Trumpets from the Steep by Diana Cooper

Author:Diana Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2018-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

The two great ships were forgotten by people in the street who looked unconcerned, and careless of the huge shadows cast. There was faith too in the inhabitants’ loyalty (true, the Japanese were a traditional enemy), but I could see no particular reason why these eighty-five per cent Chinese and fifteen per cent Indian and Malay citizens of Singapore should fight, as Cockneys do, against people of their own shade, for the dear good English, who when they hadn’t irritated them with schools and demands for work had bored them with restrictions, requests for voluntary service, for blood from their veins, for rice from their stomachs. Of course they would scatter in a crisis. At one rehearsal raid 1200 coolies had left the Naval Base and had not returned. No one did much about the shelter that had been digging for two weeks in our garden. Another slit trench was cut in our office-plot, but that was filled with our Indian guard. I restrained my brag about London in 1938, the gentlemen with their coats off, the soldiers and the old girls digging away in parks and squares, and me fitting snouts and schnozzles on to gas-masks against time.

It’s quite simple. I just take two cachets of amytol every night and sleep without squeaking until Duff gets up at seven. I feel quite different and have calm dreams and no dread of oncoming day or night. When I think of the mountain of morphia I consumed in the last war with no habits formed, a few amytols won’t do me any harm.

Poor Mrs Reed, the young American doyenne of the typists, who came over with the Mission, cried all yesterday with homesickness. I tried my hand at comfort with fair success but she said: ‘You can’t really understand, Lady Diana, because you are never down.’ Isn’t it extraordinary? I think my gloom, despondency and great alarm stick out for the public to be shocked at. If only I were like Eve Curie with one selfless preoccupation, that of winning the war.

Evacuation of women and children is talked of. I notice it is a subject Duff is loath to discuss with me. I am quite determined not to go and know how to avoid it, namely by not arguing but hiding at the last. No ship is going to be held up for one. My trouble would be (and it’s what I greatly fear) a reasoned appeal from Duff – duty, others, his own work etc. I can’t stand up to that if it comes to it, so I try, and shall to the end try, not to discuss it. I live on prayer. A lot of women are off voluntarily to Australia. Never a dull moment, now beri-beri is listed as a threatened epidemic, with cholera of course and malaria.

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