18 January 1980
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I was in foul London, dropped into WH Smith to buy the sort of mags which are my drug & there facing me on a shelf called BEST SELLERS was Shanks’s Europe [1] in paperback. Oh good. I bought one (imagine) because it’s so light & handy & you never know I might have a read. You would have been so pleased to see the display. What a thrill.
Last night I went to AN OPERA. The second in my life. It was a plan of Andrew’s in aid of the Putney Hosp for Incurables & good Cake came & turned it into a gala. One forgets between seeing her what a star she is & what incredible & wicked charm she has got. The Swiss conductor panicked & struck up ‘God Save The Queen’ when she was still walking round the back to get to her box & I heard her say Oh God & she flew the last few steps dropping her old white fox cape & didn’t turn round to see what would happen to it.
She does a wonderful sort of super shooting-lunch dinner, brought from Clarence House & handed round by her beautiful footmen in royal kit, between the acts; the cheeriest thing out. We were a bit stumped though because when she’d gone home we had to go to the Savoy & have a second grand dinner with the organisers. It was a bit of a test forcing down sole after Cake’s richest choc mousse. It’s tough at the top, I can tell you.
Now I shan’t go away again for ages because I must sit & work. The Editor [2] came (you didn’t know I’d got one did you, well I have) & looked over my prep & didn’t throw it in the fire which I thought he certainly would but told me to get on with it so I must because it’s haunting me.
What I can’t think is how people start books so I looked at two when I was staying at the Wife’s. One was Whyte-Melville & began something like ‘That’s a natty suit’ & the other was a thriller which began ‘The body lay face down on the track.’ Won’t do, do admit. So I looked at yours. ‘A splendid afternoon to set out.’ NO GOOD TO ME. Bother. Do send some suggestions.
Do you know about the museum in Austin, Texas? [3] Well, don’t throw anything away, doesn’t matter what, they’ll have the lot. They’ve got all Evie’s stuff, & Osbert [Sitwell]’s, & letters saying things like ‘Arriving on the 2.14 on Saturday so much looking forward to seeing you’ are put under glass and revered. I saw five big cardboard boxes with MITFORD written on them, asked to see, & they were Decca’s notes for her two most boring books (Trial of Dr Spock and Kind & Usual Punishment), big sheets of foolscap saying Call Helen 8 a.m. Well, really. So when I talked to her I said I’d seen them. She said she was about to throw them when Austin offered her $10,000 dollars for the twaddle. Amazing, eh.
Much love
Debo
I’ve found some good quotes in the D of Portland’s bumper book, [4] but the best is good old Hobbes who said ‘Reading is a pernicious habit, it destroys all originality of thought.’
[1] DD’s name for A Time of Gifts, from the Scottish expression ‘to use Shanks’s mare’ meaning to walk.
[2] Richard Garnett (1923–). DD’s editor at Macmillan.
[3] The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which holds an important collection of manuscripts of twentieth-century British, American and French authors.
[4] William Cavendish-Bentinck, 6th Duke of Portland, Men, Women and Things (1937). ‘A too discreet memory of what must have been a very charming man, married to the famous Winnie, whom I saw aged ninety-something, dressed in pale pink tulle, smothered in jewels and made-up to the eyes, at a Court ball – a sight never to be forgotten.’ (DD)
[February 1980]
Mani
Darling Debo,
Here’s a beginning. ‘Chap I. Our crest is a mouldywarp and you may well ask what that is as I did, well, it’s a mole and a more unsuitable emblem for my sisters and me it would be hard to hit on.’ [1] I’ll do better in my next.
Thank you so much for your letter, it’s just what I needed, packed with splendid stuff and many laughs, so you’ve nothing whatever to bother about, re the book, I mean. Just let it rip. Now. If you want a pal to go through the thing during or afterwards, I’m your man. You probably want nothing of the sort; but I always let a stern though friendly eye peer through it, usually Joan’s, sometimes several, just to get the full works. The thing is, they’ve got to be fond of one, know what one likes and give one a touch on the shoulder or elbow when one inadvertently puts something down one would regret rather. I get so close to the stuff (my own, I mean) that my eye and ear get a bit out and a detached loved one can be a godsend. I don’t mean grammar or style or syntax because the publishers will do all that and, anyway, in your case, the less it’s mucked about with the better.
The great thing about our Spanish trip was the actual journeys in late December. Xan and Magouche met us at Madrid, and we drove to the Escurial, and stayed there in the bracing cold. Have you seen it? Bleak and splendid is the word, half palace, half monastery, all granite, full of dead kings, with a bell that goes on vibrating half a minute after each toll. Next night at Ávila, the coldest town in Spain (but marvellous), it looks like one’s childhood idea of Troy: a city entirely girdled by a battlemented city wall, the green hill now white under snow, with seven great gates and 88 towers. We huddled rugged-up over the charcoal brazier of our inn, sipping toddy and reading out loud. Then a swoop south to the huge Abbey of Guadeloupe, where a Black Virgin is enthroned above a high altar which is a haunt of smells and lace. Their abode above Ronda has become delightful, with thick walls, blazing fires, mountains all round, twenty minutes’ walk to the amazing town, where a wonder-bridge spans a deep chasm full of swallows. One day we climbed up into some mountains and looked down on Gibraltar and the Mediterranean & the Atlantic hanging in space, with Jebel Musa, the other pillar of Hercules, on the Moroccan side; then the Riff Mountains; then the faraway glitter of the Atlas . . .
In mid-Jan, we set off for Portugal, driving through the cork woods of Estremadura where black swine rootled everywhere, dossing down at Évora; we made a dash to the Atlantic coast at Setúbal (where the B.V. Mary rides on an elephant on one of the church walls), and across the Tagus into stately Lisbon. Next stops, Cascais, Cintra and Nazaré (back on the coast) eating prawns by the bucketful and crabs encased in shells so huge and hard they give you weighty mallets to break in like a burglar. The beautiful old city of Coimbra next, with beautiful baroque library, on through castles and abbeys – especially Alcobaça, where a trout-stream dashes bubbling through the gigantic kitchen, and Batalha, where a Plantagenet Princess Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt and mother of Henry the Navigator, lies in a splendid tomb. From Oporto we wandered upstream beside the Douro, sipping at many romantic quintas; then plunged on north, through Braga, and over the Spanish border again into the Galician mountains, to Santiago de Compostela, a maze of cathedrals, monasteries and lanes, filled, on the feast of St James the Apostle, who ended up here, with swarms of pilgrims. The place is then wreathed in smoke from a censer several yards wide, which is perilously swung by teams on the great Feast Days.
We broke up here, after a wonder trip. They drove on to León, and Salamanca and then south. Joan and I flew to Madrid and stopped a night in Barcelona, one of my favourite towns in the world.
There’s a grand hotel here called the Oriente, where they gave us an enormous suite rather cheap. We soon saw why: no lights were plugged in, rooms were choked with half-a-dozen towel-horses and hat stands, the corners of the vast bedrooms were dark with cobwebs and mousetraps ready-set, and crumbled biscuit. We ended a lovely exploring day with a feast on the Ramblas (the main street), and I saw Joan back and decided to continue my research, so had a brandy and water in a lane in which every house was a bar. The kind host stood me this. My next port of call was an Andalusian joint – I was drawn in by the sound of clapping, and ordered a beer at the bar, watching a party of twenty at another table, some of them gipsies, strumming guitars, singing, clapping in rhythm, and occasionally getting up to twirl and stamp out a seguidilla, malagueña or similar dance; then shouting for more drink. What a nice way to spend an evening, I thought. I was the only other customer. The host, a rather seedy, smooth and bald figure, asked what I was. Inglés I said, and he patted me on the back and pointed to an enormous moth-eaten stuffed bull’s head on the wall, over crossed banderillas. ‘You see that bull?’ he said. ‘I killed him in the ring in Valencia thirty years ago. They don’t have horns like that now.’ ‘What? You’re a matador?’ I said. ‘You’ve cut your pigtail?’ (Cortar la coleta, cribbed from Hemingway, means ‘to resign from the ring’.) More slaps on the back, then he left me. After half an hour I thought I’d move on somewhere else, plonked down on the bar the equivalent of a quid to pay for the beer I’d drunk and waited for the change. ‘£5 – in pesetas,’ the barman said. I said, ‘What rot.’ He burst into a frenzy and all of a sudden I was surrounded by all the twenty from the table, screaming and shaking their fists, closing in. I shouted ‘Where’s the gentleman who was a matador?’ – I could see him skulking in the background – and there was a moment’s silence. ‘¿What matador?’ they all cried. ‘¡Him!’ I said, pointing, ‘who killed that bull up there in Valencia thirty years ago!’ They all turned on him at this: he’d never been in a bullring in his life, except in the 7/6ds. But they soon turned back on me, including the ‘matador’. I remembered a useful phrase and cried ‘¿Where’s your Castilian sense of honour?’ ‘¿Donde esta su honor castellano?’ This gave them another moment’s pause, but only a moment. The barman, inside his rampart, stooped down and straightened up brandishing a club, three feet long, came out and started whirling it round his head, and towards me, all the others still shouting. I managed to get another moment’s silence by pointing to the club, then to the top of my dome and saying ‘¡This gentleman desires to strike me with that piece of wood (didn’t know “club”) on top of my head! ¡Este señor quiere tocarme con esta pieza de leño aqui sobre mi cabeza!’; ‘¡Si! Si!’ he cried, his eyes rolling round and round, breaking into a war dance. With really wonderful coolness (non-swanks) I smote the bar and said ‘¡Not a peseta more!’ and walked firmly and quite slowly to the door.
