Fitzroy House [1]
Fitzroy Square
London W1
Dear Paddy Leigh Fermor,
I’m beginning like that chiefly because Nancy [2] says one mustn’t, but as she says I’m mental age of 9 it doesn’t signify how one begins. I’m ever so excited about you coming to Ireland. Do really come & don’t just say you are.
Daph [3] & Xan [4] are coming to stay at Chesterfield St [5] on Monday, v exciting.
Best love
Debo
[1] DD was in a nursing home, recovering from a minor operation.
[2] Nancy Mitford (1904–73). DD’s eldest sister, the novelist, biographer and arbiter of correct usage, used to address her letters to ‘9, Duchess of Devonshire’, the basis of her teasing being the accusation that DD was illiterate. ‘Unfounded, it’s my theory, because, though never seen to read, she’s so full of surprises.’ PLF, unpublished letter to Harold Acton, 5 November 1974.
[3] Daphne Vivian (1904–97). Tall, beautiful, libidinous author of popular books on London society, including The Duchess of Jermyn Street: the Life and Good Times of Rosa Lewis of the Cavendish Hotel (1964), Emerald and Nancy: Lady Cunard and Her Daughter (1968) and two volumes of autobiography. Married to 6th Marquess of Bath 1927–53 and to Xan Fielding 1953–78.
[4] Alexander (Xan) Fielding (1918–91). Wartime secret agent, writer and translator who shared with PLF a natural aversion to most forms of constraint. They had been friends since the war when, as Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents, they built up guerrilla and intelligence networks in Nazi-occupied Crete. A ‘gifted, many-sided, courageous and romantic figure, at the same time civilized and bohemian.’ PLF, Foreword to A Hideous Disguise (Typographeum, 1994), p. 9. Married to Daphne Bath, née Vivian, 1953–78 and to ‘Magouche’ Phillips, née Magruder, in 1979.
[5] The Devonshires’ London house.
c/o Niko Ghika [1]
Kamini, Hydra
Greece
Dear Debo,
I’ve just heard from Daphne on the point of departure to stay with you. Why does everyone go to that castle [2] except me?
My plan is this: there is a brilliant young witch on this island (aged sixteen and very pretty), sovereign at thwarting the evil eye, casting out devils and foiling spells by incantation. It shouldn’t be beyond her powers to turn me into a fish for a month and slip me into the harbour. I reckon I could get through the Mediterranean, across the Bay of Biscay, round Land’s End and over the Irish Sea in about 28 days (if the weather holds) and on into the Blackwater. I’m told there’s a stream that flows under your window, up which I propose to swim and, with a final effort, clear the sill and land on the carpet, where I insist on being treated like the frog prince for a couple of days of rest and recovery. (You could have a tank brought up – or lend me your bath if this is not inconvenient – till I’m ready to come downstairs. Also some flannel trousers, sensible walking shoes and a Donegal tweed Norfolk jacket with a belt across the small of the back and leather buttons.) But please be there. Otherwise there is all the risk of filleting, meunière etc, and, worst of all, au bleu . . .
Please give my love to Daphne if she’s with you. You can let her in on this plan, if you think it is suitable, but nobody else for the time being. These things always leak out.
Love
Paddy
P.S. Please write & say if this arrangement fits in with your plans.
[1] Nikos Ghika (1906–94). The well-known Greek painter and sculptor, a great friend of PLF, had lent him his house on the Aegean island of Hydra. Married to Barbara Hutchinson in 1961.
[2] Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford, overlooking the Blackwater River, has been the Irish home of the Dukes of Devonshire since 1753.
30 April 1955
Lismore Castle
Co. Waterford
Eire
Dear Paddy L F,
I was v v excited to get your letter with the swimming plan in it. It is a frightfully good plan, but the pestilential thing is that you would find, not me, but Fred Astaire [1] installed in this pleasant residence. However if you could swim a bit further to the right and land in England and then be like an eel & get a bit across the land you can have the freedom of my bath in Derbyshire & I will have the sensible shoes etc ready.
I would like it like anything, so have a try and I will instruct any salmon around your route to see that you aren’t filleted or meuniered or bleued.
I heard they set on you at a ball and broke you up, oh it was a shame. [2]
Is it jolly in Greece? I bet it is.
Love from
Debo
[1] Fred Astaire (1899–1987). The dancer and choreographer’s sister and stage partner, Adele, married DD’s uncle by marriage, Lord Charles Cavendish, and lived at Lismore Castle 1932–44. When her husband died, she returned to America but continued to visit Lismore each year, during which time Fred Astaire was a frequent visitor.
[2] PLF got into a fight at a hunt ball in Ireland and was badly cut.
2 March [1956]
Gadencourt [1]
Pacy-sur-Eure
Eure
Dear Debo,
Thank you very much for your letter in January, also for asking me to stay in Ireland in April. It’s frightfully rude not having answered earlier, and I can’t quite think how it’s happened. Anyway, if it is still open, I would simply love to – if I could come towards the end of this month, as Daph and Xan are coming here on their way back to the Kasbah.
The cold here has been worse than Baffin Land. It got so bad about three weeks ago that I baled out and went to Paris. I had a delicious luncheon with your sister Mrs Basil Seal [2] with lots of vodka beforehand – O for a beaker full of the cold north! – and then lots of a wine called Château Chasse-Spleen. This was very nice; then I took sanctuary at Chantilly, [3] and had a paralysing, but most luxurious attack of lumbago. Don’t be spellbound by the beauty of the name – it’s as though a mastiff had mistaken your spine for an ordinary bone, and given it the usual treatment. This was dispelled by heavenly drugs, thrust in like bayonet practice by a jovial nun resembling a Merry Wife of Windsor.
Annie Fleming, [4] Judy Montagu, [5] Ld Gage [6] & Peter Quennell [7] came to stay, and we had lovely protracted meals by candlelight, discussing poetry, sex, heresy and kindred themes. The big castle looked like some tremendous Russian Winter Palace in a park peopled by statues posturing under loads of snow. All the lakes were frozen and covered with ducks and swans mooching about rather awkwardly, wondering what on earth had gone wrong. There were also a number of displaced herons.
I had a rather dispiriting return to Normandy. The Normans are an awful lot really. My heart bleeds at the thought of the nice easygoing Saxons suddenly, in 1066, having to put up with an influx of these bossy and humourless louts. [8] What was rather curious was the discovery, in the house, of two tortoiseshell butterflies walking about the place with wings ajar. They were tottering in a most inexpert way as though they’d had a few. I can’t think where they have been all through the winter or what living on; furtively grazing in their stunned way, I suppose, on dark pastures of Harris Tweed and Lovat mixture . . .
Do, please, let me know about Ireland. It really would be lovely.
Best love from
Paddy
[1] PLF and Joan had been lent the Normandy house of Sir Walter Smart (1883– 1962), Oriental Secretary in Cairo before the war, and his Lebanese painter wife, Amy, daughter of the Cairo newspaper mogul Fares Nimr.
[2] Evelyn Waugh’s caddish anti-hero Basil Seal, described in Put Out More Flags as ‘an obstreperous minority of one’, was largely based on Nancy Mitford’s husband, Peter Rodd.
[3] PLF had been staying at the Château de St Firmin with Lady Diana Cooper. She and her husband Duff, 1st Viscount Norwich (1890–1954), had settled there after his retirement as ambassador in Paris.
[4] Ann Charteris (1913–81). Social and political hostess who became friends with PLF and DD in the 1950s. Married Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, as her third husband, in 1952. Intelligent, beautiful and witty, she had ‘a flair for tossing in the right word to start people capping each other or throwing down gauntlets’. PLF, unpublished letter to Mark Amory, 3 April 1983.
[5] Judy Montagu (1923–72). The daughter of Venetia Stanley, confidante of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, married art historian Milton Gendel in 1962. ‘She wasn’t remotely like anyone else . . . Some lives must be assessed by the warmth with which friendship is lavished and returned, and, in these rare terms, Judy’s was an entire success.’ PLF in H. H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley, edited by Michael and Eleanor Brock (OUP, 1982), p. 611.
[6] Henry Gage, 6th Viscount Gage (1895–1982). Lord-in-Waiting to King George V 1925–39, who possessed, according to his Times obituary, ‘strong Christian beliefs, fortified by a considerable knowledge and erudition in the Scriptures’.
[7] Peter Quennell (1905–93). Biographer and critic, editor of the Cornhill Magazine 1944–51 and History Today 1951–79.
[8] PLF was alluding to a letter he had received from his great friend, the novelist Rose Macaulay, ‘my one aim on landing in France with my car, is to hurry through Normandy AUSSI VITE que possible . . . How awful it must have been for us (the Saxons and Britons) when the Normans arrived; so boring, heavy-handed and dreary.’ Rose Macaulay, unpublished letter to PLF, 23 January 1952.
6 March [1956]
Edensor House [1]
Edensor, Bakewell
Derbyshire
Dear Paddy,
I am so pleased you will come to Lismore, any time would be terribly nice.
It is unfair you having Daph & Xan, they won’t come to us. I’m booking for the Kasbah though, I can see one has to book a long way ahead or some horrid counter-hon [2] would get there first.
Sorry about it being so cold, anyway there are crocuses now. Also calves.
Don’t forget to come to Lismore. Explain to the Fieldings how one worships them, as a matter of fact I suppose they know.
Love,
Debo
[1] A rambling village house within Chatsworth Park where DD and her family lived 1946–59.
[2] The Society of Hons was invented by DD and her sister Jessica when they were children. They met in a linen cupboard, a haven of warmth in their Oxford-shire home, Swinbrook House – later immortalised as the ‘Hons’ Cupboard’ in Nancy Mitford’s novels. Anyone not an Hon was a ‘horrible Counter-Hon’.
Gadencourt
Pacy-sur-Eure
Darling Debo,
I’m not going to attempt to say thank you in this letter for that lovely Paradise stay in Lismore – only that I still exist in a glorious afterglow of it, and find myself smiling with the inane felicity of a turnip lantern whenever I think of it, which is almost the whole time: it must astonish passers-by . . .
Millions of hugs & love to Xan and Daph. I’m writing to them this afternoon. [1]
And Glorious love & devotion to you, from
Paddy
[1] The letter follows.
Saturday [May 1956]
Gadencourt
Pacy-sur-Eure
Darling Daphne & Xan,
Lismore was beyond all expectations, absolute bliss throughout. Thank heavens no one else there most of the time except Debo, Emma & Stoker, [1] Andrew [2] & Eliz [3] half the time, then Ran, [4] Debo’s Wife [5] for a night, and three heavenly days with nobody but Debo and those sweet & comic children, for whom I fell like anything, also for Andrew, but most of all, as you might guess, for your best friend, Debo, who is funny, touching, ravishing and enslaving, an exquisite and strange deviation. With all this, there was another quality that I like more than anything, a wonderful and disarming unguardedness in conversation, and an intuitive knack – which you’d both mentioned – for people’s moods and feelings. Well, as you see, it’s as I feared! These graces and charms must really be enormous, because they even compensate for an engagingly unashamed Philistinism.
Anyway, all that flair and instinct, coupled with so many pretty ways, nearly makes up for the gaps left by Shakespeare etc. As you can imagine, we talked lots about you both, an orgy of body-worship [6] all round. I long to hear how it all went, the descent on Tangiers. I thought for one wild moment of inflicting myself on you – or the neighbourhood – but had, ruefully, to come back here.
There was hardly a drop of rain all the time and the whole castle and the primeval forest round it were spellbound in a late spring or early summer trance; heavy rhododendron blossom everywhere and, under the Rapunzel tower I inhabited, a still leafless magnolia tree shedding petals like giant snowflakes over the parallel stripes of an embattled new-mown lawn: silver fish flickered in the river, wood pigeons cooed and herons slowly wheeled through trees so overgrown with lichen they looked like green coral, drooping with ferns and lianas, almost like an equatorial jungle. One would hardly have been surprised to see a pterodactyl or an archaeopteryx sail through the twilight, or the neck of a dinosaur craning through the ferns and lapping up a few bushels out of the Blackwater, which curls away like the Limpopo, all set about with fever-trees . . . Anyway, you know it all so well, and Debo must have told you all our adventures and peregrinations: lovely gorse burning; visits to cows, drinking Guinness as one went; watching salmon hauled in below Dromana, finding bones in a graveyard overgrown with giant broccoli, while ravens croaked in a ruined tower; two swans nesting on the mudflats in front of Ballinatray, the falling house where the housemaid is a keen huntswoman; the little Gaelic-speaking lobster harbour of Helvik – a Norse name – then my search for a shrimp tea (what was shrimp in Irish we wondered? – sráoimph? At last we found an old boy in Ardmore, who scratched his head and said, as if he was imparting a treasonable secret: ‘Birawny is what they call ut’). Then, on the last day, a wonderful picnic three miles from Bridget’s [7] house, outside a witch’s hut in a magical wood containing a fairy tree, and a queen’s tree, so the witch said. She had a small boy there, a grandchild: ‘my dartur doid in the bearin of him, and left us in poor circumstances . . .’ Then Aer Lingus, London, and the 400 [8] in the space of 3 or 4 hours.
Darling Daph & Xan, must stop now. Do sit down (unlike me!) and write at once with lots of details and news. I’m feeling un poco adagio & lonely as you might say at the moment. Thank heavens Joan [9] gets back in a few days.
Fondest love
Paddy
[1] DD’s elder daughter, Emma Cavendish (1943–), and son, Peregrine Hartington (1944–), always known as ‘Stoker’.
[2] Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire (1920–2004). Politician, racehorse owner, keen collector of contemporary British art and passionate book collector. Married DD in 1941. Having lost his older brother, Billy, in 1944, he succeeded to the title and Devonshire estates after his father’s death in 1950. PLF described him as ‘infectiously spontaneous, stylish and funny’, with a ‘baseless feeling of unworthiness for the wholly unexpected succession to his great heritage’. Spectator, 12 June 2004.
[3] Lady Elizabeth (Deacon) Cavendish (1926–). DD’s unmarried sister-in-law. Long-time companion to the Poet Laureate John Betjeman.
[4] Randal McDonnell, 8th Earl of Antrim (1911–77). Chairman of the National Trust 1965–77. A great friend of the Devonshires who nevertheless always addressed him, for reasons forgotten, as ‘Lord Antrim’.
[5] Lady Katherine (Kitty) Petty-Fitzmaurice, Baroness Nairne (1912–95). DD’s closest friend’s nickname, ‘Wife’, originated from an involved family joke which began when a man repeatedly referred to his wife as ‘Kitty my wife’ in one breath. It was adopted by DD to describe any great friend of either sex. Married 3rd Viscount Mersey in 1933.
[6] An expression applied by DD to anyone – or anything – that she happened to like.
[7] Lady Bridget Parsons (1907–72). ‘Beautiful, silent and often grumpy friend of my sisters and my brother Tom.’ (DD) Her widowed mother, the Countess of Rosse, was married to 5th Viscount de Vesci of Abbeyleix. It was in their woods that the picnic took place.
[8] A nightclub off London’s Leicester Square. Owing to the licensing laws at the time, it was not possible to buy individual drinks, only whole bottles, ‘but they would keep it for you for your next visit. I finished a bottle in 1945 that I had begun in 1940.’ (PLF)
[9] Joan Eyres Monsell (1912–2003). PLF first met the beautiful, highbrow amateur photographer in wartime Cairo and they were eventually married in 1968. She was first married, 1939–47, to John Rayner. Naturally self-effacing, it was her ‘elegance, luminous intelligence, curiosity, understanding and unerring high standards that made her such a perfect muse to her lifelong companion and husband’. John Craxton, The Times, 10 June 2003.
[Postcard]
Tangiers
I am having a jolly time, no one goes on at me about learning to read but there is ever such a lot to hear. V. pleased with your telegram in Frogland. We are going on a Mystery Trip into the hinterland and to a grand dinner party, Daphne has made a wonderful holiday. Xan is being a terrific Hon, very gullible.
Come back to Lismore.
Much love
Debo
*
(DD)
Daphne Weymouth – as she was when I first knew her – was synonymous with enjoyment, laughter, fun and high jinks. She was one who lifted the spirits with her energy and overflowing good nature. She went in for almost childlike excesses of all kinds which, with her beauty, courage and imagination, made her an irresistible companion.
Sturford Meade, Henry and Daphne’s house near Longleat, was a refuge of luxury and pre-war gaiety made more immediate by the friends ordered abroad, often never to return. For Andrew and me it was a second home while he was stationed at nearby Warminster in 1942–3.
Many marriages failed to survive wartime separation and when Henry came back after five years in the Middle East both had changed and theirs sadly stuttered to an end.
Daphne alone and in the prime of her life meant lovers; one or two serious, some here today and gone tomorrow. Her admirers were legion. She remained a great friend of us both, as did her second husband, Xan. She was married for twenty-five years to both her husbands. Two silver weddings must be unusual.
Wherever Daphne and Xan settled – like migrating birds they were often on the move – they made you feel happy and at home. Their company, the chat and the fun overcame any physical discomfort or rough edges which might be found in a hired house.
Tangiers was one of their stops and I stayed with them there. Their little, damp and badly lit house was squashed in a busy street so narrow that the continuous noise never got out, roamed by packs of dishevelled children with runny noses, and no Europeans nearby.
We went into the hinterland in the hopes of seeing the Blue Men of the desert, crossed mountains and drank too much coffee. With Xan one always felt safe, however hazardous the road.
We had lunch with the best-known ex-pat, David Herbert, [1] a lifter of mood, so quick and funny. I felt he must have been very homesick. One side of his life could flourish unchecked, but there were few kindred spirits to entertain his whizzing social side, which was such a feature of life at Wilton and its neighbourhood. I loved him until his disloyalty and cattiness about my sister Diana [2] ended our friendship.
[1] David Herbert (1908–95). Immensely hospitable son of the 15th Earl of Pembroke, who grew up at Wilton House in Wiltshire. He first visited Tangiers in 1933 and settled there permanently after the war.
[2] Diana Mitford (1910–2003). DD’s sister left her first husband, Bryan Guinness, for Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, whom she married in 1936. Her political views and her refusal to repudiate her friendship with Hitler led many people to turn their backs on her.
Sunday [1956]
Gadencourt
Pacy-sur-Eure
Dearest Debo,
I really must try and get hold of a travelling brain-sharpener [1] (the size of one of those old bucket-shaped helmet-cases of japanned leather or tin, usually found in attics), because I was convinced you were leaving London a day later than you did. So you must picture my sorrow and dismay at the end of the telephone when I discovered that I was wrong, and that you had left an hour and a half before. It was little comfort to think that you were staying at the Continental. I hope you got a telegram from me there – also another and a stop-gap letter to Tangiers begging you to stop in Paris on the way back in order that we might spend a lovely evening guzzling and then dancing till cockcrow and finally eating onion-soup in the Halles as dawn broke.
The truth is I simply long for you, and hate the idea of changing jokes etc. You know, the sort of mood when nobody else will quite do. I’m still basking in a felicitous hangover of Ireland, and constantly discover vast smiles bisecting my rough-hewn features at the thought of all the fun and enchantment there. You, Andrew, Emma & Stoker seem saints and angels in human form. It’s a miracle you’re allowed to live, so do beware of traffic, falling flagpoles, mushrooms, lighting rockets and undercurrents when bathing; and a billion thanks for letting me come & stay.
I’ve just written a long letter to Xan and Daph about all this and about you, and piled it on pretty thick – but no thicker, I hasten to say, than the truth, which is glorious. I long to hear from you and from them about Tangiers, so please don’t be sparing, and write almost at once and let it rip. I wish you could fly to Paris just for fun so that my splendid scheme can come into operation. Otherwise, I doubt if I shall survive, and that would never do. I’m down with Blackwater fever as it is, and the doctors are pulling long faces.
I say, wasn’t it marvellous discovering that wobbly echo – Fermor’s echo – under the bridge? [2] I wish I really had written down all I wanted to remember, instead of only a few, but I’ll get them all straight in time. At the moment they are all dotted about my brain like bits of Meccano to be assembled some time . . .
I spent the weekend at Ad. Lubbock’s, [3] then dined with Judy Montagu, Peter Quennell and the girl, called Spider Monkey, [4] who he is about to marry. She’s very beautiful but etiolated and looks like Alice after finishing the bottle labelled DRINK ME. Then I came to Paris, and spent the evening, till 3 a.m., talking to Diana Cooper [5] in a café, only to discover as we left that the key of her car had been pinched . . . Luncheon with Nancy next day, when, by request and accompanied by her silver peal of laughter, she sang me ‘the bubbling of the glands’; [6] a sound for sore ears. Then I came out here, where my darling Joan arrives on Teusday.
It might be still summer, and I’m scribbling away under an apple tree up to the ankles in long grass, daisies and dandelion clocks, those infallible timepieces. Thousands of birds whizz to and fro, an oddly English sounding cuckoo lives close and a frenzied rattle indicates that several woodpeckers are taking toll of many an elm trunk. Although it is only 6 in the evening, an untimely nightingale sets me a-swoon with forlorn thoughts. In fact, I’m going indoors to get a swig of calvados. How lovely it would be if, on coming back, I saw you mooning about under these branches in that saffron kilt and black stockings, like an Edwardian girl who’s just finished a fencing lesson. One of the nicest bits at Lismore was walking through the wood above the river just before dinner on the last night, with a sunset streaming through the branches.
I saw Ran at Lady Bridget [Parsons]’s and we almost wept with nostalgia. It would be lovely if you came to Paris, so please try – I’d be there hot foot! But please write hourly, or I’ll pine away, I do believe.
With fondest love and devotion, darling Debo from
Paddy
[1] ‘A mythical device invented by Andrew to get a quicker response from dim friends. It was a metal headpiece from which two razor blades penetrated the skull and sharpened the wits of the wearer. Often accompanied by a mind broadener, a gentler mechanism, that stretched the mind in all directions.’ (DD)
[2] ‘The bridge over the Blackwater at Lismore has several arches crossing fields that are regularly flooded. When the river is low you can walk under them. The highest arch echoes loudly and was called after Paddy, who used to sing there for the satisfaction of hearing his amplified voice.’ (DD)
[3] Adelaide Stanley (1906–81). A friend of PLF and cousin of DD, who lived near Sevenoaks in Kent. Married Maurice Lubbock in 1926.
[4] Sonia (Spider) Leon (1928–). Nicknamed for her long-limbed elegance by Peter Quennell, whom she married in 1956.
[5] Lady Diana Manners (1892–1986). The reigning beauty of her age, greatly admired by PLF, married Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich, in 1919. Flouting the convention that a retiring ambassador should not return to the country of his former post until at least a year after his departure, the Coopers settled at St Firmin immediately after his retirement in 1947 and remained there until Norwich’s death in 1954.
[6] ‘Nancy used to tease me mercilessly about the tuberculin gland in my neck, which she said would put off prospective suitors as it “hubbled and bubbled” at night. She sang to the tune of a popular song, “The hounds and the horses, galloping over the land, all stopped to hear the hubbling and the bubbling of the gland”, which induced tears.’ (DD)
Gadencourt
Pacy-sur-Eure
Darling Debo,
Your letter was a marvel and a lovely fat one. I revelled in every single word, and laughed a lot and love your flat-out, headlong way of writing. It plunged me back in Lismore – staying there and all the fun, jokes and everything were by far the nicest thing for me this year – and also gave me a dash of the gloom of an exile wandering far away from Eden. I say, what do you mean about me not liking gardens? I love them, and that one especially, in particular with a glass in hand and the key lost, lawns in stripes, but some grass under trees so long that one gets back slightly late for dinner, festooned up to the knees in cuckoo-spit.
Alas, I ought to resist the temptation to implore you to come to Paris now, as I am bombarded by my publisher daily to have the manuscript of the book [1] in within the fortnight, or else it won’t be able to come out this year – and I’ve only got this house till the end of June. However, if you did come to Paris, I need hardly say that I’d be there faster than an arrow from a bow . . . I thought of trying to get you to come and stay here, but it wouldn’t be sensible at the moment, as I’d have to be closeted with this blithering book in a muck sweat of creative fever, leaving you and Joan alone all day in double agony of shyness. BUT, I do hope you’ll be in London for the last half of June, when I’m coming over purely on pleasure bent, and rather hoping to be practically inseparable from your side. DO PLEASE TRY! We could do innumerable glorious things. I long to do lots more dancing for one thing, and make you stay up long past bedtime, also to take that river steamer to Greenwich. Do let me know about this, and what hopes there are. I do hope you haven‘t got a million beastly thwarting plans! The truth is I worship & long to see you, and keep thinking of things to talk about.
The sun pours down here and I scribble a lot in the garden, planning to arrive in London brown and gimlet-eyed, ready to win friends and influence people. Two swallows flew into my room this morning and circled round for twenty minutes. I suppose it’s too late, but it would be nice if they built a nest against one of the beams that cross the ceiling. The windows would have to be left open even in a deluge. One of them kept banging against a window instead of flying out. I put it in my pocket, went out to the lawn where some people were. I said ‘Watch me throw a stone over that enormous tree’, took it out and threw it up into the air. It fluttered up into the firmament and everyone was amazed!
Do please write at once and tell your plans, and an autobiography of your immediate past.
With lots of love from
Paddy
A published report recalls in 1952 that fornication was responsible for over 32,000 illegitimate births. So THAT’S what it’s caused by! I’m glad they’ve put their finger on it at last . . .
[1] A Time to Keep Silence (1957). An account of PLF’s sojourns in monasteries in France and Cappadocia, where he retreated to work on his first book The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (1950).
2 June 1956
Edensor House
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
V nice to get a letter. V v sad to leave Ireland. The Wife and I are so overcome with shyness, we find it difficult to speak to strangers, even dogs, just like you & I did when we felt funny about going to a restaurant.
It is midwinter here, quite a nice day for February, & one needs woollen knickers. The Wife has got on orchid pink, it will get dirty in the coal dust of the industrial north.
When are you coming to England, what I mean is when are you really coming, not saying one day & meaning something quite else. Then I can get on with my plans for going to Greenwich by boat etc. Get yr travelling Wit Sharpener on in good time.
Let one know all.
Much love
D Devonshire
[Postcard]
My address of Ensor Lodge was a v bad shot. It is Edensor House, Bakewell, Derbyshire.
Al Khan [1] was v v good & came to Harvey Nichols to buy stays & stockings & gloves. He knows unexpected things like how gloves shrink. I looked in the pig house here – what do you think I found? A little pig. I’ll show you if you come here.
Wife & I were sitting, thinking no ill of anyone when what should my eye light on but that great fat green book you wrote, [2] so
I had a look in it. Meanwhile I’ve got to page 18 of Hide & Seek. [3]
Do you always spell Tues Teus, is it Greek or something?
Diana Cooper looked smashing at a ball I went to, about 16.
Just got a P.C. from Xan so my day is made.
[1] Prince Aly Khan (1911–60). The racehorse-owning playboy, father of the present Aga Khan, was reputed to be able to handle more women simultaneously than most men can in a lifetime. His marriage to his second wife, the actress Rita Hayworth, ended in 1953. He was often DD’s host in Paris and at the Château de l’Horizon in the South of France.
[2] The Traveller’s Tree. The book grew out of captions PLF wrote to accompany photographs of the Caribbean, taken by his friend the Greek photographer Costa Achillopoulos.
[3] Xan Fielding, Hide and Seek: The Story of a War-time Agent (1954).
Monday, 12 June 1956
c/o Julian Pitt-Rivers [1]
Château du Roc
Fons, Lot
Darling Debo,
I’m sorry about Ensor Lodge.
Yes, I’ve always had trouble with Teusday; I expect you make mistakes about different shapes of cattle cake sometimes.
It would be lovely to have a transparent and invisible brain-sharpener that one could wear all the time, or even a small pocket one like a hearing aid, self-stropping, stainless with a set of refills.
I set off with Joan last week in a Bentley she’s got, so old as to be practically a fossil but fast as the wind. We stopped the first night at a small town called Valençay, where there’s a huge castle that used to belong to Talleyrand. In the park are numbers of strange birds that ought to be put in the book: scores of different-coloured peacocks forever perching on pinnacles and stone urns; secretary-birds that sound more useful than they really are and glorious-coloured cranes from Sardinia and the Cape of Good Hope, with headdresses like Red Indians, and a number of flamingos.
Lots of love from
Paddy
[1] PLF was staying with the anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers (1919–2001) and his second wife, Margarita, former wife of Miguel Primo de Rivera, son of the Spanish dictator.
26 August 1956
Aix en Provence
Darling Debo,
I’m terribly sorry not having written half a century ago, after telephoning you on the eve of leaving to join Xan and Daph in the South of France. Things there were such turmoil that I don’t think any of the hundred-odd people engaged on making that film [1] wrote so much as a postcard the whole time. D, X & I talked it over and decided you would have hated it. I did, rather, and buggered off after about a week.
It was all pretty queer. First things first: Dirk Bogarde, [2] the actor who is doing one in the film, is absolutely charming – slim, handsome, nice speaking-voice and manner, a super-gent, the ghost of oneself 12 years ago. He and Daph & Xan had become bosom friends by the time I got there, and he and his equally nice manager (rather a grand thing to have?) are going to stay with them for Christmas in Tangiers. We all lived – us, the other actors, directors, cameramen etc – in a vast chalet, miles above the clouds in the French Alps, leagues away from anywhere and at the end of an immeasurable tangle of hairpin bends. The film itself, what I saw of it, is tremendously exciting – tremendous pace, action galore, staggering scenery, with the guns of whiskered and turbaned Cretan guerrillas jutting down from every rock and miles of peaceful French roads choked with truckloads of steel-helmeted Germans bawling ‘Lili Marlene’. It’ll certainly be a thumping success, and when it finally appears at the Odeon or elsewhere, I propose to sneak in and see it in a false beard night after night. Some bits – not yet filmed, fortunately – turn Bogarde-Fermor into a mixture of Garth [3] & Superman, shooting Germans clean through the breast from a dentist’s chair, strangling sentries in an offhand manner – all totally fictitious! I’m having a terrific tussle getting them to change these bits in the film, not because I really mind, but because anyone who knows anything about the operation knows that it’s all rot. There are scores of small things dead wrong, & Xan and I are having a death struggle to get them put right, mostly for the sake of Greek and Cretan friends. It’s all v. rum. The main trouble is that once a film script is written, the authors themselves bow down and worship it as though it were Holy Writ. IT becomes the truth and anyone trying to change it (like X or me) incurs the horror of heretics trying to tamper with the text of the Gospel.
Well, I baled out of this mountain madhouse after 7 days and retreated to a minute Provençal village called Auribeau, where I stayed in the pub and scribbled all day (against time) in the priest’s leafy garden overlooking a forested valley along which flowed a swift and icy river with deep green pools dappled with the shadows of leaves where I splashed and floated between paragraphs for hours among the dragonflies. There was never anyone there except occasionally a solitary fisherman with a straw hat and never a bite. *
Then everything changed 100%, when Annie Fleming went to stay with Somerset Maugham [4] (not Willy to me) at Cap Ferrat, where he inhabits a gorgeous villa. It was a concerted plan that she should try and wangle my staying there for fun, for a few days. She duly got me asked there to luncheon, and afterwards, as if by clockwork, Mr Maugham asked me to stay several days and everything looked like a triumph of Annie’s engineering and plain sailing. But there were rocks ahead. (Do you know Somerset Maugham? He is 84, and his face is the wickedest tangle of cruel wrinkles I have ever seen and so discoloured and green that it looks as though he has been rotting in the Bastille, or chained to the bench of a galley or inside an iron mask for half a century. Alligator’s eyes peer from folds of pleated hide and below them an agonizing snarl is beset with discoloured and truncated fangs, but the thing to remember is that he has a very pronounced and noticeable stutter that can seize up a sentence for 30 seconds on end.)
All went better and better – a sort of honeymoon – as the day progressed. But at dinner things began to go wrong. Two horrible and boring guests arrived (publishers) called Mr & Mrs Frere. [5] Mr Frere made some sweeping generalization and
Me ‘I love generalizations – for instance, that all Quakers are colour-blind (you know the line) – or that all heralds stutter!’
Mrs Frere ‘Stutter?’
Me ‘Yes.’
Mrs Frere ‘How do you mean, stutter?’
Me ‘Stutter . . . you know, stammer . . .’
Later on, after that fatal 8th glass of whisky, I was in trouble again: – Somerset Maugham ‘It’s a c-c-confounded nuisance t-t-today b-b-being the F-feast of the As-as-as-assumption. N-none of the g-gardeners have d-done a s-s-stroke . . .’
Me ‘Ah yes! The Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin! Just after the Pope gave out the dogma a few years ago, I was going round the Louvre with a friend of mine called Robin Fedden [6] (who, by ill luck, has a terrible stammer) and we paused in front of a huge picture of the Assumption by (I think) Correggio (ah, oui ) & Robin turned to me and said “Th-th-that’s what I c-c-call an un-w-wwarrantable as-s-s-sumption”.’
There was a moment’s silence, the time needed for biting one’s tongue out. When bedtime came my host approached me with a reptile’s fixity, offering me a hand as cold as a toad, with the words: ‘W-w-well I’ll s-s-say g-good-b-b-bye now in c-case I’m not up b-by the t-time y-you l-l-leave . . .’
Annie helped me pack next morning, and as I strode, suitcase in hand, to the door, there was a sound like an ogre’s sneeze. The lock of the suitcase had caught in the sheet, leaving a jagged yard-long rent across the snow-white expanse of heavily embroidered gossamer. I broke into a run and Annie into fits of suppressed laughter.
As a result of bullying by Annie & Diana Cooper (who turned up in the area, where I had settled in a horrible hotel, soon after) I was asked by W. S. M. to a meal of reconciliation and amends, where we met as affable strangers. It was really a gasbag’s penance and I, having learnt the hard way, vouchsafed little more than a few safe monosyllables.
The rest of my short stay in that area was spent with D. Cooper, Annie, Robin & Mary, [7] & Hamish [8] (who were all staying with Mrs Fellowes). [9] I hate it – the Côte d’Azur I mean – and will never set foot there again.
I’ve taken rooms here for a week – ending tomorrow – in a pretty, retired midwife’s house, in whose garden I write. This ravishing town, full of chimes of bells, fountains, peasants playing boules in the shadow of lime trees and splendid decaying palaces and churches, is a wonderful disinfectant after that awful coast. All is splendid or dilapidated, nothing smart.
In two days time I set off on the great yacht Diana has borrowed [10] with D[iana], Joan, Alan Pryce-Jones [11] and a couple called Frank & Kitty Giles: [12] Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily. It really would be a kind act were you to write c/o British Consul, Cagliari, Sardinia. Meanwhile, please give my love to Andrew, to Emma & Stoker (angels in human form) & to your Wife.
Lots of love from
Paddy [13]
[1] Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A romanticised version of the daring abduction, led by PLF, of General Heinrich Kreipe in Nazi-occupied Crete, based on the book by PLF’s comrade William Stanley Moss (1950).
[2] Dirk Bogarde (1921–99). The actor was apprehensive about meeting the real-life character he was playing but was soon won over by PLF’s charm and adroitness.
[3] Muscle-bound hero of a strip cartoon which ran in the Daily Mirror 1943–97.
[4] W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965). The writer bought the Villa Mauresque on the French Riviera after his divorce from his wife, Syrie, in 1927.
[5] Alexander Frere-Reeves (1892–1984). Publisher, for many years head of William Heinemann, Maugham’s publishing house. Married to Patricia Wallace, daughter of the thriller-writer Edgar Wallace. ‘Frere (nasty man) made us all angry by saying that no author wrote for anything but profit, this put my voice up by several octaves as well as Paddy’s.’ The Letters of Ann Fleming, edited by Mark Amory (Collins, 1985), p. 185.
[6] Robin Fedden (1908–77). Gifted writer, poet, traveller and mountaineer who was Historic Buildings Secretary at the National Trust 1951–73. Married Greek-born Renée Catzeflis (d. 1992) in 1942.
[7] Lady Mary St Clair-Erskine (1912–93). Wayward daughter of 5th Earl of Rosslyn. ‘She could get away with almost anything through her charm, and was always forgiven; and there was often plenty to forgive.’ Daphne Fielding, Mercury Presides (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1954), p. 159. Married to Sir Philip Dunn 1933–44, to Robin Campbell 1946–58, to Charles McCabe 1962–9 and again to Sir Philip Dunn in 1969.
[8] James Alexander (Hamish) St Clair-Erskine (1909–73). Son of 5th Earl of Rosslyn with whom Nancy Mitford, in spite of his homosexuality, had been infatuated when young.
[9] Marguerite (Daisy) Decazes (1890–1962). Well dressed, sharp-tongued daughter of the 3rd Duc Decazes, and heiress through her mother to the Singer sewing-machine fortune. She owned the luxurious villa Les Zoraïdes on Cap Martin, near Monaco. Married Reginald Fellowes, as her second husband, in 1919.
[10] Diana Cooper had been lent the 103-foot Eros II by Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos (1908–96).
[11] Alan Pryce-Jones (1908–2000). Writer, critic and editor of the Times Literary Supplement 1948–59, who had once been engaged to Joan Leigh Fermor. Married Thérèse Fould-Springer in 1934.
[12] Frank Giles (1919–). Author and journalist, Paris correspondent of The Times 1953–60. Married to Lady Katherine (Kitty) Sackville in 1946.
[13] PLF reworked this letter at a later date, providing further details of his fateful visit to Somerset Maugham. It was published in an article by Ben Downing, Paris Review, Spring 2003.
* Perhaps because of the splashing I mentioned.
1 October 1956
Easton Court Hotel
Chagford, Nr. Exeter
Devon
Darling Debo,
I’ve been at this pub in the heart of Andrew’s damp duchy for about a week, ever since leaving that yacht (which was perfect), and I’m scribbling away like mad. Outside, the rain thrashes down as though out of sheer spite, and I wish there was somebody I could complain to, and have something done. I don’t mind as much as I would at other times, though, as it stops me from mooching endlessly about the moors (which I might otherwise do) instead of writing.
It’s rather strange and mysterious country, and whenever there’s a couple of hours that look faintly possible, I go tittupping over the moors and through the woods on a black horse called Flash that lives hard by; usually getting soaked by sudden showers or by crashing along overgrown rides where each leaf one collides with seems to shed a tablespoonful of rainwater. Very steep hills are separated by rapid streams flowing with Guinness-dark water. The banks are full of rowan-berries, Lords and Ladies run to seed, ragged-robin and willowherb dribbling with the spit of cuckoos long flown. The woods are thick with moss & lichen (like Lismore), turning into the same green coral. Occasionally they open into glades where many vixens would be decadently gloved in magenta. Stone bridges as uncouth and angular as early heraldry span these streams and ring hollow under-hoof, and the dampness, darkness and greenness gives them a submarine & legendary feeling. One should be dressed in full armour under shoals of green-haired mermaids drifting through the oak branches on slow and invisible currents, all to the sound of harps, if you catch my drift.
