Trumpets from the Steep

The platform was Frith’s Paddington Station – people with all their worldly goods (nothing so pathetic), the guitar, the clock, the old rugs, cricket bats and toy engine. Mine (had I taken any) would be my wax face by Jo Davidson and Queen Victoria’s picture of Mother, your diamond dolphins and what not? The Frith scene made me see ourselves as Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England, and such conceits as these have kept my spirits well up.

It’s a brilliant day. No balloons up. I’m equipped with luminol and a beautiful bottle of old brandy brought by Raimund to the station. I feel that this is the first time I have been part of real life. I was going to say ‘except when John Julius was born,’ but even that wasn’t very real. Artifice, science and drugs veiled the reality. My mother’s death was real enough, I suppose, and one mustn’t see only horrors as real life. Wandering in sun-bathed Somerset perhaps is real too.

There’s a man sorting at least five hundred gas-masks on the platform, some of them with snouts protruding from their cardboard confines. They are stacked in a disorderly pyramid, and these (the lost ‘Mum’s,’ ‘Dad’s’ and ‘Sis’s’) are the residue of one train-load only. Priez pour nous.

22 October 1939 Ambassador Hotel, New York

We landed in thick fog, so there was no sky-line to see, although I was up by 6.30 so as not to miss it. The good Dr Kommer was on the dock and so was my old chum Iris Tree, but I didn’t feel relief or pleasure or anything at all. My heart’s dead in me. The fog lifted and I could see without thrill how marvellously beautiful this city is, and how much more beautiful than ten years ago. Duff is in a perpetual swoon about it, and is as happy and sans souci as a colt.

The entrance is between a lady’s legs, and when you get in it’s dark except for a dimly-lit tank full of organs and rubber corpses of women. Ceaselessly a beautiful living siren, apparently amphibious, dives slowly round her own bubbles, completely naked to the waist. She fondles the turtles and kisses the rubber corpses’ mouths and hands. In the dark I could see Duff’s face glowing like a Hallowe’en turnip. I infinitely preferred the Hall of Medicine, where you can see a foetus (genuine) brilliantly lit in spirits and glowing pink (not green) from the word ‘Go!’ to the ninth month, in nine close-ups. You can see livers and kidneys pulsating, transparent men and women with pounding hearts, pools of v.d. bugs greatly exaggerated in size, and real babies in incubators, snug and warm and calm, unconscious of their doom and greatly to be envied.

When I first came to New York and so adored it, I was busy from the first day, absorbed in the theatre, with no time for Society, and a new and loving escort ever waiting. This time I have nothing to do, only Society to pull against and a sleepless broken nervous system. Where it was all new blood, in myself and others, it’s today old, old. It will be better when we start travelling.

Five o’clock was the time to meet my President face to face. I was shaking with hero-worship and trepidation. ‘He’ll say he has met you before,’ Lord Lothian had said. The White House is all it should be, not a palace but a charming country house of the date I love (1805 or 1810) with a bit of Retour d’Egypte about it. We were shown into a good-sized room with a lot of tea and cigarettes going on, and a helpful lady-hostess-secretary and a couple called Davies. The President sat on a little seat-for-two (‘love-seat’ in the trade) and said as foreseen: ‘Lady Diana, come and sit next me. I haven’t seen you since Paris 1918. You wouldn’t remember it, etc.’ Of course it was true, although I remembered only the occasion, not the man. It was during the Peace Conference, when I had been sent away from England to detach me from Duff.

