser; more ready to come to terms with her limitations, more prudent in her judgements, less disposed to rail against a malign and perversely hostile fate.
In other ways she was the same. No one who had known and understood the little girl scrabbling around the turrets of Belvoir would have failed to recognize the same traits in the great lady of 1942. No grande dame, indeed, could have been less grand, more impetuous, more informal. There was the same assertiveness, the same outrageous demands on friends and acquaintances, the same generosity and total loyalty. She had no more respect for authority, was no more disposed to trust dogma because it had always been accepted. Loving tradition, she remained the least conservative of women. The circle of her interests had widened, but the same limitations, the same prejudices flourished. Moral judgements still meant nothing to her; she either liked people or as far as possible ignored them; and if she liked them then they could commit almost any iniquity without forfeiting her affection. She still swung between black gloom and lyrical high-spirits; rejoiced in a place in the limelight and was crippled by painful shyness. Life was still far more fun when she was around. Middle age had not withered her and her infinite variety was still a delight to all who knew her.
*
The Coopers spent eighteen months in England while the war swung gradually in favour of the Allies. Then in October 1943 Duff was offered the post of British Representative to the French Committee of Liberation in recently-liberated Algiers, with the probability that in due course he would proceed as Ambassador to Paris. All his life he had longed to fill this office. He almost lost his chance when Churchill discovered that he was an ardent Gaullist but Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, was detailed to brief him on de Gaulle’s iniquities and the Prime Minister allowed his affection for Duff to overcome his doubts.
It remained to tell Diana. She knew that the appointment would make Duff happy and so gallantly put her best face on it, but the idea filled her with dismay. ‘Flustered, hysterical, funky and giggly,’ she described herself to Bridget McEwen, wholly unsuited to the pomp and circumstance of a great Embassy. Her stumbling, schoolgirl French, ‘the loss of my cow, my plot so lovingly mulched, my few fast-ageing friends, my child, this Eton, this England’; the terrors of flight, all made her feel that she was the unluckiest woman on earth. The diet in Algiers, she was told, was spam and lemons, the lemons no sourer than Algerian wine – what of the cream, the eggs, the cheese, the rabbits of Bognor? French women intimidated her: ‘they make me feel at any time a smelly, untended, untaught, uncouth, dense bumpkin’. What must be must be, however. For the second time Cincinnata put away her plough, dispersed her pigs and chickens and girded her loins for battle.
Duff and Diana arrived in Algiers on 3 January 1944. For the next three months Diana’s correspondence was an almost uninterrupted cry of woe. Their house was the first and most enduring grievance. Evelyn Waugh described it as ‘a charming Arabesque villa’, but to Diana it was the epitome of vulgar ugliness; dark, musty, squalid. The sitting-rooms looked as if they belonged to an inferior brothel; the chimneys smoked, if any fuel could be found to burn in them; the beds were damp and broken. There was no stove, no telephone, no linen or plate. Duff was little help since he was almost blind to his surroundings, though he did join in deploring the lack of hot, or even tepid water. ‘All goes worse than I have power to tell,’ she wailed to Conrad. ‘I have felt for the last three days that once the fearful flight was over nothing else would disturb my mind, and I really believe that it has taken this house, and this house only, to do it.’ Almost their first night Charles Codman from Boston arrived to dinner. Diana, still suffering the after-effects of the drugs she had taken to calm herself for the journey, made matters no better by stoking up on many cocktails and much Algerian wine. ‘She got in a state of exaggerated depression about the ugliness of the villa,’ wrote Duff in his diary, ‘and the impossibility of improving it owing to the complete absence of any commodities in Algiers.’
The house had been found for them by their comptroller, Freddie Fane, formerly Secretary of the Travellers’ Club in Paris, a Mephistophelian figure whom Diana at first distrusted. He would not make the grade, she told Conrad, he was close to collapse, ‘the cold, the shame, his impotence and incompetence are getting him down’. He bought three thousand eggs on the black market, which, as they cost sixpence apiece and there was neither ice nor isinglass in the house, Diana reasonably felt excessive. Gradually he began to prove his resourcefulness, he found prisoners to clear up the house and garden, raided a local cellar to provide drinkable wine. His methods were eccentric, but agreeably flamboyant; when he caught a young Arab stealing from the orchard he crucified him against a stone wall in the full sun. The punishment cannot have been very fearsome, for within six hours of his release the Arab was in the orchard again. ‘I’m getting very fond of old Freddie,’ Diana confessed, after she had been there a month or so. ‘My first impressions, I ought to learn, are always wrong.’