Above this, Dartmoor is dotted with rings of druidical stones or jutting at a slant from a sea of red bracken, and above this bracken, like chessmen or T’ang (ah oui!) objects, peer the heads of wild ponies the size of large dogs, gazing as though mesmerized, as one approaches cautiously. Most are bay but others are black, chestnut, roan, grey, dappled, skewbald or piebald in bold geographical designs, one or two practically striped like zebras, many with blond flapperish manes & tails. One raffish grey stallion, obviously of standing and authority, has one of his mad eyes surrounded by a piratical black patch. Up you creep till suddenly they are off helter-skelter in a flurry of flying hoofs and horsehair, the burglarious stallion taking advantage of the disorder by attempting to inflict the last outrages on minute mares at the gallop: the foals pounding anxiously after them are so small that they only make a ripple on top of the bracken. At a safe distance they freeze again, as in grandmother’s steps. They must have been caught and branded and let loose again, and now various owners are rounding them up by their brands for the annual pony fair in Chagford later this month. They are broken-in & sold as pets or for children or for circuses – formerly to costermongers and – too awful to think of, after their free and dashing life on the moors – sent down coalmines; or, worse still, shanghaied on to tramp steamers for Belgians to munch.
I went on one of these raids yesterday: Mr French, a local stable owner with a well-nigh incomprehensible Devon accent, & a ragged gang of farm boys on steeds & self. It was a long job. The stableman warned me that these ponies were contrary and artful buggers. The afternoon wore by in stealthy encircling advances through the bracken, long waits in the howling wind with nothing to do but stuff with blackberries, and sudden gallops, whips cracking like mad while the boys made shrill noises like barking dogs & owls hooting. At last we had about a hundred cornered in a lane, kicking, leaping, whinnying and trying to clamber over each other. Thirty were picked out by their brands and we set off through a ten-mile labyrinth of lanes as the sun was setting, half of us in front to block escape routes at crossroads. Night had fallen by the time we drove this cavalcade of pigmies through the streets of Chagford. The aborigines emerged, beer mug in hand, from brightly lit pubs to watch these artful buggers pound by. It was past ten when we trotted them into a field where three sleek elderly giants were already grazing. They raised their heads in amazement as though a horde of Teddy Boys, stunted with gin, had suddenly rocked’n’rolled into the Athenaeum. (What lies ahead of these problem ponies? Will they settle down?) I’m glad to say that by the time we left them there in the dark, one of the fogeys was diffidently rubbing noses with the little patch-eyed stallion (looking no bigger than a dachshund) which I thought particularly decent.
Lots of love,
Paddy
P.S. I had dinner with Mrs Basil Seal on the way back, and was pleased & flattered at her learning the saga of Mr Maugham via you; but sorry she had written back saying all his wrinkles spelt nothing but kindness & benevolence.
Easton Court Hotel
Chagford
Darling Debo
I’ve just got your letter from Sardinia. It’s a lovely letter, only marred, as was your last one, by this business about pall-bearers. You tell me all about enlisting wonderful John [1] & Xan, with never a hint of asking me, when I am exactly the right medium height, own a dark suit and a measured tread, and would really look sad (not that your other candidates wouldn’t). So please put me down, should I outlive you and there are still any vacancies. I’ll do a ‘PLF writes: –’ in The Times if you like and say that all our wishes go out to your widow, Baroness Nairne [2] etc.
I’m still chained to this never-ending book, it is nearly finished and marvellous. I think. I wish Edensor House was three miles away – I could tittup there in the evenings on Flash, on whose back I pound rather aimlessly across the moors, which grow steadily bleaker and more menacing as the days draw in. It’s just the sort of place where, some windy night, I might help some poor and infirm old woman bent double under a load of sticks, who would turn out to have supernatural powers and grant three wishes . . . But not a soul so far. I ought really to have two older brothers who had already ridden that way and not only not helped her, but mocked her age & infirmity.
With lots of love
Paddy
[1] Lieut.-Col. John Silcock; the Devonshires’ land agent at Lismore for many years.
[2] DD’s ‘Wife’, Katherine Mersey.
Easton Court Hotel
Chagford
Darling Debo,
I say, how exciting about that baby. [1] I do think you are clever. Have you thought of names? Boys: Tarquin, Clovis, Comus, Spiridian. Girls: Pomona, a minor rustic goddess of orchards and walled gardens. But perhaps Geo., Harry, Betty, Peg and Polly, etc are safest.
I would simply love to come for the chatting, when I’m out of this literary forest. My egress is being held up a lot by this Crete film. I’ve just been to another one, trying to instruct Cypriot waiters (who are dubbing – as they say – the voices of Cretan guerrillas) to talk in a Cretan dialect, which is about as hard as telling a Bakewell gamekeeper to talk like a Co. Waterford poacher. I’m going to do all the Greek-speaking bits done by Dirk, i.e. he makes the shapes with his mouth, laughs superciliously, lifts his eyebrows or shouts at the top of his voice – all in dead silence – while I, concealed in a bush, make all the noises . . . rather an intimate relationship. But most of it is in English. It’s all very queer.
HORSY INTELLIGENCE: On one of these rural rides yesterday afternoon, my horse (Flash) stopped at a gate and an immense carthorse came thundering over the grass to rub muzzles. They alternately put their nostrils end to end – not a very good fit, owing to the size of the newcomer – and blew hard, sending out great clouds of steam as it was a frosty evening. They seemed very keen on this and I’m thinking of taking it up.
Stranger still, in the middle of last night – at 2 a.m. – I heard a cavalcade of horses trotting and cantering under my window, jumped out of bed and peered out like Old Mother Slipper Slopper, but it was pitch-dark and windy and nothing to be seen, eerie, like smugglers or highwaymen or a troop of hired assassins off for an ambush with dark lanterns. I told the rather credulous maid Barbara about it next morning, who said it must have been ghosts or – rather wittily I thought – nightmares. It turned out in the end to be a fast set of Dartmoor ponies. Sometimes on very windy and cold nights, they come tooling down – ‘It must be terrible cold for them up there’ – and clatter about in the villages, waking all the dogs and setting cocks crowing prematurely. There have been times when swarms have even galloped through Exeter in the small hours, whinnying in the Cathedral Close and causing many a citizen and minor canon to sit up in the dark with their eyes rolling in wild surmise.
Lots of love from
Paddy
[1] DD was expecting her younger daughter, Sophia, born on 18 March 1957.
[1956]
Easton Court Hotel
Chagford
Darling Debo,
I hunted yesterday, the first time since the war, and enjoyed every second of it. Scarcely any jumps, which was a comfort, except a few ditches over which nimble Flash sailed as lightly as a moth. It was a lovely day of bright rainy sunlight, what they call a fox’s wedding in Northamptonshire. There were only about 15 people, all squire farmers and their mates, a bit dull, but very nice and friendly. All except one, perhaps, who I later learnt was not quite all there. After pounding for miles I found myself stationary beside him outside a spinney inside which a lot of yelping, horn blowing and whip cracking was going on. He was a great lantern-jawed, sombre man on a huge horse. Just in front of us, turning his back on all the flurry in the wood, sat an idle hound smothered in filth and, as it were, with legs akimbo, gazing from one to the other of us with benevolent interest, his tongue lolling amiably and occasionally scratching behind his ear with his right paw. After about 10 minutes the silence began to weigh, so I pointed at this hound with my borrowed crop and said, in a voice that wasn’t my own: ‘That hound’s taking it very easy.’ My companion roused himself from a brown study, his great mug swivelled slowly in my direction and fixed me with large bloodshot eyes; but uttered never a word. In County Kildare he would have clapped spurs to his steed and given me two black eyes.
The going was very fast; hell for leather; but no foxes were killed. Our cavalcade now and then made a very impressive noise, as troops of heifers, fifty strong, kept joining us and hammered along through the bracken at our sides. They seem very keen. Anti-bloodsport flocks of sheep, however, dispersed at once with massed baaa’s of protest. Towards the end, ten of those ponies I’ve mentioned before – (they look rather dismal at this time of the year, embedded in sodden bracken, blinded by their manes and always wringing wet) – joined the hounds and careered along in their midst. This particular gang were black, white and marmalade skewbalds; in fact, slightly larger hounds, looking like hounds’ uncles at a rather hearty parents’ match. Lots of seagulls wheeled about mewing overhead, enjoying an inland holiday. We ended up following the hounds and the ponies round and round a wood till it began to get dark, and then chucked it. I trotted home with the hunt secretary and his simple face was puckered with surmise. ‘Funny kind of a fox, that last one’ he kept murmuring between meditative puffs at his old briar. ‘Didn’t seem able to make up his mind, somehow . . .’
Do (please) write to London (Travellers) as I think I’ve practically finished here. I hope to see Nancy in the capital. Andrew has been writing and speaking up manfully. [1] I do envy him his certainty.
Love from
Paddy
[1] Andrew Devonshire fervently supported Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s contentious policy of military intervention during the Suez Crisis and had made it the subject of his maiden speech in the House of Lords.
[April 1957]
13 Chester Row [1]
London SW1
Darling Debo,
Do take care of Sophia. The great thing, I’m told, with children of that age is to see they are not stolen away by gypsies and replaced with a changeling, while the rightful baby is stained brown with walnut juice and brought up to rob hencoops and tell fortunes, and heaven knows what besides. Fancy that nurse threatening to put her outside for the crows . . .
I feel rather gloomy, and long to be out of this wretched town.
Lots of love from
Paddy
[1] PLF and Joan’s London house.
Monday [24 June 1957]
13 Chester Row, SW1
Darling Debo,
I got a lovely letter from Emma this morning, praising a vasculum I had sent her. [1] She writes jolly well and funnily, and please give her my love. I hope it was the right size. My father [2] used seldom to be without one, and my sister and I, being snobbish and unbotanical, used to trail along a few feet ahead or behind, pretending there was no link.
Of course there were geological hammers, cameras, butterfly nets, map cases, sketching blocks, field glasses, reference books, steel-rimmed spectacles and a vole-skin cap like half a pumpkin with side flaps as well, and pepper-and-salt knickerbockers and boots with colossal studs, which he was always oiling. The great thing, I think I remember, is to put lots of damp moss in the vasculum before setting off on a stately botanical journey.
Please write at once.
Love
Paddy
[1] PLF had sent DD’s daughter, a keen gardener from childhood, a container used by botanists to hold field samples.
[2] Lewis Leigh Fermor (1880–1954). Distinguished geologist, author of Memoir on the Manganese-Ore Deposits of India (1909), who spent most of his working life as Director of the Geological Survey of India.
[Postmarked 7 July 1957]
Dumbleton Hall [1]
Dumbleton, Evesham
Worcestershire
Darling Debo,
Staying with Annie Fleming near Dover two weeks ago, half the English Channel flowed into my right ear and it’s been feeling pretty queer ever since. Yesterday, my fierce Orangeman doctor from Belfast thrust into it a silver ice-cream cone or scoil sign [2] fitted with electric light, and said ‘Why, you’ve got a fungus there!’ What can he mean? I see a forest of toadstools, the sort that elves shelter under in summer showers, Arthur Rackham’s world; so now weed killer is being pumped in. Rather glamorous, you’ll allow.
They are mowing the hay here and everything smells marvellous. When this is finished, I sneak off to the village for a meditative glass of Ind Coope.
Lots of love from
Paddy
[1] A neo-Jacobean house belonging to PLF’s father-in-law, Bolton Eyres Monsell, 1st Viscount Monsell (1881–1969), Conservative MP for Evesham 1910–35. John Betjeman recorded his memories of the Eyres Monsells in ‘Dumbleton Hall’, published in Uncollected Poems (1982).
[2] The Irish school warning road-sign resembled an ice-cream cone on fire.
12 o’clock
[Postmarked 18 July 1957]
13 Chester Row, SW1
Darling Debo,
Bridget [Parsons]’s out alas.
But the real purpose of this letter is to tell you something I’ve just read, viz. that in ancient times in Sicily the smell of the flowers was so strong that hunting dogs used invariably to lose the scent and wander about for hours at a loss, bemusedly sniffing with half closed eyes, with the quarry happily grazing several miles off. Poor fuddled Bellman & True . . . [1]
Lots of love
Paddy
[1] Two of the foxhounds in the eighteenth-century hunting song ‘D’ye ken John Peel’.
Hôtel Prince de Galles
33 Avenue George V
Paris
Darling Debo,
Everything’s fixed. I only finished reading the book [1] three minutes before meeting Mr Zanuck, [2] but it didn’t matter, because he burst into his suite at the Savoy like a rifle bullet saying: ‘Swell to see you, Mr Feemor, it’s really swell. I’m off to the Belgian Congo in three days, and I’ve just taken two yellow pills & three injections and don’t make much sense, so you mustn’t be sore at me if I talk a whole lot of boloney.’
He’s tiny, with bright blue minute eyes glinting with mad intensity, a ragged sandy moustache and his injections had clearly incapacitated him from judging distances, as the colossal cigar in his mouth – as irremovably there as part of his anatomy – was snapped in the middle, one half hanging at right angles and belching volumes of smoke, like the funnels of one of those Thames steamers going under Chelsea Bridge. He must have charged into a door or a wall or perhaps a mirror.
I can’t remember if I told you that the whole of the book is a plea against elephant shooting, in case the species becomes extinct. The villain of the book goes berserk and shoots them by the score in a sort of demon’s passion. This is obviously the bit Mr Zanuck likes best, because when I met him next day he said: ‘It’s a swell book, Mr Feemor, a wonderful book. The best bit is when they bump off all those elephants. But we’ll run into difficulties here because of all that goddam humanitarian hooey in England and America. I’d like to do the thing properly, and shoot a whole lot of them, a whole lot . . .’ his blue eyes kindled dreamily. ‘I doubt if I get permission to shoot more than a dozen.’ He looked rather dejected for a second, but then said, cheering up, ‘I tell you what we’ll do! We’ll only shoot a dozen or maybe fifteen, but I’ll put lots and lots of cameras about at different angles so it’ll look as if it were killing hundreds! But what a book!’
There never seemed to be a second’s question of my not doing the thing, so now I’ve got to start work full steam ahead and hope for the best. It’s rather an alarming, but v. exciting assignation.
I had luncheon with the old French authoress [3] the day before yesterday and with Mark Grant, [4] and there was much loving talk of you, and swapping of Athenian for Irish tales. Otherwise, Paris seems stripped of all my friends and has become one of the major tropical cities of the world. The policemen are in shirtsleeves and khaki solar-topees, as though it were Khartoum. I wandered around by myself till 7 a.m. in Montmartre the first night in countless bars full of negroes, soldiers, sailors, toughs and tarts of all colours and a few noseless pimps, and on the second night till 8 a.m. in Montparnasse and Les Halles. Here, very strangely, I fell in with two Australian nurses who seemed a bit lost, and fed them onion soup as day broke, surrounded by porters and butchers in blood-stained smocks as though they had just been helping at the guillotine. I am writing this in the mosaic courtyard of this luxurious hotel, with a bogus Spanish fountain tinkling in the middle. The Frogs and Americans here look awful, exactly like pigs, with tiny pig’s eyes. I have just caught a sobering glimpse of my own reflection, and so, alas, do I. Circe has done a thorough job.
How I wish you had been here! Just think of the night prowling and dark dancing, all the fun. I long for you like anything, and yearn and gaze towards the dividing Channel with hate.
Meanwhile, a billion tons of love, Debo darling, and promise to write hourly.
Paddy
[1] Romain Gary, Les Racines du ciel (1956). Set in French Equatorial Africa, the Goncourt Prize-winning novel tells the story of Morel, an idealistic ex-soldier, who sets out to save the African elephant from extinction. PLF was asked to work on the screenplay of the novel, adapted as the film The Roots of Heaven (1958).
[2] Darryl F. Zanuck (1902–79). Hollywood producer of The Roots of Heaven.
[3] One of DD’s many nicknames for her sister Nancy, sometimes varied to ‘the Old French writer’.
[4] Mark Ogilvie-Grant (1905–69). A friend of PLF and all the Mitfords, who was posted to Greece with SOE and taken prisoner in the Mani soon after landing. Settled in Athens after the war, where he worked for BP and was ‘a great friend of everyone interesting. He loved music and had a passion for the singing of Dame Nellie Melba and, late at night, would burst into imitations of her, half worship, half skit.’ (PLF)
Château de St Firmin
Vineuil
Oise
Darling Debo,
I say what an adventure with Evelyn Waugh! [1] I can see those pale eyes burning. He has the most peculiar expression of mouth, eye-socket and nostril, as though they were all recoiling from his own aroma, which would be a blend of tweed, claret, cigar smoke and incense. Freud [2] too, eh? I suppose it’s alright. H’m.
I’m writing this in bed, and was woken up an hour ago by hunting horns playing lovely melancholy tunes, soon followed by hounds giving tongue, as they say, and, sitting up in bed with one ear cocked, lo and behold, three men in scarlet coats were moving across the park in the middle distance, with those horns that go round the body like lifebelts. Ever since, there has been a distant rumour of muted baying & fanfares. Is it stag hunting already, I wonder, or just a sort of exercise? I wouldn’t half mind doing it in France sometime, just for the oddity. They hunt for truffles in the oak forests of Périgord, in the south west, with specially trained truffle hounds. It would be rather smart to be an MTH, [3] even a joint one.
A Basque woman called Jacqueline looks after Joan and me here. All her front teeth are missing, otherwise she’s rather handsome in a dark wild way – she’s having a new set made by a dentist round the corner. One has to look her hard in the eye when giving orders, and none of one’s usual diffidence; as, I imagine, with some animals like lions or jaguars; otherwise she might turn and rend one, with her back (perforce) teeth joining in one’s jugular. Perhaps she’s only waiting for the dentist’s work to be done before leaping and rolling one over and over.
I’m rather enjoying this work, and am writing apace. It’s all about French Equatorial Africa, elephants, tom-toms and jet-black witch doctors with spectacles painted on to their faces very eerily with white clay.
I must go and borrow the gardener’s bike, and spin through the rain to the post.
So lots of love, darling Debo, and polar bear hugs from
Paddy
[1] Evelyn Waugh (1903–66). The novelist, a difficult and demanding guest, announced that he had found an unemptied chamber pot in his bedside table when staying at Edensor with DD.
[2] Lucian Freud (1922–). The artist painted six members of the Devonshire family. ‘Very attractive, an original. As well as his prodigious talent, he is delightful company, can be very funny, always unexpected. He was a will o’ the wisp, appearing and disappearing in a disconcerting way, day and night were the same to him. Scathingly critical of those he does not like, he is a real friend to his loved ones. Admittedly he does discard them sometimes, but Andrew and I were lucky in that we remained friends for more than fifty years.’ (DD)
[3] Master of Truffle Hounds.
Wednesday [1957]
BOO HOO
Hôtels St James & d’Albany
202 & 212 rue de Rivoli
Paris 1er
My darling Debo,
I do feel glum and downcast at your not coming to Paris! I somehow felt sure you would, and could already see us toddling about the streets arm-in-arm, two jolly bachelors, rolling from one lovely meal to another and dancing till daybreak and then stoking up on soupe à l’oignon in the Halles and then, after a suitable pause, beginning all over again. It’s lunatic to be so sad about it. I wish you didn’t love everyone else more than me – it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t rather love you, as I suppose I do, otherwise I wouldn’t feel so selfish and possessive. The thing is, no one else will quite do, it’s too idiotic. But I do adore you. I mustn’t go on grumbling and groaning like this.
It’s lovely here – we play boules under the moulting trees below, with long-legged girls pelting after them squealing with flying plaits followed by small teams of barking dogs. There are also quite a lot of small children who stagger about the grass opposite as though they were the worse for drink; suddenly falling flat on their faces. When this happens, I count three slowly, and then the first perfunctory wail sails through the Tuileries.
I’m having lunch today with Françoise Sagan, [1] the rather pretty mop-headed near-teenage prodigy who wrote Bonjour Tristesse. I wonder what that will be like. Pretty awful, probably.
Nothing more for the moment, darling Debo, except love and hugs and fond and loving thoughts by the bushel, from
Paddy
[1] Françoise Sagan (1935–2004). The novelist’s first book, Bonjour Tristesse (1954), was published to great acclaim when she was only eighteen.
Teus [1957]
Hôtels St James & d’Albany
202 & 212 rue de Rivoli, 1er
Darling Debo,
Lunch with Françoise Sagan went OK – at least I think it did. She’s so shy that it rather infects one too. She perches like a bird on the edge of the chair with eyelids fluttering up and down timidly over nut-brown eyes, talks quickly and hesitantly, frequently breaking off, has a nice giggle, and looks about 15, with occasional hints that she might be 50, stunted by gin for a travelling circus by gypsies. All this rattled me a bit, but we talked away more or less consecutively about literature and kindred subjects. There seems little, at a first glance, to hint at the existence of volcanic passion and the torments of love. We’re going to listen to Gréco [1] singing at a music hall tomorrow. They are great pals. After that, supper with these two & Zanuck, which will be interesting. I rather love Juliette Gréco.
Last night at about 8 in the evening I saw an enormous limousine in a traffic block in the Boulevard Haussmann, with an old-world chauffeur at the wheel, and, lolling among the upholstery in the back, like Cleopatra in the poop of her barge, Coccinelle, [2] the prettiest of the performers at the Carousel. ‘She’ was wearing a tremendously low-cut white satin dress, emerging from a vast sea of white fur falling off her shoulders; long diamond earrings, and the long white-gloved arm that hung on to the old-fashioned acorn-ended tassel at the side of the window had an elaborate pearl necklace twisted round it. I couldn’t help it, my heartbeats broke into double-time.
No more news for the present, but lots of love from
Paddy
[1] Juliette Gréco (1927–). The French actress and singer appeared in Otto Preminger’s film of Bonjour Tristesse (1958), singing the title tune. She and PLF became lifelong friends.
[2] Jacques-Charles Dufresnoy (1931–2006). Transsexual singer and entertainer who became Jacqueline-Charlotte Dufresnoy, better known as ‘Coccinelle’; a fixture at the fashionable Carousel nightclub.
Wednesday [1957]
Hôtels St James & d’Albany
202 & 212 rue de Rivoli, 1er
Darling Debo,
You were an angel to come to Paris, and I do wish I hadn’t made such a hash of it somehow. I meant it to be a glorious time for you. Probably trying too hard! As you say, there’s plenty to chew on. [1]
I went to a tremendous Shakespeare reading by Sir John Gielgud [2] (forgive me for making you jealous) on Monday night with Diana Cooper and Horrible Mrs Fellowes and another Frog, then to a supper in this knight’s honour at the Embassy, which was no good at all because the wine flowed like glue. [3]
I’m spending a fascinating evening tonight with a writer called Michel Leiris, [4] who is head of the Black Africa section of the Musée de l’Homme, and a pal of his who is the world authority on drum-language in central Africa, how messages are beaten out, the range of what they can say by drum beats, speeds, distances, and so on, which you will freely admit [5] is exciting.
I long to see you again, for lots of reasons. I’ve chewed like mad but there still remains a faint lump of something that won’t quite dissolve, try as one may. You know the sort of thing I mean. I’d really like to be anywhere but here at the moment, and think longingly of Flash last winter and pounding about those stony ravines in Devonshire soaked to the skin; but fear the only fox I shall see this year will be Twentieth-Century.
I do wish you were here, as I miss you like anything, so please write fairly steadily starting with now; and lots and lots of true love, darling Debo, from
Paddy
[1] Neither DD nor PLF, after racking their brains, have the faintest recollection of what this was about.
[2] John Gielgud (1904–2000). The actor was knighted in the 1953 coronation honours.
[3] Britain’s ambassador in Paris at the time was Gladwyn Jebb, 1st Baron Gladwyn (1900–96).
[4] Michel Leiris (1901–90). The noted French writer and ethnographer worked at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris for over fifty years.
[5] ‘I freely admit’ and ‘Do admit’ were expressions often used by DD and adopted by her family and friends. ‘I freely admit that the best of my fun I owe it to horse and hound’, the Whyte-Melville quote, was on the cover of Horse & Hound magazine, ‘my bible when I was a child’. (DD)
Sunday
late November 1957
Chantilly
But really St James & d’Albany
Darling Debo,
I came here yesterday afternoon with Cecil Beaton, [1] after a lovely luncheon with the French authoress at Véfour, where we had marrow and mushrooms on bits of toast and two wonderful soles floating in pale beige. How nice Cecil is. We gassed away in the motor-car about everyone we could think of; mostly him dissecting and dismembering person after person with that astonishing needle-thin voice.
The house is absolutely full, and I’ve been shoved miles away from anywhere in a claustrophobic attic, a terribly depressing one, where I woke up a couple of hours ago in a rage: the rage of an out-of-date bowler hat in a hat box, forgotten for several generations in a box-room; but soon got over it when I came down and found a brilliant, cloudless frosty morning with scores of swans circling over the lake and settling with the noise of an express train gathering speed. The lawns are stiff and brittle and shiny with frost, and when one walks across them, it leaves a dark track of footprints, as across sand. These swans made me think of peering down from that big window during happy hols at Lismore. I wish you were here.
Love from
Paddy
P.S. Don’t think I’m not taking your horrible silence hard, because I am. I telephoned to you in London in a sudden access of depression yesterday, but they said you would be at a Newbury number after seven. I almost telephoned there too, but thought it might be rather silly, so didn’t in the end.
[1] Cecil Beaton (1904–80). After winning a Tony Award for his costumes for the Broadway production of My Fair Lady (1956), the photographer was at work on the film Gigi (1958).
New Year’s Day, 1958
(Happy New Year)
Island of Porquerolles
VAR
but as from Hôtels St J & d’ A
Paris (back tomorrow, alas)
Darling Debo,
CHAP I.
As you were toiling north with Cyril, [1] I was walking across the road on a fine frosty morning from Diana Cooper’s house, feeling pretty smart; dressed to kill, as I thought, to uphold our island honour among the Frogs, but not daring yet to clap on that velvet cap, because I wasn’t sure whether in France the little bow at the back should be tied or untied. I found my new horse-owning chum, a jolly, tall, very good-looking, slightly bounderish Brazilian called Jean de Souza-Lage, waiting over a wonderful breakfast of omelettes, kidneys, liver, mushrooms and a bottle of claret. He was so gloriously got up that the subdued correctness of my rig at once looked like the female version of some splendidly plumaged male bird, i.e. he had on a scarlet waistcoat with gold buttons, a long royal-blue wide-skirted coat smothered with gold and silver braid round the collar and cuffs and scalloped pockets, huge gold and silver buttons, white buckskin breeches and gleaming jack-boots coming halfway up the thigh like the Household Cavalry; his stock was fastened with a stag’s head in rubies, and when he set off, he had a murderous gold-mounted crop slipped into a belt, one of those lovely strange horns over one shoulder and under the other, a gold embroidered belt and a silver-hilted short-sword in a gleaming scabbard. (I furtively unpicked the bow at the back of my cap after a glance at his, and let the ribbons dangle.)
Off we set on two mares of almost Trojan size – mine was called Herodiade – and soon arrived at the Abbey of Royaumont, where Alan Pryce-Jones’ rich relations in law [2] live. The courtyard was full of haughty steeds neighing under coroneted blankets and menacing black and white hounds, dribbling and barking, were leashed in and thrashed by bottle-nosed hunt servants; also numbers of gorgeously clad swells, glass in hand, were striding about with their mates in habits and gold-trimmed three-cornered hats, looking spiffing. Lots of greeting, hand-kissing, sweeping flourishes of those velvet caps and general hobnobbing. The Master is a fine old boy called the Marquis de Roualle [3] who told me ‘Most of zese ’ounds come from Badminton. Down Rrrover!’ – crack, slash. The male members, all with their horns the size of orchestral instruments, play a hundred different & stately tunes on them, all together and very well, to mark the different incidents of the chase – slightly hair-raising and drenched in romance. We moved off in a fanfare and were soon in some fields surrounded by forest. Almost at once, two stags came leaping out of the trees and crossed the field the other side of a stream with immense bounds, heads tilted back under their antlers. One was a ‘royal’, as they say, with a vast scaffolding of antlers, the other a ‘six’ (rather professional, all this?). The whole scene was just what I’d been longing for and very like something on a tapestry.
I stuck to my pal all day, as he’s considered a great expert. I may say it was not nearly as wild as I had thought. There was no jumping except one or two little brooks, but miles of hell-for-leather galloping through thick undergrowth and under low branches till you are striped like a zebra with marks of twigs and brambles, the horses smothered with sweat. Two hours later, after heavy pounding (part of it through a built-up area like Welwyn Garden City), we found ourselves in the middle of a swampy tract full of pampas grass and reeds ten feet high, with a great shindy of hounds somewhere in the middle. Down we got, gave our horses to a peasant girl in clogs, and plunged into the middle on foot. Jean loaded me up with horn, crop, belt and scabbard, and charged ahead, brandishing his naked blade. I plodding after, 2ft deep in slime – all right for him, just like his native Amazon, but it nearly killed me. We came on the ‘six’ stag at bay surrounded by hounds, S-L advanced on it, to stab it in the breast, but it broke away and was killed a mile away by one of the huntsmen with a special gun, as it was in a village full of children, and they slash out like anything, it seems. The poor slain quarry was put in a cart, taken back to the Abbey and cut up. Joints of venison were distributed to the peasants who had helped; the rest was wrapped in a bundle with the antlers, while we swigged champagne & ate caviar & smoked-salmon sandwiches. Then it was the hounds’ turn, a grizzly banquet of innards on the grass, while, for ¾ of an hour, ceremonious laments were blown on the horns. Overpoweringly strange and medieval it all seemed. ‘Dieu, que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois!’
Lots and lots of love & fond & loving thoughts from
Paddy
[1] Cyril Connolly (1903–74). Shortly before Christmas, the author and critic had driven with DD to Edensor, where he spent two nights. DD had thought his manners ‘unforgivable’ on a previous visit to Lismore, but ‘he got such glowing references from his friends that I tried again. This visit was not a success either. He was a good friend of Andrew, who appreciated his company more than I did.’ (DD)
[2] Royaumont, the Palladian Abbot’s Palace near Paris, was lived in by Baron Max Fould-Springer, whose sister Thérèse was married to Alan Pryce-Jones.
[3] Marquis Jean de Roualle (1890–1973). Master of the Piq’avant Nivernais Hounds.
(PLF)
After a spell slogging away at the scenario for The Roots of Heaven, some of it with Joan at Duff and Diana’s house in Chantilly, we went to Andros, and when it was finished flew back to London. I deposited the ‘treatment’, as agreed, for Darryl Zanuck at the Savoy. Next morning I turned up at his suite, which was full of smoke. ‘Come in, Mr Feemor,’ he said, ‘sit down.’ He puffed at his cigar in silence. I asked him if he had got the treatment. After a few more silent puffs he said, ‘It’s a whole heap of crap’, then, after another pause, he said, ‘IT’S NO GOOD!’ There was a further pause, and several puffs. Oddly enough I felt rather relieved. It wasn’t my world, after all. But after more silence and several puffs, he said, ‘We’re going to the races.’ I looked a bit puzzled, so he went on, ‘We go to Paris tomorrow and I’ll get you a suite like mine in the Hôtel Prince de Galles and a bottle of whisky and a nice-looking typist, and we’ll get down to it. Is your passport OK for French Equatorial Africa?’
30 March 1958
Twentieth Century Fox
Boîte Postale 83
Maroua, Cameroon
Africa
My darling Debo,
I’ve not behaved very well about writing. I’m abroad, and take up my pen feeling a bit hangdog.
Well. I flew out to French Equatorial Africa – with Darryl Zanuck and John Huston. [1] We got there about 6 a.m., to a town called Fort Lamy, in a lovely turquoise dawn, full of priests calling the Moslems to prayer. But soon day broke and revealed a fly-blown town of mud walls inhabited by dejected looking negroes, the air a-swoop and a-flutter with vultures, the heat giving you a straight left like a boxing glove. We settled for three weeks in an immense stockade by the banks of the Shari River – about 50 huts with, in the middle, a six-roomed bungalow with a wide and shady verandah in which the six VIPs lived. I was staggered to discover – and I bet you are too – that I was one of these. The inhabitants were John Huston, Darryl Zanuck, Juliette Gréco, Trevor Howard [2] – who plays the male lead – Errol Flynn [3] and me. Rolling savannah – and on one side, the river – surrounds this stockade; the region teems with elephants, lions, jaguars, panthers, buffaloes, baboons and crocodiles, no stranger fauna than the inhabitants, however.
We came here, to the Cameroon, two weeks ago, to a second stockade. I couldn’t bear camp life any more, so took a house in the negro quarter of the town, and I am writing under a huge mango tree, with a jet-black Foulbé tribesman in the middle distance. I have hired him for a month and he is beating a rush mat with infuriating slowness and deliberation: whack! wait for it; whack! w.f.it; w! etc. The town is a labyrinth of mud walls surrounding conical thatched huts and the population consists entirely of coal black enormous Foulbés, very fine looking, clad in splendid robes – their faces slashed by ceremonial scars, and they ride horses with medieval tilting saddles and black-and-white checked caparisons down to their fetlocks. Curly scimitars glitter from the saddles. They are ruled by a feudal chieftain called the Lamido of Maroua who lives in a sort of mud Lismore on the outskirts of the town. His subjects approach him kneeling and when he sallies forth surrounded by his horsemen, trumpeters sound fanfares. He has many slaves and concubines and a subterranean jail where his prisoners lie in chains.
The country is rolling and volcanic, full of tall mountains and deep valleys of enormous blackish boulders that look like fossilized stampedes of mastodons. It is full of troglodyte villages and fetish-worshipping primitives who never leave their caves without a bow, a quiver full of arrows and a long sharp spear. They gather all round us on the rocks, drinking in all our strange equipment, the clothes and the unfamiliar noises – ‘Roll it, please!’ ‘Cut!’ ‘Action!’ – with utter bewilderment. I think they are convinced that we are members of a strange sect connected with making the sun set, as, the moment it dips beyond the hills, we pack up.
But of course what you want to know about is the people. It’s pretty complex, but here goes.
John Huston. Wildly bogus, charming, complicated, boastful and ham. I like him very much and don’t trust him a yard. He has to be kept under pretty strict control; he would trample on one if he saw the faintest flicker of a flinch, and does so when he does see it. This entails keeping on the offensive quite a lot, i.e. diagnosing his weak points and, when occasion arises, hitting hard and often. This establishes an equivocal and amusing kind of truce and makes life quite fun, a rather dangerous game which both sides divine by an amused look in each other’s eyes: thin-ice work & figure skating. He sings ‘Johnny, I Hardly Knew You’ [4] beautifully.
Darryl Zanuck. In spite of the rasping voice and the huge cigar, I think he probably has a heart of gold. The sheen of the gold is obscured at the moment by his demented jealousy of Juliette Gréco. He follows her everywhere with his eyes or in person, suspects her almost entirely without reason and attempts to incarcerate her in vain. It is quite obvious that she can’t bear to be touched by him any more. This leads to scenes and blows. Last night he knocked her out cold, then, in a fit of anxiety, threw a bucket of water over her and sobbed for an hour. It’s all rather pathetic and awful, and our world crackles with anger and unhappiness at its very core.
Trevor Howard. Have you ever seen him? – sorry, of course you have. I only asked because I’m so ignorant in such matters. He is playing the lead – Morel, the elephant defender – and seems to me wonderful. A very nice man, but as with nearly all actors, there is something missing: – ‘A bit of a bore’ doesn’t quite cover it, somehow. It’s something missing somewhere else, which I have yet to put my finger on. He drinks like Hell, starting at breakfast, and goes through his part in a sort of miraculous trance.
Errol Flynn. All the above strictures about actors do not apply here. He poses as the most tremendous bounder – glories in being a cad – but is intelligent, perceptive and, in a freak way, immensely likeable. We are rather chums, to my bewilderment. Sex rules his life, and very indiscreet and criticisable and amusing he is about it.
Juliette Gréco. By far the most interesting of the lot. Extremely well read, unspoilable, wild, rather like a panther, a tremendous sense of humour. The camp is divided up into cliques within cliques, and the French one, consisting of six, to which I unpatriotically belong, is the most exciting, and, I rather suspect, the most hated. We became great pals at once. She is utterly bohemian, and incorruptible by the richest film company in the world; or so I should think. Her involvement with Zanuck is a bit of a mystery, which I have not yet fathomed. It’s queerly out of character.
On the whole, with one or two exceptions – apart from those mentioned – I hate the lot of them. The standard of conversation and jokes is deplorable, and I sometimes feel on the brink of weeping. The staggering sums which I suppose I am earning are really not worth it. The only justification will be if it’s a really tremendous film.
How I long for you and all my friends. So please write at once, in spite of my awfulness on the same count. Please, please, at once!
And lots of love from
Paddy
[1] John Huston (1906–87). The American film director and actor, who was directing The Roots of Heaven, had chosen PLF to write the screenplay.
[2] Trevor Howard (1913–88). The British actor played Morel, hero of the film.
[3] Errol Flynn (1909–59). The actor’s last major film appearance was as Major Forsythe in The Roots of Heaven.
[4] The Irish traditional anti-war song, the basis for the American popular song ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’.
11 April 1958
Darryl F. Zanuck Productions Inc.
Maroua
IN HASTE
Darling Debo,
This is scribbled at high speed in the hopes of shaming you into writing.
I’m sitting under a mango tree, turning a deaf ear to an old negro whose nostrils syphilis has quite eaten away; he is trying to sell me a sheaf of fiendish-looking assegai-heads with spikes and cruel barbs and grooves for poison. He spends nearly all day trying to do this and his mumbled litany is seldom out of earshot; cries of Old Maroua: ‘Who’ll buy my sweet spearheads?’