Two of the party followed me into the street, not to clock me, but to reason with me, as my last exclamation had been ‘¡Verguenza!’ viz. ‘¡Shame!’ – perhaps fearing a complaint. I strode off in a seething fury, found three uniformed policemen coming down a side lane, and urged them to return to the bar, which they did. The people all came out into the street, rather cowed now; but apparently this particular brand of police weren’t allowed inside premises, they were only for keeping order in the streets. They advised me to go to the police station, so off I set, feeling a bit milder, and suddenly thought, ‘What the hell!’, started laughing, and headed for the Ramblas, and was soon having a beer for about 2/6 at an amazing drugstore, full of all the low life of Barcelona. Lots of male and female tarts. As I finally left – about 4 a.m. now – you know Spanish hours – a marvellous-looking tart, eyelashes a foot long, standing between two queer pals, one tough, the other willowy, tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘¿Which of them do you want? ¿Him? or ¿Him?’ pointing at both of them in turn; then at herself, ‘¿Or perhaps me?’
Well, I mean to say . . .
When I got up to the suite, Joan was fumbling her way like a sleepwalker through the jungle of towel-horses to the bathroom, so I told her the whole saga, and our laughter must have put the wind up the mice in the wainscoting. I felt very set up by the whole evening.
No more now, I’ve gone on too long, and less legibly every second. Do send another smashing letter soon; and
Tons of fond love, as ever from
Paddy
[1] The Mitford family emblem is a mole.
13 March 1980
(My Dad’s birthday, he’d have been 103)
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Now then. What are Hoary Morning, Bedfordshire Foundling, Seek No Further, Dutch Minion, Hanwell Souring, Striped Monstrous, Reinette and Hall Door? [1] RSVP pronto. If you get the answer I will give you a prize, not quite sure what.
Woman is the undoubted star of J Jebb’s film on the Ancient Dame of France. She is amazing. There’s a good scene of her sitting on a tree stump on the banks of the Windrush reading the Chubb Fuddler. [2]
I am exactly like a headmistress about to retire, terribly boring & matter of fact & awful to look at.
Much love
Debo
[1] Varieties of apple.
[2] In Nancy Mitford: A Portrait by her Sisters, a television documentary by Julian Jebb, Pamela Jackson read out a passage from Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate (1949) describing Uncle Matthew’s annual treat: the arrival of the Chubb Fuddler, who sowed some ‘magic seed’ on the river, which brought the fish to the surface, ‘flapping, swooning, fainting, choking, thoroughly and undoubtedly fuddled’.
Mani
Darling Debo,
Back two or three days ago after your Uncle Harold’s prize-collecting [1] visit to Athens. He was glorious. Such a relief to hear his short, funny, scholarly, charming and deeply moving speech – ex tempore, except for what looked like half a sheet of crumpled lav. paper which he peered at only once – after the booming of Madame Simone Veil, [2] foghorned from twelve pages of typescript, one predictable cliché after another. There were lots of banquets, pretty boring ones, including a solemn feast with the President of the Republic, which was nicer than it sounds, as his wife is the sister of our dead poet friend, George Seferis. All sorts of jaunts were involved. Last Monday we were all flown to Olympia, which Joan and Michael Stewart and I wandered round in the wake of Mr MacM., all of us nipping off into the pine trees for secret swigs of ouzo when the bearleading archaeologists weren’t looking. Nice grandson Adam. [3] The next day, this small party were piled into a beautiful yacht, and sailed to Salamis – where Mr M. recited yards of Æschylus – then to the temple of Aphaia on Aegina where we had a glorious banquet of lobster and John Dory under the plane trees’ shade.
A visit to Marathon followed next day and another feast, all great fun, organised by Michael Stewart and, a bit, me. The hero was a wonder throughout, v funny, particularly good on the Blunt scandal breaking the day your catalogue appeared in the Exhibition – ‘sold out and reprinted same day!’ [4] He also stimulated everyone by explaining that the war of Troy was nothing whatever to do with ‘Helen’, who was getting rather long in the tooth anyway, but all about a beautiful young mare that the Trojans had pinched from the Greeks – ‘Can’t you see her, being trotted past those old Trojans, a beautiful chestnut with four white socks and a blaze, and a flowing mane and tail? They wanted to improve their bloodstock! The Greeks came to get her back and that Wooden Horse business was just a horsebox!’
I do envy you all at Lismore.
Tons of love from
Paddy
[1] Harold Macmillan, Chairman of the British Acropolis Appeal Committee, had been awarded the Onassis International Prize.
[2] Simone Veil (1927–). French lawyer and politician, elected first female President of the European Parliament in 1979.
[3] Adam Macmillan (1948–). Son of Harold Macmillan’s only son, Maurice.
[4] ‘I was in Fort Worth for the opening of the exhibition Treasures from Chatsworth: The Devonshire Inheritance at the Kimbell Art Museum in November 1979. The scholarly catalogue was written by Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, who stayed at Chatsworth several times when working on it. I was often alone with him at meals and thought him cold, distant and uncommunicative. I turned on the television at dawn on the day of the grand opening party to see Blunt’s angular face and the sensational news of his exposure as a Soviet spy. There were hurried discussions as to whether the catalogue should be withdrawn. It was not and it sold like hot cakes.’ (DD)
29 July 1980
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Will you do a v kind thing, write just how that tale goes re Derek Jackson [1] at a conference. Please. I know it’s a pest, but I can’t remember how it went.
No news. 6000 Scouts & Guides are camping in the park. Goodness knows what happens when darkness sets in.
Much love
Debo
[1] Derek Jackson (1906–82). The distinguished physicist, amateur jockey and heir to the News of the World married, as his second wife, DD’s sister Pamela 1936–51. He subsequently remarried four times.
6 August 1980
Mani
Darling Debo,
Scene A Roman palace where an international congress on nuclear physics is taking place.
Time During a morning recess between lectures, a number of years ago.
Dramatis Personae Derek Jackson and another English delegate. They are strolling under the arcades during the break.
Other English Delegate ‘I’m told we’ve got an extraordinary fellow delegate on this congress. English, too.’
Derek Jackson ‘Really? Who?’
O. English Delegate ‘Well, he’s not only a brilliant nuclear physicist, but he was a famous pilot during the [war] – covered with decorations, and all that – and rode three times in the Grand National and dashed nearly won it. It seems he’s one of two identical twins and got married to one of those Mitford girls, you know.’
Derek Jackson ‘I say, before you go any further, I think I ought to tell you that I’m the chap in question.’
O. English Delegate ‘Oh, really? I’m so sorry, I didn’t quite catch what you were called when we were introduced.’
Derek Jackson ‘Derek Jackson.’
O. English Delegate (after a pause) ‘No, that wasn’t the name.
’ I’m in my outdoor study, which is a sort of shady bower, on one of the lower olive-terraces, viz., a criss-cross of laths on four uprights, covered with branches and creeping plants, cool and slightly dappled underneath. Two terraces down, two mules are audibly munching, and I see them swishing their tails. We’re taking them up into the mountains for a picnic tomorrow. (Where the mules munch, there munch I.) Rock nuthatches hop about in the olive branches, and I find their name rather difficult to say. Why not rack nothutches, hitch nuckrackies, nockratch hickies etc.
No more now, as I see you’re urgent, so off to the pillar-box. Tons of love
Paddy
I’ll address this envelope to Bolton, and wish I could climb in.
Mani
Darling Debo,
Back to base again, and rather worried because absolutely no news of Annie. Do, like a saint, sit down in a few seconds and scribble all, as being in the dark makes one anxious.
Joan and I are just back from Syria, where we went with our old travelling companions, Xan and his bride, Magouche. We took wing to Damascus, a vast Oriental slum really, but marvellous all the same, with the biggest and most beautiful mosque I’ve ever seen. One simply sat at the foot of tremendous pillars, at the heart of hushed acres of carpet, and mooned two hours blissfully away. Then across the desert to Palmyra, a knockout, and on to the Euphrates, back to Homs, and Hamah, a warren of souks with scores of giant waterwheels turned by the green Euphrates. Then to the tangled lanes and caravanserais, sunsets in the desert:
But when the deep red eye of day
is level with the lone highway,
And some to Mecca turn to pray,
and I toward thy bed, Yasmin,
. . .
