This is not the end of the letters, but it marks a milestone. My Oxford days were over, and in the autumn of 1952, a newly married man, I began my life as a member of the Foreign Service that was to continue for the next dozen years. For the first three of these I was stationed in London, going backwards and forwards to Chantilly whenever possible and speaking to my mother most days on the telephone. The letters consequently almost dry up; it was only when I was posted to Belgrade in January 1955 that they once again come thick and fast.
As I read them now, for the first time in well over half a century, how do they strike me? To begin with, they come from a different world, a world in which the presence of servants was a matter of course – and by no means only in families of the relatively rich and privileged. The perfectly ordinary middle-class family with whom I lived in Strasbourg, for example, a couple in their early thirties with two children, employed a staff of three – a cook and two maids – and still brought in caterers when they gave a dinner party. At Chantilly my parents must have employed six or seven at least; and, as the letters make all too clear, they frequently seem to have been a good deal more trouble than they were worth. Not that my mother was a difficult employer: Miss Wade, who plays a considerable part in the early letters, remained devotedly with her for over fifty years and was lovingly looked after for the rest of her life – though she proved, alas, untransportable to France.
To a large extent, of course, servants were indispensable. Vacuum cleaners, though still of a fairly elementary kind, were already in common use; but our primitive refrigerator at Bognor was operated by gas, while dishwashers, blenders, microwaves, deep freezes and the thousand other devices which we now take for granted – suitcases on wheels also come to mind – were still non-existent, as were supermarkets with their copious stocks of precooked dishes. This, perhaps, still fails to explain why my father, his friends and contemporaries needed personal manservants for every day of their lives, valets who would automatically accompany them whenever they went away for the weekend and whom their hosts would expect to accommodate. Standards of dress were admittedly far more demanding than they are today; certainly until the Second World War, my father would expect to wear white tie and tails three or four times a week, and always when going to the theatre. After the war, white ties became a lot less frequent; but he still changed into a dinner jacket almost every night of his life,1 and at Chantilly – which was, let me emphasise, considered pretty informal as such houses go – we never sat down to lunch or dinner without the butler, Jean, standing in the corner supervising the service.
Then there is the matter of transport. After the war the age of civil aviation gradually resumed, but at least until the middle 1950s aeroplanes remained unreliable. It was not that they tended to fall out of the sky; already they were probably safer than cars or even trains. But they were irregular and unpunctual, hideously so during the winter. When my father came to London in December 1944 to pick me up and take me back to Paris, RAF Transport Command made us wait four days in London before the weather permitted a cross-Channel trip; we arrived only on Christmas Eve.
There was one other enormous difference to our way of life sixty – nearly seventy – years ago. No television. I wonder whether my father ever in his life watched that tiny, flickering, black and white screen – not that it had much to offer in those days. Certainly we never had it at Chantilly. At weekends when people came to stay, there might be a rubber or two of bridge, which he loved; otherwise we just talked, or occasionally sang to my guitar or around the piano. On all other evenings we read aloud, usually Dickens or Trollope, but sometimes short stories – by Kipling, perhaps, or Somerset Maugham, or – for me best of all – P. G. Wodehouse.
Mention of my father raises another question. To those who never knew him – and by now there are relatively few who did – I wonder how he emerges from these letters. Self-indulgent certainly: he loved all the good things of life and made sure that he got them whenever possible. ‘It’s always cheaper in the long run’, he used to maintain, ‘to stay at the Ritz’ – though in fact he personally preferred the Dorchester. He was, on the other hand, anything but soft or effete. His physical bravery he had shown by winning the Distinguished Service Order in the First World War; his moral courage by his resignation from Neville Chamberlain’s Cabinet after the Munich agreement of 1938. He was astonishingly well read in history and literature; his biography of Talleyrand has been consistently in print for the past eighty years. He also had a passion for poetry, which he could recite for hours at a time; Shakespeare he knew virtually by heart; he even wrote a short, light-hearted book about him. Thanks largely to a superb sense of humour, he was wonderful company – though if he was bored, he was incapable of concealing it.
None of this, of course, comes out in these letters. Why should it? I knew him already. The picture painted here strikes me as slightly mocking; but the mockery, such as it is, is clearly a sign of affection. This is made clearer still by the genuine anguish that my mother felt whenever he showed the slightest signs of sickness. He was, as we know, seriously ill in April 1947 and, as I have already said, I believe he never quite recovered. By the 1950s he was on a strict diet, which after a few early lapses he conscientiously followed; but it was too late. On New Year’s Day 1954 he died of a sudden violent haemorrhage – at sea, on his way with my mother to a Caribbean holiday.
It took her a long time to recover from his death. She had had one or two light-hearted affairs, but he was the only man she had really loved. He, on the other hand, had had a great many throughout their married life; but she never minded except when she believed that the lady concerned was unworthy of him. ‘Mind?’ she once said to me. ‘Why should I mind if they made him happy? I always knew: they were the flowers, I was the tree.’
