Diana Cooper Read online

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  Diana Manners was born on 29 August 1892, at the family’s London house in Bruton Street. No one can prove that she was Harry Cust’s daughter but her parents’ contemporaries took it for granted that she was. It is dangerously easy to convince oneself that a likeness exists where one expects it to do so, but Diana does seem to have had the features, build and colouring of Cust far more than of the swart and stockier Manners. From the moment that the possibility was pointed out to her she herself never doubted that it was the truth, writing some time during the First World War: ‘I am cheered very much by Tom Jones on bastards and like to see myself as a “Living Monument of Incontinence”.’

  Whatever his private feelings, Lord Granby accepted this new addition to his family with dignity. His youngest daughter was christened with due pomp: Diana after Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, Olivia, Winifred after her godmother the Duchess of Portland, Maud after her other godmother Lady Tree. Her godfather was Arthur Balfour, an unsatisfactory choice since he forgot his responsibilities until Diana reminded him of them when she was thirteen and he Prime Minister. ‘Oh, fancy that,’ said Balfour, and changed the subject. The only curious feature about her birth is that Lord Granby – who, to save endless reiteration, will in future be referred to without qualification as her father – failed to register it. When asked why, he is said to have replied that he didn’t think girls counted, an explanation rendered less convincing by the fact that he had previously done all that was necessary in the cases of Diana’s elder sisters.

  Almost Diana’s first memory was that of being held by her mother and looking down at the pale and wasted face of her elder brother. She was only just two when the nine-year-old Haddon died and the event meant little to her. John, the second son, a studious, good-natured, slightly colourless child a year younger than his brother, now took his place as eventual heir to the dukedom, but it was her sisters who meant most to her. Marjorie, the firstborn of the family, was almost eleven when Haddon died, a child of unusual talent who excelled at anything she touched – drawing, painting, singing, acting. She was restless and already unconventional, showing signs of a taste for the rackety and Bohemian. She craved love and admiration, yet resented it, at once tearing up the picture on which she was working if anybody presumed to praise it. Raymond Asquith, five years her senior, was intrigued by her: ‘she is so puzzling, illusory, impalpable, whimsical and dissatisfied – a mixture between a monkey and a moonbeam. I doubt if anyone will ever be much in love with her, but she is a capital companion.’

  The three elder children – or two after Haddon’s death – were in the schoolroom during Diana’s infancy; she and her sister Letty composed the nursery. Letty, four years Diana’s senior, should in fact have been with the first wave of children, but she was held back to provide a companion for her little sister. Letty was ‘a plain baby,’ wrote Marjorie, ‘who could not compare with us great-eyed, tangled-haired, almost eastern-hued babies, added to which she, so Mother was given to say, was disagreeable, unloving, a cry-baby and worse’. Whether for these reasons or because she was preoccupied with the other children, Violet Granby felt little for Letty and lavished her love on her youngest child. Letty cried so much that the German governess decided that the corners of her mouth were beginning to droop and tied her chin up with a ribbon. Yet underlying her childish misery was an obstinate determination to make the best of things. Loving and trustful by nature, all her geese were swans, all her reverses for the best. Cynthia Asquith noted her ‘stern sense of duty about the maintenance of good spirits’; ‘Are we down-hearted? No!’ was her constant refrain.

  For Diana, Letty’s companionship was of inestimable importance. She ‘was my be-all, my day spring, my accomplice’, Diana wrote in her memoirs. An imaginative child, Letty was the narrator of endless sagas, pointless and protracted to those grown-ups who casually overheard them, to Diana the most exquisite romances. She had a fine sense of the macabre. When Aunt Kitty drowned herself in the lake at Belvoir the children were told she had died of a chill but Letty ferreted out the truth and gleefully passed it on to her sister. Diana was not discomfited; she had not much liked Aunt Kitty and her suicide was an event rather than a tragedy. Always Diana was ready to welcome anything that would stir things up and upset the even tenor of her ways; the drowning of an aunt was better than nothing.