She did not change her first impression of the Rookers. Kingsley Rooker was Duff’s deputy, and not the last of Diana’s grievances was that the two couples had to share the house. In normal circumstances she would probably have found the Rookers harmless if not congenial, but living cheek-by-jowl in acute discomfort proved a strain on everybody’s nerves. Hostilities grumbled for weeks, then erupted when Diana proposed to open the villa gardens to the employees of Duff’s office. Rooker vetoed the idea; one wanted the grounds to oneself, one would get an awful crowd. Duff advised Diana to give way and avoid any more rows. Fuming, she acquiesced, then revived the idea when the Rookers at last moved off to a house of their own. The staff flocked to the gardens and the experiment proved a success. ‘I’m surprised at my own energy and confidence,’ she told Conrad proudly.
Diana’s irritation at the squalor in which they lived was heightened by the comparative luxury enjoyed by their colleagues. The Americans had heat, light and even a sofa; the Russians disposed of three comfortable villas. Down the road, Harold Macmillan, Minister Resident with Allied Headquarters, lived in considerable style. He asked Duff and Diana to many meals, but Diana felt he might have invited them to stay, he had no wife with him and four or five empty rooms. She still liked and admired him, however. Randolph Churchill, when he came to stay, said that he was going to run Macmillan as next Prime Minister: ‘Anything is better than Anthony. You must think so, darling.’ Diana did think so: ‘There’s more life and vision, less die in his wool, than there is in Donkey’s ears or Sir J. Anderson’s warts.’ He was her horse in the prime-ministerial stakes and she backed him loyally till he finally came home.
Gaston Palewski, ‘my old grinning, spotty friend’, now chef-de-cabinet to de Gaulle, met them on their arrival and was their principal ally among the French. Occasionally Diana found him too much of a good thing with his endless ‘O, la joie de vous avoir ici’, ‘la première femme civilisée’ and so on ad nauseam, but she appreciated his high spirits and his affection. He could do little to influence his intractable leader but at least his heart was in the right place and he would do all he could to ease Anglo-French relations. General Giraud, ‘a more wooden Kitchener of Khartoum’, would have liked to be friendly too, but he was so preoccupied by the crumbling of his position in face of an implacable de Gaulle that not much could be expected from him. De Lattre de Tassigny seemed to Diana the pick of the bunch, ‘spirit and wit, strength and fun’. Her personal favourite was probably d’Astier de la Vigerie, a ‘spellbinder and no mistake’, Diana called him, a romantic hero of the Resistance with whom every woman in Algiers was in love. She felt no similar enthusiasm for the worthy René Massigli, future French Ambassador in London, in spite of the fact that the local gossip had it that she was a grande amoureuse, sleeping regularly with Palewski, Massigli, and some third lover not yet identified.
De Gaulle, himself, was the reason for their being in Algiers. ‘Wormwood’, Diana called him. Before she met him she called on his wife and babbled on about her life in England. The word reached Wormwood: ‘Qu’avez vous fait de votre vache?’ he asked at their first meeting. When in doubt Diana always talked about her childhood, which lasted for a meal or two; but the thought of a procession of meals in Algiers and Paris beside this iceberg filled her with dismay. She cast around for new subjects and tried Australia: ‘Il paraît qu’il y a des kangarous,’ Wormwood observed gloomily. Fortunately for Diana, though sadly for Duff, de Gaulle was usually in such a rage with the Allies about their treatment of what he held to be the only legitimate French Government that social occasions were rare. Diana in fact sympathized with him. What she felt to be the persecution of the French seemed to her ill-judged and absurd. ‘I feel ashamed now to talk to the French about the situation, or would be if they were not all confident that Duff was doing his best for them whole-heartedly.’ Though she never learned to enjoy de Gaulle’s company, she equally never lost her romantic vision of him as liberator and superman. It was typical of her that, during the 14 July celebrations, even though due to meet him at tea, she insisted on joining the crowds and running after his car, cheering and clapping. ‘I like my celebrities seen through difficulties,’ she told Conrad, ‘and I like to run for them, not sit and speak with them.’