Shine down thy love, O burning bright!
for one night or the other night
Will come the Gardener in white,
and gather’d flowers are dead, Yasmin! *
Yes. Huge crusader castles, Krak des Chevaliers, tremendous Greco-Roman theatres (Bosra), the fortress of the Jebel Druse. Xan and I went to the Hammam in Aleppo, a great domed building put up in 1200 AD by Nur-ed-Din el Shāhed el Mansūr, Saladin’s brother. [1] We were pounded to a pulp in the steam by brawny Moslems, then wrapped in towels and gold hemmed robes, set on divans with cardamom coffee and hookahs, where we reclined, listening to the muezzins wailing next door, and sallied out into the gloaming, the cleanest men East of Suez and north of the Hejaz, and the Bedouins of the souks followed our fragrant and disembodied progress with black and blazing eyes.
Now we’re back here among the cats and the owls, cold as hell, but clear and starry.
No more now, darling Debo, except heaps of love from
Paddy
[1] PLF had been misinformed about the history of the building. The only Nur-edDin bath in Syria being in Damascus, it is likely he bathed in the thirteenth-century Hammam al-Nahasin, built by Saladin’s son.
* From James Elroy Flecker’s marvellous ‘Hassan’.
6 February 1981
Lismore Castle
Co. Waterford
Darling Paddy,
Look where I am, at an unaccustomed time of year. Andrew came as per for the fishing & had a sort of frightening collapse, temp of 103, unable to walk, delirious. He’s much better now, mending fast in that amazing way he has, extraordinary one for being really ill & very soon pretty well alright.
He’s had many major worries lately. Chatsworth is being made into a charitable trust & the Poussin Holy Family is to be sold in April to underpin the trust & you can imagine the heart searching & thought & meetings & discussions & all which led up to the decision to do this. [1]
Enough of us, now to Ann. [2] I rang several times, the last time I got her as she had just got back from N Ireland, & was tired of course after the journey but the fact she was able to go there shows she’s not too bad, eh.
The trouble was a twisted gut as far as I can make out which can easily be a killer & she damn nearly died. When I get back to England I’ll have a proper talk to her & will write again.
Diana is in London for Feb. She’s being marvellously good but misses him dreadfully. They’d been as one for nearly 50 years. Many a publisher is after her but she doesn’t feel like work. (Perhaps you don’t know Sir O [Mosley] died in Dec.)
Your outing sounds awful. You are lucky to like that sort of thing. (I KNOW Flecker, you needn’t put it, FOOL.)
There is a musical called The Mitford Girls [3] coming on at Chichester in the summer. Really & truly what next. I’ve noted the script & it’s perfectly alright, I mean nothing objectionable, so I don’t mind. The man kindly spouted it out to me & Woman & Diana & the fellow who plays the piano is IT. He played for Noël Coward the last two years of N.C.’s life. [4] The tunes will do you in, the theme song is ‘It Looks Like Trouble Ahead’, & things like ‘Ukulele Lady’ loom large. I wish you’d been there.
I’m going to the rehearsals to try & get the voice & pronunciation right. It was disastrous in the telly of Love in a CC. [5]
I do wonder who’ll be me. They’ll have a job to get Diana right, & Woman for that matter.
I must stop & get ready for the Dr (who is an Irish Dr in a play, arrives with pills in his hot hand, flies out in a hurry because it’s Clonmel Races shouting Give him two sleeping pills AND TAKE ONE YOURSELF).
Much love
Debo
[1] The painting was sold at Christie’s on 10 April 1981 and fetched £1,165,000.
[2] Ann Fleming had cancer, initially diagnosed as a twisted gut.
[3] By Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin (1981).
[4] Peter Greenwell (1929–2006). The composer and pianist was Noël Coward’s accompanist during the last decade of the Master’s life.
[5] An eight-part ITV adaptation by Simon Raven of Nancy Mitford’s novels The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949). ‘Hideous children who swallowed their words, a Hons’ Cupboard with NO LINEN in it, oh dear.’ DD to PLF, 4 November 1980.
29 March 1981
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Any chance of you looming? I go to Lismore on 2 April till 30th. COME.
The editor has been. Richard Garnett, son of David, [1] that’s all. Do be impressed. The terror of it. But he was v v nice & we sat with scissors & paste & chopped up a photo-ed copy of the Bachelor Duke’s Handbook & stuck the bits we like above my bits describing the same bits of house. Good sport. Now I’ve got to look sharp & finish it, the outside & some more boring details. What a business it all is.
Lismore, 3 April.
Somehow got stuck, & now I’m here. Oh, Whack, the beauty of this place, & suddenly it’s fine & WARM (well, sort of ) & everything two weeks early & busting out all over.
I jolly well knew I was in Ireland when the first garage I came to in Wexford had OPEN & CLOSED signs both up. A bit further on I asked someone how far to Waterford. Eight miles he said. His mate said it’s 28. First man said ‘I knew there was an eight in it somewhere, God Bless.’ All in one sentence.
I do love them but I do wish they’d stop shooting people’s knees. It’s such a horrid trick.
Much love,
Debo
[1] David Garnett (1892–1981). Bloomsbury author whose books include Lady into Fox (1922) and Aspects of Love (1955). Became Duncan Grant’s lover in 1914; married to Ray Marshall 1923–40. After his wife’s death, he married Angelica Bell, the daughter of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.
7 April 1981
Mani
Darling Debo,
I would have loved to come to Lismore, but I can’t. I’m getting a move on with this wretched book [1] at last, after dragging my feet as usual. I long for it all to be finished, and me free. I was an idiot to leave it all so long. It seems to be all right, thank goodness. I’m a bit nervous, after everyone being so nice about Vol. I.
The frogs are making a terrible noise. A curlew should be imposed.
I wish you would come here sometime. I think, quite apart from anything else, one ought to know how and where one’s friends live, then one can imagine what’s going on. Otherwise they disappear into a sort of void until you see them again.
Tons of love
Paddy
Library book-title: ‘WILD OATS, A cereal story’ . . .
[1] Between the Woods and the Water:
7 June 1981
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I went to lunch with Ann at Sevenhampton three days ago, & hasten to write & tell you what I expect you know, that she is very ill.
Once you have got over the shock of her poor twisted face everything appears to be normal. Alas it is not.
She was in bed so I did not see her walk but I know it is a struggle & she has one of those things to lean on to help her along. She is blind in one eye & I noticed someone has brought her books printed in a v big type so presumably the remaining eye is not perfect.
The word lumbago which she speaks of reminded me of Nancy, who used to think the awful pain in her back was that. The truth is the wretched thing is all over her. No one knows how fast it will choose to move. It may be more or less static for some weeks, but it may not. At the moment she is a bit better, seeing people & apparently quite pleased to do so. Her d in law told me they have taken her off the drugs which made her feel so awful, so that is why she is sort of brighter.
I am very sorry to write like this but I know she is one of your greatest friends, & I guess you’re coming to England soon?? DO let me know your plans. I will be here nearly all the time except for a few days in early July when I go to my good Wife for the preview & the first night of The Mitford Girls at Chichester, what a lark. I have got to go & tell them how to speak, to say ‘orphan’ for ‘often’, ‘frorst, corf & orf ’, & try & make them resist hostess. What a hope.
Much love
Debo
17 June 1981
from Corfu
IN HASTE
Darling Debo,
How miserable about Annie. I had heard roughly the same just a few days before from Pat Trevor-Roper, [1] who came to stay for a few days. He, too, thinks that things are uncertain, and may end abruptly; so I plan to come to London early in July, and will make a sign at once.
Saddest news last night, about Philip Toynbee’s [2] very sudden death from the same beastly thing.
I went to Crete for the 40th anniversary of the battle, which was marked by all sorts of ceremonies, lots of v nice Aussie, N.Z. and British veterans, Scots Guards pipers in plaids and silver and feather bonnets, Maoris blowing ‘The Last Post’ till one’s hair stood on end. Lots of old Cretan hands were there. I wish Xan had been, and would have urged him more if I’d realized the scale of the thing.
I had to make an address [3] in Greek at the unveiling of an SOE monument at Heraklion, to which we had all contributed. Pat T-R had told me exactly what to do, to overcome nerves: a double whiskey quarter of an hour before, no more no less. I had it in a little bottle in my pocket, and threw it down the red lane in the loo of the Defence Minister’s private bomber, just before we landed at Heraklion. It did the trick! There were lots of troops in hollow square, masses of archbishops and incense, thousands of old friends, rolling drums, crashing arms etc. When Avéroff, the Def. Minister was summoned to unveil the monument, he unexpectedly shouted for me, and we paced across the square together, each pulled a string and down flopped the British and Greek flags. He made a short address, then led me to the mike, and Pat’s formula must have been just right as I got through it in ringing tones with not a single mistake! It seems to have been a success, and when the public ropes were down, old whiskered pals broke through, and one was mobbed pretty well black-and-blue with hugs. No dry eyes anywhere, all a-clank with medals, full-size ones for the first, and probably last, time in one’s life. It was very moving.