Thanks to the support of friends and family, she gradually regained the will to live. Henceforth, inevitably, her entire life centred on me and my family. She hung on for another six years at Chantilly, on the grounds that the Foreign Office might post me to Paris. Over and over again I tried to explain that this would not and could not happen; that, if it did, life for my chief the ambassador – and still more for his wife – would be impossible; as the letters make all too clear, she had made things difficult enough for the Harveys. Of course she refused to listen, of course she pulled all the strings she could, but – thank heavens – to no avail. When, in January 1955, I was posted to Belgrade and my wife Anne and I lived for the first six months in one tiny hotel room, she took care of our two-year-old daughter Artemis at Chantilly, giving her daily lessons as she had given me; later she came to visit us, once to Belgrade, two or even three times to Beirut.
Finally, in 1960, I returned to London, with every prospect of remaining there for the next four or five years; and she gave up. The Château de Saint-Firmin was returned to the Institut de France, and she rented a house a few hundred yards from ours in Little Venice, where she was to live for over a quarter of a century. By this time my son Jason had been born; she took over his education too. No grandmother, I feel sure, ever got more fun out of her grandchildren; they adored her in return.
Despite everything we could do, her last three or four years were, I’m afraid, unhappy. Her great joy had been driving her little Mini around London; while she was mobile she was content; she could go shopping, take friends on errands or her grandchildren to the cinema. She would leave notes for parking wardens tucked under the windscreen wiper: one, I remember, read ‘Dearest warden, have gone to dentist 19a. Look like 85-year-old pirate. Have mercy.’ We were all surprised by how often they worked. Then, one day when she was eighty-nine, she hit a traffic island in Wigmore Street. She drove straight home, locked the car, went up to bed and never drove again. ‘I never saw it,’ she told me later, ‘it might have been a child.’
She never left her bed again; there was no point. She had, thank God, no dementia; but failing eyesight gradually made it impossible to read, and increasing deafness to enjoy the television. ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like’, she said to me once, ‘just staring at the same bit of wallpaper – and with nothing to look forward to.’ I would call in every evening on my way back from the London Library, hoping that there would be no other visitor; three-way conversations were beyond her.
She died – quite simply of old age – on 18 June 1986, a few weeks before her ninety-fourth birthday.
1 At Belvoir Castle my uncle, the Duke of Rutland, who died during the war, was known to insist on white tie for dinner every night. When he was once asked if he never wore a black one, he replied, ‘Only when I am dining with the Duchess alone in her room.’
Lady Diana Cooper, considered the most beautiful woman of her day, was an aristocrat, a socialite, an actress of stage and early screen. She married rising political star Duff Cooper, who went on to run the controversial Ministry of Information for Churchill. This golden couple knew everyone who was anyone and sat at the very heart of British public life.
Diana’s letters to her only son, John Julius Norwich, cover the period 1939 to 1952. They take us from the rumblings of war, through the Blitz, which the Coopers spent holed up in the Dorchester (because it was newer, and therefore less vulnerable, then the Ritz), to rural Sussex where we see Diana blissfully setting up a smallholding as part of the war effort. After a spell with the Free French in Algiers, Duff was appointed British Ambassador to France and the couple settled into the glorious embassy in post-Liberation Paris.
All of fashionable and powerful society is here, often in affectionate and unguarded detail, from Diana’s close friends Evelyn Waugh and the Mitfords to Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Hollywood; from an off-duty Churchill to Roosevelt at the White House; from Edward and Wallis Simpson to the young princesses Margaret and Elizabeth.
Over and beyond all the glitz, Diana emerges in these letters as highly intelligent, funny, fiercely loyal: a woman who disliked extravagance, who was often crippingly shy, who was happiest in the countryside with her cow and goats and whose greatest love and preoccupation were her son and husband.
As a portrait of an age and some of history’s most important events, these letters are invaluable. But they also give us a vivid and touching portrait of the love between a mother and son, separated by war, oceans – and the constraints of the time they lived in.
Lady Diana Cooper was born on August 29th, 1892, daughter ostensibly of the 8th Duke of Rutland, in fact of the Hon. Harry Cust. Defying all her mother’s efforts to stop her, she became a nurse at Guy’s Hospital during the First World War and married Alfred Duff Cooper, DSO, son of a surgeon from Norwich, who became one of the Second World War’s key politicians. Her startling beauty resulted in her playing the lead in two silent films and then Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle.
For the war effort, Diana converted their seaside cottage in Sussex into a small farm. In 1944, following the Liberation of Paris, the couple moved into the British Embassy, Paris. They then retired to a house at Chantilly just outside the city. After Duff’s death in 1954 Diana remained there until 1960, when she moved back to London. She died in 1986.
John Julius Norwich, the only son of Diana and Duff Cooper, is the author of histories of Norman Sicily, the Republic of Venice, the Byzantine Empire, the Mediterranean and, most recently, The Popes. He has also written on architecture, music and the history plays of Shakespeare, and has presented some thirty historical documentaries on BBC Television.
Westbury Manor1
Brackley
Northants
February 2nd, 1940
My darling Mummy and Papa,
We are not snowed up any more, I am glad to say, but there is still a lot about.