Her French was an added hazard in these relationships. Diana possessed a wide vocabulary but even less control of grammar than in English. Tenses and genders were a vexatious barrier to self-expression, to be knocked over if they could not conveniently be jumped. She had discovered the essential truth: that the French do not much care whether you speak their language correctly provided you speak it fluently. ‘It’s nerve and brass, audace and disrespect, and leaping-before-you-look and what-the-hellism, that must be developed.’ At first she ‘tutoyéd’ de Gaulle, because that was the only construction she had learnt in her nursery; her use of the wrong word sometimes caused embarrassment; yet she got by and the French loved it. Duff, with twice her control of the language, was stiff and tongue-tied, afraid of making a fool of himself. Half aghast and half admiring, he listened as Diana rattled on, and thus won for himself a reputation for stony taciturnity.
Shortly after their arrival the Coopers were summoned to Marrakesh where Churchill was recovering from pneumonia, for what was to be a critical confrontation between the Prime Minister and de Gaulle. The meeting went well and Churchill was in uproarious form. They talked about the future. Mrs Churchill was tranquilly concerned that her husband would not long survive the war. ‘You see, he’s seventy and I’m sixty,’ she said, ‘and we’re putting all we have into this war, and it will take all we have.’ Diana was moved but unconvinced. She believed that the only thing that would kill Churchill off before extreme old age was some lethal disease. ‘He is too interested in other things. The peace will absorb him while he’s part of it, and he’ll be fighting like a champion to get back to the helm if he loses it.’
The party went on an elaborate picnic in the hills about eighty miles from Marrakesh. Churchill was settled on a long chair and fed a succession of brandies, each one accompanied by an elaborate charade of consulting his doctor, Lord Moran, first. Churchill insisted on pounding down a steep slope, then staunchly confronted the climb back. Diana seized a table-cloth and looped it behind him, and a group of men towed him puffing to the top, with Lord Moran walking behind carrying the great man’s cigar and at intervals taking his pulse. Mercifully, Churchill took an interest in their sad plight in Algiers, and a stream of peremptory telegrams went off, insisting that the British Representative must be better housed and served.
From then on things began to mend. China, silver and glass arrived in large quantities; linen too, floridly marked ‘Empire Hotel, Bath’. Lord Portal was enlisted to bring a four-branched candlestick, Sergeant-Major Bright scrounged a new boiler, Diana ‘borrowed’ blue paint from the military stores. Rifleman Sweeny, formerly from the household of Lord Gretton, lent tone to the establishment. He remembers above all the unexpectedness of Diana. She was always having new ideas, goats in the dining-room, meals in the garden. You never knew where you were, but could be sure at least that life would not be dull.
For almost the only time in her life, Diana had started off in Algiers by being bored. She moped for hours on her bed, slept late and went to bed early. ‘In any other place I have been – Geneva, Singapore, New York, Midwest towns – I always found something: learning the language, exercises for the hips, riding. Here nothing that I can find makes sense.’ Then abruptly she pulled herself together. The villa began to function properly. Guests flocked in. The Embassy, as it was usually known, became a place to which people competed to go. The official French welcomed invitations, the unofficial too. André Gide came to lunch. ‘I expected an old Frog in a skull cap and velvet collar covered with scurf; instead I found a very clean, bald, gentlemanlike man dressed in a good brown tweed suit with brown shoes and spats. His only eccentricity was when he saw there was a fire in the dining-room and exclaimed, “Ah, je vais ôter mon sweater”, which he retired to the hall and did.’ Martha Gellhorn was called in to entertain him and ‘swept the old sod off his feet’; indeed he enjoyed himself so much that he refused to leave until Miss Gellhorn was on her way.