Joan and I motored here a few days ago, where we found the Ghikas and Jacob & Serena Rothschild. They buggered off two days ago, and have been replaced by Stephen Spender, [4] hot foot from China where he has been travelling all over the place with David Hockney. [5] He doesn’t look awfully well but is as nice as ever. His wife Natasha rolls up this evening. I forgot to mention that the great point of our coming was the presence of Dadie Rylands, in order to be here with him. He’s a glory and I bet you would love him, 82, swims like a fish, pink cheeked, blue eyed and enchanting. He’s the most wonderful reader-aloud in the world. It has been a new Trollope novel every year – Phineas Redux this year, but I won’t go into that – and he does all the voices marvellously – Phineas, Dss of Omnium, Ld Cantrip, Mr Chaffanbrass the barrister, Ly Laura – last night we had twenty pages of a marvellous murder trial scene at the Old Bailey, full of surprises and sensations. We wait for reading time of an evening exactly like children.
Home in a few days time, taking the Spenders with us.
No more now, Debo darling, except see you soon and tons of love from
Paddy
[1] Patrick Trevor-Roper (1916–2004). Quiet-voiced, bookish and learned eye surgeon, author of The World Through Blunted Sight: An Inquiry into the Influence of Defective Vision on Art and Character (1970).
[2] Philip Toynbee (1916–81). PLF and the writer were both in the Intelligence Corps during the war. Their shared interest in literature, history and late-night parties created an enduring friendship.
[3] PLF enclosed a copy of his address with this letter.
[4] Stephen Spender (1909–95). The poet and novelist married Natasha Litvin (1919–), a concert pianist, in 1941.
[5] David Hockney (1937–). The painter and Stephen Spender recorded their travels in China Diary (1982), illustrated by Hockney with photographs by Spender.
24 June 1981
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Your speech is a wonder. V brave to have the whiskey, think if it had made you sort of different, like it would have me. It must have been v moving, floods all round.
If you come do come to The Mitford Girls at Chichester. I’ve found a book in the library here I long to show you. Much love
Debo
[July 1981]
Mani
Darling Debo,
After three days of trying to get through to Pat Trevor-Roper (and he to me) to find out whether Annie would be up to seeing me – or anyone – we have just got through. He tells me that when he went there on Sunday, she was in a coma and under deep sedation and could hardly recognise him, and that the whole thing is only a question of a few days. [1] Things being so, he strongly advised against my coming back, rather indicating that it would be hopeless under the present circumstances, and, very possibly, too late . . .
You can imagine how one feels, as you must too. I can’t get over the idea that I’ll never see her again. I wish I’d simply dashed back, as you suggested, but she was very down when Pat was here, and he said wait; then not a word for days and days, during which she had a brief recovery, when she saw Robert and John Wells. [2] I wish I too.
You’ve been marvellous keeping me informed of things. Do try and ring or send a telegram if there’s any change, as they say.
Lots of love,
Paddy
[1] Ann Fleming died on Sunday 12 July.
[2] John Wells (1936–98). Actor, satirist and founder member of Private Eye who appeared as Q’s assistant in the film of Casino Royale (1967).
19 July 1981
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I found your letter today, when I got back from Ann’s funeral. OH DEAR. What is there to say, except how she will be missed & what a hole there will be where she was.
The funeral was awful. There is nothing like a country churchyard for killing the mourners. I drove down from here & got there very early & sat in the car & then in the church. Oh dear. The flowers, & the churchyard flowers & the people all looking anxious & no one knowing where to sit. Her sister arrived, ridiculously smart in a hard black shiny straw hat, she’s gone tiny & looked like a wretched ill bird of the crow family, not my favourite. [1] When you think how they didn’t like each other I thought how daft form is.
No one in the congregation were CHURCH GO-ERS so didn’t know when to stand, & the clergyman had to tell them – honestly. How she would have taken in all that.
The burial part seemed to be done very quickly & was over by the time I got to it, thank goodness. We all went to the house for lunch. It made me think of what Robert said about Philip Toynbee’s funeral, & how he kept expecting him to come in & thought he’d just been left behind in the churchyard by mistake.
I always thought Sevenhampton a very sad house, but really yesterday it was hauntingly so. After a bit people started talking & laughing like one has to. Brainstorm [2] was very tight & said he has decided to buy a house in Derbyshire so I rushed to the car & fetched the Derbyshire Times & we looked at the For Sales & I think he’s rather decided against it. Raving.
Goodman [3] looked huge but drained, hunched up in a chair too small for him.
The curious thing was there was a service for Philip in London at the same time. So Robert didn’t come. The other notable absentees were Pat T-R & Lucian. Perhaps Pat had to do some ghoulish operation & Lucian sort of wouldn’t be there, would he.
It’s no good going on but oh what a gap. And as I looked at the people there I thought how I should never see any of them again because it was Ann who gathered them all up. I hope Mark Amory & Jacob [4] & one or two others will be exceptions.
Decca went to Philip’s service. It is v v sad for her because he was really the only friend left in England. She went to The Mitford Girls. I went to the 1st night and a preview. It’s dotty of course, spindly actresses being us, & getting everything just wrong. How could they be expected to get anything right.
It seems to be an extraordinary success & got a standing ovation on the royal 1st night charity perf. They talk of it going to London. Too odd for words. I looked first at the floor & then at my watch, so did P Jebb. The good thing to be said for it is that there is nothing unpleasant, just STOOPID.
Richard Garnett (editor) has taken my book, a v odd feeling which you must know all too well (or all too little as we know how your books hang about when it comes to finishing). I suppose he’ll come back saying he wants it all different. Never mind, it’s like the theatre, we never need go again.
Much love
Debo
[1] Laura Charteris (1915–90). Ann Fleming’s younger sister. Married to Viscount Long 1933–42, to 3rd Earl of Dudley 1943–54, to Michael Canfield 1960–9 and to 10th Duke of Marlborough in 1972. ‘She seemed to me to be hard and a bit too smart, but with hindsight this may have been unfair.’ (DD)
[2] Raymond Carr (1919–). Historian and Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. ‘When my daughter Emma was up at Oxford in the early 1960s, she nicknamed her popular tutor after the absent-minded character Professor Theophilus Branestawm in Norman Hunter’s novels.
[3] Arnold Goodman (1913–95). After Ian Fleming’s death, the large and powerful solicitor helped his widow sort out her husband’s financial affairs and had become a close friend.
[4] ‘Thankfully I did not lose Jacob Rothschild. Instead, he and Serena have become great friends of mine. When Chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, he often came to Chatsworth to oversee the regeneration of Buxton, which was a grateful beneficiary of the fund. His own achievements at Spencer House and Waddesdon are a lesson to anyone in charge of a family legacy – but to me the garden of The Pavilion, where they live, is the all-time treat.’ (DD)
3 August 1981
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Here are the last pages of my BOOK, finished & gone. I KNOW you want to see how it worked. Well, anyway, here it is. Too late to say it’s all wrong.
I must say I’d rather write a book than read one any day. Not so sure about the victims who are supposed to read mine. Can’t help that, I never would have done it if it hadn’t been ordered by Uncle Harold.
You would have loved the Buckingham Palace party [1] on Mon night. All trad to begin with, a huge crowd of people, got two OMs at once viz. Freddie Ashton [2] & Solly Zuckerman, [3] all kinds of freaks like Harold Wilson [4] with his garter stitched on to a sort of blazer like house colours for a cricket match, Sybil Cholmondeley queen of all she surveyed, the Queen ditto, the Bride v fascinating-looking & so on & forth. Come 1.30 & Andrew insisted on leaving so I didn’t see the scrum of dowagers fighting for blue & silver balloons with Prince of Wales feathers painted on them. Emma said it was like a Brixton riot only the rioters were white-haired ancients fighting for grandchildren & gt grand children at home. Lovely.
Much love
Debo
[1] To celebrate the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer.
[2] Frederick Ashton (1904–88). The dancer and choreographer was awarded the Order of Merit in 1977. ‘He was the best company imaginable and a brilliant mimic – he practically turned into the Queen Mother when acting her arrival at Covent Garden, as he did Queen Victoria, seated in Andrew’s grandfather’s Bath chair in the garden at Edensor House.’ (DD)
[3] Solly Zuckerman (1904–93). Scientist and public servant, President of the London Zoo 1977–84, awarded the OM in 1968.
[4] The former Prime Minister was made a Knight of the Garter after his retirement in 1976. He was suffering from symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease although his condition was not yet publicly known.
15 April 1982
Lismore Castle
Co. Waterford
Darling Paddy,
I’ve got a new friend. Met him at Ann Fleming’s once. He used to be keeper of drawings & manuscripts at the BM, retired of course like everyone (who isn’t dead as well) called John Gere. [1] He really is a good egg, came to Chatsworth to look for some Raphaels or something or other & we ended up going on mystery trips to the Tram Museum (shut) & such places. He found some dire mistakes in my book. One in a Latin inscription which you can imagine yours truly had somehow overlooked, just in time to get the damned things put right. He’s got a wife, never invited by Ann, but she & Lady Abdy [2] got up an exhibition re the Souls which might have been jolly had one been in London & able to tear oneself away from Peter Jones.