I was ridiculously nervous. Duff was far away talking to a middle-aged lady and I was wanting all the time to change places with him but didn’t know how to. Roosevelt ran the party. He talked all the time and seemed completely leisured and serene and all I pictured, devoid of nonsense, talking immediately about the triumph of repealing the Neutrality Bill, his hopes and his fears. What fun it was drawing lines down the Atlantic with a pencil. His ‘belt of chastity,’ he said. He clearly despises neutrality. We were there about an hour and then the aide came in to say: ‘The Secretary of State wishes to see you.’ I suspected an arrangement, and the darling said: ‘I’m afraid I must go – at least I don’t go.’ So we all said goodbye, clearly having outstayed a bit, with promises of another visit when we return, which is quite soon, and as he said to Duff: ‘I admired so much what you did in 1938 in the light of later events,’ I should think that he means to see him again and alone, but the talk I want to have with him can’t be had at a tea-party nor yet at a lunch for six, but only in a crowd or à deux in a buggy.

20 October Mells

I plod away on the farm and think of you and miss you terribly. There’s not much ground for feeling cheerful. Look at it how I may, the separation is utterly beastly. Today I listened to our propaganda in German. I never got it before. It seemed very well done; lots of bits out of Mein Kampf and examples of German deception in the last war. Old Hitler said in his last speech (the one where he escaped blowing up) that he never felt in the last war that he was ‘engaged against a superior foe.’ It’s what I always felt. I always had a sense of the immense efficiency, strength and bravery of the German army, though I always thought that we’d win because of our ‘don’t know when we’re beaten.’ The German Freedom Society, according to the Standard, has distributed a million copies of Mr Duff Cooper’s ‘Manifesto to the German People.’ Have you heard about this? Total surprise to me.

Lady Horner is no better. The war is killing her wish to live. If one is 85 it might be wiser to die now than to live on another two or three years. On the other hand there are two Miss Horners aged 90 and 97. They don’t go to bed until 1 or 2 in the morning, and I’m told that if you pass their house about then you’ll see lights and hear a lot of chuckling and low quiet laughter coming from their room. I wonder if it’s: ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one!’

Our separation has begun and it will extend for 120 days at least, but I won’t indulge in mopeyness and self-pity. What prayers there are will be for your safety of mind and well-being and happiness. When we walked down the Savoy corridor in the early hours this morning, a corridor fragrant with memory of high jinks, I thought of Lady Wolseley saying that when Sir Garnet left her for active service (which was very often) she always said goodbye exactly in the same way as when he was going round to the club to see the evening papers. They were two turtle-doves.

Why does censorship drive people (i.e. censors) demented? We read that Queen Mary went shopping in a West Country town, and a photograph of Lady Astor’s children at Cliveden was rubber-stamped ‘Not to be Published.’ I presume because the picture might reach Germany, on which German bombers would leave for Cliveden in order to kill Lady Astor’s children. Insanity can go no further. Tommy Lascelles writes, dating his letter ‘Somewhere in England,’ and the postmark is Sandringham plain as a gate.

I go regularly to Maurice [Baring] at Rottingdean. He is fair. Spirits good. There are lamps in the train going down, but I come back in a completely dark train, last night alone with a woman (sex guessed by light-coloured stockings).

The Daily Mail had a competition on ‘What part of the war do you mind most?’ To my surprise ‘Women in uniform’ came first and ‘Black-out’ second or third. Some people simply put ‘Unity Mitford.’ The thing that I mind most, which is shortage of animal feeding-stuffs, came sixteenth. ‘Evacuees’ didn’t come as high as I expected.

Seven and a half years of my grown-up life have been wars, and always, always England’s failure. It was Stormberg and the Black Week, Tugela, Magersfontein, guns lost, unpleasant white-flag incidents, the retreat from Mons, Gallipoli, Passchendaele and backs-to-the-wall etc., etc. Here we are still going strong, but never once in seven and a half years did there come the news of a brilliant victory, nothing like Waterloo, and Jutland was far from being like Trafalgar. When we had allies it was Caporetto or Tannenberg or ‘Mutiny of the French Army,’ yet we seem to win in the end. I’m afraid you’ll mind coming back from the whirlwind gaiety of America to this sober serious melancholy life. Wars make it impossible to be happy.