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  Of the house in Bruton Street where she was born she had only the haziest recollection. A dapple-grey rocking horse in the nursery had a habit of bucking savagely and inflicted wounds on the elder children but Diana was forced to content herself with watching wide-eyed from a corner. A nanny with an anachronistic zeal for saving the washing-up, mashed mutton, cabbage and potatoes into a thick paste and poured lemonade on top of the resultant mess, but Diana was still perched in a high chair sucking fingers of bread dipped in milk.

  It was Cockayne Hatley that provided her first real home. A large but unpretentious ivied house near Potton in Bedfordshire, it belonged to Lord Brownlow and had been Harry Cust’s holiday home as a child. Characteristically, neither Lord nor Lady Granby saw anything odd about Lady Granby’s lover providing the family with a roof. ‘The celestial light shone most brightly at Cockayne Hatley,’ were the first words of Diana’s memoirs, and for all the children this ugly, friendly, rambling house, rubbing shoulders with its church in a tiny village on the edge of nowhere, left a bright image of fun and laughter and unclouded skies. Roaming the fields with a nursemaid Diana encountered a notice reading: ‘No Birds-Nesting’. ‘Poor birds,’ she observed. ‘What harm do their nests do?’ – thus exhibiting for the first time a lifelong tendency to assume that no sign prohibiting a course of action could possibly be aimed at her.

  By the time Diana was six Hatley was abandoned. Her father had acquired a London house more than large enough for all the family. No. 16 Arlington Street was substantial even for an heir to a dukedom. It had splendid rooms by William Kent and one of the largest ballrooms in London. It lay at the end of Arlington Street, far from the hubbub of Piccadilly and sheltered even from the calm of its cul-de-sac by the eighteenth-century cobbled courtyard and grand wooden gate. Today it has been subsumed into the Overseas League and sadly mangled in the process but in 1900, even though the Granbys only had nine living-in servants and entertained with what their neighbours felt to be striking informality, it was held to be one of London’s finest residences. The Duke of Portland, an ardent admirer of Diana’s mother, put up the £20,000 needed to buy the freehold and was repaid year by year.

  In Arlington Street the nurseries were tucked discreetly away in their own wing up a wooden staircase on the fourth floor. In The Woodhouse, Rowsley – a name descriptive of surroundings rather than building materials since the house was basically stone and Jacobean – child and adult lived far more cheek to jowl. It was here that the family spent every summer and it took over the arcadian role that formerly had been filled by Hatley: ‘We have had a swing put up in the field, I love it, Letty loves it and Marjorie loves it but yells hard if she goes high. You can’t think how happy we all are.’ Diana took over a dark panelled room, filled it with ‘curious bottles, coloured and crusted with incandescent sediment from elixiral experiments, delicate gold scales, George Meredith’s palsied head’, and called it the necromancer’s room – a title it still bears today. It was here that she first became aware of her disinclination for organized or, indeed, orthodox religion. Every Sunday, dressed in a fawn coat with highwayman’s cape and a wide-brimmed felt hat with silver galloon cockade, she would parade with the rest of the family and bump in a wet and smelly hired fly down the mile-long drive to Rowsley. There she endured an hour or more of torment as the Reverend Mr Parmenter droned through the service: ‘I never remember applying myself to prayer or to listening. I was only wondering, how much longer, O Lord?’

  The Woodhouse was an appendage of the Haddon estate, centred on Haddon Hall, the immeasurably romantic second seat of the Manners family. Haddon had
long been deserted in favour of Belvoir Castle some forty miles away. Though Diana only spent occasional holidays at Belvoir until her father succeeded to the dukedom in 1906, it always bulked large in her mind. She would have been a singularly unimpressionable girl if it had not. Rearing grandly on its hill which dominates the Vale of Belvoir, the castle is the paradigm of all those stately homes erected to prove that the upper classes still had the upper hand. It was built by James Wyatt in the early nineteenth century, a sighting shot for his nephew’s subsequent work at Windsor and supporting the comparison extremely well. Augustus Hare visited it a few months after Diana’s birth:

  How I like all the medieval ways – the trumpeters who walk up and down the passages and sound the dressing time; the watchman who calls the hours through the night; the ballroom, always ready in the evening for those who want to dance; the band, in uniform, which plays soft music from an adjoining room during dinner.