Lots of love
Paddy
Paros
As from:
c/o Hon. Alan Hare, [1] MC
British Embassy, Athens
Darling Debo,
Nine days ago Joan, Maurice Bowra, [2] his professor pal, [3] Mark [Ogilvie-Grant] and I set off at noon for this island in a hell-ship, a sort of Ægean Altmark, the decks a-cluck with poultry and awash with vomit; a black-and-white cow kept sticking its head through the dining-room porthole and mooing. This was the only nice thing. At Syra, the first island where we dropped anchor, at 9 p.m., Mark and I went ashore and made a bee-line for a wine shop that also sold kokoretsi, entrails stuffed with good things, twisted round a skewer and roasted over charcoal. We had some, then a second helping, when lo and behold! the ship was sailing away. We leapt into a dinghy, the boatman pulling like Grace Darling, but the ship churned hard-heartedly off into the night with our loved ones, leaving us feeling pretty foolish. No boat for another two days! We settled down on the waterfront, drank endless jugs of retsina and wandered oafishly along the quay. Our fancy was taken by a handsome yacht, which had moored at the quay and was locked in sleep. We pretended it was Ran’s one, on which he had set off in a different direction that morning, and began shouting ‘Wake up you beasts! Don’t think we can’t see you!’, and, like the children of Bethel to Elisha, ‘Go up thou bald head’ and so on. Shadowy figures began to stir indignantly on the deck and finally up through the opening double doors of the companionway emerged a bald pate a-gleam in the soft starlight. Lord Antrim! They had changed course, tying up there silently while Mark and I were busy drinking. Odd, eh? Ran was ashore in his pyjamas in a twinkling and drinking continued, I’m sorry to report. Our troubles were over, and we arrived in Paros in style next morning.
Lots and lots of love
Paddy
[1] Alan Hare (1919–95). Former SOE operative in Albania and future chief executive and chairman of the Financial Times who was working for the Secret Intelligence Service in Athens. PLF had known him since they shared lodgings in Cairo during the war. Married to Jill North in 1945.
[2] Maurice Bowra (1898–1971). The legendary Oxford don, an old friend of Joan Leigh Fermor, was Warden of Wadham College from 1938 until his death and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford 1951–4.
[3] Ernst Kantorowicz (1895–1963). German historian, author of a controversial biography of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II; he had been a friend of Bowra since they met at Oxford in 1934.
*
(PLF)
When the others had left, Truman Capote [1] and a friend came to see us (told by someone to look in). He was very small and frail, and wearing a tartan tam-o’-shanter, and carrying an enormous woolly dog, almost larger than him, under his arm. He was very amusing and told us all sorts of stories in a rather high and fluting voice, accompanied every so often by a deep bass laugh. It was hard to think that the two sounds came out of the same small frame.
[1] Truman Capote (1924–84). The American author, whose novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s was published later that year, was travelling in Greece with the writer Jack Dunphy (1915–92).
22 July 1958
Edensor House
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
V nice to get your letter with an account of falling on your feet again, viz Ld Antrim’s ship being there to fetch you away.
Much has occurred since you left, but nothing tremendously important. I mean no new bodies to worship, it’s the same crew so far.
Desmond [1] has given notice. They are busy with the hay. An army of workmen have moved into Chatsworth [2] & are making a great deal of dust and noise, nothing to show for it of course. It’s alternately bitter and boiling.
My love affair with Ann Fleming prospers. Sometimes I get this sort of telegram ‘Warden of All Souls Dining Monday Please Come’ (didn’t go of course) so that should put that ancient French writer in her place.
I went to dinner with her (Ann) the other night and sat by Harold Nicolson [3] and Angus Wilson [4] who is perfect. Andrew came, & Robert, [5] & he sat by Diana Cooper & Judy Montagu and I’m sorry to say we resorted to making a face or two at each other. [6]
I had been to Percy St before to make sure of forcing him to come as he is such a slippery customer, and there was Augustus John, [7] goodness he is like my father both to look at and in the things he says, things like ‘Great Scott’. I told him how Emma wants to give a skeleton for a leaving present to St Elphin’s so he said she could have his, but then admitted it might not be ready by August.
Andrew was on The Brains Trust [8] yesterday. You must say that was brave. The chairman was that v nice person with a beard in a wheelchair who we saw on the stage doing songs & things with one other person. [9]
Give Joan my love & lots to you.
Debo
[1] Michael Desmond; the Devonshires’ butler.
[2] The Devonshires had decided to move into Chatsworth and were restoring the house completely.
[3] Harold Nicolson (1886–1968). The diplomat and politician was working on one of his last books, The Age of Reason (1960).
[4] Angus Wilson (1913–91). The distinguished novelist had published The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot earlier in the year.
[5] Robert Kee (1919–). Writer, broadcaster and great friend of the Devonshires and PLF. Author of The Impossible Shore (1949), A Sign of the Times (1955) and Ireland: A History (1980). Married to Janetta Woolley 1948–50, to Cynthia Judah 1960–89 and to Kate Trevelyan in 1990.
[6] Neither Diana Cooper nor Judy Montagu, both great friends of PLF, were favourites of DD.
[7] Augustus John (1878–1961). The painter lived at 14 Percy Street, in London’s Fitzrovia, where Robert Kee also lived for a time. ‘I met him once with Robert Kee in a Soho street. He looked me up and down and said, “Have you got children?” “Yes.” Another long look. “Did you suckle them?” ’ (DD)
[8] The popular BBC programme, in which a panel answered listeners’ questions, had transferred from radio to television in the early 1950s.
[9] Michael Flanders (1922–75). Actor and singer who performed in a wheelchair after contracting poliomyelitis. One-half of the comic duo Flanders and Swann.
*
Andrew loved walking and Bolton Abbey, our estate in Yorkshire, was his opportunity. He scorned Land Rovers and ritzy Range Rovers, which have replaced legs in the last twenty-five years, and often arrived at a distant line of butts before they did. But as we got older and most of the regular guns no longer came he went elsewhere in August, saying the place was full of ghosts.
A pheasant shoot is a bait for persuading people to travel a long way for a winter weekend. Describing a shoot to a non-participant is as bad as going over games of golf or bridge, so I spared Paddy the bother of reading about it. But my gun took me from Sussex to Devon, from Anglesey to Norfolk and home via Northumberland. I loved it and all the people who went with it.
Paddy never took to shooting and a good thing too. I can’t imagine a more terrifying thought than Paddy let loose with a 12-bore in high excitement untutored in the rules of safety. But he occasionally stayed with us for a shooting weekend and came out and took it all in. After a good lunch, he was a dangerous obstacle in my butt, sound asleep and oblivious of the loud bangs immediately above him.
He was always the star of the evenings. Most of our contemporaries had been in the army and were thrilled to meet the Cretan legend.
12 August! [1958]
Kamini
Hydra
Darling Debo,
How clearly I spy you at this very moment, in my mind’s little eye, in shooting rig but well muffled against wind and rain, flanked by Lord [1] and two dogs straining at the leash with their tongues hanging out and breathing hard with a tweed-clad troop of well-breakfasted peers heading for the drizzling moors. I discern the glint of gun barrels and the fly-looking rough-hewn North Country beaters deploying; equally, hosts of birds enjoying the end of their hols but wondering uneasily what’s up and not knowing what’s coming to them in a few minutes’ time . . . The rain falls inexorably, zero hour is nigh . . . There is a whirr of wings . . . then bang! bang! bang! (thud, thud, thud . . .) I see faithless Ran, his sunburn almost all gone, not many yards away; not your Uncle [2] though, who must be discussing Cyprus in London; and Andrew, making all welcome and pointing out likely clumps, but gunless; Emma and Stoker looking pretty serious over their special weapons; Martyn Beckett, [3] perhaps, slightly blood-shot from the Bag o’ Nails [4] . . . I taste slugs of raw whisky by proxy, smell gunpowder, observe tweed collars turned up against wind and rain, and, as the dark and bloodthirsty afternoon wears on, matchless eyes beginning to run with the blast and bulbous or alabaster noses turning more ruby than the port they will soon be sniffing . . . I see the maids of Bolton scuttling through the downpour for lack of a way indoors and Desmond, who must have wisely thought better of his notice, arranging ice-cubes in a hollow metal apple . . . the gurgle of baths filling up . . . (Please strike out or amend anything that doesn’t apply. But admit it’s not far out.)
It’s all very different here. I’m back in the vast white studio on our old island, scribbling away. The cicadas outside are deafening. Below, the tiled roofs go cascading down to the sea which is covered with islands and the sun rides rough-shod over all. The thing is this: don’t you think you’d better come for a bit, when there is a truce with those birds? I think we’ll be here till the end of September, I wish you would. Joan pines for you and sends love. You could bring Robert [Kee] if he would like it (I’m not sure I approve but I suppose I’ve got to lump it!) I think he’d like it too. I could meet at the airport and bring you out here after a very short gay Athenian spell. Please ponder the matter. There’s no one to see, really, except us. I’d get Mark [Ogilvie-Grant] & Coote [5] to vary the danger of boredom. It seems sad to bury the summer so soon.
Last week Joan and I, with Alan the Spy and Roxane Sedgwick, [6] climbed to the top of Mt Olympus. It took four days, sleeping out on various ledges and it nearly did us in. The last day was real hand-over-hand stuff, till at last we were on the highest point of S.E. Europe, with the whole of Greece below like a map. It was very strange and rather wonderful and the air was like whisky & soda (don’t think I didn’t hear you say Ugh). Tony Lambert, councillor at the Embassy and great bird expert, had told us to look out for some rare birds, the Wall Creeper and the Sombre Tit. We saw lots of the latter, none of the former. Numbers of choughs, though. But we were slightly under-eagled. Joan grumbled a certain amount, and said she was to be buried there if she fell down a crevasse; not lugged back by train to Athens. I made up an epitaph for her:
Bury me here on Olympus
In the home of the lonely wall-creeper
But don’t take me back to Athens, please,
Stretched out on a second-class sleeper . . .
At an open-air hangout by the sea on our return (us, Mark, Coote, the Spy & wife and others) Coote reminisced happily about her RAF days, smoking a cigar the while. She is very good on the slang (Wing Commander = Winko, Group Captain = Groupie, etc). This evoked these lines:
‘What’s happened to Winko?’ asked Groupie.
The Mess Corporal wagged his old head:
‘He said that he’d fancy a Bass, sir,
But he went for a Burton instead . . .’
The Muses are not absent, as you see.
I do wish we were all a bit closer together. Do try and remedy this. Anyway fond love to Emma, Stoker & Andrew and lots and lots to you, from
Paddy
[1] Tom Lord; the Devonshires’ head keeper.
[2] Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton (1894–1986). Conservative Prime Minister 1957–63. Married Lady Dorothy Cavendish, Andrew Devonshire’s aunt, in 1920, and was always called ‘Uncle Harold’ by DD.
[3] Sir Martyn Beckett (1918–2001). Architect, enthusiastic amateur pianist and an old friend of the Devonshires. Married Priscilla Brett in 1941.
[4] A nightclub in London’s Regent Street.
[5] Lady Dorothy (Coote) Lygon (1912–2001). Youngest of the Lygon sisters, daughters of 7th Earl Beauchamp, whose family and house, Madresfield Court, inspired Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). Served in the WAAF 1940–5. After the war, she worked in Istanbul as a governess, in Athens as social secretary to the British ambassador, and lived for a while on Hydra before returning to England to work as an archivist at Christie’s. Married Robert Heber-Percy in 1985.
[6] Roxane Sotiriadi; Greek wife of Alexander Sedgwick, New York Times corres -pondent for the Middle East.
Estate Office
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I did love your description of shooting. It was nearly all right but slipped up over one or two things, like a Hollywood film about England, so I am afraid it’s your American blood lately infused by Huston & Zanuck which has put you wrong.
The other thing was that the weather Thank God was much better than usual, with the result that one sweated into one’s Devil’s Suit (red wool from neck to ankle under everything else) and was bitten to death by midges & harvest bugs & other counter-honnish denizens of those benighted moors.
The waits are terrific. Some drives take two hours & one can’t have a sit down with one’s eyes shut because one NEVER KNOWS, suddenly without a word of warning (as their wings fail to whirr & are deathly quiet) those blasted birds have come & gone & the other guns, keepers etc give one NASTY LOOKS if one is asleep.
Conversations with the loaders are nice, viz. Jones, from the Swiss Cottage here, [1] tells one about what touches him, things like hares screaming. He knows the partridges on his beat individually. One day he found one with her legs all twisted up in a bit of sheep’s wool, couldn’t fly & was hopping about, so he took the wool off & let her go & said he didn’t see her for four days. But then of course he did & all was well.
John Wyndham [2] came to Bolton in waiting to the Prime Minister. He is a marvel. I forget between seeing him how much I love him. One night at dinner he pushed me off my chair quite hard so I fell with a flump on the floor & Desmond solemnly picked me up with a hurt look as though it was he who had been shoved.
I talked secrets one day with the PM. Most jolly & educational. He has become much more human all of a sudden and talks about things like Adultery quite nicely.
Much love to Joan & you write & tell all.
Debo
[1] Harry Jones; one of a family of gamekeepers who lived at Swiss Cottage, an isolated house on the Chatsworth estate. ‘Their philosophy of life was different to that of any other people I have known; they saw little but nature in the raw.’ (DD)
[2] John Wyndham, 1st Baron Egremont (1920–72). A great friend of both Devonshires. Private Secretary to Harold Macmillan for many years. Married Pamela Wyndham-Quin in 1947. ‘I have never been much good at place à table – John Wyndham used to do it by weight, which didn’t go down too well with smart foreigners.’ DD, The House: A Portrait of Chatsworth (Macmillan, 1982), p. 167.
9 (?) September 1958
Kamini
Hydra
Darling Debo,
Your letter arrived in the nick of time. I was about to settle down, with a curling lip, to some fairly brisk remarks about calloused trigger-fingers too tired for penmanship etc when in comes Vasiliki, the tragedy-queen cook, with your splendid letter and takes all the wind out of my sails. Coote and Mark are staying and I read out sundry and chosen bits to them and Joan and caused much happy laughter. Mark said enviously, ‘I say, that’s a much longer letter than the ones I get from Nancy, [1] you are lucky.’ I didn’t let on about the long wait.
I went into Athens a couple of weeks ago and went on board the S.S. Hermes, which was carrying D. Cooper, Rose Macaulay, [2] Juliet Duff [3] and various others to Constantinople, then a trip round the Black Sea touching at various Russian ports, then back. This was all very convivial – the Grande Bretagne Hôtel suddenly became a rather jolly lunchtime Ritz, with the above-mentioned, Mark, Gladys Stewart-Richardson, [4] Coote, Cecil Beaton (who was just back from staying in Paros with Truman Capote).
A sudden passion for astronomy has sprung up here. I got a huge star atlas sent out by Heywood Hill, [5] it’s wonderful for sleeping out on the terrace. One just lies there with the atlas on one’s lap, torch in hand to flash on the page – it’s hardly needed – spotting constellation after constellation blazing away overhead. We’re becoming pretty good at hobnobbing with and bandying about the names of stars. You’ll probably have cause to complain of this anon. I want to invent, and have patented, Fermor’s Heavenly Brolly: a vast black-lined umbrella with all the stars embroidered inside in silver, the ferrule being the Pole Star. You would just open it at night, point it at the Pole Star, and the heavens become an open book.
Fond love from
Paddy
[1] Mark Ogilvie-Grant was one of Nancy Mitford’s oldest friends and they kept up a regular correspondence.
[2] Rose Macaulay (1881–1958). The prolific novelist and journalist died shortly after returning from this cruise.
[3] Lady Juliet Lowther (1881–1965). Daughter of 4th Earl of Lonsdale, married Sir Robert Duff in 1903.
[4] Gladys Stewart-Richardson (1883–1966). Descended from an old Scottish highland family, she drove lorries and ambulances in Macedonia during the First World War. Settled in Athens and set up a factory producing fine raw silk for clothing.
[5] The bookshop, founded by Heywood Hill (1906–86), opened in London’s Mayfair in 1936.
27 July 1959
(Castello di Passerano [1]
Gallicano nel Lazio
Provincia di Roma)
Abruzzi
Darling Debo,
This non-writing won’t do at all; so bags I break silence, in order to seize the advantage and put you in the wrong, before this sly move occurs to you.
Don’t be fooled by the splendour of the address at the top of this paper; I set it myself at a local printers. This castle is a huge empty thing of spell-binding beauty on top of a leafy hill overlooking a froth of treetops and cornfields surrounded on three sides by classical mountain ranges whose names need not concern us, and on the fourth by the Roman Campagna and the dome of St Peter’s in the distance, indicating – too near! – great Rome itself. The castle hadn’t been inhabited for 600 years, so it meant putting windows in and borrowing, buying or hiring furniture (all of which has ruined me). It looks rather marvellous, but there is not a drop of water running. Two beautiful girls called Loredana and Gabriella come wobbling gracefully up the castle ramp twice daily with great brass pitchers on their heads. I won’t enlarge on the loo situation . . .
Some nuns in Tivoli sewed me a huge heraldic banner, which I fly from a mast on a tower (Fermor’s answer to Lismore). I have been building up a fictitious character for myself: the Black Bastard of Passerano, and like to think that when I unfurl my banner from the topmost battlements, all the trembling peasants of the valley look askance and cross themselves, dowse their lights and hide their cattle and bolt up their dear ones. Actually, most of my time is spent driving car-loads of white-clad little girls or Fauntleroys into nearby Gallicano nel Lazio for first communion, or the castle women – there is a farm grovelling at the foot of the ramparts – to market: the Black Sucker of Passerano, Il Succho Nero.
There used to be masses of nightingales, but they’ve vanished now, but there are plenty of owls which sometimes get in and flap silently round for hours among the oil lamps and candles, having rashly flown down a spiral stair inside a tower; also frogs, crickets and nightjars. The atmosphere at night is like the castle in Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
The discomfort is almost beyond sufferance. Some of this is caused by rats, which, rather intimidated at first by my usurping their age-old suzerainty, are getting the upper hand again. I think Joan was rather taken aback by all this. The other night, hoping to foil the ants (which I forgot to mention), she put a basin of water on a table, and inside this, a jug with a plate on top containing a loaf for breakfast tightly wrapped in brown paper, and, balanced on top of this, a saucer with butter in. Next morning I was reading early by a window in the same room – the banqueting hall! – when I was roused by a rustle; there, his hind legs on tiptoe on the basin’s rim, stood a tall rat carefully unfolding a hole in the bread paper with his forepaws and nibbling in felicity. I threw my book at it – The Age of Elegance by Arthur Bryant – but missed. The rat sloped off perfunctorily, but turned back halfway to the door and resumed his post in half a minute. I thought I’d better let it rip. So there he crunched, the butter wobbling to and fro on top, looking at me out of the corner of his eyes with a victor’s glance . . . Next night, Joan found a large scorpion nestling on her. So I suppose it’s time to draw stumps.
We are now in the cool heights of the Abruzzi, great Alpine mountains about 100 miles E. of Rome, in a village called Ovindoli. The cattle here are a wonderful body of cows. At dusk, a bell is rung from the church tower, and, quite unaccompanied, all gather from their fields at a never changing rendezvous, and head for the village by the hundred. Once in the market square, they split up and mooch off along various lanes to the houses where they live and tap on the door with their horns and out comes a girl or a grandmother and lets them into a comfortable cellar for the night.
Lots and lots of love from
Paddy
[1] PLF had been lent this castle in the Alban Hills.
9 August 1959
Edensor House
Bakewell
Darling paddy,
I was pleased to get your letter and to know you have not departed this world.
I never really believe in foreign addresses, for instance that well known old French writer my sister is at a hang out called S. Vio & then a number, Venice. [1] Well, admit that doesn’t sound real. So of course I’m not going to spend hours writing fascinating things, or boring ones either, for the delectation of the lost letter box somewhere or other. Yours sounds a bit more true though damned affected.
Anyway it was v v nice to get it.
I did once have millions of things to tell, like sitting next to John Huston one night at dinner. My word he is awful. I can’t think how you spent so long near him without smashing him. He said ghoulishly embarrassing things like We Irishmen ought to get together. Well he’s American and I’m English, but I didn’t like to enlarge on that.
Otherwise I can’t think of much except that Sophy was portrayed by Epstein. [2] They had to go every day for two hours for 14 days, so Diddy [3] & Sir Jacob became terrific friends & Diddy said ‘I think Sir Jacob’s fallen for me – he likes a ton weight.’ I thought that a very good joke & so would you if you could have seen them in that studio surrounded by ½ finished monster nudes with droopy bosoms & such like curios.
I saw a good bit of Ann Fleming. I truly love her & kept going to dinner, sometimes in the wrong clothes, like when she took us all to a recep. at the Tate after dinner. I didn’t know it was grand & went in a cotton frock & when I got there found all the women in dresses to the ground & pearls. Then we got to the Tate & to my horror Cake [4] advanced on unseen feet in crinoline & diamonds glittering from top to toe & I was in her path like a rabbit & a snake & she made the sign to go & talk to her & it was wicked work with the dread wrongness of get-up & Sir J Rothenstein [5] looking at one as though one was a v small bit of dirt & then her saying ‘isn’t that wall lovely’ meaning a lot of daubs by famous painters & me being speechless because of being honest & after a bit I heard myself saying ‘Oh dear now I’m stuck’ which of course was v v rude indeed.
That’s the sort of thing that’s been happening, nought of great interest.
The children are here, very tall, very lazy & very nice. Emma is in revolt about most things but that is the disease of her age I think (16).
I am engrossed with Chatsworth, v boring for everyone else. Next week the moors loom (not William Shakespeare’s Venetian variety – would that they were) & Uncle Harold and his followers. Oh dear, well never mind.
Where will you be the 2nd ½ of Sept? I might be able to do something nice about then, & Nancy’s Colonel [6] has v kindly asked me to his Palace which I would like except what about my fat ankles, deformed thumb [7] & Harvey Nichols clothes.
Much love – & send a P.C. or so – from
Debo
[1] Nancy was staying with her Venetian friend, Countess Anna-Maria Cicogna.
[2] Jacob Epstein (1880–1959). The sculptor’s bust of DD’s daughter was his penultimate work.
[3] Ellen Stephens; nanny to DD’s children 1943–63.
[4] DD’s nickname for the Queen Mother, which she gave her after being lastingly impressed by her enthusiasm at a wedding when the cake was cut.
[5] John Rothenstein (1901–92). Director of the Tate Gallery 1938–64.
[6] Gaston Palewski (1901–84). The love of Nancy’s life, whom she always teas-ingly called ‘Colonel’ after his rank in the Free French army, was posted as ambassador in Rome in 1957. ‘Gaston brought life and laughter to the magnificent Palazzo Farnese when he was ambassador. I loved his company because of his understanding of English humour – somehow so unexpected in an out-and-out Frenchman (or an out-and-out French politician).’ (DD)
[7] Nancy used to tease DD that her thumb was deformed from sucking it as a child, and warned her that she would never find a husband as a result.
29 September 1959
Lismore Castle
Co. Waterford
Darling Paddy,
Thank you so much for my lovely visit. I did love every minute of it and I do think it was kind of you to have me on top of all those others. I think the most surprising thing was Mr Tom [1] looking up from The Times (only for a minute I admit) to look at The Green Grotto on Capri. He said it was Awfully Nice, which was going it I thought.
We did miss you after you had gone off.
I’ve boasted to E Sackville West [2] that I am an intimate of Sir W Walton [3] but I didn’t tell him how Sir W admitted the true horror of his and others’ music.
I spoke to Ann F[leming] for a moment in London but then had to rush for the train, but I gathered she had been poisoned by the Colonel in Rome as they had Fish for dinner on a Monday, which she says is well-known to be fatal.
Much love
Debo
[1] Thomas Egerton (1918–98). A lifelong friend since schooldays of Andrew Devonshire, with whom he shared a passion for racing. During the war, he served in the Coldstream Guards in North Africa where he was famous for saving the Officers’ Mess marmalade during the Siege of Tobruk. Married Anne Cobbold in 1962. ‘His quiet charm and humour endeared him to his contemporaries.’ (DD)
[2] Edward Sackville-West, 5th Baron Sackville (1901–65). Music critic and writer who shared Long Crichel House in Dorset, a sort of all-male Bloomsbury, with a circle of writers and artists. In 1956, he moved to Cooleville House, Co. Tipperary, and was a neighbour of the Devonshires at Lismore. ‘He adored playing Freda, the game on the billiard table. It sometimes involved running round to get your shot in, so he did not risk his dinner jacket and brought a change of clothes for the evening’s entertainment.’ (DD)
[3] William Walton (1902–83). After his marriage to Argentine-born Susana Gil Passo in 1949, the British composer settled at La Mortella on Ischia.
6 October 1959
Bar da Filipo
Forio d’Ischia
Prov. di Napoli
Darling Debo,
I say, it was decent of you to come. It cheered me up like anything, and I’d really thought I’d never smile again after the rigours of the first half of the month.
It was blowing a ghastly sirocco here when I got back, for days, the air full of headaches and limbs turning to lead, suicidal depression and demoralisation. Then, all of a sudden, lovely crystalline autumn weather, a touch of chill in the air, pale clear blue skies, emptying towns and bare beaches, all’s well.
Henry and Virginia Bath [1] are staying at the San Francesco, and we had a nice noisy meal at Filipo’s last night. Iris [2] said that, much as she dislikes people chewing gum, she thinks chewing tobacco is an attractive and manly habit – especially the sort of talk that goes with it. I asked her what on earth she meant. She thereupon fixed me with those ice blue eyes, scowled, and began slowly and ruminatively to munch, her whole face assuming the leathery lineaments of a frontiersman. She then said in a deep and husky voice, ‘There ain’t no rattlers there, ma’am’ and squirted a ghost-jet of tobacco juice out of the corner of her mouth, fixing me challengingly in the eyes.
No more now, dearest darling Debo, except lots and lots of love from
Paddy
[1] Henry Thynne, 6th Marquess of Bath (1905–92). ‘Extraordinarily handsome, a romantic’s idea of an aristocrat. He brought wild animals to Longleat when it was opened to the public after the war, calling it his Safari Park. It still brings thousands of sightseers to that beautiful place.’ (DD) Married to Daphne Vivian 1927– 53 and to Virginia Tennant in 1953.
[2] Iris Tree (1897–1968). Bohemian daughter of the celebrated actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Married the screenwriter Curtis Moffat in 1916 and the actor Count Friedrich Ledebur in 1934.
14 October 1959
Train (not rapido)
Darling Paddy,
I nearly wrote to you from the Hebride [1] which I’ve been on but somehow didn’t & when I got back to London last night I found your letter & was v glad to hear that Iris Tree admires tobacco chewers. I agree with her I’m afraid. V brave of you to dine at Filipo’s.
Since I wrote there has been the election. The jolly thing was driving people to the poll at home, keepers’ wives who live at the back of beyond, old ladies who were hard of hearing, two wives of farm workers (who lived 300 yards from the polling station but said they must be fetched) and such like. The interesting thing was they all wore their best and put on hats to perform the ritual (which I freely admit makes one feel rather funny).
Evie Waugh has done a good joke on me (& probably others). His new book arrived, [2] all wrapped in bits of other books as they do, & I thought how nice & felt rather superior, NOT BEING A GREAT READER, to get the damned thing straight from the horse’s mouth as it were, so I undid it & read something like ‘To Darling Debo, in the certainty that not one word of this will offend your Protestant persuasion’. Naturally I didn’t look any further, but Emma and my Wife who were sitting there bagged it & started to turn the pages which were ALL BLANK, just lovely sheets of paper with gold edges & never a word on one of them. That’s the sort of book which suits me down to the ground. Good Old Evie.
[1] DD had been staying with her mother on Inch Kenneth, a small island off the coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides, where Lady Redesdale spent several months a year.
[2] The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox (1959).
[October 1959]
Bar da Filipo
Forio d’Ischia
Darling Debo,
We – Iris, Joan, Iris’s staggering ex-husband Friedrich [1] and I – got back from Capri yesterday. There are all sorts of things we didn’t see there, notably a dining cellar with the walls painted to simulate falling plaster where the curly-haired waiters repair the nylon cobwebs daily with a special solution and give a final whisk round with the dust-gun before opening time. It is the prototype of all those ‘continental’ restaurants or bistros in Sloane St and Elizabeth St: –
He served me some ravioli
Under a cardboard ham,
The shirt on his back was from Capri
The hairs on his chest were sham
And the apron across his codpiece
Was the colour of strawberry jam.
‘In Sloane St they call me Tonino
In Sydenham they call me Ted’
The hair that curled on his bosom
Was died blue-black from red:
– Nest for a holy medal,
(Nest for a diner’s head!)
The place is full of similar splendours.
A lot of migrating geese flew overhead for Africa half an hour ago, but I’m staying on for a bit.
Love
Paddy
[1] Count Friedrich Ledebur (1900–86). Actor known for his roles in Alexander the Great (1956), Moby Dick (1956) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1972). ‘Whenever the studios needed a picturesque or stately figure, or a deep voice to whisper, “All is not vell”, they sought him out.’ (PLF)
10 November 1959
Hairdressers
Darling Paddy,
I can’t quite think what’s been happening except that Chatsworth is now like a job, 9–6 with an hour for lunch, so there is no time for anything except being horrid to people on the telephone (radiator people & that kind of thing) & suddenly it’s become November & shooting is toward.
Daphne and Xan came for a nice stay. I do love them both in their various ways. As for Xan he becomes nobler, smarter, more beautiful & less confident as the years go by & I WORSHIP HIS BODY, but what’s the good, one never gets past idiotic chat & one has the strong feeling that he is hating it all, that he knows one knows he is (& he isn’t the only one) but that’s the end of it, v annoying as I would like to settle down to an orgy of depth plumbing but it’s no go & I can’t think of a single thing to say. What a waste.
Next day
Train 11 November
Today I had a Business Lunch with Lucian [Freud], to arrange about him coming to Chatsworth to paint the walls of the bathroom which belongs to the bedroom which is stuffed all up to the ceiling with Sabine Women being tweaked. It is Horrific, so whatever Lu does will go nicely. When we got on to the price we both got rather nervous, so the Business part of the lunch was a failure.
Andrew’s Granny has gone potty. Her maid suggested moving her to the middle of her bed when she was dangerously near the edge & she said ‘I won’t be moved, I have been just here in this bed ever since I re-married.’
Much love
Debo
26 February 1960
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I have found a lot of bunches of wax crocuses, like one sees on graves in France, and have planted them skilfully among Andrew’s real ones and am waiting on tenterhooks for them to be noted. As they are slightly larger than life size I feel they can’t be missed.
I might fall in love with John Freeman. [1] He is an exerciser of fascination of rabbit & snake variety. Never met him of course.
Much love
Debo
[1] John Freeman (1915–). Labour MP, ambassador in Washington 1969–71 and interviewer on Face to Face, the celebrated BBC live television show.
28 March 1960
Lismore Castle
Co. Waterford
Darling Paddy,
V v glad you will come here. We will have old No Eye [1] and his daughter for one night, Laure by name. Also her hubby. Quelle belle surprise.
My sister Decca has written a book, [2] and the burden of its song seems to be to steal all you can lay hands on and then be v proud that you have done it. I suppose that’s one way of going on. She’s a bit batty of course. It seems a bit hard on Lady Redesdale [3] who is an honest type.
Don’t not come.
Much love
Debo
I believe the ageing French writer will be at Mr Eddy [Sackville-West]’s for May so we can have Intellectual Evenings. Quelle dread surprise.
[1] Viscount Charles de Noailles (1891–1981). DD became friends with the patron of the Surrealists and expert gardener through her sister Nancy. Married Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim in 1923. They had two daughters: Laure (1924–79), married to Bertrand de La Haye Jousselin in 1946, and Natalie (1927–2004), who married Sandro Perrone, owner of the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero, in 1949.
[2] Jessica (Decca) Mitford (1917–96). The fifth Mitford sister’s first volume of autobiography, Hons and Rebels (1960), recounted her childhood, conversion to Communism, and elopement and marriage to Esmond Romilly, who died in 1941 when his plane went missing over the sea. In 1943, she married American attorney Robert (Bob) Treuhaft.
[3] Sydney Bowles (1880–1963). DD’s mother. Married David Mitford, later 2nd Baron Redesdale (1878–1958) in 1904.
Sunday [1960]
Dumbleton [1]
Evesham
Darling Debo,
I went for a long walk with Joan & Graham [2] in the Dumbleton woods yesterday, and we found a young fox caught in a trap by one fore-pad. It snarled and glared as I approached to release him, so I had to pull him by the brush with one hand, opening the trap with the other. Free at last he paused and fixed me with a glance of implacable hatred, then limped off, sensibly, into a jungle of foxgloves. If it had been a lion, far from saving my life like with Androcles years later in the Coliseum, he would have swallowed me there and then. I minced on my way rather crestfallen.
Lots of love from
Paddy
[1] After the death of PLF’s mother-in-law in 1959, Dumbleton Hall was sold to the Post Office as a convalescent home for employees and the family moved into the agent’s old house.
[2] Graham Eyres Monsell, 2nd Viscount Monsell (1905–94). PLF’s unmarried brother-in-law, an accomplished pianist, was very close to his sister Joan.
c/o Niko Ghika
Hydra (temporary)
My darling Debo,
A brief autobiography follows, hoping you’ll put me up to date in return.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Off we set in Joan’s Sunbeam Rapier, hood down, singing at the wheel, heading from Le Touquet to our old friend Lady Smart’s, spent three days there, then into a deserted dusty summer Paris, so bare that it might have been emptied by a Bedouin raid, and south to Fontainebleau, for a further three days of utmost luxury and pleasure at your old pal Charles de Noailles and Natalie’s house. [1] I can’t remember whether you’ve been or not, but if not, do hasten. The house is probably more Nancy’s Mecca than yours, but it seems enchanting to me, all that’s best in froggery. Natalie darted about the place seeming almost as nervy, frail, small and wide-eyed as her Chihuahua, whirling us at the speed of light from one cousin’s castle to another; but the real treat of course was Charles de N., pottering and talking and smiling and clipping and prodding from one strange and wonderful plant to another, clad in mole-coloured corduroys and gym shoes, with a wonderful basket in one hand, slotted for trowels, forks, secateurs, labels, bast string, gloves and indelible pencils. I wished you had been there and then thanked my stars you weren’t, for the conversation would have soared into such a rarefied empyrean of botanical expertise that we wouldn’t have understood a single word, instead of the lovely told-to-the-children tour we had. He worships your body, as you know (and rightly).
At dinner the first night I asked him about the Irish tour and, do you know, the most extraordinary and eerie thing happened. It was word for word, or so it seemed to me, what we imagined he might say, when, without having met him, I improvised what it might be, at Lismore! I couldn’t believe the evidence of my ears. The only thing in which I was a bit out was in being too snobbish, which he wasn’t. But the rest was uncanny. You were his favourite by far. His horticultural high point, after a long pause for thought, turned out to be Annes Grove. [2] I felt very bucked I’d been there that day with Eddy [Sackville-West] and the French Writer. Anyway, it was a glorious stay, with no one else there, except François Valéry’s son, [3] which was perfect. I felt it had all been rather a click: but one never quite knows.
(This para. can be skipped) Then off hot wheel eastwards to Châtillon-sur-Marne, to see the Vix Vase, a huge Greco-Etruscan amphora dug up seven years ago, an amazing object, and further east to Colmar in Alsace-Lorraine to gaze for the 5th time at Grünewald’s Issenheim altarpiece, the most amazing crucifixion in the world.
Then across the Rhine, through the Black Forest, one night on the shores of Lake Constance surrounded by Germans; south into the Austrian Tyrol, on into Italy at Bolzano, then clean through the Dolomites, hundreds of miles of sheer and dizzy spikes a-gush with streams out of which beautiful trout virtually leap straight on to frying pan, grill and saucepan; north of Venice into Yugoslavia at last; through Slovenia to Lubliana, through Croatia to Zagreb, then east along a billiard table autostrada towards Belgrade. Now, a travel tip for motoring in Yugoslavia: there are only about three petrol pumps in the country, and scarcely any motors. We ran out hundreds of miles from one on this autostrada in the heat of the day and settled for hours under an acacia tree (shittim-wood in the Old Testament) until at last a caravan of twelve Cadillacs drew up and succoured us by siphoning petrol out of their tanks. They were a party of Persian princes with their sloe-eyed princesses on the way from Claridge’s to Teheran. They partook freely of our wine flask, asked us to stay in their palaces (the competition began to look ugly) and then slipped into gear for Iran.
We continued south into wildest Bosnia, where mountains began to rise and minarets to sprout in every village, each alive with Moslem invocations intoned thrice daily. The roads became dust tracks across plains or twisty ledges of rubble little wider than eyebrows along the rims of deep gorges at the bottom of which huge rivers curled and swooped through echoing and forested ravines, with here and there an old Turkish bridge spanning them as thinly and insubstantially as a rainbow. The food became odd and wonderful, stuffed with garlic and paprika and the sunlight and our breath got stronger with every mile. So on to Sarajevo, scene of the Archduke’s murder, and, through range after range of mountains to Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast, a terrific medieval walled city full of renaissance palaces and belfries and winding columns and cloisters, and oysters too – huge and wonderful ones. South of this is the old kingdom of Montenegro, now part of Yugoslavia, reached after a three-hour zigzag up a sheer and cloud-topped wall of mountain, looking down on to strange rock fjords caked with water lilies and with pyramid-shaped mountains that hover on mist like the ones in Japanese pictures, and plenty of gliding storks. Then comes a wilderness of rock, in the heart of which lies the old capital, Cetinje, and the king’s palace, the size of Edensor. Long Byronic gorges a-swoop with eagles brought us down into Southern Serbia and an Albanian population: baggy-trousered women heavily veiled, and tall, raffish, guarded mountain men in red and white fezzes, all selling watermelons to each other. They are always in a crowd, always moving compactly along the streets, as though to or from a public execution. Then we came to Serbian Macedonia and wonderful lakes with frescoed Byzantine monasteries on the shores, and deeper and darker mountains and more fearsome gorges and hotter sun. These monasteries and frescoes held us up for days. We were playing it slow but not cool.
Into Greek Macedonia at last, and then by familiar roads to Athens. Here we found Gladys [Stewart-Richardson]’s house (now Joan’s) a great deal smaller than we remembered. It is, in fact, a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen, a sort of old cottage in the middle of Athens (much smaller than Mark [Ogilvie-Grant]’s), with a nice terrace. It’s very pretty, but much too small for two. What are we to do? Worse, a colossal road is being built outside, with fifty pneumatic drills, giant steel claws for rubble, hydraulic pumps, steamrollers and blasphemy. One has to talk in bellows. I have now bought some pink wax ear plugs, which makes everything even eerier. I see massed drills a-shudder, rollers a-crunch, and ten tons of broken concrete crashing from suddenly gaping steel claws, all only a few yards off, and all in dead silence; lorries hurtle by as soundlessly as minnows. Meanwhile, one’s heart sounds like a steam hammer, and one’s own steps like nail-clad footfalls in a cathedral.