The new music teacher, who plays the organ in church, is very nice. I have her twice a week, for half an hour, and am getting on fine.
We had films last night. One was about owls, hawks and things. It was frightfully good, showing hawks in midair, catching bones. Film No. 2 was pure humour but it kept going wrong. It was a maid who dropped all the best china, and it came to life and tortured her. I did not like it and you would have loathed it.
The master, Mr. Clinch, is an owner of performing fleas. We are going to have a demonstration this afternoon. He is also going to try to get a scout troop, and is teaching us many knots. Still, to go on with fleas. They are called performing livestock, since ‘fleas’ sounds too undignified. They are called Oscar and Cuthbert, and Mr. Clinch got them from the Sahara Desert.
I now know about thirty verses from Horatius.2 When I have learned it all, you will owe me £3 10s, since there are seventy verses.
Lots and lots of love,
John Julius
HAVING RESIGNED FROM the Chamberlain government in October 1938, my father found himself at a loose end. When, therefore, towards the end of the year, he was invited to lecture in America, he did not turn the suggestion down flat. He replied that given the existing situation he could not possibly commit himself at that time; he might, however, be able to do so in the following year, ‘if conditions were favourable’. He was in fact fairly certain that they would not be; but the inactivity that had continued month after month in 1939 had proved almost more than he could stand. War was declared on 3 September 1939. He knew there was no hope for a ministerial post while Neville Chamberlain remained in power; at the same time he did not feel that he could leave England without the Prime Minister’s approval. On 21 September he managed an interview; but, as he noted in his diary, ‘Chamberlain merely suggested that in six weeks’ time, when “things will be getting pretty hot here”, a man of my age might be criticised for leaving the country. I said that that was my own responsibility and was a question that I could settle for myself. After some humming and hawing he said that it would be a good thing for me to go – and so I left him. I wasn’t with him for more than ten minutes and I left with a feeling of intensified dislike.’
His mission, if he went, would be clear enough. He must do his best to persuade America that the isolationist policies then being advocated by Colonel Charles Lindbergh – and a good many others in high places – would prove disastrous to both our countries. The cause of Great Britain was not everywhere popular in the United States. There was in particular a deep suspicion of the Empire; not 1 per cent of his audiences, wrote my father, believed that the Dominions were really self-governing; nor did they have any idea of the bloodshed that was bound to follow a British withdrawal from India, which most of them wholeheartedly advocated. Above all, they had to be made to understand that the western world was fighting for its life. Without American help, the battle might well be lost.
He decided to go; my mother, as she always did, went with him; and the letters begin.
In the train to Southampton
October 12th, 1939
Papa and I have barged and battered our way through a mob of passengers and seers-off and are at last seated (not everybody is) in a Pullman car with eggs and strawberry jam. There was a crowd of photographers hunting Papa like sleuths, but I implored them not to take us as we don’t want the enemy to send a special torpedo. We gave a party last night at the Savoy and tried to forget we were going, not that I mind much except for leaving you. I’ll write, no cable you as soon as I arrive in N.Y. but I don’t suppose it will be for ten or twelve days. Work hard, play hard and don’t change till I come back anyway. Be just as I left you, gay and brave and good and sensible. Don’t forget that there’s a war being fought and that it’s got to be won and that your contribution towards winning it is to be better, more hardworking, more thoughtful and braver than usual . . . I love you very much.
S.S. Manhattan
Halfway over
The sea is rather Cape Wrathish3 and I have forgotten the terror of the torpedoes in my efforts to cope with standing upright. Everybody except Papa and me is sleeping five and six in a cabin on cots like you slept on in the Enchantress and all the big saloons are dormitories of fifty unfortunates all sicking together. We have a film every afternoon and we have to go and sit on our places two hours before it starts. The news that you will delight in is that we shall actually see the World’s Fair.4 I’ll send you pictures and details. The deck is black with children which makes me want you very much. They play a nice dart game on deck which I’ll send you for Christmas if I can get it over.
We get very little English news. What comes through is on a radio at its most confused and raucous worst. I’m trying to remember what Belvoir was like when I was half your age, with no taps, no electric light, no motors, but instead lamp-men and water-men carrying gigantic cans. Drives in the afternoon with Grandpapa in a big landau with a big fat coachman on the box driving a pair of spanking horses and a footman in a long coat and top hat who leapt down and opened a gate and scrambled up to the box again and did nothing else in life. If I can put it all together and make it interesting enough I might make a radio talk in America, and make some money to give to the Red Cross. I’ll stop now and add a bit more to this letter before we land.
Saturday. We are due to land tomorrow. It got lovely and calm again yesterday and there was a good film called Stanley and Livingstone5 and in the evening we gave a dinner party of two other people . . .
Shall hope to see old Kaetchen at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. I shall be happy to arrive, the perils of the sea behind us for a bit. I shall be thinking about you all the time and longing for letters, nothing too silly to tell me about, remember that as I shall be hungry for news of you – air raid warnings, outings with Nanny.