My cat Goebbels passed away yesterday after an illness of a few hours. It’s rather strange and may forbode something. As you may remember, I called a cat Austria and it was murdered by its own father. I’ve been woodcutting all day with Brixey and old Monty. A great deal of politics talked. They are very anti-Chamberlain as the man that got us into the war. ‘He’s too old’ and ‘He’s too soft’ they say. ‘Eden and Duff Cooper knew what was coming’ and ‘We ought to have had Eden and Duff Cooper there to stop Mussolini taking Abyssinia, then there’d have been no more war.’ This last opinion rather surprised me, and it’s always ‘Eden and Duff Cooper’ who are named together as representing a particular attitude. Their only way of showing disapproval of Chamberlain is voting Labour next time.

I went to Frome, where I took an oath holding the Bible in my right hand and saying ‘I swear by Almighty God’ etc. and in the end I only swore by Almighty God that I didn’t know that I ought to pay American income-tax on my Celanese shares. It seems blasphemous.

At Cincinnati the Union Jack and the Star-Spangled Banner streamed bravely from our window on the twenty-fourth floor. The town has changed from cottage to palace since I was here fourteen years ago. The great cities concentrate on stations and hotels; these take the place of the baths in a Roman community. Here the station is as always of marble and crystal, mosaic and silver, as warm as one’s bed and on such a scale that the entire town couldn’t crowd it. There you can eat and read, buy a hat or boots, medicine or Pravda, be photographed while you wait, be ill and retire to the Invalids’ Room, have your snack of oysters and stout in the taproom, or muffins-and-maple, shirred eggs, cookies or cheese, palm-hearts and lettuce and pineapple in the coffee-shop, or tenderloins, hash and brown potatoes, yams, chicken à la King, Bourbon, Scotch or Benedictine in the restaurant, all iced or piping. You can put a coin in the door and it will open and allow you to wash and dress in cleanth and artistic surroundings. It no doubt has a tasteful mortuary. The hotel does all this and more, and costs more. I prefer station life. By the way there is never a sight or a sound of a train until you leave the station proper. At the hotel you can buy the motor-car that is generally on show in the vestibule. I should think they would let you try it out in the corridors. You choose your music with a dime in a slot, melodious or hot, Hungarian or Hawaian. On every floor there are ballrooms, and dancing starts at noon. You can be shaved or shod, pedicured or dentally fixed, operated on or laundered, while you wait. One of these Baths of Caracalla hotels was a town, with at least two Conventions going on, and swarms of Elks and Kiwanis and Rotarians.

In these delightful houses hung with blessings it is often nearly impossible to write a letter, not for me who write with a stub on my rounded knee as the train cavorts, but for my patrician lord it’s more difficult. Educated, business-trained Americans don’t have a writing-table in the whole house. Staying with the Paleys, Duff said that he must write some letters and the footman was asked to find all the necessaries, as if one had asked to make toffee on a wet afternoon. Again at another house in Chicago the answer was: ‘Yes, of course, only the pen is such a bad one. That’s why I never write letters. The pen is so frightfully bad,’ as though it was irremediable, like the central heating in our country.

How came I not to write to you about the Chairman of our lecture in Toronto? The Lady-in-Command told us on arrival how lucky she felt herself, and for that matter us, in having secured him as Chairman. He had been gravely ill, but was back on his feet and he would turn the prettiest of speeches, brief, witty, succinct, all the facets. She was right. He said his piece to perfection and sat down two paces behind Duff, who was alone on the platform with his chairman. Within five minutes he was unmistakably drowsy; within ten he was in a logged sleep. Before they got used to it the audience tittered dreadfully, which poor Duff could not understand. No cheek-on-hands dumb-show from me in the front row would have explained the situation. The chairman remained to the final applause snoring, mouth cavernously open, slumped over his chair. He woke to clap loudly.