  Diana described in her memoirs the castle which she remembered as a child and showed that it had changed little during the intervening years. The long corridors, so icy in winter that overcoats were worn to go from one room to another; the Belvoir fire-brigade, under the leadership of the domestic chaplain; the white-bearded gong-man whose solitary function was to announce the time of meals; the lamp-and-candle man; the water-men, ‘the biggest people I had ever seen, much bigger than any of the men of the family … they had stubbly beards and a general Bill Sikes appearance’; the coal-man, Caliban to the life; fifty indoor servants; sixty horses in the stables; vast Gothic halls; a dining-room to seat eighty; a staircase up which eight men could advance abreast: it was the quintessence of grandeur and yet somehow a stage-set, the whim of an antiquarian aristocrat with limitless funds. The pomp was formal yet fantastic. Julian Grenfell visited the castle in 1914, after many anachronisms had been swept away, and commented: ‘Isn’t it an absurd thing, really, that there should still be places like Belvoir? It’s just like a pantomime scene. And even the owners can’t take it quite seriously.’ Diana cherished it, yet she never took it quite seriously. All her life she was to love dressing up, surrounding herself by the extravagant, the exotic, the exaggerated. Never was she deterred by the fear that people might say she was going too far. Belvoir went too far. Whether it formed her inclinations or merely fed them, there could hardly have been a more splendid backcloth against which to enact her childish fantasies.

  For most of Diana’s childhood Belvoir was the home of her grandfather and his second wife. The duke was an exquisite old gentleman, model for Henry Sidney in Disraeli’s Coningsby, always beautifully dressed, as Marjorie remembered, in ‘corded riding breeches, pale-coloured riding gaiters and a lovely gold serpent chain threaded round his slim waist. He had soft, immaculate white collars and shirt-cuffs and impressive coral links and buttons, and his shock of shining white hair, sleekly parted on one side, swept back over his handsome clearskinned forehead.’ Belvoir was crowded with artistic treasures which the duke surveyed with mild curiosity, once producing from a bureau drawer two miniatures by Cosway and one by Hilliard and speculating whether they might have any value. His wife wrote books on temperance and pressed port and brandy on invalids or those in need of cheering up. On Sunday evenings grandchildren and servants were made to sing hymns to her accompaniment on the harmonium: ‘It was bad, very; “Son of my Soul” drawled to agonizing pitch.’

  For Diana her grandparents were lovable but remote, nor could a late Victorian father be expected to impinge forcibly upon his offspring. Because of his fierce temper the children always approached their father with some circumspection, asking the butler first whether it was a propitious moment to talk to His Lordship. Diana would address him with slightly glutinous sentimentality: ‘My darling one … When do I see you again, my sweet? Goodbye, my sweetheart. Lots and lots of love. Your ever-loving Diana snubnose.’ Her father responded affably to such overtures but took little interest in her upbringing. The children were aware that their parents’ marriage was not a particularly harmonious one and Diana attributed some part of the sense of insecurity that has always haunted her to her childhood fear that her mother and father were about to divorce and desert their family. She craved protection and the certainty that she would never have to cope for herself. At The Woodhouse she remembered sitting under the piano while her mother played, thinking: ‘O, I’m glad I’m a girl. I’m glad I’m a girl. Somebody will always look after me.’ Her most private prayer every night was: ‘Let me live till eighty and don’t let poppa or mother die before me.’

  She was considered plain as a child, podgy with a bump on her nose and a bony protuberance in the middle of her forehead, known in the family as ‘the unicorn’s horn’. ‘Diana will never make a beauty’, Letty remembers an aunt pronouncing sadly as she surveyed the lumpish six-year-old. ‘Plain but decorous’ was the verdict of a contemporary. The only crime she could remember committing as a child was stealing pennies from a pile in the hall intended for the crossing-sweeper. When she broke things she found it hard to own up or apologize but always did so in the end with a flood of no doubt therapeutic tears.