This place is as beautiful and odd as ever. The town is a bit sad, more shops shut, no tourists (longed for by all) because of the fantastic prices & the fact that people think the south of Ireland is the same as the north. Inflation is 23%. You get fewer than four stamps for a £1. It’s 26p each, even for a letter to the next village. Goodness knows how people with big families feed their children. It must be as difficult now as it was when the wages were 30/– a week. And so on.
No word of R Kee, but I was sitting in the beautiful new hairdresser’s salon (The Golden Scissors) in Main St above Crotty’s Bar Best Drinks, wireless full on as per, & a man started on about his book [3] & how we must all buy it pronto, well of course.
Emma has been made head of all the National Trust gardens, a great compliment, eh. Ld Antrim would have been pleased. She’s got 120 head gardeners to deal with. Rather her than me.
Much love
Debo
I said to the gardener here It all looks very nice. Ah he said When it’s open in the summer people of all nationalities are charmed with it.
[1] John Gere (1921–95). Curator at the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings 1946–81. Married art historian Charlotte Douie in 1958.
[2] Jane Noble; art dealer and co-author with Charlotte Gere of The Souls: An Elite in English Society 1885–1930 (1984). Married Sir Robert Abdy in 1962.
[3] Robert Kee, Ireland: A History (1980).
5 May 1982
Mani
ONE FOOT IN THE STIRRUP
Darling Debo,
There was a bit – v. nice – about you and the book in The Times the other day. I do pine for it. It read gloriously I thought.
We went to Athens for all sorts of splendid ceremonies for the award of the Onassis Prizes [1] (I’m on the committee, heaven knows why. I seldom open my mouth), presidential luncheons etc. Then back with fellow committee member Michael Stewart & Ghikas. Now I’m off – tomorrow – to Budapest (a) to see an old Hungarian pal, and (b) go through a brief refresher course in a hired car across the Great Hungarian Plain, then over the Rumanian border into Transylvania, so to Bucharest, where I’ll see Balasha’s sister. [2] I’m very excited about this. My memories of the middle-distance were getting a bit blurred. One remembers skylines – chimneys, steeples, mountains, forests – and foregrounds – prams, elephants, trams, wheelbarrows – but the in-between past dissolves in a kind of haze.
I’m so glad you cleave to J Gere. We became great pals chez Annie. I hope I was enthusiastically remembered by you both. You cruelly never mentioned it.
Do please send lots more news. I’ll be back here in a fortnight. Meanwhile, tons of love,
Paddy
[1] Awarded for contributions to Greek ‘culture, environment and social achievement’.
[2] Princess Elena (Pomme) Cantacuzène (1900–83). Married Constantin Donici, a Moldavian boyar, in 1924.
28 May 1982
Mani
Darling Debo,
I’ve just had such an odd time. Feeling I wanted to have another look at my 1934 itinerary for Vol II of A Time of Gifts, I flew to Hungary a fortnight ago. There was no room in any hotel, so the Tourist people, in a way they have in Budapest, billeted me on a private citizen, a frightfully pretty fair-haired one called Aggy – short for Agatha – who turned out to be a great pal of your wonderful Bill [Stirling], and of P Stirling. [1] We peered at her album of snaps of the Highlands and stags and kilts. Wasn’t that rum?
I drove 1000 kilometres in E Hungary, in a hired Volvo, all over the Gr. Hung. Plain, over which I’d trudged – and ridden – as a stripling, and the Hortobágy, with its troops of semi-wild horses, then to north, where I sat with chance acquaintances drinking delicious red wine in a maze of caves dug out of the mountain. Most of my halts were at places I had stayed at of old, a series of minor Bridesheads really, but with all the Grafs fled long ago, except one, called Hansi Meran [2] who I last saw when he was 12, and I 19, staying with his parents. He had been arrested when returning from the war in the East by some Russians, who sent him to Siberia for 10 years, on no charge at all. On his return he married a v nice village girl, settled in the village in a cottage outside the rambling baroque Schloss at Körösladány, and worked in the commandeered fields. He was enormously tall when I saw him now, Marie Antoinette’s biggest gt. gt. gt. gt. nephew, grizzled and weather-beaten, rather shy with v nice blue eyes. He remembers my visit in April ’34 perfectly. A Biedermeier table had been salvaged from the Schloss (also a portrait of gr, gr etc grandma Empress Maria Theresa) and he said ‘You used to sit at that all day writing away in a green book.’ (Diary. I’ve got it by my side today.) A visiting sister called Marcsi, [3] who lives in Vienna, was there – thirteen, when last glimpsed 48 years ago, now a great-grandmother. We talked about their parents – his mother was a great beauty called Ilona Almásy, and their v nice governess, a coz called Christine Esterházy.
I lurked round two other places – now roadmenders’ storages – then slipped over the wall of a vast place called Okígyós, where I had played bike-polo of old. A school now, but with all the box-hedges neatly trimmed, vast trees, millions of doves, tulip trees and Magnolia grandiflora, lakes, reeds, old Slovak gardeners who talked fondly of the old Wenckheim incumbents, when I dared to tackle them in German.
Then back to Budapest and my nice landlady, and took wing for Bucharest, hired another car, and drove to where Balasha’s sister Pomme lives and teaches English & French to commissars’ offspring, near the Carpathians. Stayed 24 hours, talking night and day; then on to Transylvania, which is where I had gone after the Hungarian Plain.
This was another series of Bridesheads: they had all been the dwellings of Hungarian landowners who had stayed on when sovereignty was transferred after the First World War. (All gone now, of course.) I slunk round seven of these, one or two pretty Palladian ones, but nearly all loony bins now, with wild-eyed figures mopping and mowing among the tree trunks and up and down the balustraded steps. One of these had been the setting of a short romance and I felt very queer. The last one was a big, late medieval place with giant chestnuts, pink and white candles, whose owner, Elemér [4] (85 now) I’d seen in his Budapest tenement a few days before. It’s now an experimental nursery for bamboo and similar plants, inhabited by v nice peasants. In all those places the locals were thrilled to learn I had been a pal of the old folks. These ones said, ‘Have some baratzk made out of Mr Elemér’s plums. Please give him our respects. We feel guilty living in a stolen house, but it’s not our fault.’ Unlike Hungary, the repression in Rumania is fiendish. I gave lifts to dozens of workmen & peasants. All complained bitterly if they were alone but sickly in praise if there were more than one. I couldn’t bear the idea of returning to Baleni in Moldavia, the home of Balasha and half her family. You know all about that . . .
Tons of love from
Paddy
[1] Peter Stirling (1913–94). Brother of David and William Stirling.
[2] Count Johann (Hansi) Meran (1921–94). Married Ilona Farkas in 1960.
[3] Countess Maria Meran (1920–92). Married Béla Rudnay de Rudnó et DivékUjfalu in 1944 and had ten children.
[4] Elemér von Klobusiçky (1899–1986). Married Juliana Apponyi de Nagy-Apponyi in 1943.
16 July 1982
Mani
Darling Debo,
A week after I got back from Hungary and Rumania, Joan and I suddenly decided to go to Crete, taking the car to the west end of the island by a ferry. I can’t tell you how moving it was. We went to countless villages that were our haunts. Hugs, whiskers, tears! Many are oldsters now, and many dead; but it really was glorious. The only trouble was having to have 15 meals a day. Every single house in a village had to be visited, bread broken, meat carved, wine poured, lest the owners pined away. Some of the people in the west I hadn’t seen for nearly half a century, in remote villages perched like eagles’ nests, said: ‘O dear, how thin you’ve got.’ Others in the east a week later said: ‘You have filled out, oh dear, oh dear . . .’ Presents galore, the boot of the car was filled with delicious cheeses the size of cartwheels, demijohns of marvellously pure and heavenly wine, red and white, wicker-covered gallons of mulberry raki, baskets of raisins, walnuts and almonds, two shepherd’s crooks. Most of us stood godfathers to Cretan friends’ children. All my goddaughters are now forty-something, with vast broods of their own. (We mostly stood godfather to little girls, as in the Orthodox Church children with the same godparent are not allowed to marry each other. The god-relationship is thought more binding than blood, and the idea of such a marriage worse than incest.) We both felt re-born by the whole trip.
I’ve just been sorting out Annie’s letters for Mark Amory, [1] only holding back ones that are terribly wicked about people, so damaging – oddly enough, there were not as many of those as I feared. I know quite a lot are missing, and will probably turn up as bookmarks. Early ones I probably threw away, worst luck, not realising then that it’s a great shame to throw some people’s away. My word, they are good and funny, aren’t they, the quickest and most direct form of communication I’ve ever seen, all of them surprising, all of them brilliant, several of them rather sad, none of them with a flicker of self-pity. I wonder if you’ve been on the same task.
Just before the Hung. Rumanian journey, a Persian singer called Shusha [2] – very nice, known years ago – turned up here to take notes for an Observer profile of yours truly (due in Sept). I bet it’ll be a bit embarrassing. Can’t wait.
Finally and most important. Please write.