I listen to Haw-Haw, the German propagandist from Germany, in English. I don’t know what it is meant to accomplish. Not being an idiot I’ve never thought England or the English perfect, so isn’t it very good for us all to know our faults? Then we can try and improve. We all ought to know about the Opium War and our failures in India and Ireland, the Black and Tans, the disgraceful surrenders in South Africa, the non-payment of the American debt, slums, low wages and unemployment. It can surely be only a benefit to have all this brought to our notice. I suppose Germans can’t stand hearing of their own faults. Hitler must be a demi-god or nothing, whereas we are quite aware that Chamberlain is a second-rate old bungler that we’ve got to put up with for the time being. The papers all advertise when to hear Haw-Haw.

Lady Dufferin’s pet goldfinch was frozen to death in her bedroom. This is a remarkable thing to happen to a British bird.

How dreadful your life sounds! We are happier in Mells. But Miss Gamble who keeps the general shop has said that she thinks Hitler is in the right. It has deeply shocked my carter and he said darkly that it wouldn’t surprise him if Miss Gamble found her windows broken one morning. So minorities are persecuted and Mrs Baker (aunt to Miss Gamble) said she believed that the Second Coming of Our Lord was at hand. He would appear as soon as the first bomb fell on England. Lady Horner sent Mrs Baker a message telling her not to talk such rot.

Mrs James of Sutton [Conrad’s general servant] has been ill and her morale is zero minus. Everything is too awful and her tearful complaint of the war is: ‘It isn’t like an ordinary war – not like the last war at all.’ She means the retreat from Mons and the long casualty lists, I suppose.

Both my refugee boys have gone lousy. They had no lice when they came. Now the village heads are crawling and there is a delousing parade so many days a week in the barn. Mrs James told me about it and burst into tears. I had to say quite sharply: ‘Shut up! Everyone has lice in wartime.’ She said she had had the most miserable Christmas of her life. I said: ‘I can well believe it; about a hundred million have.’

Zero in Alabama, magnolias and gardenias under snow, but in Barbara’s house tuberoses that brought me all Venice – youth, escapades, d’Annunzio and Longhi – in a whiff. In the garden pattered her little Danish son, game and sturdy for three, followed by a big white French governess, English nanny and a burly detective in pale-grey flannel, growing fat and flabby in his unmanly occupation.

I had to sleep under my fur coat. They’ve shut the schools in Florida as it’s too cold for the children, too cold to have Duff’s lecture in a tent as intended. So it was given at the Everglades Club and the hurricane gave the unenthusiastic guests no excuse for defaulting.

I notice a distinct change in the Press and general attitude in this country. It isn’t much, but it’s clear that the feeling is leading away from the Allies. Our old fool who won’t allow propaganda here and says: ‘Leave it to Hitler and let the rugged truth talk’ would change his orders if he could see the rugged German lies doing their work so successfully. Germans make speeches and write letters to the papers proving the war unnecessary and kept going by England. They write articles on the slavery practised on Indians by a tyrannic Empire masquerading as a democracy. Only Duff is here to reply against a powerful organisation. They are violently anti-war. It hasn’t died down at all, and won’t until the Allies’ true troubles begin. Duff answers the commonest question: ‘Why did England wait so long before seeing the danger and protesting with force?’ by saying that it was because of the dread of war, and that there is no more dangerous state of mind for a country. The theory that anything is better than war will inevitably land you into one. That gives them pause.

Jacksonville

Shaming departure. In front of the Quality the big brown oubliette bag containing night-necessities, coats, boots, books, bottles, a radio, Duff’s slippers (embroidered with roses and a D.C. in forget-me-nots), buck-basket linen, a half-bottle of whisky etc. got a jab in its canvas back and split, spread and started gushing out its intimate contents, headed by Vincent Sheean’s collected works. Duff’s ‘vanity case,’ designed and planned with tender care and great expense in ivory and scarlet, also gave out. So two pieces are scrapped, thank God!