October 27th, 1939
New York
I’ve been to the World’s Fair for the first time – not, you will be sorry to hear, to the Amusement Park. I go there tomorrow, but I’ve been inside the Perisphere. It’s that large globe one sees in the pictures. One goes in the door at the foot of the pyramid and there’s a blue-lit, rather sinister moving staircase which shoots you off into the inside of the globe on to a revolving platform that carries you round the circle while you look down upon the city of the future – done like panoramas are done. The dome above you looks just like the real sky and changes to night and stars and the model city lights up. I did the English Pavilion – good but dull – and the French one – good and exciting – and the Russian one, immense and made of marble and showing with tremendous pride things the U.S.S.R. has made and invented and developed since their new regime – all the things we’ve had for years, such as an underground railway. The Exhibition doesn’t look half as lovely as the Paris one – fountains much less good, but one doesn’t get so tired as there are little motors and little chairs a man pushes you in. I saw too a room of minute babies in incubators. That was fascinating, and you would have very much liked the Palace of Health, with transparent men with pulsating kidneys and brains, etc. I’ll write you about the Amusements next time.
It seems dreadful being so far from you and the family and unhappy England. No news from anyone yet, only stories of Germany’s hatred of England. It makes one desperately sad. Here the cry is ‘Keep out of the war’. A few years ago America passed a law called the Neutrality Act which meant that they might not sell any armaments or aeroplanes or oil or steel to countries that were at war. Now there is a big fight going on because Roosevelt, the President, wants to repeal that law, to tear it up and allow any nation at war to buy what they want, as long as they can fetch it in their own ships and pay cash down for it. (‘Cash and Carry’ it’s called.) He wants this because he is very pro-England and France, and he knows that the repeal of the law would advantage us, who have ships and money and the command of the seas. So we must pray that the President pulls it off, and now you know what the Repeal of the Neutrality Act is, or you ought to if you’re not a tiny idiot or if I am incapable of making myself clear. We are going to Washington next week and I hope to see my darling President in his White House.
Goodbye, my beloved. Don’t forget to say your prayers at night under the clothes – you needn’t kneel if the other boys don’t, but say them please.
British Embassy
Washington D.C.
November 3rd, 1939
You will be very sorry to hear that I never again got to the Fair. I’d promised myself two days – the last two before the Fair closed – to do all the parachutes and heart-stoppers. And on those two days the heavens opened and torrential rains that drowned everything, and now it’s shut till next year and it’s just too bad. We came to Washington D.C. yesterday to see our Ambassador there, Lord Lothian, and this evening – great excitement – we are to go to the White House and see the President, so I won’t finish this letter till later so that I can tell you what he is like. I’ve always loved him as you know, but he is unpopular with the very rich because he taxes them mercilessly and a good job too. He’s very pro-Ally and does not really think that America should be an ‘isolationist’ country that takes no part in the rest of the world’s troubles. He would like to come to our help and has already done so by getting the Neutrality Law repealed (it was done yesterday just as we arrived, by a big majority of votes). So now we can buy all the arms we can pay for from the U.S.A. and so can France, and Hitler won’t like it one little bit. That will do for my lecture bit of this letter.
Papa makes his first lecture next Monday at Columbia University – that’s New York – and three days later he makes one in New Jumper – I mean New Jersey, which is the next state. Papa has gone very American – he has given up carrying a stick or umbrella, he is very energetic and full of hustle as though he thought ‘time was money’. He speaks through his nose and soon he will be wearing pince-nezes and smoking a cheroot, and may even grow a little goatee beard. I’m going out now to the Capitol and to look at a colossal Abraham Lincoln made of marble sitting in a chair. I pray every night that you are happy and well. By the time you get this there will be only about three weeks more of school. Perhaps you’ll be preparing a play. I haven’t heard a word of you yet.
Saturday 4th. Well, the White House was a big success. Mr. President was gleeful over his repeal and didn’t pretend to be neutral at all. I was a bit nervous and didn’t do very well with him, but he did very well with me. If his legs had not been paralysed he’d have danced a war dance. Before the tea with the President we went to see the Hoover Institute of Criminal Investigation.6 You would so have loved it. When the gangsters and racketeers were at their worst and the kidnappers, Mr. Hoover was put in charge of the Police Department and made the ‘G-men’. (G stands for Government.) They are a severely trained body of men who know the law, who are husky and strong, and who are taught to shoot straight and carry guns. The result has been miraculous. The headquarters are at Washington and there you can see all the relics of the gangsters, their blood-stained bits, their death masks, their sawn-off shotguns, notes written by kidnapped children, millions of indexed fingerprints. To finish up you are taken to the shooting gallery where you are first shown how the different kinds of machine-guns and repeaters of all sorts are operated with tracer bullets that show in the dark, and then you can try them yourself on the target of a life-sized man. I did pretty well and kept my riddled man for you. I’ll send it if I can.
On to Williamsburg today to see what a colonial town in Virginia in the time of Queen Anne looks like. They have restored it to look exactly as it did. New York next day.