English friends came thick and fast. Victor Rothschild arrived; ‘On no account unpack his Lordship’s bag,’ Duff warned Sweeny. ‘It’s full of bombs.’ Randolph Churchill and Evelyn Waugh were frequent guests, spitting venom amiably at each other. Churchill later had a non-malignant tumour removed. ‘What a triumph of modern science,’ commented Waugh, ‘to find the only part of Randolph that is not malignant and remove it.’ Evelyn Waugh haunted the house, slumped in black misery alleviated only by sudden rages. Diana asked what was wrong. Nothing, said Waugh in surprise; he was rich, he was successful, he loved his wife and children. Then could he not look a little happier? Waugh was struck by the suggestion, which people, he said, had sometimes made before, but did little to act on it. Randolph Churchill arrived to nurse his injuries after the aircrash in which he and Evelyn Waugh had come close to being killed in Yugoslavia. He seemed to settle in almost permanently and proved a wearing guest:
Randolph chain-drinks from noon on, it’s quite alarming. He does not seem to get any tighter. I should think he must go through two bottles of gin a day. I wouldn’t mind if only he were better house-trained. He staggers into my room at about 9.30 and orders his breakfast. His coughing is like some huge dredger that brings up dreadful sea-changed things. He spews them out into his hand or into the vague – as soon as I get up he takes my place in my bed with his dirt-encrusted feet and cigarette ash and butts piling up around him. He is cruelly bored and leaves his mouth open to yawn.
Another constant visitor was Bloggs Baldwin, second son of the former Prime Minister, who attached himself to Diana as a cross between aide-de-camp, lover and court jester. Turnip-white-faced, ginger-haired, heavily bespectacled, ill-at-ease in society, he was not a glamorous figure; but he was a true original, uproariously funny when relaxed with a few close friends, with a streak of poetry and a sense of beauty. He was a perfect companion for Diana when Duff was preoccupied by business; as ready for adventure as she was, as unconcerned about decorum or discomfort. Devoted to his wife and son in England, he was forlorn and lonely in North Africa and found in the Coopers’ house a home where he could feel appreciated and at ease. ‘We go and picnic and read Browning,’ Diana told her sister Marjorie, ‘and talk interminably about our childhood and our families.’ Diana approached the Secretary of State for Air, Archibald Sinclair, and suggested Bloggs Baldwin should be promoted. Not surprisingly her proposal met with no success.
Diana was still not wholly happy in Algiers – she did not feel she had a proper role to play, slept badly, was bored by the official dinners – but life had many compensations. There was a freedom to life which she feared would be lost in Paris. ‘Duff allows me to be eccentric in clothes and deportment and behaviour. I thought he just put blinkers on but I discovered the other night when there was a row because I broke his last pair of spectacles, that his leniency is a policy. So good he is.’ Martha Gellhorn was summoned to help entertain important visitors and found her hostess in full Arab dress. Lunching with Sir John Slessor Diana wanted to bathe but had no costume. Rejecting all offers of a loan she plunged into the pool in her lettuce-green lunch dress and Chinese coolie hat and swam to and fro at a stately breast-stroke. She lunched in underclothes and Sir John’s macintosh, looking ravishing.
She found activities to fill her day. At 8.30 every morning a forceful lady in white trousers arrived to put her through a routine of exercise, bending and stretching and puffing and panting. Two or three mornings a week were devoted to packing Red Cross parcels at a particularly sordid convent. She acquired a cow called Fatima, from the franche comté, with a white face and brown body. She was asked £170 for it, an impossible price; then a rich French colon offered to buy it and leave it with her on extended loan. ‘I said I couldn’t allow it. Then I said I could.’ Second thoughts proved best. There was also a tame gazelle that fed on rose-petals and cigarettes, a peacock that periodically visited the drawing-room and lay with tail extended on the sofa, two partridges, some hens and a family of hoopoes.
From time to time she escaped officialdom to undertake the sort of expedition she adored. Often Bloggs Baldwin came with her. She dragged him once to the famous market at Michelet, a journey that involved a night in a bug-ridden hotel. They started too late on the return journey and darkness found them still in the mountains. Trying to remove the blackout-masks from the headlights, a relic of wartime London, Diana removed the entire light by mistake. She was delighted since it gave her an excuse to invade a nearby hamlet and curl up on the first verandah she came to. At her feet slept a cat, by her side a pariah dog; only at dawn, when it took off and harooshed over her, did she discover that an enormous hen was roosting a foot from her head.