February 1940 Mark Hopkins Hotel, Barbary Coast

Good old George Gordon Moore, ranchless yet unwhitened by age, met the train and we dined with him at a Babylonian hotel with dance music to stun you. Moore is like a mammoth truffle, black and of no known shape. There’s no diminution of vigour. Twenty-five years ago it was just the same – a war and Moore screaming against the band, and my listening to hotly-whispered words of love, not one of which I could actually hear. You might say he has ‘a wild originality of countenance’ while not at all resembling Byron. Another pleasant shock from the past was dear Sister White, ex-matron of the Rutland Hospital, she who brought me nightly to my dressing-room in old Miracle days hot chicken-wing smothered in mushrooms under a cloche.

I tried to straighten my possessions and conceal the dirt and deficiencies from the simpering maid who has been given to me. She whipped away every stitch as soon as my back was turned to have it washed or cleaned (there is a private laundry). The walls are covered in Chinese paper, the twin Chippendale beds are under a single Chippendale canopy, the carpet is rich and white, every piece of furniture is a museum piece. The lamps are Ming and the sheets embroidered from hem to hem. An on-time clock on every table, a lordly dish of fresh fruit, a table of forty magazines of this week or month, flowers in profusion, a large orchid for this evening in a box, two white fur couvre-pieds, even stationery and pens, a radio too (of course). The ravishing dressing-room is made of unpolished flesh-coloured wood and is completely cupboard. There is no part of the wall that does not open on to shelves, hooks, racks, jacks, hangers and presses. The drawers of the dressing-table are filled with cotton-wool, tissues, aspirin, pins of all shapes and sizes. The bathroom is the size of a drawing-room and includes separate showers, with new rubber caps hung in them, separate lu-lu with cupboards within easy reach when seated, filled with a wide selection of the most intimate necessaries. Other bathroom cupboards hold all drugs, strapping, soaps, unguents and a big bottle of French scent to refill the bottle and spray on the dressing-table. My plan for the desert is collapsing.

In the evening we went, while Duff lectured at Long Beach, to the Russian Ballet. They were giving, amongst others, the surrealist Dali creation. The male dancers are naked but for black trunks with large lobsters as codpieces. After this to a night-club and our first view of the stars at play – Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Charlie Chaplin and Olivia de Havilland. The dance-club got me down a lot, and once home I became a great nuisance of groans and despair. In Hollywood I always feel an undesirable alien.

16 February

However, I woke bright and better today. Mr Warner sent me down his osteopath, a very fresh young man who, when I asked him if he got tired on his job, said no, he always had a strong rye whisky between treatments, which kept him going. I don’t think he did me any good, but as everything is free in this house I won’t miss a trick. I talked to Aldous Huxley on the telephone and tried hard to get Laurence Olivier and your Miss Leigh without success, so we ordered our Rolls and drove off to lunch on top of a far hill, Palos Vendes by name. We ate out in the sun, staring hard at the Pacific, and I felt I could face things better. The birds sing when I wake. When dressing starts Mrs Warner sends her coiffeur down to me. I admit he improves me, but I’m embarrassed. I feel he is criticising my scalp and my comb and the unicorn’s vestige on my forehead. He will take no payment.

22 February

Duff’s fiftieth birthday. He never groans at the passage of time. I can’t think why. The night before the Warners threw us a star-scattered party. It was a bit of an orgy, none the worse for that, and we enjoyed ourselves hugely. I started in a fine pink brocade Molyneux dress, but Mr David Selznick told me that my breasts were too flattened and that people were complaining about them, and could I change? So I went back to the old Central European peasant’s dress and took a new lease of deep-bosomed life. This morning after being woken betimes by Anne Warner’s enchanting child of five singing ‘Happy Birthday, Mr Cooper,’ I feel fine. ‘The climate looks after you here,’ as George Gordon Moore used to say as he gulped down another demijohn of alcohol. We lunch with adorable Vivien Leigh in her caravan. There had been galaxies of kisses the night before, and now we had a birthday bottle of champagne and more kisses, and back to pack, for we must leave these glowing fleshpots of Ming and jade, these beds of Chippendale and asphodel and moly, for the desert and the war. I witnessed a fine battle between very ‘sound’ Elsa Maxwell and a hideous Hitler agent, who turned up at Elsa’s hotel to book a room and got an avalanche of insults from Elsa in front of the manager and clientèle. ‘I’ll have you run out of the State of California,’ she said. I never hoped to hear the phrase. She will be as good as her word.