Kiluna Farm,
Manhasset, Long Island
November 12th, 1939
This letter will probably get to you before the last one I wrote you about Washington because I’m giving it to Ronnie Tree who leaves on the Clipper7 tomorrow. It’s a month since I left, and I haven’t had a letter from anyone except Conrad,8 and one from Hutchie9 by air. I really can’t wait to hear something of you. Tomorrow we are off to the Southern States for ten days and there will be seven lectures and seven or eight nights in the train. When we get back to N.Y. we shall be wrecks. I spend half my day at the washing basin scrubbing Papa’s socks and drawers and pyjamas and handkerchiefs, and the other half ironing them and perpetually burning them. You will say why don’t you send them to a laundry. The answer is that everything in this country is so expensive that it hurts my sensitive Scotch soul, and what Papa flings away on tips and leaving money about, and not taking the trouble to learn the currency and so giving 50 cents instead of 10 cents, I try to make up for by pathetic economies. We had a very successful lecture at Summit, New Jersey, the state on the other side of the Hudson river from N.Y. They’ve built a splendid tunnel, bigger and better and faster and generally more impressive than the Mersey Tunnel. We had dinner before the speech with an old American family, good and noble and high-principled and delightful. Grace before our dinner which was at half-past six. We had to eat the food though I wanted to regurgitate. I thought of you. Papa likes a drink before a lecture, but this home disapproved of anything but water!
This home, which belongs to Mr. Paley, the President of the Columbia Broadcasting, has too much alcohol on the other hand. Result – I’ve got a headache today and wish that I was back with the fine American middle-class family in spite of their abstinence.
I enclose the man I shot at in the Criminal Investigation Department with a hand machine-gun. My Washington letter will explain.
British Embassy
Washington
November 19th, 1939
At last I’ve got a scrubby little letter from you dated 29 October. You are the nastiest little pig I know and I despise the school for not urging you to be a little less beastly. Do you realise that you let eighteen days pass without giving your poor frightened exiled mother a thought? Please, darling horror, don’t do it again. Write as often as you can. It’s so sad waiting for letters that don’t come and are not even written.
I’m writing on very thin loo paper because airmail is so expensive and it goes by weight. Papa and I spend every night in the train, Papa up above monkeywise. He’s more like a monkey than I was because up above there is a criss-cross arrangement of green tape like a cage to keep him from being shot out. Most nights he lectures and yesterday at Pittsburgh, a huge town where they make steel (their Sheffield) he had to speak for an hour at 10 a.m. They gave him in return a large ivory penknife with the giver’s name which happened to be Duff engraved upon it. I should claim it from him when we get home. He’s more likely to cut himself than you are. It’s hot as summer and Washington is all avenues of trees and spaces and big beautifully designed offices for Government. Tonight it’s the train again for Charlotte, N. Carolina, and the next night train again to New York, three days break and off to Canada. I love my darling boy. Don’t treat me so badly again or I’ll have your lights and liver when I get home.
November 29th, 1939
Here we are at Ottawa where the Governor General of Canada lives in kingly splendour. He’s called Lord Tweedsmuir and we curtsey to him as though he were the King himself. Last evening Papa was on his legs bawling away at Boston Massachusetts and at 11 p.m. we got into our train bed and got out again at Utica, N.Y. State. There we waited an hour and had a glorious breakfast if rather curious, i.e. coffee, grapefruit juice, drop scones made of buckwheat, sausages, bacon and over the lot maple-sugar syrup. On again in a boiling train that went about three miles an hour and stopped with a sickening jolt at every station. My feet swelled with the heat and my back ached and we were both in a kind of coma, like people in a submarine that’s gone wrong. At last we came to the majestic St. Lawrence river that divides Canada from U.S. and where there is no frontier nonsense, no soldiers or forts or things like Mussolini ha sempre ragione10 (do you remember?). Canada and the U.S.A. understand and trust each other, hence the simplification.
Don’t forget to love me. I feel so far from you and frightened that you’ll grow away from me. Be determined not to, for if you did it would break my heart.
Deshler-Wallick Hotel
Columbus, Ohio
About December 7th, 1939
This will probably be your Christmas letter and where am I to imagine you as being? Where will you be delving into a bulging stocking? I hope at Belvoir. Wherever you are I want you to have a lovely lovely Christmas full of fun and presents and treats, and for war to be forgotten, anyway for the day. It’s the first Christmas I shall not be with you and I mind it dreadfully. Please pray hard that we’ll be together next year and that Hitler will be defeated, and that we’ll all be trying to mend our poor England. I shan’t be much of a mender because I’m so tired and weak, but you’ll have to do a lot about it, and so will Papa.
What a day we had yesterday. We tumbled out of the train at 6.30 a.m. at Cleveland, Ohio, and there were the merciless photographers and reporters. At 11 a.m. Papa gave a lecture. Then came a luncheon of 500 strangers at the end of which Papa had to answer their questions about the European situation. Then a two-hour motor drive with strangers and dinner with them and another lecture, and then an endless supper with a different lot of strangers at a place called Canton, Ohio. Then a two-hour motor drive to a place called Youngstown, and at last we tumbled back into the train at 1.30 a.m. – nineteen hours running without a break. We woke up next morning in Toronto, Canada, where everyone is in khaki and off to the war. Now we’re at Troy, N.Y. State, very unlike my idea of Troy, no Greeks, no gods, no visible heroes. These Trojans make shirts for all America to wear. Tomorrow we shall be in Boston, and so it goes on.