A still more perfect afternoon was passed after she escaped before the coffee from a stuffy lunch given by their Russian colleagues. ‘Bognor clothed, kerchiefed head and cowboy hat, I walked off into the hinterland, adventure bent.’ She infiltrated through the vineyards to a neighbouring convent and snooped around the farm, talking to the Arab cowman. Diana asked if she could milk them some time; the cowman was agreeable to the idea, but explained that the morning milk was at 3 a.m. Diana said that in England she always milked her cows at 7 a.m. The Arab saw nothing surprising about this apparition being a milkmaid but found her schedule grotesque – ‘“tordant”; he laughed and laughed and had to go to tell his chums of this English eccentricity.’ She rambled on happily in search of an old palace she had glimpsed from a distance. Encouraged by a No Entry sign she pushed on until she reached the front of the house. At this point the U.S. military arrived and asked what she was doing. She apologized for losing her way; as she had got this far could she perhaps see the other side of the house. ‘Certainly not,’ said the soldiers: a restricted area. Charmingly Diana surrendered, walked back out of sight, then darted through a hedge, across a ditch and into a farmyard. In a few minutes she would have reached her objective but the military police, now thoroughly suspicious, were on her track, and a jeep intercepted her. ‘Have you come to arrest me?’ asked Diana. The answer was clearly that they had: ‘So in I got, delighted that I was to see my house, and from the inside too.’ For an hour they incarcerated her, uneasily conscious that they had got hold of something not covered by the military manuals: ‘They’d caught something odd, like the clowns in The Tempest finding Caliban.’ Eventually they took her name and let her go. ‘I hope Duff won’t be serious,’ wrote Diana nervously. She had little cause for worry: it had all happened many times before and Duff knew that nothing he could do would stop it happening many times again.
The end of the war was drawing near. The flying bombs were now hitting England – ‘terrible news from London,’ wrote Duff. ‘Wilton’s gone, and before the end of the oyster season.’ Life ebbed from Algiers as the war moved up Italy. Winston Churchill paid a brief visit in August 1944. Randolph, ‘all smiles and love and as irritating as possible’, elected to take Duff’s side in support of de Gaulle and pontificated as if he were the elder statesman and his father a foolish young man. ‘Shut up!’ shouted Churchill, finally enraged. ‘I will not be lectured by you.’ Lord Moran, in attendance as usual, thought that Diana looked as lovely as ever but exhausted. ‘When a beautiful woman begins to lose her looks she needs something else to keep her afloat. When the time comes, Diana, who is still beautiful, will, I think, be saved by her character. Meanwhile, she is one of the few women who is not intimidated by Winston.’
Rome was liberated and at once Diana began to dream of a visit. It seemed likely to remain a dream, then suddenly it became reality. A passage was available, room could be found for Bloggs Baldwin as well, Churchill would be there and had said he was particularly anxious to see her. Jock Whitney, who had fallen from a table in Rome on which he was dancing and broken his glasses, had told her that never had licence and brothelry gone further. The prospect sounded delightful. It turned out less well. Bloggs fell ill shortly after their arrival. ‘Unforgivable,’ Diana stigmatized his conduct. ‘People have no right to be ill on three-day trips.’ Every time Churchill saw her he thought of de Gaulle and became apoplectic. Randolph Churchll fêted her energetically for the first day or two, then moved north with his father. Evelyn Waugh was at his most amiable, very much at home and clearly considering the Roman Catholic church his private property, but Diana declined to join in his enthusiasm for Pio Nono – Pope Fanny Adams I was Bloggs’s name for him. The Canadian George Vanier, too, was wild in his enthusiasm for the Roman Church and its Pontiff – ‘Please talk to George after dinner,’ pleaded Mrs Vanier. ‘I think he’s gone mad.’
Diana was in Rome when news came of the liberation of Paris. Years later she wrote to Evelyn Waugh: ‘I remember to my shame the stab of personal anguish the news gave me.’ Algiers, once a hell-hole, now promoted to paradise, was behind her. The postwar was beginning. Shades of the prison house began to close. By the time she wrote the letter they had long closed. ‘It’s very dull now (my life I mean). It’s what you like. Calmly planned – unhurried – no adventures – no milking – no interest to me at all. I am to blame, but I was born and bred an adventurer, with a great zest for change and excitement.’ In fact, as always, she was to create her own adventures as she went along; but in Rome in August 1944 the future seemed depressingly taped and ticketed.
She went back to Algiers for a few final days. ‘I feel sad,’ she told Conrad, ‘because it can never be again, and because it has been sunlit and strange and unlike real life.’ The last night she dragged her mattress to the garden, tethered her mosquito-net to a tree and tried to sleep. Within an hour she was woken by a cloud-burst that soaked her and ripped away her net. ‘I fled whimpering to the house,’ she wrote in her memoirs. Whimpering she left Algiers and, with a brave smile but inwardly whimpering still, she went to Paris.