Duff and I agree that we could live in California. It has a radio quality of having the world in this little space. You can tune in and live your day in whatever country, art or grade of intelligence or idiocy you feel inclined for.

In the train

Hard reading and looking up every minute for a squint at this amazing desert. It goes on and on. I picture the Mormons crossing it. Mountains, rocks, canyons, no habitation, no animals, an occasional eagle; grey as shadow, with grey vegetation and our own dissolving grey smoke wreathing it. Occasionally there is a contorted grey cedar growing out of rock, and it looks like Hades, drawn by a scholarly Chinese of the fourth century. At other times the valley opens wide and it’s snow and blue skies and pyramid-shaped rocks and architectural geology, looking for all the world what it should look like – a Masonic Victorian print. I look up to the sky for an eye in a triangle. Soon it will be Nebraska and then Iowa, and then Illinois. We turn the clock’s hands on an hour every day. There’s a lecture at Chicago, another next day at Louisville, Kentucky. The police came to see us at Salt Lake, as threatening letters have been received about the lecture at Louisville. I mustn’t think about it.

Louisville

Duff’s threatening letters weigh upon me, not unduly, but imagine my nerves when at 7.30 a.m., that dark hour of arrival and Press photography, we were met by a posse of ’tecs and a couple of big cops carrying bludgeons! We hopped into a police car along with the ’tecs and whizzed through the streets shrieking like a million banshees. I enjoyed it very much.

It’s a nice place and the hotel was most tasteful. The police had us well in hand. The two ’tecs sat in the room next ours with the door open and their eyes on the elevator. At five Duff was escorted to a radio station to do a local broadcast, and said that he’d be back in half an hour. The boys took him off to find a mint julep and he returned an hour late. I’d worked myself into a hysteria of terror lest he had suffered at the assassin’s hand. A lecture that evening followed by a very successful reception, which ended in the night-club of the hotel with dancing and carousing, everyone a bit lit and the boys each warning me about the other’s tipsiness.

March New York

It’s nearly over. Three good letters from you this morning tell me what to expect. The coal-and-foodstuffs muddles pass belief. I suppose wartime has always been the same in all countries. Well, I’m coming back to it all, and I don’t care a pin about coal or light or food. But I do care about fear and alarms and excursions, death in all forms, hidden weapons, germs and gasses, and getting both ends to meet. I must try and find a profession. Kaetchen suggested that I write him news of London weekly in my own inimitable style and that he will publish it. I have promised to try, but I doubt its working, especially as a letter is made amusing by the stories of muddle, mistakes, cattishness and gossip, none of which would help our rough island’s cause.

The tour draws triumphantly to its close. I must bid goodbye to light and security, and look forward to darkness and fear.

Fancy me and Mrs Stubbs

Joining all the ladies’ clubs,

Fancy us forsaking pubs

At our time of life.

I packed Duff off to a smart dinner, put on the old squadron cap, a tarpaulin jacket and my rubbers, and set out to walk down to 11th Street, where Mrs Iris Stubbs lives below stairs. On the way I bought some raw hamburger steak, a pound of butter, some bread and some fat raisins. Getting late, I hopped the subway for the last lap. What fools foreigners look from ignorance! In the station there is a turnstile with a slot for one’s nickel and several other odd slots. I pop mine in and wait for a ticket to shoot out. It doesn’t shoot out. I peer and press things and shake, and finally have to appeal to a stranger who thinks I’m dippy and tells me to walk through. He passes on while I’m still trying to explain that it’s all different in England.