Just arrived Boston and found a wonderful account written by Martin of his torpedoing. Also three letters from Conrad and one from Hutchie and a scrubby little bit from you. Really your letters are too horrid, one side of a sheet, not one word of affection or love. This one only told me your gym master had been ill. It was not even signed. You can’t think how disappointing it is to get a letter like that. You used to write lovely long ones before you went to school.
Sunday, December 17th, 1939
Our mad bout of travelling is ending for a bit. In three days we shall get two weeks without lectures. Papa is like you and wants to sit quiet in town and go to the theatres and eat and drink and play cards, and wink at the lovely ladies, while I, as you know me, am trying to put a bit more enterprise and adventure into it. I am drawn to the snows, or to the hot beaches of Florida, or to cowboys or Indians or something. Papa will win.
The other night when we arrived at the lecture hall in Brooklyn we saw it to be completely surrounded by policemen with bludgeons. We were half an hour too early, so we went and sat at a café opposite and watched developments. It was raining and soon sad bedraggled young men began to appear carrying placards which read ‘Send Duff Home’, ‘We Won’t be Dragged into War’, ‘Don’t Listen to English Lies’ and so on, but no one was paying the slightest attention to them. When we got inside there were still more cops but nothing happened at all – no demonstration, no row. The only effect it had was to give us a friendly crowd at the stage door when we left. They cheered us.
I’m not expecting to get any Christmas presents. I hope you get a great many, you darling little boy. Write by air on a typewriter. There is sure to be one at Belvoir if you can get around the secretary. You write longer and better letters on the machine, I think.
The Ambassador Hotel
Park Avenue, New York
January 3rd, 1940
We had a lovely New Year’s Eve sitting up in a large kitchen till 5 o’clock a.m. cooking eggs and bacon and people were still dropping in when I left, treating night as day. I wonder how it all went at Belvoir, and if it’s all very different to normal times.
Yesterday I went to the Natural History Museum. It’s as lovely here as ours in London is awful. I missed you a lot. There were so many revolting exhibits you would have rejoiced in. One extraordinary peepshow was how a room, for instance, looks to you and how it looks to a dog. A dog sees no colour, whereas a fly sees more colours than we do. A hen sees other hens bigger or smaller according to the other’s pecking abilities and she sees the cock-a-doodle-doo enormous, though how they can tell I don’t know. No more do I believe they do.
The streets are still covered with ice and the roofs with snow. Tomorrow we start on our travels again. In two months we shall be starting home. I haven’t heard from you in a long, long time. All the ships are delayed and the Clippers too. Label your letters ‘Clipper’ and get them stamped. It’s 1/6d the ½ oz.
Hotel Oliver
South Bend, Indiana
January 14th, 1940
We are keeping our peckers up splendidly. Sometimes it is gloomy and dull and other days the town is bright, the hotel lovely and the people full of life and fun, and everything seems good. South Bend, Indiana, is the worst we have been to, whereas Toledo, Ohio, was heavenly. At Akron, Ohio, there was a restaurant called the Hawaiian Room. It would have amused you, I think. It was very very dark with a sort of witch-doctory light on the tables. The bar was a native hut, but the fun was that one wall was a panorama scene of a coral reef – a sandy bay edged with palm trees. Suddenly, though no one was there except Papa and me and a group of very old ladies having lunch together, the panorama darkened and flooded itself with torrential rain. The artificial thunder and blinding lightning deafened us for ten minutes . . .
Now I must get up and wash Papa’s vest and drawers and socks and pack and have lunch and listen to the lecture and catch a train to Chicago where with any luck there will be a letter from you.
Fort Worth, Texas
(‘Where the West Begins’)
January 28th, 1940
I’ve had lovely letters from you lately. Belvoir sounds a hatful of fun and the letters were long and full of the kind of thing I like. What luck to have ice! It’s been ridiculously cold here but I haven’t smelt a ski or a skate. It was 22 below zero in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and snowing in Alabama, which should be as hot as summer, and at Palm Beach, Florida – where I have always been too hot in January, swimming and sweating alternately – it was so cold that they had to shut all the schools. They have no heating arrangements as it’s always hot, so they thought the children would suffer and get ill. Palm Beach is known as the ‘millionaires’ playground’. Lorna Mackintosh’s11 father runs a bar there called the ‘Alibi’ Bar, his name being Ali. I think Ali-Bar-Bar would have been a funnier name.
