Trying to Please

From Chapter One: Beginnings

“Poor old baby,” said the nurse when, a day or two after my birth, I was bawling my lungs out. “Poor old baby, he’s only trying to please.” It was one of my mother’s favorite reminiscences. I suspect, in a way, that I have been trying ever since.

I was a late arrival. My parents had married in the summer of 1919; a few years later, after consulting the most fashionable specialists in London, my mother had been told to give up all hope of a child. She tried everything, including prayer at Lourdes; and then, a full decade after the marriage, her prayers were granted: at 10:25 am on Sunday, September 15, 1929, in Lady Carnarvon’s nursing home in Portland Place, I was born by Caesarian section. The name Julius accordingly seemed indicated; and that too, accompanied by the rather less imaginative John, has stuck with me for the past eighty years. So there I was, the infant John Julius Cooper, standing—or, I suppose, more accurately lying—at life’s threshold. My mother, in majestic ignorance of the limit of three godparents prescribed by the Church of England, had decided on quantity as well as quality. One day, many years later, I tried to tot them all up; the total came to seventeen. Of these, one—the Aga Khan—was a Muslim who was worshipped in his own right; several were Jews, including the mega-rich banker Otto Kahn, who gave me $5,000 in shares for a christening present, all of which became worthless as a result of the Wall Street crash. Then there were several Roman Catholics, among them the writer Maurice Baring, and of course a smattering of Church of England, including Betty Cranborne (later Salisbury) and Margot Asquith, widow of the Prime Minister in the First World War. Betty proved to be the best; none of the others seemed to take their duties with very much seriousness.

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On June 2, 1919, my parents were at last able to marry at St. Margaret’s Westminster. They had known each other for six years, and had been seriously in love for three. Few suitors have encountered more furious opposition. To the Duchess, only the Prince of Wales would have been good enough for her beloved daughter; how could she give a thought to this penniless young man who was well known to drink too much and play too hard and to pursue—all too often successfully—any girl that came within range? He had hoped that after the news of his DSO came through they might relent; but it made no difference at all. Only dogged persistence at last wore the Rutlands down. On April 30, 1919, he wrote in his diary:

In the evening Diana had the interview with her father. I met her afterwards at the Ritz. They have given in completely and are willing for us to be married as soon as we wish. It seems too wonderful and hard to realize. The Duke, she says, was perfect—and gave away the whole case by saying to her after the interview which only lasted about 10 minutes—“Don’t go upstairs for a little, as I don’t want your Mother to think I gave in at once.” I felt wonderfully happy and elated.

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From Chapter Four: The Embassy

Even my mother balked at staying at Bognor through the winter. There was no suggestion of central heating, the walls ran with damp and our tiny boiler could not begin to cope. The cow and pigs would be sold at Barnham market, the other livestock meeting whatever fate seemed appropriate; and the Coopers would move to a suite of three rooms at the Dorchester Hotel, in one of which I would continue my attempts, not altogether unsuccessful, to teach myself Russian. One or two Christmases back I had prevailed upon a generous godparent—I can’t remember which—to give me a Linguaphone course in the language, which I was pursuing with fascination. In our second decade of life we have not yet lost that wonderful faculty of absorption which in our first makes the learning of our native tongue so remarkably effortless, and I mopped up the first dozen lessons with such ease that even today I can recite most of them by heart. By the beginning of our third decade, alas, the faculty is lost. Sometime in the 1970s I decided to learn Modern Greek by the same method, and though the language is far easier the words somehow refused to stick. Apart from the stock formulas of politeness the only Greek sentence that still comes tripping off my tongue is one which, in lesson four, is uttered at a dinner party by one of the lady guests when her food is set before her. “It has a beautiful appearance,” she remarks, “and I do not doubt but that its taste will be equally delicious.” I use it constantly in Greek restaurants; the waiters fall about laughing and I usually get an ouzo on the house.

In a suite above us at the Dorchester, summer and winter alike, lived Emerald, Lady Cunard, who has already made one rather surprising appearance in this book. Tiny and delicate, she was already well into her seventies. She can never have been beautiful, but certainly never stopped trying: bright yellow hair, thick makeup which was rather sticky when you kissed her; the effect was one of a very small tropical parrot. She was the widow of Sir Bache—pronounced Beach—Cunard, a son of the founder of the shipping line. In the twenties and thirties, when living in a huge mansion in Belgrave Square, she had been London’s most prominent hostess, and in spite of wartime austerity she continued to entertain as lavishly as circumstances allowed. She had always looked on me as a sort of honorary godson—hence her visit to Upper Canada College—and whenever she invited my parents to her luncheon or dinner parties she always made a point of inviting me too. Though almost unbelievably well read—she never forgot a name or a plot—she may not have been a dazzling talker herself; but she was a superb manager of conversation which, with never more than eight people gathered round a small table, she invariably kept general, almost imperceptibly drawing out each guest in turn. The guests themselves were chosen with little regard for age or suitability: when she introduced them to each other she always added a one sentence description which got them talking to each other: “This is Stuart Preston—he is an American sergeant and he knows everything there is to know about Henry James.” Just occasionally she went too far: “John Julius dear, tell us your views about love” was something of a challenge to a fourteen-year-old. But at that age one is always grateful to grown-ups who show an interest and take trouble: she was kind, generous, and treated me as an equal; and whatever shyness I may once have had she could almost instantly dispel. She also took me to my very first symphony concert—conducted, it need hardly be said, by Sir Thomas Beecham himself.

At the beginning of 1944, with the outcome of the war no longer in doubt, my father had been sent to Algiers, there to be Winston Churchill’s personal representative to General de Gaulle until the liberation of Paris, on the understanding that he would then be our first postwar ambassador to France. So it was that halfway through my time at Eton, my family life suffered a sea change—and what it changed into was something rich and strange indeed. Paris was liberated at the end of August, my father was officially given the post of Ambassador that had been promised him, and early in September he and my mother moved into the British Embassy. He had never really enjoyed life in Algiers—unlike my mother, who had loved it—largely because he was always having to keep the peace between Winston Churchill and General de Gaulle. This ungrateful task—which had actually put no small strain on his thirty-year friendship with Churchill—was obviously by no means over; but the Paris Embassy made up for everything. My mother viewed the prospect with some alarm, but he was happy and that was enough for her. As for me, my principal emotion was, as I remember, wild excitement; I should be going over for the Christmas holidays—one of the first English civilians, and certainly one of the youngest, to set foot in the French capital after the German occupation.

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