END of Autobiography. Pause for tea break.
In spite of all this, it’s lovely being back in Greece. Mark was away when we arrived, chez Joan, and then, which made one feel wistful, chez you. Diana Cooper and Cecil [Beaton] had just been through, missing by the skin of all our teeth. But waiting on the mantelpiece was a huge stuffed seagull Diana had bought, and two stuffed hoopoes with pearl necklaces about their necks, as a housewarming present.
Well, after wandering about a bit in various islands and mountains, vaguely looking out for a permanent writing nest, we rendezvous-ed with Mark in Leivadia and headed for fateful Arachova and Delphi, and set off next dawn from A by car to the plateau, thence towards the summit with a nice guide and one mule. Mark veering to right and left with his sawn-off trident in one hand, polythene botanist’s bag in the other, through Niebelungen-clouds and fir-forests to the bare rocks, when we discovered that the guide did not realize we wanted to go down via the Carysian Cave to Delphi as well. There would be no time to make the summit and this as well, so we turned down into the Devonshire country, [4] waded across the plateau – Mark pointing out all the points of that Way of the Cross, where the wrong turning was taken in your journey etc. We sat by a well, very thirsty. The guide lowered his waterbottle on the end of his belt. Mark bent in to prod it below the surface with his stick, hoping to fill it, and out of his breast pocket and into the depths dropped his very expensive spectacles. There’s obviously a sort of blight on the place. Then up to the cave, and down through the woods that everyone missed on last year’s return journey. Mark dug up several colchicums and a centauria (impressed?) and we saw two lovely black squirrels, getting down to Delphi just after dark, Mark pointing out with his trowel where you had waited and craned like Sister Anne.
Our search was begun in Hydra, but we’re back in Athens now after about three weeks of hot and cloudless October and early November weather, our last bathe there was on 3rd Nov. Well, since Niko Ghika has settled there with Barbara, it’s been transformed – more terraces flung out, glorious paintings, strange sweet-smelling plants in amphorae, awnings like striped yacht sails, and the most glorious view in Greece, often described to you in the past. How I wish you’d come there when we lived there, as now we only come as guests now and then. Barbara and Niko have become more fervent bed dwellers than ever, those happy faces always seem to be gazing brightly at one from twin pillows whenever their door is open. The other day they were actually up and about for five hours on end, which is a record. It made me a bit anxious; I wondered if it was cracking up . . . But no, next day they were more lovesick than ever, unable to keep hands unclasped for long, either chatting, walking or at meat, keeping in touch by foot when knives and forks got in the way. It made one feel rather protective and a bit sad: such ages since one was in such a plight, at least overtly.
But the main and immediate thing is, write at once please. Lots and lots of love from
Paddy
Late Night Final
You’ve probably heard all about Stavros N’s island from Anne Tree. [5] Last week he came over on the wonder yacht Créole to Hydra to pick us up for dinner and a rather luxurious night on board, so off we skimmed to Spetsopoula, his island off Spetsai, through the sunset. This wild island is now a network of roads, and up one of these we rambled in a couple of brightly coloured waiting dodgems, to a large new and pretty ugly villa, but v. luxurious, and found some French friends playing tric-trac, a M. Bonnet and his bride (née Dubo Dubon Dubonnet) and Porfirio Rubirosa, his beautiful but inane wife, [6] and Tina Onassis & Eugenie Niarchos [7] (v. nice indeed). After a deluge of drinks there, we en-dodgemed again, tooled down to the shore and into Criss Crafts and swished round to a gorge-like cove a mile away, the beach glittering with specially imported sand and about 100 blazing pine torches stuck into the rocks, looking very wild and magnificent. A jukebox in the rocks jived away non-stop, and we settled down to caviar round a circular table out of doors. At the end of the meal, Stavros, who had been drinking non-stop all day, suddenly leapt on to the table, sending candles and gold plate flying, and danced like a wild thing, seizing Tina O, Mrs P.R. and Mrs B, all four whirling then stamping and leaping by torchlight, till Stavros, all the day’s drinks now churning up to an inner whirlpool, staggered down to the imported sand again and rocketed off to repose.
There was drinking, eating, bathing and jiving all next day, then a tour of the island by dodgem, thousands of imported pheasants whirring through the branches (mown down daily by S), and imported stags trotting under the trees. One of these tried to rape a lady last year, but she strangled it (its head now glowers down from the drawing room wall – a stuffer stuffed). Then a visit to a grass factory, which turns out seventy trays of forced grass a day, to be left about for the pheasants, and a review of a vast cage full of Prussian Elkhounds (the Baskerville department) all barking fit to bust and used as gun dogs. Then farewell to red-eyed Stavros and a quiet yacht-borne return to Hydra and sanity by moonlight.
[1] Natalie Perrone lived at the Hôtel de Pompadour, an exquisite folly designed by the architect Gabriel for the Marquise de Pompadour in 1749.
[2] Annes Grove Gardens in Co. Cork; created in the early twentieth century by Richard Grove Annesley.
[3] In fact PLF’s fellow guest was François Valéry himself, son of the writer Paul Valéry.
[4] While on a Hellenic Cruise earlier in the year, Andrew Devonshire, his daughter Emma, Mark Ogilvie-Grant and other friends had got lost walking above Delphi. DD, who had not gone on the walk, spent many anxious hours waiting for them while the cruise ship left without them. ‘Passengers are warned to this day not to stray like the Duke of Devonshire.’ (DD)
[5] Lady Anne (Tig) Cavendish (1927–). Married Michael Tree in 1949. DD’s sister-in-law and husband had a house on the Aegean island of Spetsai, adjoining the small island of Spetsopoula which was owned by Stavros Niarchos.
[6] Porfirio Rubirosa (1909–65). The well-endowed Dominican playboy was married to his fifth wife, twenty-three-year-old French actress Odile Rodin.
[7] Athina (1926–74) and Eugenia Livanos (1927–70). In 1947, Eugenia married Stavros Niarchos as his third wife. After her death, Niarchos married her sister, Athina, who had previously been married to Aristotle Onassis.
Train to London – Pity
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Pad,
Well I was pleased to get that fat letter.
Several bits were v praiseworthy viz. letting one know when to skip (always grateful for that sort of inf ). All most educational.
Things here are exactly the same. It is November, thank God, but not the 28th day of yet. Andrew has got a job [1] & a pay packet, an office, a phone and a BOSS. Did you ever know five more unexpected things. The result is Happiness, Fury at having speeches mucked about by the aforesaid boss, & the High Commissioner for Ghana looming for lunch at Chatsworth on Sunday. Very odd, & very good really as he loves the regularity of offices and the civil servants who make tea for him.
I think it was just in the nick myself, as he was killing himself with rushing about England ridding himself of guilt by pace.
I’m dying to meet his top boss, feller called Duncan Sandys, [2] because everyone who knows him loathes him. He is a tiger for work (0 else to do I guess; you know, lives in Surrey & doesn’t hunt). [3] He is Interested in Women but probably for only one horrid thing. We’ll soon see because I’m going to have lunch with him in a minute or so. I’ll report.
We went to a recap for diplomats & officials at B Palace. It beat cockfighting for (a) a long wait (b) the unpleasant shock of a whole passage of Topolski horrors [4] commissioned by the Duke of Edinburgh & (c) the following conversation with a lady called Mrs Alport, wife of Minister of State, [5] a job between Sandys’ & Andrew’s.
She I’ve been longing to meet you as I came out with your sister Jessica.
Me Oh lor.
She You know, you’ll find you’ll like all the people you’ll have to meet, they are very kind really and you’ll have no reason to be shy.
Me Oh. (Thinks Haven’t been shy for 20 years.)
She Of course you’ll join the CROWS.
Me What?
She Crows – Commonwealth Relations Office Wives.
Me Oh. Well I live in the country & I don’t go about much any more.
She Oh, don’t worry, you’ll enjoy it.
Well, really, you see what it’s like. RUBBISH. Making women have anything to do with politics, it makes me very angry. I shall speak to Uncle Harold about it & let Sandys have the rough side of my tongue when at last we meet. But as long as Andrew enjoys it I’m all for it, but CROWS, oh dear.
The well-known French lady writer is in England. It’s so nice having her & I hope the book [6] is making her rich, & that the Portfolio will benefit.
Lady Mosley is also about & with those two, Lady Redesdale & Woman [7] we had a very fine unveiling of a memorial thing to my Dad in Swinbrook Church. We cried a good deal & laughed even more of course. It’s rare for four of us to meet.
I had a very jolly time in Scotland with Col Stirling, [8] a visit after my own heart. No books were mentioned, no one asked if one was happy & the other guests were two sweet generals, one called de Guingand [9] & famous for the war. On a very wet day it was a fine sight to see those generals in their mackintosh knickers on hands & knees down a road stalking grouse on stubble.
I’d never seen or heard wild geese before. Have you ever? A fantastic noise, like a lot of women at a cocktail party in the sky, tumbling over each other for the best place in the air. The oddest & most impressive nature note for years.
I’m going back there in Jan – can’t wait. Col Stirling has gambled away all his Spanish pictures, I believe there used to be El Grecos, Goyas and Velasquez by the doz, but there is only a dolly’s sized Velasquez left, v enviable all the same.
Love to all, masses to you
Debo
Important P.S. Saw Diana Cooper’s point for more or less the first time at a pretty ghastly dinner at the Hamish Hamiltons’ for Nancy’s book.
[1] Andrew Devonshire had been appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Commonwealth Relations. ‘He always used to say that no one who had not held that office knew quite how dim an under-secretary’s job was. He enjoyed it all the same.’ (DD)
[2] Duncan Sandys (1908–87). Minister in several Conservative governments, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations 1960–4. Married to Winston Churchill’s daughter Diana 1935–60.
[3] DD was quoting the 10th Duke of Beaufort, Master of the Beaufort Hounds, who could not imagine what James Lees-Milne, one of his tenants, did all day. ‘Pointless man, the feller doesn’t even hunt.’
[4] The Polish painter Feliks Topolski, official artist for the coronation of 1953, was commissioned to produce a record of the event to hang at Buckingham Palace.
[5] Cuthbert Alport (1912–98). Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Commonwealth Relations Office 1957–9, Minister of State 1959–61. Married Rachel Bingham in 1945.
[6] Nancy Mitford’s last novel, Don’t Tell Alfred, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1960.
[7] Pamela Mitford (1907–94). DD’s second eldest sister, nicknamed ‘Woman’ by her family, was best-known for being the unknown Mitford. Married to Derek Jackson 1936–51.
[8] William (Bill) Stirling (1911–83). Scotch landowner, farmer, soldier and entrepreneur. Led the 2nd Special Air Service regiment while his brother, David Stirling, founded and led the 1st (the SAS was dubbed Stirling and Stirling at the time). ‘He was a brilliant game shot and the best host of the best shoot at Keir. I was lucky enough to be invited for the last week of January for many years. This unmatched entertainment became known as The Festival.’ (DD)
[9] Francis (Freddie) de Guingand (1900–79). Distinguished soldier who had been Chief of Staff to Field Marshal Montgomery.
8 December 1960
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Pad,
I can’t remember when I wrote, or whether Andrew had got a job by then.
Anyhow, we’ve had the first small dose of official entertaining & I can tell you I shall put my foot in it soon as I can’t understand (a) protocol (b) sucking up and (c) not saying very loud what one thinks about (a) the government & (b) Uncle Harold & his troupe.
Anyway what’s happened so far is an official dinner at the High Commissioner of Ceylon’s & lunch, in his own dump, with the Boss.
It’s a new world, and a rum one.
The Ceylons live in a plain house in Addison Road, never an ornament to be seen, but many chairs placed about the room like those lounges where television interviews take place. No fire, not even electric, but bright lights & central heating.
Very well then. I thought it wd be Andrew & me & some Ceylonese people. Not at all. It was for grandees like Ld Home, [1] Ld Mountbatten, [2] Mrs Pandit, [3] Ld Soulbury [4] laced with a few gloomy faces like Mr & Mrs Creech Jones [5] & various anonymous but high up civil servants.
I was lucky & sat by Ld Home. He is sweet & looks like an amiable goat but does not smell or anything. Lady Home is one of those large English county ladies with a loud voice, but comforting because of their unchangingness, usually to be seen & heard on saints’ days at Eton. She wore an electric blue dress of strange shape & nameless stuff & huge dirty diamonds on a huge clean bosom.
Ld Mountbatten shouted about the bag at Six-Mile Bottom to me across the table & scarcely addressed a word to the lady in a sari whose dinner it was. When the pudding loomed – jelly – he said very crossly to the hired waiter ‘What on earth’s all this.’ It makes one despair of the behaviour of some hopeless English people.
When we’d all stuck it till 11, Ld Home was very polite & said to the hostess ‘I’m afraid we must very reluctantly tear ourselves away.’ I thought that was better.
Lunch with the boss was most educational. He gives one pretty straightforward looks & he’s got everything red, except for his teeth which were vaguely yellow. He paints, in his pyjamas, before getting up, or so he says.
I will ask him to stay & report further. I don’t think it’s any good pretending that one can like or understand ambitious politicians.
I’m so awfully sorry about Ralph Partridge [6] – what it means to all our friends. I wonder what his poor wife will do, if she can stay on at that house – all that. It is sad.
OH how I wish you were coming for Christmas. Poor old Andrew is faced with Lady Redesdale, Mrs Hammersley, [7] my m in law and Woman – no man to leaven them.
Much love
Debo
[1] Alexander (Alec) Douglas-Home, 14th Earl of Home (1903–95). The Conservative politician and future Prime Minister was Foreign Secretary at the time. Married Elizabeth Alington, daughter of his headmaster at Eton, in 1936.
[2] Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1900–79). The former Viceroy and Governor-General of India was Chief of the Defence Staff 1959–65.
[3] Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (1900–90). Politician and diplomat. Indian High Commissioner to Great Britain 1955–61.
[4] Herwald Ramsbotham, 1st Viscount Soulbury (1887–1971). Conservative politician. Governor-General of Ceylon 1949–54.
[5] Arthur Creech Jones (1891–1964). Labour politician who, as Secretary of State for the Colonies, presided over Ceylon’s independence in 1948. Married Violet Tidman in 1920.
[6] Ralph Partridge (1894–1960). One of the Bloomsbury quartet that consisted of Lytton Strachey, who was in love with Partridge; Dora Carrington, whom Partridge married; and Frances Marshall, who became Partridge’s wife after Carrington’s suicide. They lived at Ham Spray House, on the borders of Berkshire and Wiltshire. Frances Partridge moved to London after her husband’s death and died in 2004, aged 103.
[7] Violet Williams-Freeman (1877–1964). A childhood friend of Lady Redesdale and a favourite of DD and her sisters.
28 or 29 December
1960 Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Pad,
Our Sunset Home have departed. Woman brought four dogs (one of which was incontinent) and her days are spent cooking for them, feeding them what she has cooked, then going out to make messes. I know this is a natural cycle but it’s repeated in such quick succession that there was no time to do anything else. It must be a strange life.
Going out with the oldsters was a job. They never learn where the front door is and so many shawls, scarves, sticks, rugs and deaf aids have to be collected that it’s pretty difficult and there are specs down every chair. The housemaid had a heart attack on Christmas Day & was rushed to Bakewell Cottage Hosp, where I must say I wouldn’t mind a week or two as there are only three beds in a room. Think if the Wife & Lady Mosley were in the other two. It would be the fittest thing going.
I sent the Wife a book (empty) with COMPLAINTS heavily engraved in gold, companion to the visitors’ book. She sent me a Landseer drawing and a basket. I gave Stoker a cashmere jersey. He gave me some Beecham’s powders and a loofah. That’s the best of the Christmas news, except that we had some fine cards from people like MR AND MRS SCRIPP KELLOGG printed inside.
No signs of (a) R Kee (b) Daphne and Xan (c) Ann Fleming who has been taken by her ridiculous husband to Switzerland for a whole month.
Much love
Debo
5 January 1961
12 Kallirhoë Street
Makriyannis
Athens
Darling Debo,
I got stuck in the mountains the other night, miles up in clouds and snow, with the huge white starlit peaks of Mt Helmos and Mt Kyllene outside the shepherd’s hut that sheltered me. My hosts were two old boys, Uncle George and Uncle Dimitri. I asked them about ghosts, centaurs, Nereids and other familiar spirits of the Greek countryside. U. Dimitri said that was all rot, but Uncle George came across with reams of absorbing lore. When he had finished, Uncle Dimitri said, gazing thoughtfully into the brushwood fire: ‘I don’t believe a word of it. But demons are another thing. Plenty of them about.’
U. George Rubbish.
U. Dimitri Rubbish my foot. My own niece Maria, my sister’s daughter, was bothered by one for years.
U. George What was it like?
U. Dimitri A small black dog with one eye in the middle of its forehead. It followed her about everywhere, talking to her in a low voice, and she would answer it – a continuous mumbling, it was. Then my sister bought a miniature New Testament on a loop of blue string, and went to find Maria in the forest, where she had been cutting wood. She was just starting home, with a load of logs and faggots tied behind her, on the back of her mule, and on top of them this wretched dog was sitting, mumbling away without a break. My sister slipped the Testament round her neck, and the dog suddenly stopped talking and shot like a sky rocket to the top of Mt Kyllene where it burst like a bomb with a report you could hear all over the Peloponnese. She was alright after that, and now she’s married with eleven children.
This completely floored U. George, who sat in silence, clicking his tongue in appreciation.
No more for now, except heaps of fond love from
Paddy
18 January 1961
4 Chesterfield Street
London W1
Darling Pad,
A slightly ghoulish prospect looms today. Andrew & I bugger off to America for Jack Kennedy’s coronation [1] – back Sunday I’m happy to say. I can’t tell you how queer it is getting a visa – they send you a jolly invitation from The President to his crowning & then proceed to ask you all sorts of cheeky questions & insist on seeing you to make sure you’re not a Communist. Well how can they know just by looking at one’s ugly mug. On one of the many forms was printed ORIGIN & the clerk wrote CAUCASIAN. I asked Look here what’s that & he said without a flicker of anything Means you’re white. I didn’t know I was a jolly Georgian in floppy trousers & a cuirasse wildly dancing & tweaking people left & right. The Consul in Manchester said Take all your pretties – you’ll see some fabulous gowns and toilets. Bet I will.
We’re staying at the English embassy – I’ll report.
Life with the Creature of the Mist [2] was v strange indeed, smashing shoot, we got 1050 objects in four days but I have lost the art & have made up my mind (vaguely) not to go away & shoot any more, only do it at home.
My train arrived at 5.15 a.m. & who came lumbering up the platform in the meeting dept but the Great & Good man himself. I worship his body but he doesn’t notice.
I sat next to him for thirteen meals out of fourteen & the talk was the same each time, most restful & a refreshing change from the intis, [3] viz. Will you all come back in the summer & we can look for the flowers which only grow on Ben something or other (the local Parnassus). This said in a leaning towards one confidential way & it was so exciting knowing what was coming.
Sincerely (practising for America)
D Devonshire
[1] DD had known the Kennedys since Joseph P. Kennedy, ambassador in London 1938–40, brought his family to live at Princes Gate where they were neighbours of the Mitfords. Andrew’s older brother, William (Billy), married Kathleen Kennedy in 1944. The presidential inauguration, which took place on 20 January 1961, was described by Andrew Devonshire as ‘all rather engagingly schoolboyish, but infectious’. Accidents of Fortune (Michael Russell, 2004), p. 87.
[2] William Stirling.
[3] Intellectuals.
25 January 1961
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Pad,
Two new bodies to add to the list of worshipped – a sweet ambassador called Sir Harold Caccia, [1] and Jack Kennedy.
I lay beside Mr Gaitskell [2] for six happy hours in the plane to London & scraped his bottom (strange expression from a French friend who is not too good at English describing confidences received on a journey) & we became vague friends.
He was a Friend in Tweed is a Friend Indeed in Washington when our Austin Princess (1950) broke coming away from the Inaugural Ball at a place called The Armoury which is a vast hall about twice as big as Olympia & was the venue for many a Presidential festivity last week.
The last day of our fantastic outing we were taken to the Senate & Andrew was led into the Chamber (as they have a reciprocal agreement about govt people from foreign parts) & before you could say Robert Kee, two Senators were making speeches of welcome to him. I was sweating with fright in case he would make one back but thank goodness he only bowed. Good old Andrew. [3]
Jack Kennedy was marvellous, chiefly because he was so marvellous to us & summoned me from the back of his stand to sit with him during the Parade & it fuddled the commentators on the telly as they only know politicians & film stars & when strange English ladies loom they are stumped.
I can’t even tell you what an odd feeling it was sitting there with him like a Consort while majorettes from Texas & crinolined ladies on silver-paper floats went by by the thousand in the bitter cold. An Air Force contingent marched by & one broke ranks, whipped out a camera, took a snap of the President & rejoined the others. I wish I could see a Coldstream Guardsman do that one day.
Jack asked me what I do all day. Stumped. I asked him if he was going to see Uncle Harold – he’d never heard of him. He is lovely – face & hair look as if it had been dipped in the same sand, eyes only different.
We went in a bus labelled ‘Kennedy Family’ to The White Ho & they all cheered as we went through the gates.
White Ho is very pretty, proper rooms covered in proper silk, green, red, yellow & ghastly blue put by Mamie [4] (I think).
The Gala (seats 1000 dollars, for party funds!) was a literal galaxy of stars, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Durante, Nat King Cole, the kind of music was SO NICE compared with the usual ghouls, viz. Willie Walton. I appreciated.
At the ball Jack Kennedy climbed over seven rows of cinema seats to say goodbye, to the astonishment of the people next to us & who were nicer from then on.
He is surrounded like a queen bee by photographers, detectives, nexts of kin & fans so if he breaks out of the phalanx of people to come & talk to ONE, one nearly faints with pleasure & surprise.
It was so hot in & so cold out it’s a wonder people survive.
V odd to be back here, shooting cock pheasants out of the car like today.
I went to a shop with the secretary to the Ambassadress & saw some lovely gloomy shirts, khaki & black stripes, & said out loud oh those are perfect for Robert & Lucian & the sec said Are they your sons? Oh how I wish they were.
Much love
Debo
[1] Harold Caccia (1905–90). British ambassador in Washington 1956–61. Created Baron Caccia of Abernant 1965.
[2] Hugh Gaitskell (1906–63). Leader of the Labour Party from 1955 until his death.
[3] ‘The Cavendishes were well known to be silent and spoke only when there was something worth saying. The Cecils were the opposite, talk, talk, talk from earliest childhood. My mother-in-law was a Cecil, born and brought up at Hatfield House where everyone had their say on every subject. Andrew took after her and started the Cavendishes talking – something Chatsworth had not known before.’ (DD)
[4] Mamie Eisenhower’s favourite colour was, in fact, pink. During her husband’s presidency, the White House was often referred to by the press as the ‘Pink Palace’.
16 February 1961
(Feast of SS Pamphilius
and Seleucus, Martyrs)
Metsovo
Epirus
NW Greece
Darling Debo,
I was impressed by your coronation trip (did you get a mug?), and so were others I imparted the proud news to. It was a wonderful description of J. Kennedy. He seems to have done jolly well so far. I wish he weren’t so much younger than one. You do write good letters, you know, you really do, in that whizz-bang planchette style, hitting the nail on the head again and again without even looking. Please persevere through the coming decades, only another forty years or so, if all goes well.
You’ll never guess where I am. Last year in Rome, I got a fanletter from Mr Avéroff [1] (the Gk Foreign Minister, now in your midst) saying he thought Mani [2] was glorious (he’s better read than some), and would I and my party go and stay in his house in Metsovo any time, as long as I liked, to write. So here I am, and Joan too. It’s what they call an ancestral Epirot house, in the Turkish style, huge rooms surrounded by divans, with carved wooden ceilings giving one the feeling of being inside a cigar box, jutting out in storey after storey, overlooking the snow-covered roofs of the highest village in Greece, bang on the top of the Pindus Mountains in fact, almost the wildest and remotest bit of the wildest and remotest range in Greece. These cigar-box rooms, thank heavens, each have enormous porcelain stoves, so it’s piping hot within, and just as well as snow falls and swirls without and icicles dangle a foot thick. The lanes outside have that marvellous winter smell of snow, cattle, straw, pee, dung, pines, hay, ice, and cigars, appropriately being smoked by me. The inhabitants are Koutzovlachs * who speak a v. queer Latin dialect akin both to Rumanian and Italian. Some say they are Rumanian nomad shepherds who wandered here centuries ago with their flocks and never found their way home again. Others, more plausibly, say that they are the descendants of Roman legionaries, speaking a corrupt camp Latin, stationed here to guard the high passes of the Pindus, miles from anywhere; and that when the Emperor Honorius ** recalled the legions to Rome in 410 A.D., they never got the order; and here they have been stuck ever since, rather bewildered little rock pools of Romans, wondering wistfully if their absent centurions know as much as they should about Care of Men. They wear ribbed velvet pill-boxes, black goat’s-hair boleros, black ditto kilts, black leggings of the same, and pom-pommed shoes, with hooded full-length capes so stiff that they can step out and leave them standing like sentry-boxes. They are semi-nomads, and now half of them are down in the plains with thousands of black sheep and goats, the last two devouring the delicious grass there, while their masters moon the winter through in numberless snug wigwams made of plaited willow and brushwood. The rest of my party (Coote and, I hope, Mark [Ogilvie-Grant]) roll up tomorrow: by plane to Yanina, the capital of Epirus, and then up here by bus, bringing newspapers and whisky, & perhaps letters from you and other dear ones. It’s quicker by bus than by car, because a bulldozer-cum-snow plough goes before the bus. We were blocked in a howling blizzard on the way here, in spite of heavy chains, in the highest and windiest part of the pass. It was awful watching the snow blowing higher and higher as we cowered gazing through the fan-shaped bits the wipers made on the caked windscreen, till a snow plough came along, and let us through – creatures of the snow – finally delivered at this warm casket of a house, with books and carpets and whisky and shaded lamps and roaring stoves. It seemed a true miracle.
Did you come across Mr Avéroff – I thought you might because of Andrew’s uncle, perhaps. He’s an odd kind. (PRIVATE ) I scarcely knew him; but I took my courage in both hands (knowing he had just wangled an old friend of mine out of Rumania – more of this anon) and asked if he could do anything about my old love, Balasha Cantacuzène: [3] and he has promised to, if he can! I can’t believe it, though it may take a year or two. She was over ten years older than me when I was twenty – so still must be! – which means over fifty-five (-six since last week). There was a faint chance of her getting out two years ago, but she didn’t want to, because, after prison for two years (for trying to escape) and living in utter hardship as a pauper for 15 years in forced residence & little to eat in a remote village, she said she dreaded seeing anyone again – painfully thin, teeth and hair dropping out fast. It’s too awful. Poor Balasha! But I’m sure something could be done about all this, and thank heavens, there are several old friends who will cough up something to begin with. And indeed go on. She’s a painter. She always adored Greece, and would probably want to settle here. How wonderful it would be if she did make it! We haven’t met for 22 years. She used to be so beautiful. The one who did get out through Mr A – he’s called Nicky Cryssovelóni, a very old friend of mine – says that in spite of all these calamities, she’s quite unchanged in character, just as funny and intelligent and charming as ever.
I was amazed by how little he had changed after countless imprisonments and beatings up. He was, and still is, amazingly good looking, ½ English with a great fascination, I think. Bridget [Parsons] used to be terribly in love with him, & I think would have liked to have married him. But (alas for poor B!) the only one he asked after in England was ‘Ann O’Neill’, [4] so I’ve put him on the right track. I’ve given him a letter for you – is this alright? I wish you’d organise a meal or something with Robert [Kee] and perhaps A. O’Neill, as I think his accounts of occupied Rumania and the Communist regime would fascinate him. It’s quite something; a lot of it, unexpectedly, is side splitting. Judging by what’s going on outside the window – I’ve let the curtain fall with a shudder – my party are going to have a pretty rough ascent tomorrow.
Heaps of love
Paddy
[1] Evangelos Avéroff (1910–90). The Greek Foreign Minister was on a three-day official visit to Britain.
[2] PLF’s account of his travels in the southern Peloponnese, first published in 1958.
[3] Princess Marie-Blanche (Balasha) Cantacuzène (1899–1976). PLF met the Romanian painter in Athens in 1935. Her marriage to the polo-playing Spanish diplomat Francisco Amat y Torres had ended, and she and PLF spent several months together in Greece before returning to live at Baleni, her ancestral home in Moldavia, south-eastern Romania. PLF was at Baleni in 1939 when war was declared.
[4] Ann Fleming was married, firstly, to 3rd Baron O’Neill 1932–44.
* DON’T SKIP
** ditto
30 June 1961
Cliff Cottage [1]
Fforest Farm
Dinas, Newport
Pembrokeshire
Darling Debo,
I ffeel ffrightfully guilty about being so ffearffully slow in writing to say thank you for that lovely weekend. It was glorious, and I really loved it.
It was a bit gloomy here to begin with – the deed-box smell of long-closed rooms as Joan and I tiptoed in, and the wriggle of moths’ larvae. (But they’ve all been slain now.) Also, it poured to begin with and, whenever one went out of doors, great cotton-wool clouds weighed down on one, making one feel like a bird’s egg packed against breakage and, where flowers ought to be, nothing but tares: not at all a case of (please intone this like a psalm):
‘As he swore unto our forefather:
Sutton and his seeds forever.’
Glorious meals, as you rightly guessed, so that one longs to be at meat. A giant lobster, caught an hour before, last night, with raspberries and cream to follow; and these cliffs are one vast Nature Note, puffins, choughs, guillemots, kittiwakes, shearwaters, buzzards and the like, and deep chasms running down to the sea choked with tropical vegetation where foxes and badgers live. Also, there are low but wild mountains behind, the scene of bleak and bracing gallops, then heavenly rides homeward along winding lanes between hayfields and through farmyards where cottagers talk to each other, in Welsh no doubt, about music, wizards, rarebits and kindred themes.
I suppose it’s too far to drive from Derbyshire, but, were it not, one might explore further down the coast.
Lastly, work is going like a fire hydrant and about time too. Lots of love from
Paddy
[1] PLF had borrowed the house from Barbara Ghika (1911–89), née Hutchinson, who married the painter Nikos Ghika in 1961. She was married previously to Victor, 3rd Baron Rothschild 1933–46 and to Rex Warner, writer, painter and translator of Greek tragedies, in 1949.
17 July 1961
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Pad,
Re. Iris Tree. She came for the weekend. Well, she arrived with the Exchange & Mart under her arm so I was knocked all of a heap. I never saw such a lady, such sequin ties, such golden evening outfits (chain mail), such memory for poetry, such company. She is the fittest thing this side of Tipperary. No wonder you love her so much. The reactions, the being an American, saying ‘Well what d’you know’, the words used describing things, my goodness, & all this & the Exchange & Mart.
I spoke about Ivan Moffat [1] being one of the three people left I want to meet (others are Lds Beaverbrook & Birkenhead). [2] She said one must have three goes at him. I believe he’s getting married & that sometimes makes people different for, say, three months so we must hang on. Anyway his dear old mother takes a bit of beating.
Keep in touch.
Much love
Debo
[1] Ivan Moffat (1918–2002). Screenwriter, son of Iris Tree and grandson of the actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. PLF had known Moffat since 1940: ‘All his life, with his high forehead, tousled hair and large eyes, he had the look of an intelligent, rebellious, finely-strung and charming boy. His quiet, urgent style was spaced out by pauses and changes of pace and pitch and interrupted by bursts of all-consuming and infectious laughter.’ PLF, Daily Telegraph, 2 August 2002.
[2] The powerful press baron Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook (1879–1964), and the historian Frederick Smith, 2nd Earl of Birkenhead (1907–75). ‘Beaverbrook was such a person. Of course I wanted to meet him, so much spoken of – devil incarnate or irresistible charmer, depending on who you talked to. Freddie Birkenhead was Tom [Mitford]’s great friend. Hearing about him was enough to make me very curious.’ (DD)
17? November 1961
Poste Restante
Nîmes
Gard
My darling Debo,
Feeling a bit low. It’s Saturday night in this town, pouring with rain, and here I am in this café, unknown and unloved. I wish you were here, and Xan and Daph, Ran, several other people, let alone Joan. Think what lovely drinks and talks we’d have, followed by some smashing guzzle somewhere, then more drinks and a great deal more talks and jokes, and finally pretty tight to bed, and off into dreamland, knowing a glorious day was about to dawn on the morrow, rain or shine.
I did lots of work in Brittany but it got too damp and dark and sad, so I thought, off to the glowing south and pitch camp there, with any luck somewhere near my old pal Larry Durrell. [1] (Not here of course.) But the journey, though solitary, was marvellous, all through S. Brittany, then down to Nantes, over the Loire to La Rochelle, a very pretty arcaded town where, in a bar late at night, I fell in with a delightful old boy who seemed to know everyone anybody’s ever met anywhere, and is also curator of the local Natural History Museum, which we went over next day. We sat up in his very pretty book-lined house in the port drinking whisky till 4 a.m. and next day he gave me a thumping lunch with clarets almost too fabulous to drink. He’d just read Nancy’s book, and asked me who everyone was so I was able to score rather heavily. [2] Why I go on about him is that, when he was a very young man in La Rochelle, your uncle Jack Mitford [3] was there learning French, a tremendous dasher apparently, with a small pack of hounds for hunting cats. He used to send out cards asking all the smart world of La Rochelle to the meets, and then, hell for leather all over the town, to the wonder of the citizens.
So, on down the west coast of France to Bordeaux, which might have been at the bottom of the sea, it was so rainy. I stopped here at an old-fashioned, quite empty hotel, all long passages, brass bedsteads and threadbare plush, overlooking the submerged cathedral. The maid who helped me up with my luggage – mostly in baskets, the advantage of motor travel – was a tall fair sad beauty, no make up, in a severe black dress and starched white apron. Peering into the rainy square I quoted two lines of Verlaine about the monotonous noise of the rain, which she promptly continued for several more lines. She turned out to be enormously well read, from Paris, lonely and gloomy in Bordeaux, not liking the burghers much. I asked her advice about where to go on one’s own in this strange town, and ended up by meeting her round the corner in a bar (it wouldn’t do in the hall of the hotel) as it was her night off: black and white now replaced by suede jacket, black jersey & skirt and flat shoes; then lots of oysters and things at another place, and lots of a rather sad life story. It turned out that the happiest time she’d had in her life, so far (she’s 24), was last summer, with her greyhound Dick, at Arcachon in the estuary of the Garonne, where the oyster beds are. She would hang about till after sunset when everyone had left the sands, and then swim out with Dick and dive into the oyster beds and pinch the oysters; then turn back to the shore, where she had a plastic bag with a knife, bread, butter and lemon in, and have a solitary feast. Dick didn’t like them, fortunately, but is a wonderful oyster-spotter, for after rough weather quite a lot are washed inshore and scattered about the sand, so off dashes clever Dick, to halt panting over some scaly trove, Annie following hot foot.
Kindred themes kept us up late, after which, at two in the morning, we went to a Spanish bar, already shut, but bursting with noise – claps, stamps, wails, guitars etc. We managed to get in and it consisted entirely of the family, about fifteen strong, all reeling, except a boy of four called Juanito who would tell them every quarter of an hour or so, and in vain, that it was long past his usual bedtime, then catch our eyes to commiserate on their hopelessness. The thing about this girl was, apart from her marvellous watermaiden looks, the ingrained sadness (as though her heir had gone down in the White Ship). I felt I’d won a prize whenever I made her laugh. One of her reasons for gloom was that, being solitary and nice-looking, she had a pretty rotten time with chaps, none of whom knew anything about Verlaine etc but were all after You Know What, and drifted off when nothing was doing; which cast a blight over all, & ruined most evenings – ‘Not like with you!’ she said, eyes wide with grateful candour. This, of course, completely tied one’s hands, SHOULD there have been any question of a Thurber-like lunge; and so it continued through next day Sunday off – indeed from beginning to end – and a great drive with Dick to St Emilion & the castle of Montaigne, and some more oysters. The next day, descending to depart, there was a discreet farewell wave in a passage, behind the other maids’ backs, from this tall figure – black and white again. Then away, to discover on the seat of the Standard Companion [4] a surreptitiously placed present of a Mozart record I’d said the day before was one I liked, and hadn’t got; with a covering note saying thanks for some of the ‘heures les plus heureuses de mon existence’. Wasn’t that nice? I’ll often think of that alluvial, estuary scene of Dick pounding across the sunset dunes under a mother of pearl sky, followed by this beautiful honey-coloured biped with knife, lemon, bread and butter.
So, on through Toulouse, Narbonne, finally here, where I’m staying in a rather gloomy hotel, but hope to move into a nice room in a courtyard of an old arcaded house once owned by a cardinal whose name I won’t burden you with. Nobody writes (plainly a conspiracy).
In Brittany, I saw a plough being drawn by a huge black-and-white bull, yoked behind a carthorse, rather an unusual sight, especially as there was a rainbow at the same time.
Do write at once, darling Debo, and lots of love and hugs from Paddy
What of Daph & Xan?
[1] Lawrence Durrell (1912–90). The writer was living in Sommières, a small village in Provence. ‘When all seems to languish and droop, his arrival acts like a stiff dose of Eno’s or Kruschen Salts and everyone is suddenly ready to clear five-bar gates.’ PLF, ‘Observations on a Marine Vulture’, Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 33, no. 3, Autumn 1987, pp. 305–7.
[2] In Don’t Tell Alfred, Nancy used aspects of her nephew Alexander Mosley for Basil; Diana Cooper for Lady Leone; Susan Mary Alsop for Mildred Jungfleisch; Lord Redesdale for Uncle Matthew; Eddy Sackville-West for Davey Warbeck and DD for Northey.