Believe it or not I went flying yesterday.12 A man who had a two-engined, two-piloted plane offered to take us for a joyride. The conditions seemed perfect – no wind and perfect visibility – ground flat as a pancake and few buildings, so I thought it a golden opportunity of breaking the ice. Oh John Julius, how I hated it! I had to stay up an hour and twenty minutes and I was agonised with fear all the time, but of course couldn’t say so and the owner thought I was liking it and kept telling the pilot to go further and to circle round things. When you turn in a plane you tip right over and see the ground alongside you, and you feel you’re going about five miles an hour because nothing passes you in the way of hedges or traffic. So if it wasn’t alarming it would be boring and I shan’t go up again ever for fun. All the old ladies travel by air in this country and nobody thinks anything of it, but your mother is a shuddering funky old mouse and you must make the best of her.
Kansas City, Missouri
(‘The Heart of America’)
I got a delightful letter from you yesterday, still from Belvoir. How can you explain your letters being so horrible to start with, and so nice now? Was it, is it, the dreadful influence of school, do you suppose? We went to see Gone with the Wind at Oklahoma City, and when we got into the theatre all the audience stood up and ‘God Save the King’ was played. The Americans are all very pro-Ally, thank goodness, but they are also determined not to get into the war. Someone in the question period after the lecture always asks ‘Why didn’t England stop Germany sooner?’ and Papa answers ‘Because all our actions and all our policy was affected by wishing to keep out of the war. There is no policy more dangerous – every insult will be put upon you if the offender knows you will not fight, and in the end you are forced into it.’ That makes them think a bit. I wonder often if all our dear sailors of the Enchantress are safe. Hitler’s sharks are so hungry.
One more stop in Amarillo, Texas, and then the real West. San Francisco next. Papa has gone American, but not much hope I fear of his going cowboy. He’s been given a white Texan hat, but not what they call a ten-gallon Tom Mix one.13 Still, he wears it with a certain swagger.
February 7th. We’re in the desert now, in Arizona – distant spiky mountains and all the rest desert covered with a grey-blue-lavender sort of bush and tiny stunted palm plants; soon there will be cactuses like this:
February 8th. The cactuses have come and gone.
February 9th. We woke up, still in our train, to find the world changed from desert to garden. California is as green as England in May and laden with flowers and fruit – orange trees, mimosa, eucalyptus trees, grapefruit, vines. It’s a paradise of sun and sea and plenty – the Promised Land, milk and honey everywhere. I’ve seen it before but Papa hadn’t, so he is doing a Cortez. If you don’t know what that means get a book of well-known poems and look at a sonnet by Keats called ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’.
El Mirasol
Santa Barbara
California
February 1940
I’m in Hollywood you’ll be thrilled to hear and who should I sit next to the other night but your favourite Errol Flynn. He certainly is very good-looking but I’m sorry to tell you I took a violent dislike to him. First of all he was disgustingly anti-English, which being an Australian-Irishman he should not be, and secondly he’s got an awful lot of ‘side’, and kept on pointing out other men as giving themselves airs. Another night I sat beside Charlie Chaplin. He has dyed his grey hair black to look like Hitler in the new film14 he has just finished. They say that he has made dictators so ridiculous that we ought to show the picture on a screen opposite the German trenches and thereby stop the war.
Marlene Dietrich we often see – she wears a velvet trouser suit with Fauntleroy collar and cuffs. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh are here. She’s made the greatest success ever known in Gone with the Wind. My favourite is a young man called James Stuart. I saw him acting in the studios yesterday. All the time I wish I had you with me. It would amuse you so much to see the sets indoors and out. I saw for instance yesterday the inside of Waterloo Station and a trainload of Tommies steaming out of it. You turn a corner and there is Peking under snow and a London street next to Tarzan’s jungle. The quite big trees are on flat wooden trays so they can be transplanted on wheels. I lunched there in the studio restaurant among Austrian peasants, Nazis in uniform, Victorian young ladies, Napoleonic young men. Another thing that you’d love is films called ‘blow-outs’ of 1938 or 1939. These are all the pieces cut out of films because actors either forget their words, or drop something, or fall down. They always swear of course, and those are the bits you see. We are staying with Mr and Mrs Jack Warner in great luxury. He is the head of Warner Bros. We’ve been over the Metro-Goldwyn studios and tomorrow we go over Warner’s.
Back next month. Pray for us both – pray for Hitler’s sharks not to catch us.
1 The boarding school to which my London day school, Egerton House, had been evacuated on the outbreak of war.
2 The long narrative poem by Lord Macaulay. Learning and reciting poetry by heart was my only source of pocket money.
3 In August–September 1937, when my father was First Lord of the Admiralty, we had sailed in the Enchantress around the north of Scotland from Holyhead to Rosyth, and had run into dreadful weather round the aptly named Cape Wrath.
4 The New York World’s Fair was staged at Flushing Meadows in 1939 and 1940.
5 Twentieth Century Fox, 1939. The two name parts were played by Spencer Tracy and Cedric Hardwicke respectively.
6 Now the FBI.
7 A transatlantic airline using flying boats.
8 Conrad Russell. Bachelor friend of my mother (see Directory of Names).
9 St John Hutchinson, K.C. (see Directory).
10 Mussolini is always right. When my mother had taken me skiing two years before, we had seen these words in huge letters at the Italian frontier.