  Her education was extensive but individual. She could read and write by the age of four but never learnt to spell – an accomplishment which she considered at the best otiose, at the worst slightly common. Twenty-five years after her husband was ennobled she was still capable of addressing her son as ‘The Vicount Norrich’. She had a passable acquaintanceship with the multiplication tables but never grasped the principles of long, or even short division. Fractions, or still worse decimals, were far beyond her ken. Her reading was omnivorous and she was encouraged to learn much poetry by heart – bribed, indeed, since her pocket-money was often made conditional on her performance. Her mother’s only criterion was that the poetry should be good. The first poem she prescribed was Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’:

  Come live with me and be my love

  And we will all the pleasures prove.

  The tradition was carried on to the next generation; at the age of six her son was holding a dinner-party enthralled with his rendering of ‘How Horatius kept the Bridge’. History was a staple of life; the Gods of Greece and Rome as familiar as her own family; ‘Latin, the use of the globes, the acquiring of algebra, ancient or modern philosophy – all such branches of learning were undreamed of in our curriculum; so were domestic science, cooking, preserving and the rest.’

  Nursery and schoolroom were at first somewhat distant. ‘The ladies Violet and Diana Manners,’ read a note written shortly after their father became Duke, ‘request the honour of the Marquis of Granby at their tea-party on Friday 9 July at 4 o’clock to meet the Hon. Maynard Greville, Miss Lois Sturt and Miss Elizabeth Asquith.’ An element of self-parody does not conceal what was by modern standards a curiously formal relationship. As John Granby grew older, went to Eton, became enmeshed in a masculine world of guns, rods and horses, he had still less time to spare for his sisters. Instead Marjorie grew closer. In spite of the difference in age the three girls were singularly united. Together they acquired all those accomplishments considered appropriate for daughters of the aristocracy; not ‘cooking, preserving and the rest’ but singing, drawing, painting, sewing and embroidery. The sewing, in particular, had its practical aspects; the girls were never encouraged to think of themselves as rich and did far more work on their own clothes than most contemporary teenagers would deem within their grasp.

  They played together too, all those interminable after-dinner games that had been so beloved by their mother and her circle: literary consequences, clumps, charades, dumb crambo, qualities, analogies. Happy hours were devoted to considering what would have happened if Sir Roger de Coverley had met Madame Bovary in a conservatory, or to enacting in pantomime: ‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.’ Diana was too young to compete full-bloodedly in these arcane pursuits, but she bobbed along contentedly behind her sisters, sharpened her wits and learned to make the best use of limi
ted resources.

  Anything involving dressing up and acting was especially popular. At Belvoir there was a huge chest crammed with good things; ‘a cornucopia spilling out skirts and hats, a few yellow plaits for Wagner, helmets, swords, ballet-shoes, deer-stalkers, boas, Ophelia’s straws and flowers, jackboots, wimples and wigs’. Diana’s first theatrical experience was to be dressed up in a lacy costume and sing a song of the Netherlands Lass. Then she played Prince Arthur in King John, pleading vehemently to her sister Letty that she did not want her eyes to be put out.

  She went to her first opera when about twelve – La Bohème at Covent Garden sung by Melba and Caruso. The two great singers were by now so podgy that they could scarcely kiss standing up, but Diana was overwhelmed. At her insistence Melba was invited to Arlington Street and soon became a close friend of the family. ‘She would bring me smiles and trinkets from Australia and fondle me, and for a birthday O! wonder of wonders! from the great Melba came a huge horned gramophone simulating mahogany with all her records.’ Both Lady Granby and Marjorie drew the prima donna: she preferred Marjorie’s effort because ‘it showed sadness’, an attribute of which, in her cheerful way, she was inordinately proud.