[3] John ( Jack) Mitford, 4th Baron Redesdale (1885–1963). ‘One of my father’s younger brothers. He was famously snobbish and was much laughed at in the family for this failing, which he took in good part. When King Edward VII stayed at Batsford, Jack followed him round the garden with a chair in case he wanted to sit down. He made the mistake of marrying a German arms heiress in the spring of 1914, a union which was almost immediately annulled and never mentioned again. He made one or two half-hearted attempts at finding a job, but never stuck at anything and rubbed along as good company – he could be very funny.’ (DD)
[4] ‘The Standard Companion was the first car I ever had. I revelled in it! Humble and undashing, but dear to me. “Dr Piccard goes up, goes up / Captain Cousteau goes down / But my shark-blue Standard / Carries me all round the town!” ’ (PLF)
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Pad,
I’m going to America on Friday for a spell. I had a v nice letter from J Kennedy, asking me to go, signed Yours ever Jack Kennedy, and then below in his own writing President JF Kennedy, The White House, Washington DC, USA. Well I must say I may be a 9 yr old but I had heard of him and his bonne addresse. So I’m going. I’ve got cold feet now & heartily wish I was staying here pulling triggers.
What will it be like in Washington? I know, one will go all that way & then be asked to tea, once, at The White Ho. I’m staying with David & Sissy, [1] that’ll be nice.
Think of me, & I’ll send a P.C. if I think Post Resting Nîmes is a sensible place to send things off to.
I saw Daph & Xan last week, both recovering from bronchitis and both perfect of course. I think Xan looked very nice but I couldn’t look at him, never can for at least two days as you know.
The Wife’s not too fit, and Mrs Hammersley is very cross about me going to America. She thinks no one ought to interfere with that gentleman & that he ought to be left to fry his fish day & night. Ass.
Keep writing, vaguely.
Much love
Debo
[1] David Ormsby Gore, 5th Baron Harlech (1918–85). Ambassador in Washington 1961–5. The politician and diplomat had been a close friend of J. F. Kennedy since Kennedy’s pre-war years in London during his father’s embassy. ‘It was JFK’s suggestion to Uncle Harold [Macmillan] that he should go to Washington. David had the best sense of humour and so did the President. This lightened their load and often surprised their officials. The friendship between the two men was deep and the relationship between them very different from the conventional formality of their roles.’ (DD) Married to Sylvia Lloyd Thomas from 1940 until her death in a car crash in 1967, and to Pamela Colin in 1969.
Nearly Full Moon
Easton Court Hotel
Chagford
My darling Debo,
I did love Christmas so and you were kind and angelic to have me; and I feel a shocking laggard not having written before – only idly phoning – to say so. I’ll never forget all those icicles and frosty statues and the lovely blaze and the heavenliness of everyone indoors afterwards; nor the lovely longness of it, although it seemed over in a trice.
When I got back, I found, which I’d completely forgotten, that I’d been asked to stay for a rustic ball at Mary Campbell’s ages before; so got a lift down with Janetta [1] and great fun it was. Can you imagine it, there were nearly thirty people staying in the house. Lots of them very young and in sardine-like dorms. Lots of the neighbouring quality came over for the ball, which was pretty informal to say the least, to a gramophone, and got very wild and lively. Among the guests was Magouche’s [2] ex-hub, a tall, very handsome, Harvardish looking man. Well in the small hours, I was dancing with Magouche when the tune suddenly changed and Magouche cut a bold and light-hearted caper and fell to the floor, full length, with a bump. I chivalrously – it wasn’t my fault a bit – reclined on the floor beside her, leant on one elbow, and there we remained as a joke for a minute or two, with the dance swirling all round, like two stone crusaders on a tomb or two recumbent Etruscans, quietly conversing. All at once I felt a vice-like grip on my nape, and someone shaking me as a mastiff shakes a rat, as I believe they say. It was Jack (ex-hub) who said ‘I’m going to clobber you’. I told him not to be a perfect idiot but to come and have a drink instead, which he grumblingly did, on condition that we had a ‘clobbering match’ next morning at eleven. It was fortunately completely forgotten – a dark demon called Hangover was whirling through the snowflakes and beating his foul wings overhead by then – so nothing happened.
No more now, dearest Debo, except love to one and all and 1000 thanks, and lots and lots of love to you from
Paddy
[1] Janetta Woolley (1922–). ‘Janetta has a marvellous fine-boned beauty which, when she was fifteen, smote Eddy Sackville-West so hard (in spite of his ordinary lack of such inclinations) it prompted him to propose to her. There is something magical and quiet about her; she had – has – qualities that turned her into a treasured and lifelong friend. I can never help remembering that a distant ancestor of hers was a Lord Ruthven, anti-Mary Queen of Scots, who, though old and ill, got out of bed, put on black armour and, with several other suffering grandees, climbed the stairs of Holyrood Palace and murdered Rizzio, the Queen’s Italian favourite, a friend from her earlier life as Queen of France. A grim tale.’ (PLF) Married to Humphrey Slater, to Robert Kee 1948–50, to Derek Jackson 1951–6, and in 1971 to Jaime Parladé, Marqués de Apesteguía, a Spanish architect with whom she settled near Ronda in Andalusia.
[2] Agnes (Magouche) Magruder (1921–). Boston-born daughter of a US naval officer. Married to the artist Arshile Gorky 1941–8, who nicknamed her ‘Mougouch’, an Armenian term of endearment; to John C. Phillips Jr in 1950; and to Xan Fielding in 1979.
26 January 1962
Telegrams: Antiseptic, sinister
Fitzroy House
Fitzroy Square, W1
Darling Pad,
V v nice to hear from you, specially as I’m incarcerated in this dump, which is terribly nice, but a nursing home nevertheless. I’ve only had my inside seen to as usual. It must be the most hopeless inside this side of anywhere the way it carries on. Anyway the anaesthetic was marvellous. I said to the anaesthetist the next day how jolly it was & he said yes it’s an addiction drug. Well no wonder. Have you ever had it? They give it an hour before the real thing & one floats in a marvellous state through all that’s jolly in life, trying to hold on to every minute & savour it to the full.
That dear old President phoned the other day. First question was ‘Who’ve you got with you, Paddy?’ He’s got you on his brain.
Keep in close touch.
Much love
Debo
Dumbleton
Darling Debo,
I’ve spent the last two months trying to find somewhere to live in S.W. Greece, and, the trouble is, I’ve found it; trouble, because I don’t think we’ll be able to get it; owned by too many people, scattered all over the globe, who, though none of them live there, are unlikely to want to sell it; but I live in hopes. It’s in the Mani, a peninsula in the middle of a steep deserted bay, pointing S.E., E., S.W. and W., with a great amphitheatre of mountains which turn a hectic red at sunset. The peninsula descends like a giant, shallow staircase of olive groves, plumed with cypress trees, platform after platform dwindling to a low cliff thirty feet above deep blue-green glittering sea, with trees and wild sweet-smelling shrubs to the very brink, full of beehives, olives, woodpigeons, and with a freshwater spring. The cliff is warrened with a great sea cave into which one swims, under stalactites and strange mushroom limestone formations. Not a house in sight, nothing but the two rocky headlands, an island a quarter of a mile out to sea with a ruined chapel, and a vast expanse of glittering water, over which you see the sun setting till its last gasp. Homer’s Greece, in fact. But I’ve not given up hope. It would mean building a rambling peasant house, with huge airy rooms, out of the local limestone, on one of those ledges of olive-trees . . .
So much for all that. I flew back to Rome last week, then drove back alone, stopping two nights at Fontainebleau with your pal 
[1] who sends loving greetings.
My bust wrist [2] came out of plaster of Paris in Palermo, but still seems jolly stiff and inflexible, and I bet it never quite gets right again, the way they don’t. I wonder what this entails. Balinese dancing’s out, for a start; so, should I ever succeed to a throne, is holding an orb; the other drawbacks will surface with time.
Tons of love & hugs from
Paddy
[British Embassy
Washington]
Darling Pad,
Several tons of rubble I’m afraid. [1] It’s an horrible surprise par excellence because the poor old Loved One [2] is vaguely taken up with his work instead of messing about with one.
Much comical stuff to report. Andrew came for two short nights & one long day & during the long day we were summoned to the presence for an official call. There were some fiddling little crowds, pickets etc, outside the White House, our car was stopped at the gate & a policeman put his head in & said What group are you? Well, what group are we, I don’t know.
A rich lady said to me she needed a secretary who understood her ‘nervouswise’. The lingo is very nice indeed but takes a bit of learning.
I’ve been to dinner at the White Ho twice. Jackie Kennedy was there. She is a queer fish. Her face is one of the oddest I ever saw. It is put together in a very wild way.
Last night was the dinner for the opening of the exhib of our drawings. [3] Tom Wragg got completely drunk. I introduced him to Sargent Shriver. [4] I said this is the brother-in-law of the President, perhaps you remember his wife Eunice Kennedy, to which he replied No I don’t, but then I meet so many people I can’t remember them all.
Makes one’s heart vaguely sink. He was drunk at a cocktail party & very loudly suggested he & I should go to San Francisco. Well when you think how he hates me it was rather telling.
You can buy Plastic Feather Rocks for your garden. Huge Paxtonian objects weight 2oz each. Admit it would be a help to have a few for the old home.
Much love
Debo
[1] ‘The Cuban crisis was at its height and Paddy sent a telegram to me in Washington saying, “Blimey we’re in trouble, ’arf a ton of rubble”, hence my reply.’ (DD) Bernard Cribbins’ song ‘Right Said Fred’, about three removal men struggling to remove a piano and ‘half a ton of rubble’ falling on top of their heads, was a favourite of DD and PLF.
[2] President Kennedy had telephoned DD on Thanksgiving and asked, ‘Have you got all your loved ones around you?’
[3] A loan exhibition of Old Master drawings from Chatsworth was on show at the National Gallery in Washington. Tom Wragg, the librarian from Chatsworth, accompanied DD to the opening.
[4] Sargent Shriver (1915–). Married Eunice Kennedy in 1953.
9 January 196[3]
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Pad,
I’ve been in bed for a week, alright again now. I can quite easily see about taking to drugs, for instance the marvellous feeling of well being & the happiness when going off under a sleeping pill, one feels one could do anything far better than anyone else. Dangerous I call it & once a year is the sort of amount of times to resort to them.
The sweet Loved One is on the telly today unveiling the Mona Lisa. I guess he’d rather be unveiling a spot of real flesh & blood. What do you think? He’ll be bored stiff by the evening at The Nat Gallery. [1] I can’t wait to see his honest face acting enjoying it.
Much love
Debo
[1] The Mona Lisa was on a three-month loan to the US. It went on show at the Washington National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
6 May 1963
13 Chester Row, SW1
Darling Debo,
I’m feeling rather odd this morning, and it’s a feeling whose oddity I can’t hope to convey to you. I woke up this morning, after a lively weekend at Bruern, [1] feeling rather weighed down by the flesh and the devil and decided, for a day, to give up smoking and drinking, and, except for a bare minimum, eating. It’s noon now, and I feel very strange and rather lost: don’t know what to do with my hands. I suppose I’d better just fold them in my lap and gaze in front of me with a quiet and contemplative smile. It’s all very queer; very chastening.
Tons of love, Debo darling, from
Paddy
[1] PLF had been staying at Bruern Abbey in Oxfordshire with Michael and Pandora Astor.
Sunday [May 1963]
Easton Neston [1]
Northamptonshire
My darling Debo,
I write in a state of some excitement. I haven’t smoked since Monday. You don’t know what this means, it’s the equivalent of reeling drunkenness and euphoria and airy rashness in you or Nancy. I feel low, twilit and anti-climactic (if that’s the word I seek) but, at the same time, odd, pure, clean, and with a tongue like a Maréchal Niel rose petal and breath like that of high-born kine.
I don’t know what’s to become of me. [2]
Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] PLF was staying with his friend Christian (Kisty), Lady Hesketh (1929–2006).
[2] PLF soon took up smoking again and did not give up completely until some twenty years later.
18 or 19 May 1963
Inch Kenneth
Gribun
Isle of Mull
Darling Pad,
I loved your NO SMOKING letter on the beautiful paper. It was most cheering. I do wonder if you’re still at it, or not at it, if you see what I mean.
We (Diana, Woman, the French Lady & me) are all here and have been for ten days because my mother had a sort of collapse after her journey here from London & we were sent for. Oh Whack, [1] the sadness of it to see her. Thank goodness the Dr has now arranged various sleeping things every few hours so a lot of the time she is asleep but when she is awake it is AWFUL because one of the things which has more or less given up is the swallowing bit of her throat so she is fearfully hungry & cries for food & then can’t manage it, like a ghastly torture.
There is awful moaning, but the strange thing is we have got sort of used to that. Three times we have thought she was dying but each time she has rallied & then blames us, sadly, for what she calls dragging her back from the grave. Isn’t it strange it should be so difficult to be born and so difficult to die.
Between the sad times she has had a few moments of laughing, jokes about her will, & the others say I go round looking for any small valuable objects I can see & drop them in a bottomless black bag.
We take it in turns to be in her room 24 hours of the day. What do people do who have less than four daughters – it unnerves me when I think of Emma & Sophy. What a lot of deathbeds they will have to see to.
My sister Woman is excelling herself, cooking gammon in champagne & droning & intoning about the very wonderful sauce that she’s going to make next. The wonderful thing about her is she doesn’t mind how much we laugh at her. It’s v luxurious being with all the others, such a thing hasn’t happened for years.
One simply doesn’t know how long it may go on & none of us can leave as she asks for us by name sometimes. [2] The last two days another horror has come which is it’s almost impossible to hear or understand what she says. We live for the post which arrives in the evening with the papers (but on rough days they can’t go for it & that is bitter).
There are two nurses, both saints & both young & jolly.
Being on this island is odd enough in itself, but under these circumstances it is gruelling. (Except for being with the sisters which is HEAVEN.)
I must go & find driftwood for the fire.
Much love
Debo
[1] A nickname given to PLF by Nancy Mitford, from the refrain ‘Knick-Knack, Paddy Whack’, in the song ‘This Old Man Came Rolling Home’.
[2] ‘My mother died a few days later, on 25 May, and was buried at Swinbrook in Oxfordshire on one of the first days of glorious weather that year.’ (DD)
Teusday [June 1963]
Dumbleton
Darling Debo,
I say the Loved One’s doing alright, isn’t he? What a pity no Lismore. [1] But I suppose it would seem a bit odd, as the visit is more or less to commemorate his great grandsire’s flight from the wicked English yoke.
Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] President Kennedy, who was on an official visit to Ireland, told DD that his helicopter had circled low over Lismore several times but had not landed. On his way back from Ireland he did, however, stop off at Edensor to visit his sister Kathleen’s grave, en route for talks with Harold Macmillan.
Teusday [November 1963]
Katounia
Limni, Euboea
Greece
Darling Debo,
Absolutely shattered, like everyone by the awful news of Kennedy’s death. Greece has gone into three days mourning; so I can well understand – or probably can’t – how infinitely more ghastly and tragic it must be for a great friend. You talked about him and described him so well and vividly – making him seem so vital and astonishing and so much fun, that it was like knowing someone by proxy. And what’s everyone going to do now, I’d like to know?
What a beastly age to live in.
Tons of fond love as ever,
Paddy
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Pad,
We went to Washington for his funeral. Oh it was strange, Americans aren’t suited to tragedy. They like everything to be great. I was more or less alright in church till his friends came in & their crumpled miserable faces were too much & it was floods all the way after that.
I never wanted to leave anywhere so quickly as that town. It was so sad David & Sissy [Harlech] having to remain. I suppose they’ll have to stick out another year but the whole point of the thing has gone.
If it hadn’t been for such a sad sad reason the journeys there & back would have been rather fascinating. We got a lift off the Prime Minister [1] who had a chartered Boeing 707. The passengers were him & Lady Douglas-Home, the Duke of Edinburgh, Mr Wilson, [2] Sir Philip de Zulueta, [3] Sir Timothy Bligh, [4] Sir Harold Evans, [5] 2 girl typists, 2 detectives, the D of E’s ADC & Andrew & me & 150 empty seats behind.
I had one of the strangest dinners of my life, with the D of E & Mr Wilson, Andrew at another table with the Homes.
Coming back we were without the D of E, Andrew & Wilson (they came straight back, I stayed for two days) but plus Mr Grimond. [6] So dinner that night was the Homes & me & Mr Grimond. When we got west of Ireland they said it was too foggy to land in London & we fetched up at Manchester.
NO SLEEPERS for the PM & Co so they all (11 of them) came here for the night. When I showed Mr Grimond into the Red Velvet room unkind Sir P de Zulueta said all the Liberal Party could get into bed with him.
It was all very odd indeed & Alice in Wonderlandish.
On Monday we go to Kenya for five days. Andrew starts at Zanzibar but there isn’t room for women there, so I go straight to Kenya.
I hope they’ll hold their pangas & won’t do us all in at the State Garden Party.
The first engagement is a Civic Ball. I’ll save the last dance for Jomo. [7]
Oh dear I do feel so sad about J Kennedy, but really the fantastic luck was knowing him at all, such an extraordinary person, so funny, so touching, clever, brave & sort of good, & such marvellous company.
Are you coming back before Xmas?
Much love
Debo
[1] Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Conservative Prime Minister from October 1963 to October 1964.
[2] Harold Wilson (1916–95). The Labour MP had been elected leader of his party earlier in the year. Prime Minister 1964–70 and 1974–6.
[3] Philip de Zulueta (1925–89). Private Secretary to the Prime Minister 1955–64. ‘JFK described him to me as “that Spaniard who looks after Uncle Harold”.’ (DD)
[4] Timothy Bligh (1918–69). Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister 1959–64.
[5] Harold Evans (1911–83). Chief Information Officer at the Colonial Office 1953–7, Public Relations Adviser to the Prime Minister 1957–64.
[6] Joseph ( Jo) Grimond (1913–93). Leader of the Liberal Party 1956–67.
[7] Jomo Kenyatta (1894–1978). First Prime Minister of Kenya after independence was declared on 12 December 1963. President of Kenya 1964–78.
1 January 1964
Katounia
Limni, Euboea
Happy New Year, Darling Debo,
Something awful has happened. Aymer Maxwell’s [1] dog, a frightfully nice bitch called Turka that he and Joan and I adore (a sandy coloured basic dog) came in last night looking fat as a barrel (she has a wonderful figure normally) with dark marks on her muzzle, which we wiped; it turned out to be blood. We hoped it was a hare, as she’s a great one for chasing them. Just now a furious shepherd came down from the mountain saying five of his goats and two kids had been killed last evening. (It’s lambing – kidding time? – here.) She’s been suspected before, but had a sort of alibi. I suppose I’ll have to shoot her. This is agony (a) because she’s A. Maxwell’s, (b) because she’s such a heavenly dog. What is one to do? It is like that awful story in Wild Animals I have Known. [2] Do pity me.
Here’s a riddle to change the subject: what English catch-phrase, indicating someone is better than he seems, would also apply to a yacht owner whose vessel is even more dangerous than the inlet in which she is anchored? *
No more now, Debo darling, except wishes for a marvellous year. And lots of love from
Paddy
[1] Sir Aymer Maxwell (1911–87). A ‘serious but congenial’ friend of PLF and Joan who settled in Euboea, off the coast of Attica, and sailed the Aegean in his caïque, the Dirk Hatterick.
[2] Ernest Thompson Seton, Wild Animals I have Known (1898). In ‘Wully, The Story of a Yaller Dog’, a trusty mongrel sheepdog, turned ferocious sheep-killer, attacks its owners and has to be destroyed.
* His barque is worse than his bight.
22 January 1964
4 Chesterfield Street, W1
Darling Pad,
Thanks v much for (a) your Christmas telegram & (b) your New Year letter. V kind to send same & deeply appreciated by all.
Now something really important. We’ve had to put a new door with false book-backs in the Library at Chatsworth and we’ve got to think of 28 titles. The one the other end has got things like Boyle on Steam, The Scottish Boccaccio by D Cameron & such like. Stoker says we must use The Light Reader by Ivan Artov Stone. Mrs Ham suggests Bondage by Ann Fleming. [1] I can only think of The Liverpool Sound by Viscountess Mersey. So come on now. Something topical, politics, friends, anything?
Much love
Debo
I really sympathise over the dog you’re fond of. It is the worst thing in the world because you’ll always have to be watching her and if she does disappear you’ll worry till she gets back. Don’t let anyone else shoot her, you know what I mean, they might do it ghoulishly.
[1] An allusion to the sado-masochistic nature of Ann and Ian Fleming’s relationship.
[February 1964]
Katounia
Limni, Euboea
My darling Debo,
Here are a few, most of them hopelessly feeble, but perhaps one might sift a grain or two out of so much chaff. I put them down helter skelter as they cropped up during the last few days.
Dipsomania
by Mustafa Swig
Canine Diet
Norah Bone
I Scream
Walls
In the Soup
A. Crouton
A Tommy in the Harem
Private Parts
Second Helpings
O. Twist
First Causes
F. Heckt
Weathering Heights
Nelson & Brontë
First Steps in Rubber
Wellington
Military Dilemmas
Major Crisis
Cease Fire!
General Strike
Flags of the Nations
Bunting (!)
Buy Me and Stop One
Home Dentist
William Locke
Robert Key
A Good Chap
Bacon
The Midnight Flit
A. Moss-Quito
Round the Bend
Harpic
Also Ran
Antrim
Dunking
by Ruskin
Will Yam Make Peace?
Thackeray
Plain or Ringlets
by Broccoli
Consenting Adults
Abel N. Willing
Minor Rodents
Aygood-Mausser
Where the Hormones . . .
Christine Keeler
Venus Observed
I. Sawyer
Bridge Building
A. Belvoir
Last of his Line
Tom Cobley
Studies in Sentiment
E. Motion
Reduced to the Ranks
D. Motion
Intuition
Ivor Hunch
Weather in the Streets
Omega Losches
Stalks and Giants
by ‘Jacobean’
Nancy Mitford & her Circle
Juno ffrench
Alien Corn
Dr Scholl
Rags & Tatters
by Ripon
March Days
A. Hare
Sideways through Derbyshire
Crabbe
A Bagman’s Journal
Gladstone
Prominent Capes
Raglan
Crème de la Crème
Devonshire
K-K-Katie
by Kay Stammers
On the Spot
Leo Pard
Fireside Talks
P. Flinders
Modern Sheep Farming
B. Peep
Humble Pie
J. Horner
Theories on Investment
L. Locket etc etc
Bays and Bites
by An Old Sea Dog
Jellies & Blancmanges
Somerset
Famous Monuments
Patience
Room for One Inside
Pinecoffin
Shadow Cabinets
by A. Ghost Writer
Haute Cuisine
the Aga Khan
The Day After Gomorrah
Bishop of Sodor & Man
St Symeon Stylites
by A. Columnist
Lost Horizon
C. Connolly
Call Me X
Anon
Pardon
Me Belcher
Knicknacks
Paddy Whack
The Battle of the Bulge
by Lord Slim
They’re most of them pretty rotten, but one or two might do. None of them come up to the old-fashioned improper ones, which I have rather a soft spot for, though they’re not your style, and of course, wouldn’t do; to wit, The Babies Revenge (Norah Titsoff), The Cat’s Revenge (Claude Balls), The Shaking Hand (Master Bates), The Ruined Honeymoon (Mary Fitzgerald & Gerald Fitzgeorge). Least said.
29 February 1964
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Pad,
Oh how I have been meaning to write & thank you a MILLION times for the truly marvellous book titles.
E Motion & D Motion are two authors whose works I shall keenly follow from now on, ditto Major Crisis, General Strike & the rest. Thank you awfully. It must have taken hours & is deeply appreciated.
Much love & many thanks again from
Debo
23 March 1964
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Pad,
It’s agony, choosing 28 book titles from your list. I want them ALL.
I thought I might tell you the names of the key people here as, strangely enough, nearly all their names are meaningful words. Viz.
Link
gardener
Read
agent
Wragg
well we all know what he is [1]
Lord
gamekeeper
Fisher
controller (sorry, comptroller) Child his assistant
Bond
ex-comptroller
Stone
electrician
Hey
Bolton agent (a body to worship)
I had a nice few days in Paris with the Ancient Dame but one awful thing occurred. We (her, Stoker & me) were asked to a grand dinner & I sat next to one Pompidou [2] who turned out to be the local Lord Home and . . . quelle horrible surprise he can’t speak English & we all know I can’t do Frog if my life depends on it, so we wildly crumbled bread & stared straight ahead. It was murder. I also had the Brit Ambassador [3] whom I loathed so it was a dud dinner.
Do come to Liosmor.
Much love
Debo
[1] Tom Wragg, the librarian at Chatsworth, was the only one on the list whom PLF knew.
[2] Georges Pompidou (1911–74). Prime Minister of France under General de Gaulle 1962–8, and President from 1969 until his death in 1974.
[3] Pierson Dixon (1904–65). Ambassador in Paris 1960–5.
9 May 1964
c/o Mrs Denning
Church Farm
Branscombe
South Devon
Darling Debo,
I’m scribbling like mad in this farmhouse. Green hills all round, now crowned in tea cosies of mist, rain falling, gulls everywhere, also rooky woods; well-owled at night.
This letter is a bit disjointed because the farmer’s three-year-old daughter, Dinah, v. pretty and comic, is booming up and down the flagged passage outside. A new apron has gone clean to her head and I don’t wonder. It’s pink with a pattern of small blue bears carrying parasols and I would have pined for it were I the right age and gender.
It’s true about Greece. [1] Don’t tell anyone much (not that I can help it) but just you wait and see! The thing is to pitch a huge tent among the olives and help build a rambling peasant house and live happily in it ever after.
No more now, darling Debo, except tons of love from
Paddy
[1] PLF and Joan had decided to make their permanent home in Greece on the land described in PLF’s letter of August 1962.
23 July 1964
Mani
Greece
Darling Debo,
My word, how difficult everything seems – it might be Chatsworth one was about to perpetrate, instead of a lowly cot. But the place is even more marvellous than I remembered.
Lovely lunch with Nancy in Paris, then left poor Joan there, in search of a nice pal to help drive that giant Peugeot, laden with tents, at least as far as Ancona, so that I could whizz here by air, to catch the eccentric man on whom all our future depends – i.e. the plot of land where the water is. Of course he isn’t here. I prowl and mooch, trudging the rocky mile between the village and the site, to gloat all alone, stroke the rocks and the thistles, caress the olive trunks and dive off rocks into those warm depths. I slunk off there in the middle of last night, because of the full moon. Lots of phosphorus in the water, which was glittering on the surface with moonlight the further out I swam. It looked marvellous from the sea – all rocks and olives and cypresses, with great glimmering lunar mountains like ghosts in the background, a mythical scene. I slept under an olive tree and walked back after another bathe, just after dawn.
Please forgive any illegibility in this, I’m scribbling it in the village tavern by the distant beam of the tavern acetylene lamp, with the shadow on the wrong side, so that all this is invisible and illegible. Maniots loom and subside, hatchet-faced men; a Goyaesque chiaroscuro reigns.
I had a double-tailed mermaid tattooed on my left arm, above the elbow, just before leaving London, by a craftsman in Waterloo Road.
I wonder if I was right.
No more, darling Debo, except hugs and tons of love from
Paddy
11 November 1964
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Andrew isn’t minding being out of work ½ as much as I thought he would. He busies about with this & that, a lot of Fishmongering as he is getting near to being king of that strange outfit & it takes a lot of lunches & dinners. Then he’s Shadowing his Commonwealth job in the H of Lords. The whole situation is so fascinating that it’s almost a full-time job watching, & reading the mags. [1]
I hear through a sec at Downing St that the smell in The Cabinet Room is chronic. Six of them smoke pipes & none are clean.
Emma & Toby & Isabel [2] have been in the Argentine for a month. The one letter I have had sounds happy but hot, & they’re living on culled cows. Shades of the cracked eggs & dead chickens from Lady Redesdale’s Poultry Farm. [3]
The book titles you invented for the door in the library are being done by Sangorski [4] & out of extreme honesty the last one is called Book Titles by Patrick Leigh Fermor.
Ann Fleming is having a v rotten time because she is fearfully sad about Ian & is also broke. [5] Doesn’t it seem mad that the lawyers didn’t try & arrange things a bit better. It is a shame.
I do wonder how your house is getting on & if the drawing room cum hen house is taking shape? Do enlarge.
Much love & to Joan
Debo
[1] Macmillan resigned as Prime Minister in October 1963 and the Conservatives lost the 1964 election. Andrew Devonshire became a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, one of the livery companies of the City of London, in 1941 and was Prime Warden 1966–7.
[2] DD’s daughter Emma married Toby Tennant in 1963. Their first child, Isabel, was born the following year.
[3] DD’s mother kept a chicken farm and paid the wages of her children’s governesses from its meagre profits. ‘My sisters pretended that only cracked eggs, and hens that had died, came into our kitchen from my mother’s poultry farm.’ (DD)
[4] The renowned London bookbinder, founded in 1901.
[5] Ian Fleming had died leaving his estate tied up in complicated trusts.
Saturday December 1964
Mani, but only just
Darling Debo,
I am pleased about ‘Book titles’ by PLF. This means that at least one will still be on somebody’s shelf – viz. your great grandson’s – in 100 years time.
Things are coming to a temporary stop here – for two months, that is. Joan has already left for Blighty and I follow on Teusday, after folding things up here.
It will be lovely to have some proper food again. I look forward to caviar, sometime, the last roes of summer (Sturgeon’s love song: Go, lovely roes . . .). One of the most exciting reasons for return is that Holiday Magazine, in America, have offered a huge sum, and all expenses, for a long article on the Danube, [1] which means a journey all down it, from Switzerland, through the Iron Curtain and all the way to the Delta on the Black Sea. I’m off as soon as I can get Iron Curtain visas. Rather fun?
This is a strange, rambling, jazz-vorticist flat over a taverna on the waterfront, overlooking the sea, caïques, tramp steamers and an avenue of jujube trees all a bit bleak under the winter sun and frequent clouds, early evenings and scarcely a soul about. I do hope you’re about when I return next week. Little to tell, but lots to hear!
With tons of love,
Paddy
[1] ‘A Cave on the Black Sea’, reprinted in Patrick Leigh Fermor, Words of Mercury, pp. 28–39.
13 Chester Row, SW1
Darling Debo,
I’ve been scribbling here like a maniac (‘Deadline Dick’) to finish my wretched book [1] and make a beeline for the Danube; perhaps next week. (Any chance of you before then?) I am filled with excitement and misgiving about Rumania and, if it’s not compromising or dangerous for them, seeing old friends and loves unglimpsed for TWENTY-SIX YEARS. I meant to talk to you about all this at Christmas, but, brutalized as I was with turkey and plum pudding, clean forgot. I look forward to Vienna tremendously.
Nothing much has been happening here. Joan and I went to Northumberland for a very funny weekend to see her little godson, H Harrod married to Lucy Lambton, [2] which was both very funny and great fun. I went to see Orson Welles’ The Trial with Diana Cooper and Ricki Huston [3] (neighbours in Little Venice) three days ago. Towards the end Diana got up and said ‘I think I’ll wait in the car!’ I thought she was bored stiff, but quicker witted Ricki jumped up and after her, then me, and just in time to catch her before collapsing in a faint. She came round in a chair in the foyer in a jiffy. The cinema people – girls, manager – were marvellous, and enslaved when Diana said ‘You have been kind. Don’t judge me by this ugly Mau Mau headgear I’m wearing’ – a sort of black wool busby – ‘I’m really a beautiful blonde’, then ‘I can’t think why I fainted. Perhaps it was the sight of Orson Welles in bed.’ (Furore.) She was absolutely alright again and we sat up drinking and gassing away till two.
Meanwhile tons of fond love and hugs from
Paddy
[1] Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966).
[2] The writer and photographer Lady Lucinda Lambton (1943–) was married to Henry Harrod (1939–) from 1965 to 1973.
[3] Enrica (Ricki) Soma (1930–69). Beautiful Italian-American ballerina who became the fourth wife of the film director John Huston in 1950. Mother of the actress Anjelica Huston. ‘Once in Naples we had had dinner in a trattoria when a tremendous wind-storm blew up the rubbish from the street and plastered it over the trees and telegraph poles. We pretended it was a surrealist exhibition or auction. An evening newspaper, Il Messaggero, stretched on a wall was the best of the lot. I said, “I’ll have that, even if it ruins me.” Her eyes widened and she clutched me with desperation. “DON’T TOUCH IT ,” she whispered. “IT’S A FAKE.” ’ (PLF)
17 August 1965
Bolton Abbey
Skipton
Yorkshire
Darling Paddy,
Sophy & I loom for a night in Athens on 10th Sept on our way to stay with Anne [Tree] in Spetsai. Any possible chance of you both being there, and having dinner with us?
It would be such a terrific treat to see you. We will be staying at The Great Britain (what a surprise).
Too stiff from much shooting to enlarge on anything. Much love
Debo
[1965]
Mani
Darling Debo,
How lovely you coming to Greece!
Joan, alas, has to go back to Blighty on the 8th, so I’ll be here in solitary state, in a blue tent on the headland where the house is going up. You could either doss down in Joan’s evacuated tent, or stay at the tiny hotel in the village (terrible loo but otherwise rather nice. No rot of that kind up here; we cut out the middleman and vanish into the middle distance with trowel and scroll). I might be in the absurd art-nouveau flat that we’ve got. I would be coming in every day to have a look at the building. My theory is, there must have been a time when Chatsworth was only holes in the ground. Actually, there’s a bit more to show now, three beautiful arches, several walls, doors, window holes, but all open at the top still. One’s quite liable to get ½ a ton of rubble on top of one’s dome. But I do long for you to see the place, which is really lovely.
There’s been some coming and going at the little hotel. Magouche with two beautiful daughters and Janetta with ditto & Julian Jebb, [1] then Barbara & Niko Ghika, with one Rothschild daughter Miranda [2] and her tiny Algerian daughter called Da’ad, aged three, tremendously tough, like a tiny little wire-haired weight lifter, very wild with her spoon at table, but no wilder than Maurice B[owra], who is also here now. He has gone deaf, but as ebullient & funny as ever.
Tons of love
Paddy
[1] Julian Jebb (1934–84). Journalist and television producer.
[2] Miranda Rothschild (1940–). Daughter of Victor, 3rd Baron Rothschild, and his first wife, Barbara Hutchinson. Married Boudjemaa Boumaza in 1962.
29 November 1965
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Such a lot of water etc since I last wrote.
The chief bit of water is that we had a monster shoot here on Sat, a record since the war, and one of the guns was Sybil Cholmondeley. [1] I can’t tell you how really marvellous she was. I believe she’s 71 but even not counting the shooting she was marvellous, down for brekker at 9 & ready for formal conversation – challenging sentences like ‘I’ve been to Petworth twice & never seen anything in the least remarkable’.
I went to the Opening of Parliament, v pretty, but I’m sorry to say the Peeresses smelt, well, the Duchesses did anyway. Surely they couldn’t have rolled.
Much love
Debo
It’s the French lady’s birthday. She’s 61, impossible to have a sister of that age surely.
[1] Sybil Sassoon (1894–1989). Married 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley in 1913.
Lismore Castle
Co. Waterford
Darling Paddy,
Thank you so much for sending your book. You really are a sport & do you know I’ve practically decided to read it, as I note it is far from stout & is peppered with snaps – all encouraging to one of 9.
Next day
The Dame has loomed and bought a house at Versailles [1] before she came. What a step to take, it made her heart beat.
Andrew says we are ruined by the new taxes in the Budget, but I’ve heard that before I think.
Ld Antrim & R Fedden are leading a lot of old women on a National Trust cruise round Ireland & they are coming here next week.
I think that’s all for now. Thank you again 1000 times for so kindly sending the vol. I am delighted to have it & v grateful.
Much love
Debo
[1] Nancy Mitford moved from Paris to the Rue d’Artois in Versailles at the beginning of 1967.
1 July 1966
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
The two picture worms of Christie’s David Carritt & Brian Sewell [1] were here re-valuing the drawings for insurance.
I can tell you no cabaret has given such entertainment. We went after dinner into the library & they opened the boxes & wrote their idea of values down on bits of paper. Their faces & comments were so lovely. Things that looked exactly the same to us were marked up or down with such huge differences & names of what sounded to us like Italian hairdressers were bandied about till we were reeling.
I have become a sort of slave to a new passion which is the Shetland Ponies I have got. We have got three rather good ones & we show them – I can’t tell you how exciting it is. We got a 2nd prize at the Highland Show & it made my heart beat as if I’d nearly won the Derby. The other Shetland fans are fascinating like all specialists. The Royal [2] is our next outing on 8th July. Please pray.
Much love
Debo
[1] David Carritt (1927–82), art historian and picture dealer; and Brian Sewell (1931–), outspoken art critic for the Evening Standard.
[2] The Royal Agricultural Society of England, of which DD was President in 1995.
[1969]
[Visiting card]
Mani
During the war, Sir E Codrington is said to have put out an order which ran: –
The Coldstream Guards, in future, will shout ‘Hoorah’ and not ‘Hooray!’ when storming a redoubt.
Many Hooray Henries must have looked at each other sadly.
I wonder if Andrew ever shouted it when charging across southern Italy? [1]
I have worked out a mnemonic (way to remember) your postal code: ‘DINNER EARLY FOR FIVE! ’IPP (’IPP ’OORAY’) [2]
[1] Andrew Devonshire, who served in the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards, saw active service in Italy 1943–4.
[2] The Chatsworth postal code is DE45 1PP.
Mani
Darling Debo,
This is a fine time to be writing a bread-and-butter letter – in fact it’s not one – too late – only that it encloses a 1000 thanks for that lovely weekend. You can’t possibly imagine how fascinated I was by the trip to Newmarket, and seeing those two fine steeds do so well. I felt a bit like a debutante being led into some mythically wicked haunt in Paris by an expert old hand. You were good about stopping for drinks, don’t think that the altruism goes unremembered!
Almost immediately after leaving Blighty, I flew to Athens, found Joan and Michael Stewart, [1] our glorious Ambassador here, & his v nice wife called Damaris, and we sped to Smyrna, where a Land Rover was waiting. Off we set for a Grand Tour of known and unknown classical sites in Southern Turkey: two and a half weeks in this amazing vehicle, changing places in the back where one lolled among brightly woven Caucasian rugs and saddlebags (mostly me). Sounds slight hell, but actually wonderful, owing to the niceness of the company, the jokes, the frequent pauses for drinks and picnics beside mountain streams, lolling under the poplars while the wine cooled in purling brooks. M Stewart is a perfect man, brilliant driver, excellent scholar, ex China expert at the V & A, slight limp from a polo fall. What was so astonishing about all the Ancient, Classical, Hellenistic (ah, oui! ), Greco-Roman & Roman ruins was a) the enormous quantity (oh lor), (b) the comparative completeness, (c) the size, whole cities with temples, theatres, agoras, markets, stadia etc, (d) the absence of anyone else there: only a few nomads, with a score of camels or so grazing in the orchestra stalls. In lots of them, ploughed fields and wheat ran right in amongst the debris. The temples had false floors of bright-green waterweed; shallow quadrangles for millions of frogs – convolvulus & morning glory, & brambles twisted up the shafts of the columns, and on the capital of each of these was a stork’s nest, full of young storks learning to clatter their bills like castanets while their parents glided and swooped about the wreckage after the frogs. Some of these cities were perched high up in the Taurus Mountains, overgrown with jungle, like the ruins of Angkor or Mexico, others shot out into the sea, moles and quays sloping underwater, a maze for mullets. Masses of splendid bas-relief and marble moulding, all pitched headlong by old earthquakes and treasure-seekers dead for centuries.