11 A childhood friend.
12 She was always terrified of flying. This was her first flight.
13 A cowboy hero of the silent films.
14 The Great Dictator.
Kiluna Farm, Manhasset,
Long Island, New York
July 1940
My darling Mummy and Papa,
I do hope you are well, happy and free from bombs. I am having a lovely time here. As I got up at 5.30 a.m. on Saturday the 13th I was so excited, and at about 6.30 passed Brooklyn, Ellis Island, New Jersey and the Statue of Liberty. It was so lovely, but as we were queuing up to have our passports, etc., examined, lots of reporters came on board. We kept them off for about twenty minutes but they knew I was there, and they were so persevering, getting me over the heads of the crowd that at last we were forced to surrender to them.
When we got off, Kaetchen was there on the dock, waiting. We were in New York only two hours and then we went to the Paleys. Mr. Paley has arranged for a tennis pro, Mr. Farrell, to come and teach me. He says I am very good indeed and that I shortly will be playing marvellous tennis.
Lots and lots of love,
John Julius
ON THEIR RETURN to London my parents ‘camped out’, as my mother put it, for three months in my grandmother’s old house at No. 34 Chapel Street. I’m not sure what had happened to Gower Street and why they didn’t move back there – Admiralty House, after all, was never going to be more than temporary. I can only assume that they had decided to sell it and finally to settle in Chapel Street instead; with its huge library it certainly had far more space for my father’s books. After my Easter holidays – spent with my mother at our seaside house near Bognor Regis1 in Sussex – I returned to Westbury Manor. Soon after the summer term began, however, it became clear to a good many of us that the young schoolmaster who had just arrived to teach us English was in fact a German spy. We took turns to keep a watch on him, and it was one evening when two of us were shadowing him to what was clearly the hiding place of his short-wave transmitter that I suddenly felt hideously sick and threw up in the bushes. On my return to the house I was found to be running a high temperature, and on the following day measles was diagnosed. Of the next fortnight I remember scarcely anything – which is a pity, since it means that I have totally forgotten the fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation. Then one Sunday, when I was on my feet again but still shaky, my mother appeared and took me out to lunch at a hotel in Buckingham.
From the moment we sat down I could see that she was worried; at one moment I thought she was going to cry. Then she told me that I was being sent to America, and that I should be leaving in three days. My reaction was far from what she had expected. She had thought I would burst into uncontrollable tears, fling my arms round her neck and say I wanted to stay with her for ever; but no – for me, America was simply the most exciting place in the world. It meant New York and skyscrapers, and cowboys and Indians, and grizzly bears and hot dogs, and Hollywood, where I should at last meet my hero Errol Flynn. I couldn’t wait to be off. The next afternoon I was put on the train to London, and two nights later Nanny and I left Chapel Street on the first stage of our adventure – far more frightening for her than it was for me – first by train to Holyhead and thence on the night ferry to Dublin.
There, early the following morning, we were met by someone from the American Embassy and taken to breakfast with the Ambassador, Mr David Gray, an old friend of my parents. We were then bundled into another car and driven straight across Ireland – with the occasional stop for me to be sick – to Galway, where the gigantic SS Washington awaited us, the largest Stars and Stripes I have ever seen painted all over its hull in order to leave German U-boats in no doubt of its neutrality. We landed a week later in New York, whence we were driven to the house of Mr and Mrs William S. Paley, who had very kindly agreed to take care of me for as long as was necessary. Bill Paley was President of the Columbia Broadcasting System; his house on Long Island was not uncomfortable.
My father, meanwhile, was having a distinctly rough passage of his own. His old friend Winston Churchill, who in May 1940 had succeeded Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister, had appointed him to a new post which he had just invented, that of Minister of Information. The appointment was not a success. He alone had been responsible for arranging – in the teeth of violent Foreign Office opposition – for General de Gaulle to make his historic broadcast to the French nation after the fall of France; but the press, terrified of censorship and led by Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, mounted a virulent campaign against him, and the news that he was sending his son to safety in America provided them with just the ammunition they wanted.
Left to himself, my father would never have considered the idea for a second; but my mother was adamant. Was it not true, she argued, that hundreds – perhaps thousands – of other English children were being similarly evacuated in American ships? All the signs were that London would, over the next few months, be bombed to smithereens; alternatively, Hitler might at any moment invade. Would my father – whose name was among the top half-dozen on the Nazi hit list – ever forgive himself if his only son were killed – or, perhaps worse, taken hostage to ensure his father’s good behaviour? And so he allowed himself to be persuaded – with my mother in her present mood he had very little choice. There were one or two indignant questions in Parliament; but the Government had a few rather more important matters to concern itself with, and the storm soon blew itself out.
Within a few days of my departure my parents locked up Chapel Street – this was no time to begin all the trouble and expense of setting up in a new house, particularly if it was shortly to be bombed to bits. Instead they hunkered down for the winter in two rooms on the eighth – and top – floor of the Dorchester Hotel. They got them cheap, since few people were prepared to live so close to the roof.