Iris lives underground in a room that is 50% charm and the other 50% Zola. There we threw back a schnapps and started off in the downpour to find places gentlemen (you are an exception) wouldn’t look for. Tonight it was discovery of an Armenian restaurant where we dined sumptuously enough on vine-leaves, lamb, raisins, curds, honey, almonds and heady white wine. Afterwards, already very late, a vain hunt for anywhere with a dim light. Just fancy! Back to the pubs with Mrs Stubbs!

9 March New York

They forgot to call us at 8.30, so we woke at 10.30 by good luck. Imagine the frenzy and scramble. Somehow it was done without time for tears, though many were shed as we steamed out of port, the band playing and the crowds waving their loved ones away. I’d hoped to see the Queen Elizabeth, which caused a tremendous sensation by arriving out of the blue, like the Mayflower unannounced, but she was not in sight.

On Board

I don’t sleep at all. I never shall again, I fear. Is it due to deep-lying fear that takes control at night, though well in hand by day? I fear it is. One gets tired of reading after three hours. I try reciting old poems to myself and I reconstruct the Enchantress trips, or look at my own eyelids, which makes me think of nothing, or make the mental effort of relaxing, which is done by pretending that you are sinking through the bed. Nothing works.

Gibraltar

Darling Conrad, reading old English papers I’ve just learned of Lady Horner’s death, and so long ago. One doesn’t see English papers at best for two weeks after publication, and as it isn’t news in America it’s not unnatural that we didn’t know. I’ve seen a few details that I hope to be true, i.e. that she died in her sleep. Well, well, she was like a fine tree, strong and beautiful in youth, and in age magnificent, a great shelter. I knew her first as Mark’s kind mother; that’s a long time ago, and now is a good time to be cut down. Poor Katharine, what a lot she will have to shoulder. How desirable the convent will look to her as she flounders through wills, trusts, mortgages, mortmains, mergers and all the insane laws that follow on death. Only you will be of help.

Naples

Vesuvius letting off very little steam. Somewhere in a Pass the dictators are kissing each other. God help us all. Just landing. No time for farewells.

Paris

No sign of war in Paris, no delays or substitutes. Heavy meaty and buttery meals in abundance. The Government fell with a thud as we arrived. Conversation at dinner stuck to who would be who tomorrow. Most are for Paul Reynaud. Henry Bernstein considers him a man of such value that his Premier-power should be kept for a tougher time. He has a mistress in a boater called Madame de Portes. Not my type – beastly strong.

I walked the streets, very unlike London, hardly any sandbags. Those that there are protect whimsical objects like glass fountains, while splendid monuments must take their chance, and the black-out’s a blaze. No reassuring balloons pattern the sky, no robot aerial guard, gasoline is rationed. The Ritz barman told me that they feed the cars alcohol. Motor and man drink from the same tap. Business as usual at Molyneux. Patterns are chosen subconsciously when talking of Sumner Welles or Rumania. Suzy, the ultra-fashionable hat-shop, is the same chaotic monkey-house it always was, a welter of ankle-deep débris, straw, feathers, spangles, flowers, buckram and elastic. Clients sitting mesmerised before cruel looking-glasses, Sumner Welles at last forgotten while cunning workwomen pull roses and bows over their right eyes. Very unlike New York, where surroundings and service are designed to soothe and lull and glide you into easy buying of the mass-produced. God help her who wants her own idea carried out. Here a creation must be born with labour-pains. To secure an impudent little lid needs a desperate tussle in a tropically-heated battle-room heavy with the smell of stale scent and hot hard work. Screaming like a jay among jays, I bought three. They ought to see me through my war. The French think that we are smug. We think we’re better prepared than they are. The Americans think us phoney. What is to be done about mankind?

25 March Mells

Your lovely telegram has come. I shall see you tomorrow. If I seem boorish and insensitive don’t misjudge me. It will be better when I have been alone with you for hours. I’ve hated this separation more than I’ve ever told you. I would much rather be dead than live without you.