The coastal mountains are cloaked with all this magnificent stuff; v tall mountains, too, appropriately culminating in Mt Climax – steep pine-forests with terrific gorges coiling down to bay after empty bay, nothing but goatherds and charcoal burners, every now and then a fast and deep green river with a mythological name. North, the other side of the Taurus Mountains, sweeps the Anatolian plateau, marvellous windswept pale skies, oceans of corn, flocks, oak woods, troops of half wild horses, mud-brick villages pronged with minarets (all fitted with loudspeakers, so that the idle muezzins, bawling into a mouthpiece at ground level can shirk their thrice-daily spirals). Rivers and storks again, cuckoos, hoopoes, bee-eaters, orioles and a billion larks. The Anatolian Turks are nice rough fellows; we dossed down in the unplumbed mysteries of their dwellings, mindful of the fact that kind hearts are more than cabinets . . .
There were magnificent old Seljuk bridges for caravans, and, every few leagues, an ancient khan or caravanserai, with accommodation for man and camel, hundreds of them, vast arched and gathered warrens of masonry, like Gothic cathedral architecture with knobs off, giant hollow fossils. In Konya, the capital of the old Seljuk (love that word) sultans, one is surrounded in the lanes by unfrocked whirling dervishes, forbidden to whirl in Atatürk’s day, now sad grey-beards mooning about among the tombstones, or bubbling away morosely at their hookahs, and brooding on their fled youth when they were such splendid all-rounders. It seemed a bit of an anticlimax to be back among the sweat and the Sirens of Smyrna, just before coming back here. Nobody can do anything there in summer, it seems, except hunt for a cool place to snooze. The British Consul’s son, half Greek, half Maltese, likes it, though. Bursting into French ( pause for response here) he said: ‘Comme c’est doux de ne rien faire toute la journée, et de se reposer après.’ [2]
No more now, darling Debo, except v v many thanks again and do come. Do you want any more book titles? Annie wants some too, to make up for the void of Ian’s strange collection; [3] would you mind if some were the same? Hands across the shires?
With tons of fond love,
Paddy
[1] Michael Stewart (1911–94). Ambassador in Greece 1967–71. Married Damaris du Boulay in 1951. ‘What a good, generous, warm-hearted man. The nicest ambassador we’ve ever had.’ PLF to DD, 21 March 1985.
[2] ‘How agreeable it is to do nothing all day and to rest afterwards.’
[3] Ann Fleming had sold her husband’s library, consisting mainly of books that had made a contribution to technical and intellectual progress – ‘books that made things happen’ – to the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
9 November 1970
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
A quick thing to say if by ANY CHANCE you find yourself in England for Christmas DO come here.
It will be incredibly dull, but you are needed, as per. Much love
Debo
28 November 1970
Mani
Darling Debo,
You’ve got no idea how braced I feel! After a few days rough stuff from the mountains – wind, rain etc – it’s suddenly changed to golden September sunlight, no wind, not a cloud, smooth blue sea. Seeing was stripping, charging down the steps, diving in and soaring through the sapphire depths like a dolphin. Now here I am on the terrace all of a glow. Not bad when it’s Dec. the day after tomorrow!
I do wish I could come for Christmas but I don’t seem to be coming back for ages. But should I, I’ll be there swift as an arrow from the Tartar’s bow (Wm Shakespeare). There would be an eerie rattle on the streaming window as the wind hurled round the building on Xmas Eve: –
And if you ever hear drops
Fall on your window pane,
You’ll know they’re just my teardrops
Falling for you like rai—in . . .
(Jack Smith, The Whispering Baritone, circa 1928)
Two days gap. Summoned away.
Well, now I actually have had a December bathe, and a thrill of triumph runs through my frame.
The situation here is pretty rum. There are now twenty cats stalking about the building. Oddly enough, they don’t get in the way at all, but it’s v strange to see them at meal times, crowded round their porringers, all those tails waving in unison. Joan hasn’t had the heart to chuck them in the briny, so here we are. Must give some away. Now Aymer Maxwell has given us a puppy. I brought it back, eight weeks old, from Euboea where he lives. He created like anything in the car, but calmed down for a week in Spetsai, where I took him to stay with Diana Cooper and her circle, then drove to Patras to meet Joan returning from Finland. We dreaded the encounter with the cats. The older ones all cut him dead, but all the younger set worship him, gambolling and embracing on the terrace all day, allowing themselves to be dragged about by the scruff, lining up to snuggle into his basket when shadows fall. He is more fan-ridden than Rudolf Valentino, and wonderfully unspoilt. Name, Troilus. Breed, nondescript, but very handsome, pale marmalade in colour with white spots and a bold white flash that loses itself among Gladstonian wrinkles between the ears when they are puckered in puzzlement, which is practically the whole time. This brings the total of legs in the house – including Joan & me, and the couple who look after us & two sons, but not counting the mice or the centipedes (of course) – to 96. When A Maxwell comes on Saturday, 98. I wish you were looming, to make 100 . . .
(Lady Mosley’s 61st birthday)
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
It is truly ghoulish of me not to have written ages ago to thank you & Joan for your vvv kind invitation for Sept.
The thing is I’ve been dallying & dallying because Ivan the Terrible (Andrew. He is either Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great according to his mood) is vaguely thinking (did you know?) of joining you in viewing the Fine Stands of Timber on your mystery trip to Peru. [1]
Anyway, I suppose that’s nothing to do with it but the bitter thing is it doesn’t look too good. Sophy goes back to Dread School around 13 Sept, then there’s the Sheep Sale & the Jacob Flock Owners’ Open Day here on 18th & the next day I go to Austria for the 50th anniversary celebrations of Organised Haflinger Breeding. I suppose you think the foregoing are proofs of on-rushing daftness but I can’t help it, it may be my age of course but it’s better than (a) taking to drink/drugs or (b) bagging very young men for lovers, admit. I now prefer horse shows to lovers & I’ve never liked drink – no doubt wd be a sucker for drugs but have only tried when in extremis, viz. when I had a baby which immediately died & the dr fainted & was found by Ivan stretched out in the hall. But that was many & many a year ago.
So, Whack, ALAS, I must say no. Don’t think you’ve finished with me please, I mean sometime like March would be incredibly pleasant, eh.
Emma & Toby have gone to live on their farm in Scotland for good & are loving it. They’ve got a marvellous new baby called Stella [2] who’s got limpid blue eyes.
The Fr Lady Writer is far from fit, but she’s back in Versailles. She’s seen twenty-two drs (including quacks) ranging from the Queen’s to an Indian osteopath & he was the only one who helped at all, & none of them has (a) found out what is the matter with her poor leg or (b) hit on a cure. Isn’t it foul. [3]
Much love, & do keep in deepest. From
Debo
[1] Andrew Devonshire joined PLF on a month-long expedition in Peru, setting off at the beginning of August 1971. ‘We had been included, as minor amateurs, in a mountaineering expedition in the Andes: Andrew as a botanist in charge of plant specimens, and I as the guardian of the Primus stove.’ (PLF)
[2] Stella Tennant (1970–). DD’s granddaughter became a supermodel in the 1990s.
[3] Nancy Mitford had been operated on for liver cancer in 1969 and was suffering from Hodgkin’s disease. Her condition remained undiagnosed until shortly before her death in 1973.
23 September 1971
Mani
Darling Debo,
I feel a bit lost here, quite alone at the moment, with nobody to boast to about all our Andean doings. I can’t get over how creditably we did, bearing our earlier trepidations in mind. I hope Robin [Fedden] bore out all our vainglorious assertions.
I had a lovely few days before finally buzzing off, raging happily about the metropolis like a soldier on leave: saw two films, a sophisticated French one at the Curzon about a young shaver who goes to bed with his mother, among others: [1] and an endless, awful one called Bloody, Bloody Sunday: [2] endless close-ups of enlarged pores and lustfully quaking shoulder blades and empty bottles that left the viewers (Diana Cooper, Annie, old C. [3] and self ) racked with gloom and tedium. But we cheered up over dinner at an old haunt of Annie’s, but new to me, called Pastoria’s, just south of Leicester Square – almost empty and terribly nice. The headwaiter asked Diana if she had a dog concealed within her drapery, she said ‘No, a fox – a Mexican fox.’ As the H. waiter was a Mexican, and they were thus compatriots, all was well. I expect you’ve heard that, a few weeks ago, his colleague at the Ritz said she couldn’t have the dog in the restaurant, and she flummoxed him by saying, ‘Call the police’, and was allowed to finish her meal with the little blighter asleep in her lap. She really is first-rate officer material as far as initiative goes. She was in tip-top shape, I thought, and there was lots of carefree laughter.
I flew to Athens two days ago for the funeral of our old friend Geo. Seferis, [4] the poet. Joan, hot foot from Samarkand, Bokhara, Tashkent and Tiflis, arrives tomorrow with her bro Graham.
I’m still chewing away at our Andean past. Do tell Andrew I’ll send a copy of my artless account of our adventure when typed, corrected, & re-typed – in about three weeks, I think, what with the va-et-vient, if you follow me. [5]
Many thanks again, darling Debo, and tons of love from
Paddy
[1] Louis Malle, Le Souffle au cœur (1971).
[2] Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). John Schlesinger’s film about a triangular love affair starring Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch and Murray Head.
[3] Caspar Fleming (1952–75). The ‘strange, gifted, unhappy son of Ian and Ann Fleming’ (PLF) was named after Admiral Sir Caspar John, son of the painter Augustus John, whom Ian Fleming admired. He was known as ‘Old Caspar’ from Southey’s poem ‘After Blenheim’ (1796).
[4] George Seferis (1900–71). Poet, essayist and diplomat. Greek ambassador in London 1957–62 and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963.
[5] PLF circulated his account of the Andes expedition, based on letters he wrote to Joan, to his fellow participants and various friends. It was eventually published in 1991 by John Murray as Three Letters from the Andes.
DD, aged twenty, on her engagement to Andrew Cavendish, 1940
PLF in uniform, 1944
DD on Grand National winner Royal Tan at Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford. The horse was given to her by Prince Aly Khan after its racing career had ended
PLF (left) and Dirk Bogarde, 1957. The actor played PLF in the film Ill Met by Moonlight about the daring abduction, led by PLF, of General Heinrich Kreipe in Nazi-occupied Crete (photograph Harry Gillard)
Producer Darryl F. Zanuck and Juliette Gréco filming The Roots of Heaven (1958). PLF wrote the screenplay and spent several weeks on set in Maroua, Cameroon
DD in the dining room at Chatsworth, 1950 (photograph Norman Parkinson)
Daphne and Xan Fielding, Crete
Joan Leigh Fermor by PLF, 1946
PLF (left) and DD (centre) at El Rocio, Andalusia, 1958
PLF and the actress Iris Tree in 1959 at Castello di Passerano, Lazio
The writer and historian Robert Kee
Princess Margaret (centre) and PLF (on the gray) dodging reporters on a ride in Tuscany. Behind PLF is Judy Montagu and next to him champion horsewoman Natalie Perrone
DD and Andrew (back centre) with their children: Sophia, Emma and Stoker. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is seated next to DD’s mother-in-law, Mary Devonshire. Chatsworth, 1960
DD seated next to John F. Kennedy at the President’s inaugural parade, January 1961 (photograph Life magazine)
PLF and Nancy Mitford picnicking at Lismore, 1961
Joan Leigh Fermor with PLF (standing back left), Cyril Connolly (back right), Maurice Bowra (centre) and the historian Ernst Kantorowicz. Hydra, c.1958
DD and Eddy Sackville-West, 1964. The writer and music critic was a neighbour of the Devonshires at Lismore
PLF at home in Mani, c.1986 (photograph Derry Moore)
‘Not a house in sight, nothing but the two rocky headlands, an island a quarter of a mile out to sea with a ruined chapel, and a vast expanse of glittering water, over which you see the sun setting till its last gasp. Homer’s Greece, in fact.’
27 November 1971
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
The news here is that Andrew went to hosp for over three weeks & he has come out a DIFFERENT PERSON. So much better, funny, clever & sympathetic – like he really is & not the Hyde of Jekyll and –. He has stopped refreshing drinks of alcohol [1] & lives on stuff called Schloer (apple juice) & Ribena (which looks dangerously like claret) & grapefruit juice (which is a first course at dinners in Chesterfield, so bitterly unfair). I can’t tell you how well he’s getting on on this strange diet. He was v poorly indeed when he went into hosp with ghoulish depression, a thing I never wish to see again.
We went to dinner with the Beits [2] to see Alf ’s cinema he took of friends between the wars. It was riveting. My bro [3] figured – I had completely forgotten how good looking he was. The Pagets [4] look just the same now. So does my sister Diana. The Droghedas [5] & Cecil Beaton are better now than then BUT the tragedies were Randolph Churchill [6] (Adonis of 1st water), Bridget Parsons and Mamie Lygon [7] – almost unbearably sad to think what wrecks they are/were.
Three Pagets were at dinner & they made me sure it’s better not to dye hair & do makeup now we’re all old. Liz had a dress which somehow fell apart when she sat down & there were her old legs – what for I asked myself & looked away. Rose (whose face is lovely) had a black dress, the sort described as a sheath in the fashion mags, split up one side to her thigh & then, you see, she’s forgotten she’s got a hefty tummy & it doesn’t do. Better not go in for that sort of thing, don’t you think.
I’ve written an article about Haflingers for Riding & one about the goat I liked best for the British Goat Society’s Year Book. Two publications which I feel you may not subscribe to.
Much love
Debo
[1] Andrew Devonshire’s stay in hospital was one of his periodic attempts to give up alcohol. He wrote in his memoirs that ‘drink has run in the Cavendish family for generations’. Accidents of Fortune, p. 100.
[2] Clementine Mitford (1915–2005). Posthumous daughter of DD’s uncle Clement Mitford. Married Sir Alfred Beit in 1939.
[3] Tom Mitford (1909–45). DD’s only brother trained as a barrister and used to pay his sister Nancy a shilling an hour – a large sum in those days – to argue with him. ‘He joined the Territorial Army, then the Queen’s Own Westminsters, and served throughout the North African and Italian campaigns before transferring to the Devonshire Regiment when Germany capitulated. Because he had many German friends and affection for the country, he did not wish to participate in active service there and was sent to the Far East. He died of wounds in Burma, in March 1945. My parents revered his intelligence – he was the peacemaker in the family; they and my older sisters never got over his loss.’ (DD)
[4] Three of the five beautiful daughters of 6th Marquess of Anglesey: Caroline (1913–73), Elizabeth (1916–80) and Rose (1919–2005).
[5] Garrett Moore, 11th Earl of Drogheda (1910–89). Newspaper proprietor and Chairman of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Married Joan Carr in 1935.
[6] Randolph Churchill (1911–68). The DNB entry for the son of the Prime Minister records that he was drinking double brandies at the age of eighteen – a habit that did not change over the years.
[7] Lady Mary (Maimie) Lygon (1910–82). The most beautiful of 7th Earl Beauchamp’s four daughters. Married to Prince Vsevolode Joannovitch of Russia 1939–56.
Mani
Darling Debo,
Please forgive this hoggish delay! I was waiting to send you a copy of my Lettres Peruviennes, describing our adventures last year, but it won’t be ready for a couple of days, so here goes.
I had an extraordinary experience three weeks ago: meeting General Kreipe [1] on a television programme, with all his Cretan captors, after 27 years. After the programme, all the Cretans – about 20 – the General & his wife (very nice), a niece of Field Marshal v. Rundstedt, and I had a huge banquet in a taverna. Lots of Cretan songs and dances, a few German folk songs sung by the General and me, after much wine had flowed. Some journalists got wind of it and broke in. One asked the General how I had treated him when he was my prisoner in the mountains and the Gen said – wait for it! – most energetically: ‘Ritterlich! Wie ein Ritter’ (‘Chivalrously! Like a knight!’). I felt a halo forming and it took me days to get back to normal. I took them out to all sorts of meals, and showered Frau Kreipe with roses when they left (she was extremely nice). She said: ‘You’re just like my husband told me you were all these years!’ (Three cheers again! Forgive me retailing these dewdrops – but nobody else can, you do see.) It was somehow a wonderful rounding off to this ancient story. I’ve just got a charming joint letter from them!
The great thing of Spring 1972 is Robert’s book! [2] I only got it three days ago, and am already halfway. It’s absolutely tip-top, and has that very special quality that only years of pain, toil and thought can instil: beautifully written, and fair and balanced to all sides, and, more than that, full of understanding, pity and sympathy for the almost insoluble ghastliness of the whole thing.
Gerald Brenan, [3] Carrington’s erstwhile love, came and stayed a few days, he’s 79, hares up the mountains like a buck in spring. He had a pretty and charming girl with him; love, but not concubinage, he told me. They are now wandering about the depths of Anatolia in a 2-seater.
[incomplete]
[1] Heinrich Kreipe (1895–1976). The German commander of the occupying forces on Crete. He was abducted from the island in 1944 by a group of resistance fighters led by PLF.
[2] Robert Kee, The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism (1972).
[3] Gerald Brenan (1894–1987). The British writer, who lived in Spain for much of his life, had an affair with Dora Carrington in the 1920s. After his wife Gamel’s death in 1968 Brenan spent ten years with a young Englishwoman, Lynda Price.
[1972]
Darling Debo,
This is not really a letter, more an extremely rough travel diary of our adventures this year.
AN EXPEDITION TO THE PINDUS MOUNTAINS OF NORTHERN GREECE
Expedition Party:
Robin and Renée Fedden
Carl Natar [1]
Peter McCall [2]
Andrew Devonshire
PLF
Athens, 9 June 1972
We had bad news last night. We have been refused permission to climb in the Hakkiari Mountains in Turkish Kurdistan, so it’s the Pindus for us.
I met the party at Athens airport, a joyful reunion. We dumped all our stuff at the Olympic Palace Hotel and had dinner at the Platanos in the Plaka and coffee among the reeds by the Tower of the Winds.
Yanina, 10 June
We got to Preveza from Yanina and drove out past the ruins of Nicópolis and a scattering of Vlach * huts. Then we drove up into the Louros gorge, through a forest of plane trees and on into the more open Dodóni country and into Yanina at last. It’s been hideously modernised since my last visit eight years ago, all the oriental nobility has gone; but plenty of storks nest there still. We went to the Olympic Hotel; an amusing and beautiful young couple run it. Then there was a smashing dinner with Mr Nicolaïdis and two other mountaineers at the Epirote Pavilion (tzatzíki, stuffed courgettes, and so on). I talked Vlach – or rather Rumanian – to Mr Stergios; and wandered inside the Kastro for an hour. Most of the old houses have gone; but I heard some Ladino * through a shutter, then walked along the lakeshore listening to the loudest and lewdest frogs I’ve ever heard croak.
Sunday 11 June
Out by car with Mr Nicolaïdis, the Yanina mountaineer, and Robin and Renée to Kónitsa, and through Kalpáki to the Aoös River. We arranged for Mr Tássos, an ex-schoolmaster and watchmaker, to be our guide.
We went in the little steamer to the beautiful lake-island which was full of Sunday crowds. Ancient plane trees surround the monasteries. We visited the scene of Ali Pasha’s death, then on through a corridor of tall reeds to a marvellous feast of crayfish, frogs and trout, where we were sent a bottle of wine by a party of Cretans (in my honour: because of the TV programme with Gen Kreipe and his captors). We dined in a taverna near the caves at the end of the lake, where more wine was sent to us for the same splendid reason.
Monday 12 June
Renée, Robin and I bought stores all morning. Then after packing and sorting, we went back for an even better luncheon of crayfish, frog and trout, with croaking all round us. We drove to Dodóni, the site of the ancient oracle, now lost in the oak woods: august and severe in the heart of bleak hills with drifts of shale and rustling ilex spinneys; mullein grows everywhere. We took our three mountaineer friends and Mr Nicolaïdis’s pretty wife to a return feast at the Epirote place of our first night. Late to bed.
Up early this morning. Sending all our heavy stuff to Papigo in one taxi, we headed for Kónitsa in another. (The policeman at the beginning of the forbidden zone, close to the Albanian frontier, was a Cretan from Alpha, near Réthymnon, who once brought me a message to Prinés when he was a small boy.)
We found Mr Tásso Eythimíou and set off on foot from the wonderful Turkish bridge which crosses the Aoös River like a rainbow, then followed the spectacular gorge; and passed the ruins of a Byzantine fort which the Turks captured by dressing up as Orthodox monks. He told us that the mosque above the rainbow bridge (once painted by Edward Lear) was said to have been ordered by Suleiman the Magnificent.
Our path was an overhanging canyon of rock and forest, split up into shade and sun by the early light. A green trout-laden brook rushed through boulders beside an up-and-down switchback path that led to the closed 18th-century monastery of Stómion, which had been blown up by the Germans as a Zervas * guerrilla stronghold, then roughly rebuilt. It stands on a rock above the river.
From here our way zigzagged uphill through thickening woods of pine, walnut, sycamore, plane and chestnut, ever wider and taller, but so steep we halted more and more frequently. Renée felt awful: I too. It was much too much to take on for the first day. Suddenly Andrew was smitten down, and had to rest every few yards, looking green and ominous and feeling miserable. Carl and Robin helped him along; not his fault, he had been shooting ahead in his best Peruvian style till then. The forest grew steeper and higher. I had awful cramp, legs like cast-iron drainpipes. There were long waits for the others to catch up; a nightmare ascent for all. The heights of Smólikas and Grámmos soar beyond the tree trunks. These mysterious woods full of birds, the haunt of deer, wild goat, boar, bears and wolves.
One of our helpers got on all our nerves, especially by shouting a bit hysterically when we were crossing drifts of snow. We cut steps with our picks, then spent ages crossing steep landslides where the whole planet seemed to be on the move. At last we got to the longed-for point where waterfalls came roaring down and an icy wind drove through a steep funnel of the mountains. It was here that I suddenly realised I had left my rucksack behind at one of our stops, and our helper leapt back into favour by going back for it, a true benefactor: I felt so tired it was nearly beyond me and Andrew arrived looking awful and collapsed on the grass wishing the earth would swallow him.
In the end it was decided that Carl and Robin would stay the night with him somewhere out of the wind where they could kindle a fire, and catch us up tomorrow. We left them all our warm stuff but were terribly worried.
A stiff climb followed, up a steep funnel of tumbled rock and boulders with another snow-torrent rushing down it. We crossed it many times, climbing hand-over-foot, slipping and starting landslides, and falling in. It went on for an hour and a half, with night not far off.
But when at last we reached the top, we found Alpine meadows and new ranges rearing up all round us like a gathering of castles. They were Gamíla and Astrákas. There was a tinkling and a clanking of flocks, a few scattered tarns, buttercups and lithospernum and banks of snow streaking along the hollows.
Huge black-and-white dogs dashed at us barking fiercely. Then a tall and fine-looking Sarakatsán * of the Tsouman clan turned up, splendid in black hooded cloak and steel-hooked crook across his shoulders. We hobnobbed for a while, sitting on the grass, his dogs panting all round him; then trudged on over heartless tracts of shale till we reached the Refuge just as it was getting dark. It is a beautifully fitted-out hut of the Pindus Mountaineering Society, opened and made ready by our pack-driver, who had arrived earlier from Papigo with another eager young drover called Theodore and three horses, our stuff and a few more young Sarakatsáns and their dogs. We told him to take ropes and slings and pints of hot tea down the ghastly giants’ causeway tomorrow morning to help Carl, Robin and Andrew. Renée cooked a delicious stew of bully beef and onions, preceded and followed by plenty of whisky. Mr Tássos seems much nicer all of a sudden. We went to bed in tiered bunks – it was rather like being in a four-poster – dog-tired and rather anxious.
One of the worst bits that afternoon was crossing a slanting acre of scree entirely covered with huge umbellifers and a six-foot-high forest of stinging nettles, only passable by holding our ice picks over our heads and laying about with them like battle-axes. Ah, the slipping on the pine needles and the steep grass underfoot! The solid-looking blocks we lurched across came loose and hurtled downhill in avalanches.
We saw three snakes, one brown, one green and a rather sinister one symmetrically speckled in a pattern of black and white. I started a pheasant and two ptarmigans rattled through the branches. Bright-coloured butterflies abound – including Red Admirals and Purple Emperors. There was a plant that looked like gunnera in the deeper canyons, and sudden bursts of hellebore and yellow marguerites scattered the meadows above, and crimson and purple anemones, and small flowers like forget-me-nots.
Wednesday 14 June
Tássos and Theodore went down with three horses, some Vitamin B pills, ropes, carabinas and flasks of hot tea wrapped up in newspaper. But after breakfast Carl arrived at the hut as cool as a cucumber; he and Robin had helped Andrew up that infernal path and traversed the meadows with the flocks, then taken the scree-path to this Refuge, all without seeing the horses; they must have missed each other on the opposite sides of a large intervening bluff. Then the other two appeared, Andrew looking much better. What a relief ! Theodore came back two hours later. He had gone all the way down, found the remains of the fire, shouted for a while with no answer, climbed back again. An eager, nice, intelligent boy. How lovely to be among mountain people again!
They had spent a warm night in a sheltered nook of the rocks, keeping a fire going all night; Andrew had been enveloped in one of those silver emergency blankets that fold up to the size of a bar of chocolate.
This has been a day of rest and recuperation. Yesterday’s 12-hour climb should have been seven at the outside. It was a wringing ordeal for the most hardened. We are on a ridge overlooking a wandering hollow of bright grass and we watch Egyptian vultures sailing past below us and settling beside the tarns with which the hollow is sprinkled. To the north lie the massifs of Smólikas and Grámmos, and the skyline is jagged with millions of pine trees; the other side of the now-invisible Aoös River, and to the east is Ploská, behind which lies the Gamíla massif and to the south are steep green overgrown landslides; and just in front soars the jagged Bastille of Astrákas: perpendicular limestone cliffs and needles that look totally unscalable, but which are nevertheless to be assailed.
To the west, between Astrákas and another great nearby bluff, an immense vista unfolds: range upon range, dominated to the northwest by the massif of Nemétzikas beyond which loom the peaks of Albania. They run on to Chimára and the Acroceraunian range and from the top of Astrákas, the Adriatic can be descried, with Corfu floating along the horizon in mid-air.
Most of this day of recovery is being spent lolling about the stone terraces outside the shelter, and chatting with the Sarakatsáns who gather every now and then; all belong to the Tsoumánides clan. Their flocks are scattered on many of the green levels and round the lakes; horses graze there as well and ply to and fro between the milking-fold and some cheese-huts about a mile away, beyond the bluff, laden with great tin milk-cans, flat on one side for lashing on wooden saddles. The nearest flocks are all sheep, except for the enormous black-and-white ram that leads them, and several smaller goats – NCOs – wearing heavier bells with a deeper note than the sheep’s light chimes; all of them unite in a fluctuating chord that hovers in the air. We are well above the tree line and it’s a magnificent scene, though rather a bleak one with its sweeps of grey shale, relieved by the blue tarns, the grazing horses and the flocks; great masses, like pinnacled cathedrals rise into a blazing sky, and beneath us a tremendous vista of mountain-ranges recedes, floating dim and far.
Renée and I remained alone in the shelter while the others scrambled to the top of the bluff to have a look round. To my consternation, a small caravan of laden horses appeared from the direction of Papigo. It was Mr Ioannidis, the mayor, and two brothers, Mr Christodoulou, and a local civil servant from Patmos. Renée went to break the news to Robin and the others. They had come for the night to see that we were all right and they turned out to be both delightful and helpful, and we had a great banquet. They lit flares with Butagaz cylinders to signal their achievement in getting here to doubting souls in the village below; then they packed snow into buckets to cool bottles of ouzo and fizzy wine from Zítza (where Byron and Hobhouse stayed for a night or two) and unloaded all sorts of good things – delicious fresh tomatoes, onions and garlic, excellent tyrópites and alevrópites (cheesecake and fritters), and two punnets of strawberries. It was a happy evening, full of friendly and jovial chat about the Battle of Actium, Cleopatra, Mark Antony, Augustus, King Pyrrhus, the Vlachs and the Sarakatsáns.
Thursday 15 June
Our guests – or hosts – left early, with promises of reunion in Papigo. After breakfast we set off down the steep approach path in the direction of Gamíla – grudging every inch of height lost – then through alternating layers of scree, rock and grass, climbing over stretches of snow and up the massive blocks and bands of rock beyond Ploská to the first of the rock-blades which jut into the void to the north; they form a fan of humps which gives the range the name of ‘Camel’, though it is more like a dromedary with many humps; and I remember peering up at them from leagues away on the Metsovo road ten years ago with Coote Lygon and Joan, never dreaming that one day I’d be in these terrific heights.
Gentians cluster in every fissure. Some of the rocky wastes we crossed resemble scores of wrinkled and interlocking polygons with clefts plunging all round them, jagged and pocked and spiked: ankle-breaking yataghan terrain of the kind that used to make Xan and me blaspheme in Crete. We made exciting descents of the snow-drifts later on, half ski-ing on our heels, as it were, and braking with our ice-axes. Robin and Carl were experts at this.
At one vantage point we watched a hawk pursuing a marten, which took refuge under a rock while the hawk circled and swooped fiercely, but in vain. Rock-finches – grey when settled, black and white in flight – fluttered about the wilderness: in this treeless amphitheatre enormous grey mineral blocks were tumbled into galleries, buttresses, bands and pinnacles. It seemed all wind and sun.
We ate raisins, chocolate and almonds, sprawling beside a lake in a basin under the peaks from which, two days ago, we had looked down at the conifer-spiked watersheds we had threaded; and, over the now-invisible Aoös river, at the three eagle-nest villages, with their windows all gleaming, on the wooded flanks of Mt Smólikas. The frogs croaked in the lake, salamanders flickered about the shallows. (During the Occupation, SOE [3] used to make parachute drops of arms and stores in the hollow below.)
After a lake-side snooze, we went down by easy stages over snow and rock and grass, treading on lovely green lawns covered with flowers, and surrounded by rings of grey rock – glade on descending glade – until we were down again by the lake under our hut, where a score of hobbled Sarakatsán horses were grazing. Then – an unkind final touch – came the gruelling climb to our Refuge, with the sweat pouring off us. Andrew, to all our amazement, declared he was vexed by his lack of stamina the day before and immediately charged down to the bottom, then back to the top again, without drawing breath, in what seemed record time. An astonishing performance.
Delicious lentils for supper. We slept out, dozing off under millions of stars.
Friday 16 June
I awoke on the stone terrace, after a marvellous night, to see Carl, Renée and Robin rope-slung and axe-grasping, moving off to tackle the great hump of Astrákas. I followed them with binoculars for an hour or so. They were moving at high speed, up landslides, then across snowdrifts, till they disappeared in a fold, to re-appear much higher, later on, much smaller. Peter has his tripod camera geared to the summit, but we will probably miss them.
Andrew has set off with flower-presses under his arm to the regions we crossed yesterday to try and find some specimens. He has been doing a lot of prep at Kew but, as it was with Kurdistan in view, it may not be much help in the Pindus. He sounds dazzlingly proficient to my untutored ear.
I’m writing this at the indoor table at the Refuge, and I have looked up twice to find a tall Sarakatsán leaning on his crook, peering down, and only exchanging greetings after I say something. All the time, while we chat over a cigarette, his eyes flicker away to all the elaborate photographic gear that litters the table. I feel a bit ashamed to be surrounded by all this opulent stuff in front of these austere men.
The Astrákas party, then Andrew, got back in the early afternoon, both fully successful. It is swelteringly hot, and very misty in the valleys.
At four, Theodore turned up with the mules. We had cleared up the shelter and left it bright as a new pin.
Robin, Andrew and I started off downhill and the others followed with the beasts. It was steep and shingly at first and dotted with small pine trees. A scattered forest of juniper came next; then we were sauntering down through park-like ledges of green with poplar and hazel and tall, queerly lopped oaks, stopping to drink now and then at charming springs. It was like Paradise, all the trees casting long shadows, thousands of flowers, eglantine climbing everywhere: hellebore, geranium, alyssum; down, down . . . We sat for a while by a spring and a slate-roofed shrine to St Panteleimon under a plane tree where an old crone came to fill the icon lamp. Then all at once we were in the steep, slanting lanes and the massive walls of Papigo. We found quarters at the inn of Cléarchos Starás, a fine old house where we sat out and drank shandy gaff, our new passion, looking down on the armadillo-roofs of the village while goats came down from the mountains in clouds of dust, bells clanking. The church is a three-apsed basilica in a gallery of squat pillars and with a free-standing belfry among gigantic planes and ilexes. There are flocks everywhere.
Dinner under the plane trees. There were lachanópita (spinach pasties) with much wine and lots of strawberries. Our mountain friends of the other night all came and we sang for a while. Mountain bastions towered overhead.
Two cars from Yanina had arranged to pick up our stuff and meet us in Víkos.
We got up at dawn and set off, with Stratí quoting the Latin names of all the plants we passed; he had an active hunting bitch on a lead and loosed her on the mountains; she was off in a flash, yelping after hares or foxes. His conversation was all about Miss Devlin [4] being allowed to say what she likes: ‘Lucky English! Lucky Bernadette, to belong to so great and civilised a country! Democracy in action! No wonder England is loved and respected!’ He’s very much against the present Colonels’ regime here. Quite right.
We slanted down the steep northern bank of the Víkos gorge, past jagged pinnacles of rock like rotting tusks, descending into the plane-tree-shaded headwaters of the Voïdomátis River: they came roaring out of the rock and twisted away in a deep, right-angled and leaf-dappled zigzag, teeming with trout, under diving swallows, a nymph-haunted, nereid-struck place. We lolled here in the green shadows, then climbed across meadows with cows grazing and up the steep twists and turns of this extraordinary gorge to the sleepy and half-deserted village of Víkos, where we lay under another giant plane outside a handsome triapsidal church and watched the schoolmaster with ten little boys and girls, superintending the hoisting of the flag, then prayers and the singing of the National Anthem. Hopelessly tuneless mites.
Vassílis and Dimitri turned up with two taxis and off we rolled through the leafy and soporific blaze, back through Kalpáki, down to the plain (where I saw the Cretan gendarme again) then up into the Zagorochória, through Vítsi and Monodéndri. Stupendously beautiful. The houses might be in the Cotswolds, with honeycombed slices bevelled off the corners – all lived in by civilised villagers with fine manners. Then, on to the monastery of St Paraskeví. Eagles floated above the gorge where the monastery hangs like a disintegrating house-martin’s nest. Both the cliff-sides are deep in clinging shrubs, creepers, ivy and cow-parsley. Echoes resound into the distance.
We found the cars and went on to Tsepélovo and met the kind mayor and the café-keeper, and lunched with some speleologists. Here we found a Sarakatsán muleteer, Chrístos Karvoúnis. He has four animals at 150 drachmas a day. We clinched the deal at once, set off at teatime, and trudged for two hours through the magical forest of Tsepélovo, which is mostly pines, fir and beech. There were wild strawberries everywhere, which Andrew, being slightly colour-blind, has difficulty in spotting – ‘Never mind! You’ve got the leaves!’ – till we found a narrow glen above a stream. We feasted by the fire and slept in the open. There were many fireflies after dark.
Sunday 18 June
We woke at four, breakfasted and loaded up. Winding brackeny ascents led us through the forest to the ridge of the mountains deep in beech, hornbeam, pine and fir trees, some of them enormous. Sunlight fell through leafy beech saplings, dappling them like showers of gold. We went up hill and down dale, then dropping into the beautiful village of Makrinón, where we found some eggs. Robin was rather stern about our stopping for ouzo. All the roofs here are tin as the village was burnt down three times by the Germans in 1943 as a hotbed of Resistance. There was talk of a ‘Captain Peter’ and a ‘Captain Charlie’, SOE officers, both wounded in a fight here. The population is delightful. A dear old man with a komboloi – a lay rosary – and a sweeping white moustache led us down to the garth of the old deserted and slab-roofed monastery of the Dormition of the B.V.M., frescoed in 1792, and beyond a thick-pillared cloister filled with hay and a sheltered spring in a field with beech trees for shade and clumps of hazel for nuts. We snoozed here and then moved off in the late afternoon with the ridges of Mitzikéli and Ajúnca Rosía looming near – they must be Vlach names – with Peristéri in the distance. After crossing a rainbow-shaped Turkish bridge, we climbed through more forest and then up frightful slopes to a half-made road running from Elatochóri to Flambourári, where we drank shandy and hobnobbed with some Vlachs, greatly to the disapproval of Chrísto the muleteer: as a Sarakatsán, he hates them. Then on to a pine-girt clearing by a stream with grazing sheep and a Vlach shepherd with his Molossian hounds. There were long talks by firelight later on, and a blaze of stars overhead and nightingales and a barn owl in the woods. All the shooting stars – they must be the Perseids falling – made it like trying to sleep in a planetarium. A sudden rush of dogs made us all zip up our sleeping bags and hope for the best. Peter said he heard wolves . . .
Monday 19 June
Most of the morning was an easy stroll under great trees talking with Andrew about Robert Kee’s book on Ireland. Well worth waiting for. Then up on to the rolling plateau of Polistés: tree-stumps and dark beech-forests covered the ridges. Peter taught me some amusing and highly improper Sharpshooter songs, sung by his regiment during the war. Lots of Sarakatsán flocks, a few dilapidated shelters, no huts; then along a half-made road through terrible heat across unending nondescript country and out on to the blazing tarmac of the Kalabáka–Yanina road (the great Athens–Rome link of old): very tired, sleep-walking by now, we followed a goat-path down into Metsovo.
The awful staring red ‘French’ tiles, instead of the old dark roof slabs, the cast-iron railings and the cement, have nearly done for the town. But the Tositsas house – a fine old fortified Pindus house belonging to Evángelos Avéroff (later Minister of War) – hasn’t changed. I stayed there years ago to write. The house and Apostolos, the old kilted caretaker, were as welcoming as ever. What luxury it seemed! We found a charming note from Vangeli Avéroff waiting for us and a big bottle of whisky.