With tons of love from
Paddy
[1] The Letters of Ann Fleming, edited by Mark Amory.
[2] Shusha Guppy (1940–2008). Iranian-born writer and folk singer.
1 August 1982
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Thanks v much for yours. Oh, what has happened to the wretched TOME. I sent it in June.
It was published last Thurs, 29 July. All that week I was frenzied, all of a frenzy, pushed from BBC to ITV, to British Forces Network to Radio London, Radio Reading, man from Daily Express, another from Liverpool Something, Irish Times man never turned up, Radio Yet Another, John Dunn prog, Round Midnight prog . . . RAVING, but the all-time ego trip, people taking one seriously (well, almost), Foyle’s Lunch, a Phone-In radio prog . . . I kept thinking the French Lady wouldn’t have done this but of course it was terrific fun & v bad for the character.
The first was something called Start the Week with Richard Baker, 9 a.m. on Mon. Four interviewers for four victims. Idiotic, because the interviewers, all pros who worship the sound of their own voices or they wouldn’t be pros, took over & talked over one another. One was a psychiatrist with all the maddening patter of his trade, one read a long typed paper pretending he wasn’t reading with a lot of clever quotes & one was a sharp woman who liked scoring off the victims.
Signed at Boots in Chesterfield on Sat & don’t laugh but there was a queue & I signed away for an hour & bang went 248 books, all their stock. Terrific fun because we’ve got heaps of friends in Chesterfield and they all turned up.
Now to Sheffield for Radio Sheffield, thence to Nottingham for Radio Trent. What a very strange life.
Anyway all this boasting is for your eyes only because I know you understand & I also know you understand how terrifically unfair it is because think of the professors who are busy writing real books & just because of my daft name & address mine whizzes. Oh well, that’s life but it IS unfair.
As for Ann Fleming’s letters, mine from her are v v good & exactly her talking but unpublishable. They wd cause offence & worse to all & sundry. Too soon?
Diana is v well indeed thank God, when you think that last Sept she was paralysed, couldn’t feed herself or anything. [1] She is a dr’s triumph. Rare bird I know but as one only hears the rotten things done in hosps one jolly well ought to laud a success like her. She looks v beautiful & her shaved hair has come back curly, so odd, never been that in her 72 years.
WHEN ARE YOU COMING THIS WAY? Much love
Debo
Have boldly put a couple of reviews. Please excuse all this boasting. It’s gone to my head.
[1] Diana Mosley had been successfully operated on for a brain tumour.
17 November 1982
Mani
Darling Debo,
I’ve just come across the following in a letter of July 28th 1931, from Carrington to L. Strachey. I expect you know it, so this is just in case.
‘. . . I went with Julia [Strachey] to lunch with Diana [Guinness] today. There we found 3 sisters and Mama Redesdale. The little sisters were ravishingly beautiful, and another of 16 very marvellous and grecian. I thought the mother was rather remarkable, very sensible and no upper classes graces.
We were half an hour late . . . Mercifully lunch was late as they had only just come back from Stonehenge.
The little sister was a great botanist, and completely won me by her high spirits and charm.’ [1]
All right, eh?
Love,
Paddy
[1] Carrington: Letters and Extracts from her Diaries, edited by David Garnett ( Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 473. Lytton Strachey and Carrington at Ham Spray were neighbours of DD’s sister Diana and her first husband, Bryan Guinness, when they lived at Biddesden Manor in Wiltshire.
15 January 1983
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I’m going to Houghton [1] tomorrow, to shoot on Monday. Sybil is 89 this month. I haven’t seen her for two years. How mad when in the nature of things she can’t go on forever. One ought to make monthly appointments with people like her.
John Pearson’s history of the Cavendish family is very bad. [2] Isn’t it a waste of a good subject. Journalese I think it’s called, sarcastic, generally narky. It reads as if he hated writing it, a schoolboy forced to do a boring essay. What a pity. He is so nice. I can’t think why he had to write it like that.
Must stop & get my hair done for Sybil.
Much love
Debo
[1] Houghton Hall; the Marquess of Cholmondeley’s Palladian house in Norfolk.
[2] Stags and Serpents: A History of the Cavendish Family and the Dukes of Devonshire (1983) was generally well received.
? February 1983
c/o Wife, Bignor Park
Darling Paddy,
Do note the enclosed. [1] He is obviously a terrific fan of yours.
I wrote to say how I’d loved the comp. & how you were panting for the results.
Now I want him to have a comp. inspired by Decca cheating the American telephone people out of paying, it goes like this: –
If you put a personal call in America & the fellow you want isn’t available you don’t pay. Right. She was in New York. Bob [Treuhaft] was in Calif. Their dog, Coco, went missing. She was worried to death till the phone rang & the operator said ‘I have a person to person call for Mr Coco Isback.’ ‘Sorry he’s out & can’t take the call,’ she said but happiness set in & all for nothing. Of course it’s easier in America where outlandish names are normal. I mean what a hope of persuading an English tel operator of a Coco Isback.
Much love
Debo
[1] The enclosed letter has not been found.
Mani
IN FEARFUL HASTE
Darling Andrew,
This is just a brief note to say I’m putting together a book of odds and ends – including our Peruvian Adventure [1] – and I’m going to dedicate it to you and Debo. I wanted to dedicate one to each of you, sometime. But then I may be run over by an Athenian tram, or topple over a cliff, with the thing dedicated to no one, so this is better than that.
All the best, dear Andrew,
Yours ever
Paddy
[1] Three Letters from the Andes.
10 April 1983
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Well, a book dedicated to Andrew & me. What a wonder. Never heard of such a thing, & never was more flattered, pleased, proud, boastish, anything. Can’t wait.
I might learn to read in honour of the honour.
I can’t get over it, & await the day of publication as keenly as good old Jock Murray.
Decca & Bob land in London next week. Lucky them, going to you. She’s got an attack of nerves re her P Toynbee [1] so do soothe it down. Very unlike her, she usually bulldozes along I should have thought. I bet it’s good.
Diana’s chapter on Carrington & Strachey [2] is IT. Quite a different view of them to any one has ever read before.
Jim Lees-Milne [3] is writing a life of Ld Esher, the one who was Sec to the 8th Duke of Devonshire. He has turned up some rich tales of that marvellous man.
Much love & so many thanks for being on the 1st page of yr Book. What an excitement. From
Debo
[1] Jessica Mitford was writing a memoir of Philip Toynbee, published as Faces of Philip in 1984.
[2] Diana Mosley included a chapter on Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey in Loved Ones: Pen Portraits (1985).
[3] James Lees-Milne (1908–97). Architectural historian, biographer and diarist, who was ‘now and then exaggeration prone’. (PLF) Author of The Enigmatic Edwardian (1986), a life of Viscount Esher, writer and politician, who had a fondness for adolescent boys. Married Alvilde Chaplin in 1951.
20 June 1983
Mani
Darling Debo,
I set off for New York with my old Cretan guide and pal, Manoli Paterakis, [1] a glorious chap with eagle-brows and blazing eyes and very funny, who rarely leaves his goat-folds high up in the mountains of Western Crete, a man in a million. The pilot turned out to be an old friend too, so we were spirited into the super-luxury class and given masses of champagne, caviar and foie gras. Lots of Cretans met us at Kennedy Airport, and we were whisked off to a distant green corner of Long Island almost exclusively inhabited by them, and made a tremendous fuss of. We stayed with our old head of intelligence in Heraklion, a brilliant student then, now a successful inventor: [2] he’s perfecting an internal combustion engine which will reduce fuel consumption to 10% of its present amount, so he’ll probably be a billionaire. The whole thing was to mark the 42nd anniversary of the Battle of Crete, and M and I were the guests of honour.
Endless interviews and TV broadcasts culminated, the first Sunday, in a great gathering in a vast hall called the Crystal Palace on Broadway, where we were on a dais with an Orthodox bishop and other celebrities, and all made speeches, including me (not a dry eye) and Manoli, who rambled on splendidly about shooting parachutists among the rocks. Feasting followed, and marvellous Cretan dancing, the leaders twirling in mid-air, smacking their boots thrice before landing, to the strains of the lyra and other Cretan instruments; marvellous costumes. It all sounds as if it might have been hell, but it wasn’t, because of the warmth, kindness and enthusiasm of all concerned. V moving in fact. (By the end, we were laden with engraved gold and bronze plaques, and framed documents like those above psychiatrists’ couches in the New Yorker, explaining how we had each won the war single-handed, and lots of other lovely presents.) The next weekend, the whole troop flew to Toronto, where the same happened. We were seized and hugged by the son of Father John Alevizakis [3] (see Joan’s pictures in Cretan Runner, [4] if handy – also of Manoli), fed and housed by him and driven to Niagara, where we gazed marvelling through the spray. Managed to slip away to the centre of New York for several days, and put up at a rather nice shabby-genteel place called the Royalton, on W 44th Street, bang opposite the much grander and more famous Algonquin, which was used for breakfast and last drinks; but we had to chuck this, as the waiters were from Macedonia and Samos and, knowing our mugs from the local Greek press, we weren’t allowed to pay for drinks, and finally slunk off elsewhere for fear of ruining them. How nice to devote almost an entire letter to boasting. We got back after a fortnight, tired but happy.