Baths and sleep were followed by a visit to a Mr Bombas about mules for tomorrow. (Chrístos has already started back to Skamnéli.) We had drinks in a little cluster of booths where the Vlachs are still dressed in black serge kilts or jodhpurs, kalpaks and tufted brogues like plumed gondolas, and the women in old Pindus costume. Dinner in my ancient haunts gathered many old friends.
Tuesday 20 June
A morning of shopping, and then of writing, in the delightful old Epirote room where I wrote the ‘Black Departers’, i.e. the Sarakatsán chapter of Roumeli, eleven years ago. We trooped round the Epirote museum that fills the rest of the house and all were delighted. We saw Tatiana Avéroff for a moment, she’s off to Athens; then, after lunch and a nap, new mules turned up with two Vlach muleteers: Triandaphyllo – ‘the Rose’, as we thus call him, a gruff, amusing chap – and Yanni. We loaded up, and, after farewells, our caravan moved out of Metsovo in some state; along the road south, down into a valley and up a wooded torrent-bed to Anthochóri. I talk Rumanian to the Rose and Yanni; they answer in Vlach and there is great hilarity and much teasing and banter between our fellows and the locals about the Roman Empire and the Dorian invasion, as this is a purely Greek-speaking village. We settled into a sweet-smelling Poussin-like meadow, new-mown, and striped with wind-rows of cut hay and dotted with hay-cocks against a Sèvres sky with a few white clouds – all sweeping up to a walled grove of ilexes (ilce in Vlach), like a sacred wood. For a camp-fire, our guides set fire to a whole dead tree, and the deep-noted bells of the mules and the treble notes of the flocks are sounding all round us. Excitement stops one going to sleep in this fascinating place. (Swiss Carl is from the Engadine so his first language, like Giacometti’s, [5] is Romanche, which helps him catch the drift of the old Rose’s Vlach.) A final stroll under the stars led through a twinkling mythical world. ET IN ARCADIA EGO. (We conjure up the Poussin picture.)
Wednesday 21 June, Khalíki
The last days were such a rush, I haven’t kept up.
We climbed an enormous mountainside – stroúnga-stroúnga, from fold to fold – with flocks all the way and the only man we met was an old Zervas guerrilla, Grigóris Goussiónis. Then Robin, Renée and Carl headed for the peaks of Peristéri while Andrew, Peter, the mules and I made a stiff ascent on our own, barked at by alarmingly fierce dogs at every lonely fold. We smoked with three shepherd boys in the Skafídhia Pass while choughs cawed and wheeled just above our heads: the start of a whole new sequence of the Ágrapha range. *
Then downhill, and the minor drama of losing Andrew and a stiff re-ascent to the pass: a bit of a saga. Got back to the village of Khalíki at last to find the entire party reassembled. What joy! It had been baking, noonday-devil work. An old pom-pommed Vlach was holding forth in the village plateía. Renée found some trout here, and we slept on a lovely knoll, after cooking and eating them on the spot. Flocks poured past us all night, their bells tinkling while the Acheloös River sped through the boulders below.
Thursday 22 June
After an easy morning along a half-made forest road and a stream that must have been full of trout, we had a long midday pause, bathing, washing, reading, eating off rocks as flat as tables, and then sleeping beside the Acheloös while the horses grazed. We climbed into the hills to the Vlach-speaking hamlet of Agía Paraskeví, then to Gardíki higher still in the pine-woods, then dipped into the valley again and camped with a big fire by the river.
Friday 23 June
When we had made the sweaty climb to the landslide village of Messochóra, we followed a water-channel downhill. Tin roofs everywhere and concrete; then up, up, at midday, past the handful of houses at Spítia to a little plane tree that gave us a minimum of afternoon shade. Nice shepherds. On, and over the mountains to Platanákia we came on some cherry-gatherers, a schoolmaster and his class. They gave us some, and we followed the gorge to a charming village called Moschoplýtou. A doctor at the kapheneíon gave us a wonderful dinner. We are raven-fed, lucky travellers in The Arabian Nights. We slept in front of the café under the trees.
Saturday 24 June
Up early as usual, we passed through the village of Balkánion, crossed a steep ridge and sank into a new stretch of the Ágrapha, then to the village of Elliniká with a fine church under a spreading ilex. Then on through the bracken to Kalí Kómi and here we drank ouzo sitting on an iron bedstead out of doors in a shady yard. A killing noon-day climb lifted us to some plane trees where three little boys brought us a present of eggs. A hellish slog to Petrotón came next. We settled there in a wild garden. It is an eccentric, mad, inbred village. A huge bill was presented, out of the blue, and the Old Black Rose was outraged by the utter hopelessness of everyone. Insults flew, but all came right in the end.
Sunday 25 June
An appalling morning. They said we would have to cross the river fourteen times. We crossed it at least fifty, up to our thighs in the water, and slipping and squelching about with our heavy climbing boots dragging like buckets. Robin took a wrong shortcut overland but we all reassembled later on, totally exhausted, so we had a rest under the trees of Kostí monastery. Up the right bank of the river, we halted at a ramshackle kapheneíon, past the little village of Koubourianá, and met an old Zervas guerrilla friend of Monty Woodhouse. [6] Then, down to the bed of the Petridianá River again, crossing it on bridges hanging as flimsily as cobwebs; we finally took another wrong and premature turning to Foundotó. This is a hopeless, tiny and de-populated hamlet among desolate crags but with kind villagers; several girls were planning to migrate to Toronto. Hopeless. All shale and slag and vegetation, every blade of it so precious there was nowhere for the mules to graze. We slept under the church porch.
Monday 26 June, Trídendron
We got up at four and took a high road inland from the Petriá River to Rósoi, which is opposite Petríla, then climbed down to a ruined mill and up again to a hamlet inhabited by kind hags. There is a queerly painted church there. We continued along a serpentine path through woods of pine and fir that were being wrecked by an inchoate new road like a gash of slag. Renée was loathing it. We crossed the watershed and laboured down a heartless mountainside to a clump of cherry trees. An old shepherd and two nippers shinned up into the branches at once, broke off armfuls of laden twigs and showered them down. Then the boys filled up their bucket for us from a far-off spring and we gave them pocket-knives with pictures of the Houses of Parliament on them. We went on to the delightful village of Trídendron, in a small shower of rain, and shopped and drank in the little magazí, where some Sarakatsáns gave us enormous wedges of feta cheese, refusing all payment. A switchback path took us along the Ágrapha River. It was all forest and pine needles and towards dusk we dropped down to a fold beside another watermill where the friendly miller, called Theodore Parthénios, said our mules could graze to their hearts’ content; one got lost, but we caught it again. Supping and talking round the bright logs, we built up preposterous fantasies about our destination tomorrow at Ágrapha village. We imagined it – or pretended to imagine it – as a town with a fine but over-restored castle, ‘La Favorita’, surrounded by baroque cathedrals, small palaces, picture-galleries, equestrian statues, kiosks with London papers on sale, cocktail bars, night-clubs, obelisks, roundabouts, dodgems, a museum, a zoo and a racecourse.
Meanwhile, there were nightingales, fireflies and heavy dew.
Tuesday 27 June
Next morning, our track pursued the western bank of the boulder-strewn riverbed. We had drinks at a little magazí. The mules went astray for an hour – or rather, we took the wrong path and they the right one – but it was a stroke of luck, for a landscape of the utmost beauty was suddenly all round us, the tremendous gorge with a river roaring or sighing below then a tributary full of trout flowing eastward through Salvador Rosa ilex-woods slanting with broken sunbeams, and wooded mountains towering like a theatrical backdrop. Headlands of ilex, plane and beech dovetailed along a second and ravishing canyon. Le sublime, indeed. A flimsy gossamer bridge was looped between plane trees and some tumbled and beetling rocks. Another of those Turkish rainbow bridges arched among clouds of leaves and we longed for this to go on for ever. A final zigzag led to the scattered and shady village of Ágrapha, which was delightful but quite unlike our fictional inventions last night.
One of the gendarmes here turned out to be a relative of my Cretan god-brother * Grigóris Khnarákis de Thrapsanó, one of our comrades in the capture of General Kreipe, so we had a great welcome. There is no grazing, so we bought bales of provender for the animals, and slept under the ilexes in the churchyard. When we woke, village boys pointed out the place on the mountainside of a famous single-handed fight between Katsantónis and Velighékas, two heroic figures from Greek klephtic folklore, and there was talk of the great Karaïskákis. * It is Klephtouriá – the free world of the old patriotic outlaws, a Robin Hood scene transported. After our shady siesta, we trudged down to a water meadow where a spring rushed into the Ágrapha River. Water murmured under the leaves, and we built a big fire and cooked some lentils and slept. Lots of odd dreams, as usual. Woke up under the Great Bear, Pegasus and Cassiopeia. Bells, leaves, water, fireflies and the little owl – ghióni – sitting on a barn roof next to the stream.
Wednesday 28 June
The remoteness, the seclusion of these mountains! Huge watersheds, deep valleys, rushing rivers, nearly deserted villages, forest on forest, all terra incognita! No foreigners ever, no visitors – nothing to buy in the shops, never a tourist, bobota – maize bread – but utterly unpolluted by communications. No plastic, no petrol pumps, no Coca Cola or juke box, nothing but kindness and simplicity; it’s Greece as I first knew it. The Old Vlach Rose and Yanni abominated it all, of course. Sophisticated Metsovites, they are as boastful and sanguine about progress as Kinglake’s Eothen with the Pasha of Belgrade carrying on about the Industrial Revolution. The Rose says ‘Why doesn’t that cuckold, the President, bomb the lot of them? Curses on them! Why don’t the wolves come and eat up the inhabitants? Anathema!’
We climbed sleepily all morning, though we are all resiliently run-in, now that our journey is ending, into a beautiful conifer forest past the shacks of some detribalised Sarakatsáns (Ah! Thank God I saw Sarakatsáns when they still were Sarakatsáns!) – where we asked after yoghurt, but were unlucky. A nice woman asked us to stop for coffee, but we pressed on. High, high up a circular threshing floor gleamed, hinting that all the vestigial half-collapsed terraces round about, though scarcely visible now, once grew rye or some other rough crop. Great conifers surrounded us and the bald watersheds, when we reached them, commanded range on range of mountains, resembling troops of colossal fossilized wild animals, bare and ghostly. The forests themselves suggest Red Indians; a Fenimore Cooper world. Huge trees, many of them fallen and rotting, blocked the obliterated mule-tracks, but between their trunks, faraway vistas loomed, while the other side, down the impenetrable and wood-choked slopes, we were up to our armpits in bracken.
New ranges unfolded, then ankle-snapping landslides of shale and scree, and, far below us, a pyramid of mountain lifted the village of Márathos into the air, with its white church and its roof of dark slabs. We dropped down into deep brackeny woods where the trees had grown to great height and girth. One of them had been struck by lightning and all were covered in soft green moss. Sheep scuttled away through the fronds as we settled among this gathering of giants. Ominously, a bulldozer grinds away at the slope opposite and chain-saws are at work. It is the spearhead of the modern world invading Klephtouriá. Dynamite explodes and flying rocks echo down chasms and ravines.
Sudden clouds heralded a downpour and the Vlachs were immediately hooded like monks in their roomy homespun capes while we cowered for shelter as the thunder and lightning took over from the explosions. Then, in the beautiful aftermath of the storm, we climbed to the pyramid village and shopped and drank in the plateía of Márathos, emptied of its folk, like the village in the Grecian Urn. [7] There is a fine frescoed 14th-century church of the Archangels Gabriel and Michael, basilican, like most of them hereabouts, except for semi-circular apse-like transepts as non-functional as penguins’ wings. The villages – the one or two souls still lingering – told us the frescoes were much damaged by ELAS camping and lighting fires inside. We are in Áris Velouhiótis country now and there are terrible tales in these villages of guerrilla conflicts and outrages. Our last night’s camp was overshadowed by a rock, where, they told us, fifty nationalists had their throats cut by their political rivals and were then thrown in the ravine.
We returned to our camp. Black-and-white and silver-grey goats came stampeding downhill, halting in astonishment on the tips of rocks and then coming into our midst, nosing close and inquisitive. A little boy called Chrísto came running from the village to join us. Carl heaped up a blaze and there were fire-lit trunks and branches covered with moss all round. We stretch ourselves out on last year’s leaves and go to sleep with the moon coming down on us through millions of this year’s replacements.
We caught a truck to Karpenísi next day, spent the night there, then motored to Athens and feasted under the Acropolis. The Feddens, Peter and Carl flew to London, and Andrew and I motored to the Mani. It had been a marvellous mountain journey and it had lasted twenty days.
Please forgive this scrawl.
Tons of love from
Paddy
[1] Director of Cartier in London and a keen skier and mountaineer.
[2] A friend of Robin Fedden; a passionate climber and veteran of the Sharpshooter Regiment, who worked in the City.
[3] The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a secret outfit established by the British Government to carry out clandestine sabotage and to support local resistance movements behind enemy lines. PLF was a major in SOE during the war.
[4] Bernadette Devlin McAliskey (1947–). Firebrand political activist and Socialist MP for the Mid-Ulster constituency 1969–74.
[5] Alberto Giacometti (1901–66). The Swiss sculptor, painter and draughtsman was born in Borgonovo, near the Italian border.
[6] Christopher Montague Woodhouse, 5th Baron Terrington (1917–2001). As head of SOE in Crete, he played an important part in organising partisan resistance. Conservative MP 1959–66 and author of many books, mostly on Greek and British history.
[7] ‘What little town by river or sea-shore, / Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, / Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?/ And, little town, thy streets for evermore / Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell / Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.’ John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1819).
* Semi-nomad shepherds, speaking a Latin dialect.
* Spanish dialect of the Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella, and settled in the Levant, sheltered by the Sultan.
* The right-wing resistance, EDES, was commanded by Napoleon Zervas. The left-wing, ELAS, by ‘Áris’ Velouhiótis.
* Greek nomad shepherds of the north, not on good terms with the Vlachs.
* ‘The Unwritten Mountains’: very wild and remote and so-called because, being unsafe for strangers, especially officials, they were never subjected to a census, either Roman, Byzantine or Turkish.
* Koumbáros in Greek – sýnteknos in Cretan dialect, the name for someone who has been your best man at a wedding, or godfather at a baptism, a bond considered as close as a blood relationship.
* A local leader in the 1821 War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire.
Lismore Castle
Co. Waterford
Darling Paddy,
I’m writing this in the aeroplane to Paris, where I’m hurrying to because Diana is nearly at the end of her tether because poor Nancy is so terribly bad, desperately ill and completely miserable. It is so awful. Then one reads articles which say there is no need for a cancer patient to suffer pain any more. Well, you try. She’s not easy to help I admit as she fights every yard of the way – I’d have given in years ago wouldn’t you. Incredibly brave I suppose, and I know humans cling to life even when frightfully ill but I’m sure she is exceptional.
Later, Frogland, 21 May
Well, Whack, the poor French lady is very poor. I’m sitting in her nice light room, garden all lilac & moon daisies, but what’s the good of that when she feels so foul.
There is a school hard by, & sitting all day in the window I am deafened by the screams of the beastly scholars. As soon as they are let out by their unfortunate teachers there is a noise like the Heythrop bitches leaving Redesdale’s Gorse on a breast-high scent. They take a lot of stopping, bells ring time & again before they are persuaded indoors & a merciful silence comes.
Much love
Debo
P.S. Eddie Tennant, my grandson, aged just six, said Granny I had a dream last night of BARE WOMEN, tits & bums Granny, bums & tits. Granny did you hear, BARE WOMEN TITS & BUMS . . . What would Lady Redesdale have made of that.
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy & Joan,
Thanks vv much for your incredibly nice letters, & t. gram. [1]
It has all been so supremely FOUL for poor Nancy. 4½ years of pain without a let-up, 23 doctors all charming to talk to & quite hopeless at doing anything for her.
Some of the funniness will live in the books, won’t it, but we shall miss her dreadfully – the instigator of jokes. My father was the same & when those two were together all those years ago it was the acme of entertainment. How deeply unfair it is that she should have had this ghastly illness when she had always taken such care & lived a strictly disciplined life.
The funeral at Swinbrook was strange in that it seemed absolutely normal for her to be buried there when most of her real life had been in France.
Please keep in deepest touch.
Much love to you both from
Debo
[1] Nancy Mitford had died on 30 June.
5 April 1974
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Whack,
EUREKA! I’ve found yr classic re Somerset Maugham & the sheets. Do you need it? Shall I get it photo-ed & send it? RSVP.
It was in the maw of letters of yours, Xan’s, Diana’s, Woman’s, Emma’s, Stoker’s, Sophy’s, my mother’s, Wife’s, Andrew’s, Aly Khan’s, Ann Fleming’s, Daphne’s, Uncle Harold’s, Evie Waugh’s, J Kennedy’s, Decca’s & so on & forth, all higgledy piggledy unsorted & muddled to death.
H Acton [1] is here. He & I are in despair, all the French Lady’s letters are there of course but completely muddled with the aforesaid heaps. Oh me.
Luckily ALL hers to Mark Grant have landed back here, a vast pile from 1930 on. Good. Poor Harold is so fuddled by the nicknames, but we can sort them out. Two sisters come tonight thank God & our after dinner game will be sorting. The sad thing is the weather is so beautiful & one longs to be out.
Now it’s the 9th of April, sorry.
The sisters came & went. Harold goes today. He is taking with him a suitcase of sort of bombs, letter bombs. Of course the Lady never wrote one without a monster barb somewhere but they are so good & so funny.
I found Evie Waugh’s re the full pot by his bed – he went on to Renishaw & faithfully didn’t tell Osbert [2] about ‘the strange Trove of Edensor – they wot not of the pot’. [3] Did you see C Connolly sold one of those Bridesheads, on nice paper & numbered, for £800? How MAD.
Sophy is going to Florence in Sept so we will all go & torture Harold in his lair, which I’ve never seen – I suppose you have.
He is a dear old soul, but taking him for a walk is a bit unnerving. He is tipped forward all the way & one waits for the crash. Andrew loves him. He is in v good spirits, except worried by the budget & says we may have to leave here.
I’ve put a room as a Shrine to Nancy – all her books, furniture, pictures. It looks quite nice & people make a bottleneck studying the manuscripts. What would she think.
Eddie Tennant has been here without a keeper, completely wild & v v nice but oh children are tiring. They always want to DO something & when the food comes they don’t want to eat because they just have (chocs, you know), then wolf something, then sick it up in the lift. I love him & he is Lady Glenconner [4] to the life, face I mean.
Much love & to Joan
Debo
[1] Harold Acton (1904–94). The historian and novelist, a close friend of the Mitford sisters, was beginning research on a biography of Nancy Mitford, published in 1975.
[2] Sir Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969). The writer lived at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire and was a neighbour of the Devonshires.
[3] Evelyn Waugh’s letter to DD, in which he reassured her that no one at Renishaw had shown any curiosity about the unemptied chamber pot, is reprinted in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), p. 493.
[4] Elizabeth Powell (1914–). Eddie Tennant’s paternal grandmother married Christopher Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner, as his second wife, in 1935.
10 May 1974
San Stefano
Corfu
Darling Debo,
You are a marvel, finding that letter (and I’m lower than the dust answering so late, and will spare you the watertight complexity of my excuses).
Poor Graham, Joan’s bro, stayed three weeks, and there were only three sunny days the whole time. He left last week and we came here to stay with Barbara and Niko Ghika, where it’s pretty rainy too – thank God in a way, otherwise it might have seemed like a private punishment reserved for us. It’s a charming house, built by Jaime, our old companion of Andalusia days, for Jacob Rothschild; [1] he only comes for three weeks every summer, so the Ghikas squat there whenever they want – she’s done marvels furnishing it, and Niko enlarging the buildings where necessary – and having friends to stay. The only other person here is someone I’ve heard of for years and always longed to meet, viz. Dadie Rylands [2] – is that a name to you? Cambridge’s answer to Maurice Bowra? You’d love him – not necessarily only because he’s such an authority on W Shakespeare, but because of the natural ebullience, high spirits, enterprise, & unexpectedness. He’s 72, never out of the sea, even in wind and rain, and walks so fast and far – actually running sometimes – over these damp mountains that all pant behind him. He was a great beauty when young, and I can well imagine that those blue eyes conquered all (Lytton Strachey, chief victim).
Barbara’s dog charges into my bedroom every morning, jumps on the bed and curls up, and is then turfed off, always on the stroke of eight. It is known as the Ceremony of the Fleas.
Tons of fond love,
Paddy
[1] Jacob, 4th Baron Rothschild (1936–). Elder son of 3rd Baron Rothschild and Barbara Hutchinson (who married, thirdly, the Greek painter Nikos Ghika). Financier, philanthropist and lover of the arts; first chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund 1992–8, chairman of the National Gallery 1985–91. Married Serena Dunn in 1961.
[2] George (Dadie) Rylands (1902–99). Literary scholar, theatre director and legendary don at King’s College, Cambridge.
28 May 1974
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Ireland was lovely. I do wish you had been there to study it all. Andrew has TWO police cars wherever he goes, [1] one in front & one behind. The one behind pretends not to be one at all as the fellows are in (very) plain clothes.
I had a jolly day with a burly team of woodmen, who were doing some clearing. We got to some thick ivy & stuff & I said look out, there might be some birds’ nests in that. The foreman said ‘Oh of course you have that commitment as well.’ Do admit.
Now I’m back to the grindstone here. Well it’s a sort of grindstone.
I dread this book of David Pryce-Jones about my sister Bobo. [2] He seems to be set on doing it. It can’t be any good because we don’t want it so aren’t giving any of the letters etc which are so brill & give an insight to her amazing character AND he didn’t know her. The only person who could possibly do it wd be Diana, who is the best writer and the best at everything out of our lot. It will be a great pest. He has interviewed everyone who knew her who submitted to an interview. I can now divide sheep from goats, viz. those who ring up & say What do you all think about it – shall I see him? And those who see him without so much as are we for it. Top of sheep is Penelope Dudley Ward [3] (who I haven’t seen for 25 years) & she FAITHFULLY phoned to say should she or shouldn’t she & immediately said of course she wouldn’t if we aren’t for the book.
Top of the goats (so odd of the Bible to make goats into bad things when one thinks how one worships their bodies) is my sister Decca who, oddly, is for it. She took David PJ round old gov, ancient (92) parlourmaid etc etc. Can’t see the point. And there is a strong rumour the book is to be about MISFITS & that the Amery who was hanged as a spy [4] is one of the subjects.
Well Bobo wasn’t a misfit. She was a round peg in a round hole & was a casualty of the foul war like millions of others. He could never see or possibly describe how funny she was.
Bother it all – how I HATE books. The marvellous thing about yours is that they never appear, such a good thing. And if by any chance one does (a) read & (b) like a book it’s so awful when it’s finished.
Well, there we are Whack. I wish you were here.
Much love
Debo
[1] After Andrew Devonshire became a minister in the 1960s, and up until 1995, the Irish Government required that he have a strong police guard whenever he was at Lismore. Following the assassination of Lord Mountbatten by the IRA in 1979, the protection was extended to DD.
[2] David Pryce-Jones’s biography, Unity Mitford: A Quest, was published in 1976.
[3] Penelope Dudley Ward (1914–82). Actress and friend of DD’s brother, Tom. She was in Munich in the 1930s at the same time as Unity Mitford.
[4] John Amery (1912–45). The son of a cabinet minister, he attempted to recruit British prisoners of war to fight with the Germans on the Russian front and was hanged for high treason.
8 June 1974
Mani
Darling Debo,
A propos of the great virtue of my books being their non-appearance – beware! The present one [1] is getting so long, Jock M [2] says it may have to be broken up into vols – so you can’t count on it.
Iris’s Friedrich [Ledebur] turns up here in two weeks time, with two strapping boys by a later bed, as Frogs say. Do you know him? I love him, he’s like a splendid old stag out of the Tyrolese forests. Last time I saw him, he peered for a minute at the bridge of my nose, then said, in his cavernous voice: ‘Dat is good! You have Attila’s Bow!’ ‘What’s that, Friedrich?’ ‘Eyebrows dat vant to meet in the middle! Ven de Spartans had a baby, dey looked at de eyebrows. If dey had no Attila’s Bow, no good! Dey just TREW DEM AVAY.’
Heaps of love,
Paddy
[1] A Time of Gifts, On Foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube covers the first stage of PLF’s voyage and took a decade to write. It was published in 1977 by John Murray (as were all of his books) thirty-four years after he set out on his walk.
[2] John ( Jock) Murray (1909–93). Congenial and enterprising head of the dynastic publishing house. ‘A nimble and efficient tree surgeon and delightful company.’ (PLF)
14 July 1975
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Whack,
No news, except bumpkin stuff. The Council of the Royal Smithfield Club – top farmers & butchers from all over the British Isles, every accent from Devon to Aberdeen via Wales & Norfolk – met here on Thurs. Fifty of them. So the only room I could think of was the nursery, & there they sat good as gold on hard chairs. I offered the rocking horse, but they eschewed it, ditto high chairs & Snakes & Ladders.
I really love those men, & it’s my last year as president. I shall miss it & them.
Then they had lunch, then the wives were let in (so typical of England that they had to hang about till lunch was over) & of course they wanted to see the house. I said ‘I’ll meet you at the end of the tour.’ The first butcher was out in six minutes. I reminded him of Art Buchwald’s lovely article on How To Do The LOUVRE in six minutes [1] – but he’d never heard of Art Buchwald or the Louvre so I chucked it & took him to see some cattle, which he had heard of. A really good fellow.
Much love
Debo
[1] One of the American humorist’s best-known articles, written in 1950, was about a fictional American tourist who tried to win the ‘Six-Minute Louvre’ race, taking in ‘the only three things worth seeing’, the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa and the Winged Victory. Buchwald described how the tourist made good time ‘under perfect conditions, with a smooth floor, excellent lighting, and no wind’.
1 August 1976
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Just had a visit from Lady Bird Johnson & her daughter Lynda for two nights. [1] Oh dear they were nice. I was quite overcome by such extreme niceness. You would have adored the daughter, all lively & agog for whatever was next. They were ½ dead by the time they left having seen this dump, Hardwick, Haddon & much countryside to boot.
As they drove away I suggested Sudbury to which Lynda answered no we can’t Mother is just about housed out. What I often feel like.
Much love
Debo
[1] Claudia (Lady Bird) Taylor (1912–2007). Married US President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1934. Their daughter Lynda was born in 1944. ‘They stayed at Chatsworth in the unprecedented drought and heat of that summer. I was sad that they saw the park and the Peak District brown instead of green, Texas-coloured and un-English.’ (DD)
6 August 1976
Mani
Darling Debo,
I’m beginning to feel rather excited about the Himalayas next month. (I wish Andrew were coming.) As Joan and her hermit-bro and I are going in Jan to stay with our marvellous friend whom I don’t think you know, to wit Ian Whigham, [1] in a mangrove jungle in a Malayan creek, it suddenly occurred to me: why not hang about in India, instead of the vast expense of flying back and out again – and joining J and Graham as they pass through, taking wing for Malaya. I expect we’ll be clambering about those glaciers till the end of Oct or early Nov – so why not settle and write for two months in, say, Simla, and plum pudding in a residential hotel? I’m very excited about the idea. I do believe the hill station is deep in snow – the Hot Weather was the fashionable time. I love the idea of wandering through sheeted and dusty Government House, haunted by the tunes of Yip-i-yaddy and Tararaboomdeeay, and gazing across floors where my mum twirled when Rose of Simla. [2]
I read a book about Government Houses in India [3] last year. One v good looking ADC of yore was Capt Ld Something Thynne; he was in charge of getting the ballroom ready – there were shady sitting-out nooks of palms and similar everywhere. The Vicereine, pointing to the darkest of all, asked the Kansâmah what it was. His whispered answer was ‘Lord Sahib’s Kissee-Kawasti’. (Kawasti = place, in Hindi. No offence meant here.) Ran says such a nook was generally known as the Kalajugga, i.e. the Dark Place.
O the kalajuggas of the Soul . . .
Another snatch from the same book. (Fortunately you can’t stop me if I’ve told it you before.) At a Viceregal Lodge dinner party, a v timid newly-arrived ADC at the end of the table was saying how quickly the dance tunes reached India from Blighty: the first tune the night before he’d only heard once in London. This remark chanced to coincide with a general silence, and the Vicereine called down the table and said ‘And what tune was that, Captain Jones?’
Capt Jones: (paralysed with shyness) ‘ “You’ll remember my kisses”, Your Excellency, “when I have forgotten your name”.’
Enough of this. Strike up the fifes and drums! (Thackeray, Rose and the Ring)
Tons of love, darling Debo, and v many thanks again,
Paddy
[1] ‘A delightful man, rather formal-looking, piercing blue eyes, a cheerful face. Extremely gifted for languages, drawing, painting and talking. He loved buying houses – Tuscany, Thailand, Malaysia – doing them up and selling them after a few years’ sojourn. Much in our life as he was a great friend of Joan’s brother, Graham.’ (PLF)
[2] PLF’s mother, Muriel Eileen Ambler (1890–1977), came from a family with links with India. Married Lewis Leigh Fermor in 1909.
[3] Mark Bence Jones, Palaces of the Raj: Magnificence and Misery of the Lord Sahibs (1973).
Benares
Hotel Clarks
Varanasi
BenaresIndia
Darling Debo,
Well, we did have a time in the Himalayas, and as usual, I think it was the greenhorn – viz. me – who enjoyed it most, and it would have been perfect if poor Robin [Fedden] hadn’t felt so rotten in the middle of it. I expect you’ve heard all about our adventures by now; anyway, I sent Joan enormously long letters – rather like the ones from Peru – which I’ll get done in several copies, and send you in the fullness of time. [1] Please tell Andrew that I missed him enormously – when together we managed to inject a frivolous note into things which I didn’t quite pull off on my own. We all broke up in Delhi: Robin returned to England – Carl Natar and Peter Lloyd [2] had already gone – and Renée and her newly arrived friend, Rosemary Peto, [3] and Myles Hildyard [4] buzzed off to the south of the subcontinent, bent on temples; and I returned to the hills again, heading for Simla.
This was marvellous. I managed (on advice, and by help of, Penelope Betjeman, [5] in a letter waiting there) to be allowed to stay in a seldom-used Government guest house, which was the Hot Weather haunt of the Governors of the Punjab – huge, rambling, half country-house, half wooden-beamed cottage, flagpole on lawn, monkeys from Jakko Hill overhead clattering all over the red corrugated-iron roof – I thought they were gigantic rats, when I heard the noise on the first night – but saw them trooping along the roof next morning holding each other’s tails like the Banderlog in The Jungle Books. There was a weeping willow on the lawn, grown from a cutting from one over Napoleon (Bonaparte’s) tomb in St Helena.
My bedroom led off the gallery looking down into the ballroom. The décor designed by R. Kipling’s father – enormous beams, chandeliers, displays of Afghan swords, spears, shields, helmets still on the walls, the lances of disbanded Cavalry regiments with threadbare pennants crossed – a very haunted place. The only other occupant was a nice sad chap from Perth, Western Australia, called Stan Hardisty, advising the Himalayan government about apple growing. We were dining together one night, talking about the faults of Indian fruit-tree planting and eating a blazing hot curry, when he put his fork down and said earnestly that they did not use enough spice, which seemed to me odd, as I was on fire. It took me some time to twig that he meant the Indians didn’t plant their trees far enough apart. He had an odd experience last year, he told me. He was born with a hare lip (since operated, but just detectable), and so was his little son. They were going for a walk on Jakko Hill when a she-monkey started jumping up and down and screeching; she had a hare lip too. Making urgent signs for them to wait, she went trapezing up to the top of a deodar, and came hurtling down again, with a tiny monkey in her arms, ALSO with a hare lip, which she held up chattering joyfully.
The town – or village – half Surrey architecture, half baronial – goes on forever, along a sharp ridge, with roofs tumbling away into canyons on either side, dominated by Jakko Hill, with hundreds of mountain ranges whirling away in all directions like a half-created world rising from primordial smoke – then level layers of blue mist, a dazzling sky and on the N Horizon, the snowy peaks of Kulu, Spiti & Lahoul where we have just been climbing, all gleaming & flashing; and the mountains of the Chinese–Tibet border. Viceregal Lodge – now a seldom-used sort of Indian All Souls – rather impressive: four posters floating above the clouds . . . But never a European face in the lanes, everything rather run down – old eyes might well up. In former days, much revolved round amateur theatricals at the charming little Gaiety Theatre, where I found three photographs (1930) of my sister Vanessa [6] playing the lead in The Constant Nymph, still hanging on the wall of the dress circle, the names all neatly inscribed; and in Simla Past and Present [7] there are nice mentions of my mama on the same stage: 1917 Two Sisters, ‘a wordless play in which . . . the beautiful Mrs Fermor held the audience breathless’. I like the wordless actresses and the breathless listeners . . . and again, in 1918, in a review called ‘High Jinks’ where Mrs F sang ‘Oh, Johnny!’ and ‘The Kipling Walk’. I wrote about all this lingering fame to my ma. She was pleased.
There is one old Englishwoman called Hermione Montague – one of four stayers-on from the Raj in Simla – who made Simla Past seem very real. She’s 86 – my mother’s age – looks rather like Diana Cooper, very funny, spry, and charming, a great beauty of yore and still. Stan Hardisty and I asked her to dinner at our joint – candles & blazing fire in the ex-Governor’s huge dining room, bearers in smart puggris. The electricity failed while we were having coffee, so we wandered all over the building, candles in hand. In the ballroom, I asked her: who were the best dancers in her heyday? She said, ‘Well, there was Hamilton Thompson, in the Guides Cavalry – always known as the Black Rabbit, I can’t think why – and the other – the other, my dear, was called Brocas Howell.’ I knew she was going to say that name a second before she uttered it, and chimed in simultaneously. I’d heard lots about this tall, fair, heart breaker of late Edwardian, early Georgian days, from my mother, who must have had a bit of a soft spot for him. Mrs Montague admitted she very nearly eloped with him from Jullanadar in 1913. ‘He was such a charming fellow . . .’ She WAS surprised when I answered simultaneously, lots of wonder and laughter in the shadowy ballroom! She lives in a rambling house on Elysian Hill, full of pictures of dashing relations in kilts and turbans, pig-sticking spears, snaps of herself grasping gymkhana cups, five old Moslem servants, the curtains almost permanently drawn. She gave me a charming watercolour of an officer being carried in a palanquin, for my mother; and five other pictures of a vanished India, for me. You’d have loved her. She was full of ancient gossip straight out of Plain Tales from the Hills, by R. Kipling, a closed book to you, alas.
I scribbled away happily in this mountain eyrie for a month and, a few yards from the shady nook on the lawn where I had set up my table, was a deodar tree with a gravestone at its foot, inscribed on it was: ‘the grave of / Coonah / the faithful dog / and affectionate companion / of Lady Gomm / through 12 years / May 11, 1851’. Six years before the Mutiny.
I descended from the hills, spent a night in the waiting room at Amritsar, surrounded by sleeping figures like the sheeted dead, who resurrected with me to catch the early train to Lahore, over the Pakistan border, the old capital of the Punjab. The 1000 nights and 1 night! A mosque with the biggest courtyard in the world, a huge red Moghul fort, lanes and alleys of sinister romance, and ‘Zam-Zammer’ – the cannon beside which Kim met the Lama. Then to the Sikhs’ golden temple at Amritsar, and on to Amballah. (I was roughly following the trail of Kim & the Lama, in fact, which has long been an obsession.) This was a haunted town, an overgrown ex-cantonment, full of old bikes and cars rotting and rusting in the sun. I spent hours in the English cemetery there, entered through a gothic octagon, rather like those gates near Lismore. All overgrown with fern and brambles, mynahs and parakeets in the peepal branches and creepers everywhere: ‘Our darling Bertie, aged 6, 1842’, ‘Jack and Cissie Rigley, 1870’, ‘Willm Orlebar Harvey, 2nd Lieut. Royal Munster Fusiliers, Feb 1898, aged 22. Je n’oublierai jamais’, ‘Our darling Dody, infant son of Sgt & Mrs Duncan, Black Watch, 1903’, ‘Farrier Major Smith’, ‘Bugle Major Turner’ – I was looking at the cracked and overgrown tomb of the last when an enormous hare jumped out, gave me a look, and loped off into the near-jungle, going to earth behind a tilted obelisk, commemorating the death by cholera of 17 officers, NCOs and men of the D of Albany’s Highlanders in 1840. Meanwhile a troop of about 200 buffaloes was shuffling by beyond the railings in a vast dust cloud, attended by nearly naked drovers, v slowly!
Next, Dehra Dun, and back into the Himalayas at Mussoori, full of forests and the distant snows of Tibet, down through Meerut where one of Martyn Beckett’s wives [8] once lived in the square, and so back to Delhi, to meet Joan, who had taken wing from Athens. We had a v nice lunch with Antonia Fraser’s bro, Michael Pakenham, [9] then off to Gwalior where a marvellous fort scowls on a hilltop and the Maharajah has solid glass furniture, port decanters that circulate in a miniature silver train and a guest-house of the purest Oxford bags, Lalique and ukulele period. Then to the Buddhist remains of Sanchi, then by train to Lucknow, and wandered in the beautiful battered ruin of the Residency; then to Benares, viz. here. I couldn’t resist the carol service in St Mary’s Church this morning (a great change from the Burning Ghat yesterday). Congregation of I8, five of them Europeans: ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’, ‘We Three Kings’ etc. As we came out, an elephant passed with a load of hay, stowed safely sternward out of trunk-reach of yoke fellows, followed by twelve camels similarly laden, but no myrrh or frankincense. There’s a gala dinner tonight! Joan (who sends love) and I suspect it will begin with Father Krishna in a sledge drawn by white oxen.
No more for the moment, except Happy Christmas & New Year to one and all, and tons of fond love as ever from
Paddy
[1] ‘Paradox in the Himalayas’ appeared in the London Magazine, December 1979– January 1980, reprinted in Words of Mercury, pp. 73–82.
[2] Peter Lloyd (1907–2003). Mountaineer and engineer. President of the Alpine Club 1977–80.
[3] Rosemary Peto (1916–98). After being married to 10th Earl of Sandwich 1934– 58, and producing seven children, her friendships were mostly with women. ‘Rather splendid, great guts and dash, rather like an 18th-century admiral painted by Romney or Sir J. Reynolds.’ PLF to DD, 1 February 1992.
[4] Myles Hildyard (1914–2005). Keen amateur historian who lived at Flintham Hall in Nottinghamshire. He was awarded an MC in 1942 for his daring escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in Crete, described in It Is Bliss Here: Letters Home 1939–1945 (2005).
[5] Penelope Chetwode (1910–86). The writer and traveller, an old friend of Joan Leigh Fermor, had grown up in northern India and often returned to the subcontinent. Married the poet John Betjeman in 1933.
[6] Vanessa Leigh Fermor, PLF’s older sister, married Jack Fenton in 1931. They had two children, Francesca and Miles.
[7] Edward John Buck, Simla Past and Present (1904).
[8] Martyn Beckett often sang Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Ladies’ and accompanied himself on the piano.
[9] Michael Pakenham (1943–). Diplomat who was at the British Embassy in New Delhi. Younger brother of the biographer Antonia Fraser (1932–).
22 April 1977
Mani
Darling Debo,
For some reason Joan has given up the Sunday Papers, and I long to see the reviews of Lady Mosley’s book. [1] You couldn’t possibly lend me any you happen to cut out – spare – to be returned at once. I enjoyed it enormously, and I must say your other sister’s too. [2] I wish you would write a book like everyone else, the abstention looks rather ostentatious; and you wouldn’t have to read it; someone else (viz. one) would do that.
Tons of fond love
Paddy
[1] Diana Mosley’s memoirs, A Life of Contrasts (1977).
[2] Jessica Mitford’s second volume of autobiography, A Fine Old Conflict (1977).
16 May 1977
Lismore Castle
Co. Waterford
Darling Paddy,
Re books, chiefly Mitford ones. The awful thing is I’ve thrown away the reviews. I knew it was stupid at the time, sorry. Now there is a new flood re Decca’s effort. Not so rave as I expected, but good enough I suppose.
It’s too long to go into but I shall be thankful when the mags have something else in them. One lovely thing was Private Eye, & Twiggy [1] as ‘Doreen Mitford’ whose dazzling memoirs are about to appear etc etc. She looks exactly like all my sisters rolled into one. So funny because I saw her in the flesh at a film premiere which Cake took us to, and said loudly to Andrew all that, so true.
I went to London for the day last week, Foyle’s lunch for Diana. [2] So really nice to see her fêted. I sat one off an actress called Phyllis Calvert. [3] She leaned across our neighbour & said I know who you are, you’re Mrs Bruce. I had to say I wasn’t in case she got further into the mire, but DO ADMIT because Mrs Bruce is 83 & is famous because she looped the loop last month in a weeny aeroplane. [4]
Later
I’m hurrying home for Martyn Beckett’s Arabs – the bro of the Ruler of Bahrain may want a palace & Martyn has designed a winner, but to encourage him up M asked if he’d like to see a big English house & good gracious he’s said Yes & looms.
A telex came of likes & dislikes. We’ve got to welcome him with Fruit Juice, Nuts & Toffees. Quaint. I must keep Collie’s shadow off his food, & only just stopped the new cook from putting a ham in to soak. I don’t want Martyn to have his head cut off.
Cowslips galore. Made friends with two County Council workmen who are doing a marvellous job of opening up paths round the lodges (for the tourists, oh pathos) & I asked them how they get to work – ‘We BOIK, under our own steam’. More people ought to do that, & happiness might set in.
I quite see about not having to read my own book, but I may have a shot at yours. What a wait.
Keep in deepest. Much love
Debo
[1] Lesley (Twiggy) Hornby (1949–). Like the Mitfords, the 1960s supermodel and actress had blond hair and blue eyes.
[2] A Foyle’s Literary Luncheon was given for the publication of A Life of Contrasts.
[3] Phyllis Calvert (1915–2002). After a career in films, the actress starred mainly on the stage and television.
[4] Mildred Mary Petre (1895–1990). The world-record-breaking aviatrix and motor racer had looped the loop in a two-seater De Havilland Chipmunk.
6 December 1977
Mani
Darling Debo,
’Tis the pen of the sluggard! I wish I hadn’t let all these days pile up before writing. You must think I’m an ingrate; but I won’t compound my misconduct by burdening you with excuses – all of them tip-top, and absolutely watertight! It was lovely coming to stay, and culling those mushrooms and observing the tremendous progress made by you and Collie. I could watch that performance for ever. [1] Also, you were a true saint to appear at both those parties for one’s book. I loved them, and the last one, with all that noise, must have been very surprising for the staff in the Ritz, [2] and very good for them, after endless solemn banquets for the boards of city companies. All this, and too kind words said and written about A T. of G turned the stay into a glorious sojourn, largely thanks to you; and v many thanks, and with knobs on.
We had a lovely drive across France and Italy with Coote in her car – gazing at rose-windows and flying buttresses and eating our heads off at various serious and starry restaurants across Champagne and Burgundy. You’ve no idea how lovely those vineyards looked, with all the leaves russet and golden, clothing the hillsides for miles and miles as geometrically as designs on candlewick counterpanes. We stopped two nights in Grenoble, then crossed the Alps in a downpour after a draughty watershed night in Briançon, and coiled down into the Lombard plain, swallowing pasta by the furlong now, instead of chicken in half-mourning surrounded by button-mushrooms peeping through the beige. In Tuscany we stayed with Ian Whigham, who I don’t think you know, except through my going on about him year after year. He’s a glory, immensely funny and intensely nice. You’d love him. We had a rude shock in Brindisi; while we were having a pre-ferryboat supper in a trattoria, thieves made off with Coote’s car. When we emerged, there it wasn’t. It was found gutted of all its contents – had been up to the roof with things for the house, plus all one’s garments assembled over the years – surrounded by odd socks scattered in the mud, letters whirled there in their haste by the robbers – on a rubbish dump on the outskirts. We hunted in the mire and brambles for hours, gazed on by the unhelpful louts of Brindisi . . . It was a blow. Endless hours were spent in different Carabinieri headquarters, while they typed with one finger. They are proverbially thick-witted. ‘Do you know how to burn a carabiniere’s ear?’ Italians ask each other. ‘Ring him up when he’s ironing his trousers.’ Anyway the car still went, so we came here, and marvellous it is (you know what I usually insert here. Take it as read, but do act on it). I’m hard at work on Vol II. [3] Chastening to think you’ll never read it or its forerunner, but good for one I expect.
When I arrived here, a letter from my sister Vanessa told me that my mother had died suddenly and peacefully five days after I’d set out. Thank heavens I’d been down to Brighton frequently. She’d had two strokes, memory very faulty and another might have reduced her to vegetating, which she would have loathed. We’d had several laughs and she had managed to read my book twice, and was frightfully bucked by my mentioning her learning to fly, in the Introduction. She was nearly 88.
Joan sends love, me too and fond hugs,
Paddy
[1] DD and her Border Collie were practising for a television programme. ‘Her handling of sheep dogs is marvellous to watch; with short whistles and a few syllables she makes him guide, lead, head off, and then halt a flock of 20 sheep. It looks close to sorcery.’ PLF, Daily Telegraph, 31 March 2000.
[2] A party given by Ann Fleming to celebrate the publication of A Time of Gifts.
[3] Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (1986). A sequel to A Time of Gifts, describing the second stage of PLF’s walk.
15 March 1978
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
There is frenzied activity going on here because the dump opens next week & so I’ve got a glorious team of saints setting out the shop [1] & thinking of numbers & doubling them when pricing the GOODS.
Joanna Bigham, Jock Murray’s daughter, is queen of calligraphy & puts the descriptions of the wares on tasteful cream-coloured paper & she has got a marvellous friend who waves her long thin hands over a stall which is covered by me with ghoulish SOUVENIRS & it immediately turns into Fortnum/Dior, so clever. I love shop keeping better than anything (except perhaps pedigree stock).
The other thrill is that the BBC television has done me & Collie working sheep & it’s coming on tonight. I rather dread it because of my awful voice, but the dog didn’t do too badly.
Much love
Debo
[1] DD had opened a gift shop in the Orangery at Chatsworth.
Mani
Darling Debo,
I’ve just written to Andrew, the awful thing is, I thought I already had! I’ve sent it express, jumping at the Persian idea. [1]
Lots of kind letters from total strangers – or people not glimpsed for 50 years – keep on coming in about that book. I’m rather unspoilt about this sort of thing and glory in them. What’s more, Jock writes that it really is selling well, so that’s something to put in one’s pipe and smoke.
It’s pouring with rain here at the moment. Joan is in Athens, and the sea under the cliff makes a noise like angry lions at feeding time.
No more now, darling Debo, except tons of love from
Paddy
[1] In the event, the Foreign Office dissuaded the party from walking in Iran because of the uprising against the Shah. Disappointed, they decided to head for the Pyrenees instead.
3 April 1978
Lismore Castle
Co. Waterford
Darling Paddy,
I had to be Alan [1] this year & bring the car & the luggage & the dogs. All went smoothly. It’s years since I’ve done it & I note progress has been made since one drove up two planks at all angles to get on the foul boat to Mull. Lady Redesdale used to take a jerking rush. It was a miracle she didn’t land in the deep. (And her car had a board out of the floor so one saw the road rushing by under one’s feet.)
One jolly well knows one’s in Ireland when the signposts say things like Two Mile Borris, Horse & Jockey, Galloping Green & Ovens. It doesn’t smell like it used to. Dublin doesn’t anyway. I suppose peat has been out for years. There are some TERRIBLE new buildings there. Nice ones with things like Liverpool Sack Hire Company written on them look as if they’re for the high jump. How I hate change.
This place is much the same. Someone told me a woman had committed suicide by walking all the way to the river.
The Irish Times has got a new trick of saving everything by reprinting several pages of itself of 50 years ago, & except for a bit about Lindbergh & an inflammatory speech of W Churchill’s it’s v hard to tell when those pages end & 1978 begins.
Much love
Debo
No wonder people write to you about your book. I keep glancing & see their point.
[1] Alan Shimwell (1933–). A long-time chauffeur at Chatsworth who also loaded for DD out shooting.
14 July 1994 [1]
Mani
Darling Debo,
Don’t groan! The enclosed is just a tidier, slightly topped and tailed version of our Spanish journey, recently inflicted on Andrew. But I was so horrified, picking up a carbon copy of it – the loops, erasions, and general mess – that I sorted it out a bit, to make it more presentable. I don’t know why, because it will only be scrutinised by some archivist in 100 years time; so do please destroy the first illegible screed, and replace it by this fairer copy, all for the sake of this greybeard yet unborn.
But before stowing it away, look at the passage marked*, for pathos. Fond love,
Paddy
TRAVELS WITH ANDREW IN THE PYRENEES
Saturday 16 September 1978
Begun at Gavarnie
Hautes Pyrénées
Darling Joan,
I caught the plane from Athens to Marseilles, arrived at three in the afternoon, wandered about the Vieux Port, caught the Toulouse train at 8 and dashed to the restaurant car full of hope and greed, only to find a cheerless cafeteria as bad as British Rail – cellophane snaquettes on a TV tray with elfin plastic cutlery – and munched miserably, the only mug in the place, complaining bitterly to the nice waiter, who hated it too.
Suddenly, between Arles and Tarascon, it started to get mysteriously dark: it wasn’t only the cuisine that was awry: the moon over the Alpilles was vanishing fast until there was only a sliver of it left, and then none at all. ‘Et la lune fout le camp, par-dessus le marché,’ [2] the waiter croaked in the dark. It was a total eclipse neither of us had heard anything about, and rather eerie.
After the Mani, Provence and Languedoc looked very green and beautiful in the recovered moonlight and I slumbered on until the kind waiter shook me awake at Toulouse – ‘Vite! Vite! N’y a que quatre minutes!’ [3] We galloped to a faraway platform with all my stuff, I jumped in and snoozed till we hissed into Pau at 3.30. Found a taxi at last, which took me five miles beyond Pau to the frightful NOVOTEL which is worse even than its name, a hideous and heartless complex in a wasteland with nothing in sight except a giant supermarket, a clump of petrol-pumps and a flyover. (It was the RV Andrew had wired to Athens, in all innocence.) Slept till 10 a.m. and found an army of German businessmen arriving for an industrial fair. So I started the trudge to Pau – no taxis, and no buses on Sunday – but got a lift on a truck and spent a solitary and happy day mooching about the town. A lot of it whispers of Victorian and Edwardian villeggiatura and English libraries and a vanished foxhunt, all gone now except for winter steeplechases. But there is a handsome spiked and towered castle above the tree-shaded Cade de Pau (a tributary of the Adour) full of tapestries and armour and memories of Marguerite de Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret and, above all, of Henri IV, who was born in one of the castle rooms and rocked in a cradle made of half a turtle’s shell trimmed with silver and gold, nestling now under a panoply of fleurs-de-lys. Bernadotte, the French revolutionary general, Napoleonic marshal and, finally, Charles XIV of Sweden, was born just down the lane.
For lunch I had one of the trout that abound in these mountains and a sort of cassoulet – very good – washed down with Jurançon, a delicious dry white wine from hereabouts, which has irrigated and illuminated all our travels; at night, red and roughish Corbières, from a hundred miles or so further east, takes over. Then to the Béarn museum – I tried dropping the final N of Béarn, like Madame de Guermantes, [4] but met only blank looks, as though I were a bit wanting – and pondered the stuffed bears there, which they say are extinct, and querns, flails, sickles and rakes; then moved on to the rather charming Musée des Beaux Arts. I made friends with the lady of the Roncevaux Hôtel (half the price of our miserable shelter) which I slunk back to after dinner and a Fernandel film. Spent more of Monday buying odds and ends – a compass, a small rucksack – then back just as Andrew burst into the NOVOTEL in tearing spirits, bringing the good news that Xan was arriving from Spain next morning. So we were at the station at 10 a.m., only to learn that part of the tunnel had fallen in (just missing Xan), and he only arrived at noon. We feasted joyfully and caught the late-afternoon train to Tarbes and Lourdes, then on to Luz-Saint-Sauveur.
In Pau the weather had been perfect, and has continued so, but a thin haze had veiled all the Pyrenees, an excellent omen; they say clarity presages rain. We were soon zooming along deep wooded gorges with spikes and beech-forests turning russet above streams and waterfalls, reaching the little town of Gavarnie as the sun was setting. (It seems the caricaturist Paul Gavarni took his sobriquet from here. It became our base on Renée’s advice. It was the Feddens’ HQ long ago, and she had given Andrew lots of old marked maps from the time when Robin was preparing The Enchanted Mountains.) [5] It’s much more of a holiday resort than it was then, but it is pervaded just now by a valedictory fin-de-saison mood unnaturally prolonged by the miraculous weather. The only snag was the unobtainability of pack-animals. Troops of tourists amble and tittup up the valley and the beasts’ owners charge the earth, so what hopes. The Cirque de Gavarnie is an amazing three-quarters of a circle piled on three rock-bands in succeeding tiers with wonderful echoes and a waterfall that beats Sumatra. My ice axe was pinched in five minutes. Also, that lovely spiral-ash-plant, bought at Kenilworth cattle show.*
We climbed up to the Cirque along the main valley next day, and back in a wide sweep through the forests; there was a slightly bolder march to the north next day and we got back in the gloaming. The third departure was upstream, threading valleys with a final haul over slippery acres of scree to the Pass of Boucharo where we had planned to spend the night, but missed the hut, so, down again and up next day as far as we could get by car to the same col. (I had meant to make a solitary higher loop through rocks and small glaciers to a famous upper pass called the Brèche de Roland, but the driver advised against it and I’m glad he did as night would have fallen, and it’s rather dangerous.) From the col where the unmarked border runs, we plunged down the Spanish slope into the old Kingdom of Aragon: it was very exciting, scree at first, then zigzag paths, then green bowls of Alpine meadow, sometimes with cattle grazing and sometimes with chestnut horses; then through wonderful woods of pine and forests of beech going gold and red, and whitebeam, juniper and giant box, everywhere full of birds, choughs wheeling in the pass, eagles high overhead and, on a low rock, a huge goshawk perched, as in Japanese pictures. On a steep slope we ran into a cheerful Cockney chap from Uckfield in Sussex, covered in tattooing, studying birds, and heading north to pick grapes in the Bordeaux country for fifty quid a week, a bed and all found.
This breakneck descent brought us into an astonishing valley, the bed of the Ara River, crossed by an old rainbow-shaped bridge next to a ruined Romanesque church at Bujaruelo, and a rough inn with chorizo, black beans and wine like the purple ink my mother sometimes wrote in, and forest people with Aragonese smugglers’ faces. We slept under the beech trees and set off downhill, dropping into the Ordesa Canyon, where huge mountains towered on either side. Below these overshadowing woods a deep gorge of green glacier-water rushed through troughs of twisting rock and deep cliffs and rapids. Then, suddenly, our path was full of turmoil; silver-grey cows with fawn and cream patches, furry cloven ears and sulky white muzzles, were all in an awkward muddle, lowing for strayed calves and climbing on each others’ backs along the narrow path: massed mooing, horns clashing and bells clanking, goaded by hoarse drovers, the whole steep place was full of uproar and echoes.
They were coming down from their summer to their winter pastures. We struggled through them and found a new set of drovers hanging about round another old bridge called the Puente de los Navarros: hollow-cheeked men padding about in espadrilles with flat berets tilted over their eyes, and armed with long goads. ‘¿Had we seen the herds?’ they all shouted in chorus: ‘¿Los ganados?’ The dust and the noise emerging from the canyon soon unpuckered their brows.
Beyond the bridge the country suddenly opened in a great amphitheatre of mountains like the Bad Lands of Arizona and we advanced through a dream-like late afternoon down a gentle valley with haymakers raking and spreading the hay in newly-shorn water meadows where the sun turned the poplars to flames. We came on a wedding feast where all were blotto and were given wine under a plane tree while we watched them dancing slow and ceremonious jotas of great beauty.
We trudged on to Torla, which juts over trees and the river on a buttress of rock. There was a grim windowless church with a tall belfry in a maze of cobbled lanes. One or two arched doorways had escutcheons over them, all the houses were roofed with slabs of schist, as in Thrace, and everything smelt of hay, smoke and cows. The herds we passed in the canyon soon flooded into the village, houses and yards and fields filled up with them, and the rest bumped on to the next day’s fair at Broto, a few miles further down, to be whisked off to Huesca and Saragossa. We slept at the small and only hostel called the Ballarín in a room giving on a steep fall of stone roofs and chimneys. The barkeeper had a very distinctively marked dog, which he said was English like us. ‘¿What kind?’ ‘¡It’s called a Bay-arg-lay!’ he told us: a beagle . . .
In the morning we climbed about the steep left side of the Ara, beginning with lovely fields and hazel-woods, then beech and pine-forests with that tremendous circle of mountains to the east and the gap above them – the Brèche de Roland – which I long to cross one day. It was terrifically hot and we slept high in the woods for an hour after eating the lunch we had brought in our pockets, plunging down to the river in the late afternoon where another wonderfully hoary rainbow bridge spanned a deep and reedy stream which, as it was dammed a little further down with enormous boulders, was quite still. I dived in, shot twenty feet to the bottom, then to the top again, transformed into an ice-cube. We went back to the town with the returning local herds, stuffing with blackberries all the way, then to bed early with an alarm clock borrowed from the hotel people. The Spaniards are marvellous with their directness, their manners, their lack of graspingness and their concern.
We had to wake a butcher at 5.30. There was brilliant starlight above the lanes and he drove us in his van up the valley in the dark past the Bridge of Navarros to the little inn and the ruined church at the head of the valley where we had had luncheon before. The butcher – Señor Bun – woke his innkeeper brother, who lit a fire under a giant horn chimney hung with sooty and cobwebbed hams, and cooked us breakfast. It was only beginning to get light when we crossed the bridge and started up through the woods. Andrew had a moment of discouragement on the steep slope and thought of returning in order not to delay us, but we cheered him up; spirits revived, we reached the watershed at the Port de Boucharo, then strolled back into France in a cloud of choughs. It was downhill all the way through canyons and meadows and flocks and herds till the Cirque de Gavarnie was all round us again. The little Hôtel Acazou greeted us like homing prodigals. They were a charming lot; they said they were much cheered by the high spirits, laughter and noise that came from our table of three, compared to some of the gloomy blighters they often got.
On the morrow we got a lift to Tarbes – stowaways almost – in a charabanc full of hilarious Walloon pilgrims heading for Lourdes, all of them pretty tight. They abandoned their language now and then to crack improper jokes in French, making The Canterbury Tales immediately real. Thence by train to Bagnères-de-Luchon. (We started in Béarn at Pau, and at Gavarnie, went into Bigorre; then into Aragon at Torla, and now I think we are in Comminges, not far from the famous Abbey of St Bertrand, which I’ve always longed to see. Alas, it’s out of range.)
The little spa Luchon is now desultorily closing for the season and we spent a delightful idle day. Unfortunately the mineral baths were already shut, but we made friends with the nice scholarly fogey who was curator of the museum and we planned the morrow’s assault over a giant relief-map. There were pictures of all the well-known visitors since early last century and of the izards, the wild goats of the Pyrenees, and of ibexes looking very like Cretan agrímia; bird-life too – not only stuffed eagles, lammergeiers, wrens, ospreys, and reed-buntings, but Liane de Pougy, Émilienne d’Alençon, Cléo de Mérode and La Belle Otéro, untinted and smiling oleographs, also stuffed.
Luckily next day la chasse à l’isard was forbidden – ‘Ces gens-là tirent sur tout ce qui bouge’, [6] the curator had warned us. We took a taxi in the dark as far as we could to the beginning of the climb; to the point, that is, where a landslide had recently tipped the road halfway down the mountain, and crept round the top of the gap, flashing our torches as it was still pitch dark; then followed the road for a few miles to the Hospice de France, shut up now, but thriving until the land slid: the lineal descendant of one of the chief staging points kept by the Templars and the Hospitallers for medieval pilgrims crossing the Pyrenees to Montserrat and St James of Compostela. It was daylight when we got there, and an enormous barrier of mountain loomed; meadows and woods at first, then steeper and steeper rocks and shale and scree, ending in sharp saw-teeth, leaning crags and sweeps of snow. We scaled this ascent, delighted to see how much better acclimatized we were. Andrew, blessing his stars he hadn’t chucked at Bouchero, now treads the ling like a buck in spring.
All this was on the cold and shadowy side of the range: we were among bracken and moss and wild grasses white with rime; and blasts swept down through the gaps; and when we got to what seemed the final ledge, a new, grey, forbidding and unravelled palisade towered above. We wound and climbed through a chaos of rocks and passed les Boums du Port: they are four deep tarns of dark water reflecting almost sheer precipices; chimneys, landslides and white streaks of waterfall followed, until a final interminable-seeming zigzag carried us through a cleft about three yards wide between two soaring massifs. Nearly blown off our feet, we ran through it into blazing sunlight and Spain and flung ourselves down on the hot rocks. Eating apples, we gazed down into a wilderness of forests and rocks and meadows going down in layers and many brooks and out across a great ravine to Mount Aneto, the highest peak in the Pyrenees, a jagged spike above glittering snow-fields ribbed with fragments which have rolled down into the chasms, gathering snow like ammonites. They are the famous peaks of Maladeta and Fourcanada and beyond them lay Robin’s Encantats. The other side of this barrier, which joins the Pic de la Mine via the Col del Infierno, lay the mountains of Catalonia, which had been progressively revealed on the way up, range jutting beyond range, row after row threading south-east, showing pale and paper-thin and at last not to be discerned from a ghostly film of cloud. (Somewhere beyond, to the east, lie Montaillou and Monségur and the ghosts of hundreds of Albigensians, and the shade of Esclarmonde de Foix, all burnt; and the little state of Andorra.)
But our side of this palisade was still Aragon. We had broken into it when we ran through that narrow slot, the Port de Bénasque – Vénasque – and, on the other side of the valley, we could see another religious outpost, the Refuge of Rencluse. Circular tarns were scattered about this chaos, among them one of the seven sources of the Garonne! The water comes out of a rock, gathers in a pool, then goes underground. Someone discovered this by pouring in tons of red liquid; everyone for miles was on the lookout for its re-emergence and, after a long subterranean journey, it duly came out, far away, and proved the link. Nothing but peaks were in sight, except the valley winding below. We went down through steep grazing land with autumn crocuses and harebells, then followed the valley of the Esera through endless-seeming woods until we came to the little town of Bénasque. The inhabitants talk a mixture of Aragonese Spanish and Pyrenean French – ‘Bigorrois’ here, I think – and Catalan, a patois which few strangers can follow. They were great smugglers once, perhaps they still are. There’s a lovely Romanesque church and some rather fine hidalgo-ish houses with broken pediments and corner towers. It had been a terrific day so we went to bed after masses of garbanzos and jars of purple ink.
Again we were driven up a valley in the dark, did half of yesterday’s journey backwards in record time, then dropped into the tremendous descent by defecting down a forest road from the Hospice, through huge beech woods with rushing streams; then, at last, after legging it nearly all the way to Luchon like three phantoms in a muck-sweat, we found a small wayside bistro and ate and drank ourselves to a standstill. That night we had a final trout and Jurançon, and lots of delicious Corbières. It was the last day of September, with a railway strike threatened the day after, so we had to make a break for it.
Andrew was to fly back to London next morning, just after Xan and I had pushed on into Spain by rail. He came to see us off and spotted a headline somebody was reading in the Pau Station Bar: ‘Pope John-Paul dies in the night after a reign of only three weeks.’
Bright pink from the sun, he waved his check cloth-cap as we pulled out and we flourished frantically back. He had enjoyed it tremendously and so had we. He took my big rucksack back to London and now I’m as light as Xan who sensibly had only a small knapsack for the whole fortnight.
It was now Sept 29. We went over the Somport Pass, changed to a bus because of the stove-in tunnel, crossed the Spanish frontier at Canfranc and headed west through some peculiar Meteora-like Aragonese mountains to Huesca, then on through the falling dusk with a Spanish middle-class family clattering as loud as ducks all the way to Saragossa. Here we found a tiny room with two beds of different heights, one almost under the other; and after eating some quails in a nice cellar, tried to sleep but failed, owing to a room next door full of almost non-stop gas-bags who all snored fortissimo when they weren’t arguing, and left, long before dawn, with shrieks and laughter, lugging what sounded like kegs and firearms.
We flew to Madrid and spent a long morning in the Prado; drinks in the Café Jijón; then, after a vain search for your sucking-pig restaurant, we had a delicious luncheon in a vaulted place hard by. Doing a bust, we took sleepers – vital after last night – and our train crossed the whole of Spain, bringing us to Ronda at eight in the morning. We found a taxi and tiptoed in as Magouche was still asleep and so was Essie, her mother (they hadn’t got Xan’s message). The house is absolutely charming and totally run-in. It’s only four years since we all inaugurated it. Essie is the very straight upright-sitting widow of an Admiral who must have been very pretty (not the A.), a little vague and confusing in conversation and extremely nice. Magouche is very kind to her. She (M) has a heart of gold and is awfully good with Xan’s once-in-a-blue-moon snicketty-snaque utterances.
We went for a picnic and a very long walk in the hills under a blazing Mexican-looking sky that reminded me of Peru. We looked across the sea to the Pillars of Hercules and Gibraltar and the Atlas Mountains. Tomorrow to Málaga to see Essie off to Biarritz and a grand specialist, then New York. Our triune plan is to walk for a few days in the Gerald Brenan country, beyond Granada in the Alpujarras, before I go to Tramores just before Janetta gets back; then Blighty on the 23rd or 24th.
I’ve read lots of Xan’s Wind-Book [7] and it’s absolutely tip-top. He’s totally emballé by it, charts are everywhere, and excitement reigns, which I beg him to let infectiously rip. I bet it’ll be a great success.
Every night, when lamps are lit, green baize is spread on the table by the fire and out come the Word-Making-and-Word-Taking squares you cut out. They are marvellous and treasured, and all are loud in praise of your differentiations between M’s and upside down W’s and particularly by the short line along the top of the Z’s, making it impossible to muddle them with N’s lying on their sides.
Love from all here and lots more from me.
Paddy
[1] Although out of sequence, PLF’s letter to DD has been included at this point because of its enclosure: an account of the Pyrenean walk, which was based on a letter PLF wrote to his wife at the time.
[2] ‘And the moon has buggered off on top of everything else.’
[3] ‘Quick! Quick! You’ve got only four minutes!’
[4] In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust’s narrator was taught as a child that it was incorrect to pronounce the ‘n’ in ‘Tarn’ and ‘Béarn’.
[5] Robin Fedden, The Enchanted Mountains: A Quest in the Pyrenees (1962).
[6] ‘Those people shoot at anything that moves.’
[7] First published in German as Das Buch der Winde (1988), and in English as Aeolus Displayed, A Book of the Winds (1991). PLF considered it Fielding’s best work.
[Postcard]
Mani
Did you know that Miss Mitford (author of Our Village) [1] could write and read at the age of three? Also that, at the age of ten, she won £20,000 in a lottery, by insisting on the number 2224, which added up to her age?
A thought for the day.
P.
[1] Mary Russell Mitford, who descended from the same Northumberland family as DD, published her sketches of village life between 1824 and 1832.
1 February 1979
c/o Heck [1]
Lockinge Manor
Wantage
Darling Paddy,
Alright then, I did know about Miss Mitford’s nice win on the lottery. But I freely admit I didn’t know why she chose the numbers. So you ½ win.
(Note. When the French Lady wrote Highland Fling [2] Lady Redesdale suggested it should be called Our Vile Age (see?) but Evie had just done Vile Bodies so it wasn’t.)
Andrew says he is going to you for a day or two at the start of his walk. [3] My word, it would be a comfort if you set off with him, even if you can only manage a fortnight.
Julian Jebb plans to do a documentary film for telly on the Fr Lady. I do wonder if it’s a good plan. We’ve sort of said yes & now I’m getting cold feet. The letters at home are DYNAMITE, can’t let anyone just dig in at them in case, you know, & I’m too lazy & TOO BUSY to do them myself but I can see I shall have to.
Much love
Debo
[1] Hester (Heck) Loyd (1920–2001). An old friend of DD. Married Major Guy Knight in 1944.
[2] Nancy Mitford’s first novel, published in 1931.
[3] Andrew Devonshire’s plan to walk through southern France into Spain the following spring did not materialise.
22 February 1979
Mani
IN TEARING HASTE
Darling Debo,
I do wish I could kick off with Andrew for the first bit, but I don’t see how on earth I can.
I’ve already put off going to Petra with Joan, which I had promised to do year after year; and I’ve just managed to get going on the bit of the book which my muse had been refusing for months, as a pony refuses a fence . . . But I will try and join him later on for a bit.
I’ve just got a boast-card from Daph, depicting a Cranach portrait of a cove called Duke Heinrich the Pious [1] – doesn’t look very pious to me – a terrible ruffian in slashed doublet and hose, a feathered hat at a tilt, sword half drawn, a dreadful scowl and a lurcher crunching some ugly trove at his feet, which she says looks exactly like me. I’m very concerned . . .
Tons of love, darling Debo, and more later
Paddy
[1] Daphne Fielding had sent PLF a postcard from the Old Masters Picture Gallery, Dresden, of a portrait by Cranach the Elder of Henry IV the Pious, Duke of Saxony (1473–1541).
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
What are:
Heart of Oak
Hue & Cry
Dan’s Mistake?
What is:
Tender & True
Spartan Sleeper
Now then. Your turn to be shown up. I shall be furioso if you know.
Much love
Debo
24 February 1979
Mani
Darling Debo,
Heart of Oak is our ship.
Hue and Cry are our men (i.e. either the late Ld Sefton, or Prof. Trevor-Roper in a famous hotel off Piccadilly). [1]
Dan’s Mistake was ever getting into that den in the first place.
Tender and True is the sirloin that cannot tell a lie, even under your piercing gaze in the shop.
Spartan Sleeper is a yoga-practising Greek peacefully snoring on his usual spike-mattress.
Would Ruff’s Guide to the Turf (easy to lose your way in a club that size) have helped me to the right answers? Do tell. Joan and I have been scratching our heads like mad.
Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] Both men’s first name was Hugh. The famous hotel off Piccadilly was the Criterion.
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Now then. I LOVED your answers to my questions. Very clever, but wrong, one & all.
Hue & Cry, Heart of Oak, Dan’s Mistake AND Queen of the Nile (which I forgot to put) are all GOOSEBERRIES.
Spartan Sleeper is an ONION.
Tender & True is a PARSNIP. And no doubt you wot of an excellent spud called Pink Fir Apple.
Have you read a book about the Sitwells called Façades by one John Pearson? [1] It is completely fascinating. I read it on orders from Uncle Harold [2] who suggests that this Pearson does the history of the Cavendish family. So I’m going to meet him next week to see what he smells like. The only trouble is that he wrote the life of Ian Fleming & I remember Ann loathing him, or would she have loathed anyone who set about that? I haven’t asked her, as I don’t want to be put against him yet. You might think the history of the Cav family is dim in the extreme but the funny thing is it isn’t. Every generation produced one or two amazing people, i.e. Henry Cavendish of laboratory fame couldn’t order a suit except when the moon was in a certain state, & some of the dukes were extremely rum & noteworthy.
Mark Amory is nearing the end of editing Evie’s letters, [3] really Nancy’s to him are marvellously good. ‘Now Evelyn I am not, repeat not, a communist. I am a Christian, early if you like.’ And he ends one ‘and if by bugger you mean de-camp’ – almost too sharp, eh.
Much love
Debo
I’m going to be 59 in a minute. How can I have lived so long. Sophy is 22 tomorrow. Emma will be 36 next week.
[1] John Pearson (1930–). Author whose books include Façades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (1978), The Life of Ian Fleming (1966) and The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins (1972).
[2] After retiring from politics in 1964, Harold Macmillan took up the chairman-ship of his family’s publishing house, Macmillan Publishers.
[3] The Letters of Evelyn Waugh.
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Since I know you will see the point of the gooseberry names, I have discovered a book called The Anatomy of Dessert, most beautiful print on ditto paper, written by one Bunyard, limited edition of 1000 signed by the author, 1923. But do you think they sold 1000? OH DEAR, if not.
The chapter on gooseberries is CLASSIC. Apparently ‘it owes its development to the Midland workers who raised new seedlings for competition and so was the Big Gooseberry born in Macclesfield & other industrial towns’. Lord Brougham, Lord Derby, Lord Eldon, Ranter, Bribery, Queen Caroline, Prince Regent (dull claret red, very large oval), Glenton Green, Ocean, Lander, White Swan (slightly hirsute), Mitre, Careless, Antagonist, and in the Hairy Yellow class, Criterion, Gunner & Caterina. Red and very hairy are Ironmonger & Beauty.
It says ‘the Gooseberry is, of course, the fruit par excellence for ambulant consumption. Freedom of the bush should be given to all visitors.’ Do admit.
This is really a gooseberry letter so will leave it at that. Much love
Debo
This came, usual thing asking for money. Poor Archbishops, I thought, feeling the pinch. But it turned out to be monkeys.
Athens
WRITTEN WITH ONE FOOT IN THE STIRRUP
Darling Debo,
I’m so sorry being such a rotten correspondent, just when you’ve been such a faithful and funny one. I loved all the names.
This is written in a bit of a hurry, chez Barbara and Niko Ghika in Athens, on a sort of shady roof garden embowered with exotic plants and in the distance I can hear the rhythm of communist choruses, baying like a chorus of trained jackals about a mile away to celebrate their favourite day. Give me maypoles.
Last Sunday night – Easter Sunday in the Orthodox Church – our car was blown sky high with an explosive charge and a length of fuse, with a red poster with hammers and sickles. I think they’d got the feast confused with Ascension Day. I think it’s all part of an attempt of ours to erect a modest bronze plaque to Fallen Comrades in Crete. It was to go up at a certain Abbey in the island. The Abbot and monks all consented, there was a feast to honour the decision, but a week later, it was withdrawn: four men in cars had turned up, Communists from Heraklion, and frightened and threatened the monks. The same thing happened at another monastery, where our submarines used to surface on the same coast. Then a splendid village said they’d have it, and shoot anyone who tried to disturb it; and a few days later, BANG! at our doorstep. There is quite a powerful Comm. Party in Eastern Crete. The west is all O.K.: shows what a minority can do. The amount of telephone calls and telegrams from Cretan pals and Greeks in general – indignation, sympathy, etc, has made it almost worthwhile. But not QUITE, as insurance pays nought for Malicious Acts. Bugger them all.
Tons of fond love from
Paddy
(as from White’s)
Sevenhampton Place [1]
Swindon
Darling Debo,
It has been an orgy of dictionary game here, with croquet by day, and I thought I was doing rather well, when up turns a young shaver called Bannister – son of Sir Roger Bannister the Miler [2] – six-foot-six tall, bashes them through the hoops almost without looking and strides on to the next with the pace of the Long-Legged Scissor Man, leaving one rather pensive and humbled.
Tons of fond love from
Paddy
[1] PLF was staying with Ann Fleming.
[2] Roger Bannister (1929–). The first man to run a mile in under four minutes.
11 September 1979
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Did I tell you I’ve been commissioned to write a book. [1] What madness, but I’ve gone & signed a contract so there we are. V trusting of the commissioners, they think because my sisters can write I can too. Ha ha. They will be sorry soon.
Much love
Debo
[1] The House: A Portrait of Chatsworth. An account of restoration work undertaken by the Devonshires, together with excerpts from the 6th Duke of Devonshire’s Handbook (1844). ‘For one heady week it topped the Best Seller List in the Evening Standard.’ (DD)
Mani
Darling Debo,
We’ve got two owls here, very close to the house, who hoot like anything just beyond the sort of arched gallery where we dine. I’m very jealous of Joan, because she’s an ace at imitating them through clenched palms, as I bet you can too. I can’t do it, like being unable to whistle, because of two front teeth being too far apart, I suppose. Anyway, when Joan breaks into their dialogue, there is an amazed or embarrassed silence, then bit by bit they answer, until an enthusiastic three-sided exchange begins, which it is hard to break off. I can hear them now (8.30 p.m.).
I wish I could whistle like you, you’re the most skilful whistler I’ve ever met. I think of you at the wheel, driving medium fast, and whistling ‘There may be trouble ahead, let’s face the music and dance’. Miraculous.
No more now, darling Debo, except tons of fond love from
Paddy
I say! Great news about the book. You’ll do something that’s a bloody marvel, mark my words.