I enjoyed goatherd Manoli’s calm acceptance of skyscrapers etc. (His only other absence from his native ranges was ten years ago. We were flown to Paris for a TV Resistance programme, and they put us up in a charming place called l’Hôtel Château Frontenac, near the Étoile. M’s suite had three thicknesses of lace curtain, panels of green pleated watered silk like your study, pastel-colour reproductions of Boucher and Fragonard – Le Baiser à la dérobée, l’Escarpolette etc – great brass beds and taps like golden swans’ necks. I asked him what he thought of it and he said ‘Very nice.’)
No more now, darling Debo, except tons of love (and news, please,) from
Paddy
[1] Cretan resistance fighter and a chief participator in the abduction of General Kreipe in 1944.
[2] George J. Doundoulakis (1921–2007). Second World War espionage hero and physicist.
[3] The village priest of Alones, a small village in south-west Crete, where PLF set up a wireless station during the war. His son, George Alevizakis, served in the Royal Hellenic Air Force before moving to Toronto after the war.
[4] George Psychoundakis, The Cretan Runner: His Story of the German Occupation (1955). PLF translated and wrote an introduction to the book, which included over a dozen photographs of the participants by Joan Leigh Fermor.
11 August 1983
Bolton Abbey
Skipton
Darling Paddy,
Spent two days filming with a wonder called Penelope Keith. [1] Did you ever see her on the telly, To The Manor Born, The Good Life etc, no acting necessary, she’s exactly like she is & perfect with an even more exaggerated voice than all Mitfords put together.
The subject of her interview was v unexpected – Capability Brown. The director had to tell us to stop laughing once or twice, that’s never happened before. It’s usually stop yawning. Anyway I spoke my mind about how he buggered up our garden & how thankful I was he hadn’t stopped up the river to make a soggy old lake (a miracle he didn’t, now I come to think of it, a favourite trick of his), so I hope it won’t be too dull. Couldn’t be with her. Her hubby is v Lancashire & talks same, he’s a copper on the beat in Chichester. Next time I stay with the Wife I shall Break & Enter there in the hopes of being apprehended by him. He’s lovely.
Now it’s a spot of sport, no grouse because of ghoul wet & cold in April & May, so we’ll pay attention to the picnics instead & Prince Philip is coming next week. What a shame he’s hit a dud year after last year’s bonanza.
The wedding of Catherine Guinness to Ld Neidpath [2] was too lovely, at Biddesden, all glowing pink brick on a boiling evening, a dance after, all out of doors, so rare not to be frozen at night.
My Diana hadn’t been in the house since she left 50 years ago & nor has a housemaid by the looks of it, but oh the beauty of the bones of the place.
An aged American fell in love with Diana & followed her about & I heard his wife say ‘I might as well take to drink & go back to New York.’ She’d done the first alright. I WISH Ann had been there, she ought to have come out of wherever she is for the night.
Andrew is wonderfully well, ne’ery a refresher, consequently in marvellous form & the best of all companions.
V much love & to Joan
Debo
[1] Penelope Keith (1940–). Actress famous for roles in television series and a keen gardener. Married to Rodney Timson in 1978.
[2] DD’s great-niece was married to James Neidpath 1983–8.
*
(DD)
In February, I wrote a harrowing letter to Paddy about an incident which precipitated the inevitable physical crisis in Andrew, brought on by his alcoholism. It was after the annual journey to Lismore for the opening of the salmon-fishing season on the Blackwater.
Even this traumatic experience failed to persuade him to take action. Not until the end of June did he seek treatment as a way out of the desperate affliction that affects not just the sufferers but so many people around them. With this help and a huge effort of will Andrew remained sober for the rest of his life.
It was not his first attempt at giving up. In his memoirs he wrote, ‘I made periodic attempts to give up alcohol for varying lengths of time, from a few months to a time in the ’70s when I gave up for two years, as the result of some drastic electric treatment.’ This did not have the hoped-for effect and it was not until this year that he conquered what he called the ‘old enemy’.
6 February 1984
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I’ve had two excitements. The first was being asked to shoot at Sandringham [1] & studying the house for the first time, & the second was Sybil Cholmondeley’s 90th birthday party.
Sandringham was built about the same time as Batsford [2] & smells just like it, it NEEDS palms & glut but has been cleared of same. * It’s got a wonderful atmosphere & makes one feel dangerously at home straight away.
My bathroom had three marble basins with letters engraved into them. The first said HEAD & FACE ONLY, the next HANDS, & good heavens the last was blank so what can it have been for.
I picked up a hoof, off Andrew’s writing table, with Persimmon (Derby winner FOOL) written on it, turned it over to see if it had a golden shoe & an awful rare liquid poured out all over EVERYTHING – ink. How could I guess. I wrecked Andrew’s sponge trying to wash the carpet & had to give up as the horrible beige thing was turning blacker & bluer every minute so I rang for the maid & fled. Two hours later there was no sign of the dread accident, aren’t those sort of professionals amazing?
Then back to Norfolk a week later, to Houghton for Sybil’s 90th birthday. I was so honoured to be asked, the other two non family staying in the house were Sir Steven Runciman [3] & Gp Captain Cheshire VC, [4] a bit more distinguished than yours truly, plus two non favourites of mine Elie & Liliane Rothschild. [5] The last communication I had with her was to write an incredibly rude letter about Pryce-Jones’ foul book, I can’t quite remember why I wrote it, must have been provoked but can’t remember what by. More than just the book no doubt.
Part of the fun was arriving the day before the great dinner & watching it coming to without a speck of responsibility. Lavinia [6] & Nini [7] (do you know her, Sybil’s daughter, polio when young, lame, charming, probation officer) were doing the names for the tables. Six tables of eight. I heard them muttering Give me the Dss of Kent. No that won’t do, where’s Pss Alexandra? The result was a triumph, everyone pleased with their place, even though I had Elie, famous for rudeness, but tamed by the awesome fact of the whole of the royal family being dangerously near so he was positively polite.
You simply can’t imagine the beauty of it all. That staggering Stone Hall set up for such an entertainment made me think I should never see anything so beautiful again, gold plate dug from the cellar by D Rocksavage, [8] orchids on every shelf because the present-givers mostly plumped for flowers & somehow Sybil IS orchids, daffs wouldn’t do, Sèvres china and the room itself, decorated & yet hardly because of it all being one colour viz. stone. Oh heavens it was wonderful.
All their old servants came out of cotton wool to do the job & do it they did most wonderfully.
Cake wore something shimmering as per, Pss Alexandra a terrific tartan thing in silk with huge sleeves, Dss of Kent came dressed as a clergyman – black silk with white collar & cuffs – we all made a monster effort, jewels galore &, a rare thing, there was exactly the right number of people.
Surrounded by the Oudry White Duck, many a Gainsborough, Sybil’s mater by Sargent, the Holbein of a squirrel & ‘my brother Philip’s Things’ [9] positively gaudy among the indigenous Kent kit, French clocks surrounded by sort of diamonds, eastern this & that, all one size too small but adding a lot, the royal people, seven minutes of block busting non-stop fireworks seen through the fat glazing bars & the old glass which is full of swirls & distortions, fires & flowers everywhere. Oh do try & picture the scene. SHE wore a pink cut-velvet & satin dress made for her mother in 1901.
The Duke of Grafton said some good words after dinner, & she, swearing after that she had no inkling anyone was going to do that, answered most brilliantly. She quoted from Horace Walpole something about dowagers being as common as flounders [10]
(‘What are these flounders?’ Elie asked) – nothing could have been better.
The fact that the Queen & all the rest of her push were there made the dreamlike feeling more so. Those rooms were made for all that & so was Sybil. I kept thinking how lucky I was to be there. I WISH you had been & all other appreciators of such rare fare.
Two sad funerals this week to bring one down to earth as it were. Our v.v. loved lawyer Tim Burrows only 56 & irreplaceable, & Sir Arthur Armitage, trustee of this dump & such a good fellow, ex vice Chancellor of Manchester University etc etc.
Then to the Wife where we stay for Uncle Harold’s 90th birthday party. I expect that will be the v. opposite of Sybil’s, it’s lunch in a tent.
I’m sure there are 1000 other items but I must stop & get to work on a terrifying speech I’ve got to make on the thrilling subject of Redundant Farm Buildings ( just your subject I know) to the Royal Soc. of Chartered Surveyors, terrifying because they are all pros. Why did I say I’d do it. Mad.
Much love
Debo
[1] DD was a guest of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on their Norfolk estate.
[2] Batsford Park in Gloucestershire was rebuilt by DD’s grandfather, Bertram Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale, in the late nineteenth century. DD’s brother and older sisters lived there as children until it was sold to Lord Dulverton, Chairman of W. D. & H. O. Wills Tobacco, in 1919.
[3] Steven Runciman (1903–2000). After an early falling out over PLF’s nocturnal excesses in Athens after the war, when Runciman was British Council representative and PLF was Deputy Director of the British Institute, they became lifelong friends. PLF greatly admired his books on the Crusades: ‘the skill of the writing, the vast range of his scholarship – even, here and there, the witty asides and brackets – called the name of Gibbon to many minds.’ Spectator, 13 January 2001.
[4] Leonard Cheshire (1917–92). Air Force officer and founder of the Cheshire Homes for the disabled.
[5] Liliane Fould-Springer (1916–2003). Art collector and philanthropist. Married Baron Elie de Rothschild, by proxy, in 1942. An aunt of David Pryce-Jones.
[6] Lavinia Leslie (1921–). Married 6th Marquess of Cholmondeley in 1947.
[7] Lady Aline Cholmondeley (1916–). Only daughter of 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley.
[8] David Rocksavage, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley (1960–). Hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain since 1990 and director of the film adaptation (1997) of Truman Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948).
[9] ‘When showing people around Houghton, Sybil Cholmondeley used to point out paintings, furniture and decorative works of art, sometimes exotic and often with an Eastern influence, collected by Sir Philip Sassoon, saying, in her precise clipped tones, “These are my brother Philip’s things – the best of their kind.” ’(DD)
[10] In a letter to a friend, Horace Walpole wrote that ‘Dowagers as plenty as flounders’ lived around Strawberry Hill, his house on the River Thames.
* Even Queen Mary’s Fabergé stuff has gone to London.
Mani
Darling Debo,
What a spanking description of those Proustian birthday celebrations at Houghton! I’ve read it again and again, and aloud to gaping listeners, all agog at those wonders by proxy.
I had a very bracing letter from your Emma, full of kind words about ‘Das Herz von Douglas’, [1] which I had inflicted on all friends at Yuletide. Somebody sent a copy of it to an 87-year-old Gräfin Strachwitz, who is the gr. gr. niece of the poet who wrote it. Apparently, her relation is also her life’s passion, and she has sent me an enormous book she has written about him, the first of three vols, all arriving in due course. It’s full of pictures of spiky Schlosses in Silesia and Bohemia, and pictures of splendid old grafs that Nancy would have liked when swotting on Frederick the Great [2] – all epaulettes and sabres and a criss-cross of fencing scars, ending up with a picture of herself, unscarred, but otherwise the image of Field Marshal von Bock [3] in a picture hat. Rather like O. Sitwell’s remark about Dame Ethel Smyth: ‘Ethel would be the dead spit of Wagner if only she were more feminine.’ [4]
Must now write to D Cooper.
Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] PLF had sent Emma Tennant his translation of ‘The Heart of Douglas’ by the Silesian poet Moritz, Graf Strachwitz (1822–47).
[2] Nancy Mitford’s last book, a life of Frederick II of Prussia, published in 1970.
[3] Fedor von Bock (1880–1945). The commander of Hitler’s failed attempt to capture Moscow had a thin, hatchet-like face.
[4] Ethel Smyth (1858–1944). Composer, militant suffragette and prolific author. At the age of seventy-one she fell in love with Virginia Woolf who described her as ‘an indomitable old crag’.
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Hoorah re you looming. COME TO IRELAND.
We’ll be there 16–28 April. You would be WELCOME any or all of that time.
Much love
Debo
16 May 1984
White’s
St James’s
London SW1
Darling Debo,
I’m still living in an afterglow of those lovely days at Lismore. It was more marvellous than ever, even than that glorious first sojourn, twenty-eight unbelievable years ago. Why I’m so late in writing to say all this is a mystery I can’t fathom; but 1000 thanks, and to Andrew. It was bracing to see him fit and well again.
I’ve been enjoying my minor season – or Greece dweller’s equivalent of a Mediterranean seaside holiday – and, the weekend after my return, went first to Coote Lygon’s cottage, then to the Mad Boy’s [1] for two nights. He’s considerably slowed up, walks rather laboriously on a stick, legs swivelling along rather like a pair of dividers, so my long walks were solitary trudges across green Berkshire, and I wish we had been on the march instead along the Blackwater with an escort of unjacketed Garda a couple of fields behind. Poor Robert had a fall and a sort of stroke three days later, but Coote says he is better now. I fear they will be more and more frequent.
Well, next weekend – to continue Jennifer’s Diary [2] – was at Daph’s (she had telephoned to Diana Cooper while I was hobnobbing with her as she lay abed and when she suggested it, I couldn’t resist). Well, her quarters in the Old Laundry [3] are simply glorious and she seemed very happy and settled and surrounded by loving souls. We went to the v nice house David & Caroline Somerset, now Beaufort, [4] live in, full of gigantic grandchildren of Daph and lots of guests, and I got her nice intellectual granddaughter [5] who had just written a book. The last morning I went for a tremendous walk before brekker in that park, where two simply tremendous herds of deer were on the move looking v romantic, and was overtaken by David on a glorious steed, accompanied by two Springer spaniels. He told me that two evenings before Master, your Leic Sq pick-up, [6] died, he (Master) was given rather a turn by seeing three foxes sitting on his father’s grave, giving him a serious look. The day before, Daph and I came out of the house, and his stooping rather absent-minded relict was ambling down towards the moorhens with a companion, and, spotting Daph, asked her if she lived near. Daph said Yes, here in the laundry, and the Dss said ‘I expect you have lots of fun with the milkmaids’, suggesting nameless high jinks among the churns and the mob caps. Then she asked David, ever in blue jeans, where he lived and he said ‘I live here too, don’t you remember me’ and she then said to Daph ‘They won’t like him like the other feller who was here’.
Drinks with Jim and Alvilde [Lees-Milne], also quartered nearby. He said Joan’s brother Graham had been the terror of all the surrounding nurseries and schoolrooms when young, and got so cross with Jim’s sister once that he smashed his tennis racquet over her head so hard that all the strings broke and her head came through.
Many, many thanks again, darling Debo, and tons of love from
Paddy
[1] Robert Heber-Percy (1911–87). Known as ‘the Mad Boy’ because of his wild behaviour. Married twice, to Jennifer Fry 1942–7, and to Lady Dorothy Lygon in 1985, but his liaisons were mostly with men.
[2] The social column by Betty Kenward (1906–2000), chronicling the activities of the English upper classes, ran for more than half a century in Tatler and Harper’s & Queen.
[3] Daphne Fielding moved to the house on her son-in-law’s estate after her divorce from Xan Fielding.
[4] David Somerset, 11th Duke of Beaufort (1928–). Married Lady Caroline Thynne, Daphne Fielding’s daughter, in 1950.
[5] Lady Anne Somerset (1955–). Historian, whose first book, Ladies-In-Waiting: From the Tudors to the Present Day, was published in 1984.
[6] Henry Somerset, 10th Duke of Beaufort (1900–84). Master of the Horse, 1936– 78, to three British Sovereigns. Known as ‘Master’ since he was a small boy by virtue of his creation and Mastership of his own pack of Rabbit Hounds. ‘A few years previously, Debo and I had been to see a film in Leicester Square called The Belstone Fox. We were the only people there, except for a very tall silhouette in the front row. It was the late Duke of Beaufort. Afterwards, on the pavement, he looked sad. “What did you think of it, Master?” Debo asked. “O, I didn’t like those hounds being run over by a train,” he replied. “Don’t worry, Master,” Debo reassured him, “scenes like that are always faked.” He cheered up a lot and was driven off in his big beflagged Master of the Horse Daimler. “He’s very shortsighted,” Debo said, “I bet he thought I was a street-walker.” ’ (PLF)
19 August 1984
[Postcard]
Bolton Abbey
Skipton
I thought you’d like this P.C. [1] Got permission from Ld Oxford as you note above.
I took Stella Tennant to the S of France for a few days. Asked her what she was going to do when grown up & without a moment’s hesitation she said Oh I’m going to be a coroner. [2]
Much love
Debo
[1] A postcard printed with an extract from a letter from Raymond Asquith to Katherine Horner, written from Chatsworth in 1906, ‘How you would loathe this place! It crushes one by its size and is full of smart shrivelled up people . . . there is only one bathroom in the house which is kept for the King.’
[2] DD’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter was to become a famous model.
18 December 1984
Mani
Darling Debo,
Joan and I met Xan and Magouche in Salonika towards the end of September. The Hotel Mediterranean Palace, where I had appointed the rendezvous, had been pulled down ten years ago, but I found them mooching about in a café hard by, and we set off for Turkey next morning, through Thrace and Macedonia, and finally reached Constantinople, & dossed down at the Pera Palace, which used to be charming, now gone to pot. Here we sight-saw, gaping at all the marvels I hadn’t properly gazed at for half a century, and in the evenings, hobnobbed and ate deliciously with various exalted Turks who lived in romantic wooden palaces in bosky gardens on the edge of the Bosphorus. I’d forgotten how simply delicious the food is: have you ever been there?
From here we struck south, to Bursa, and climbed Bithynian Olympus. Then came to a score of ancient sites of incredible beauty lost among mountains and woods and wilderness – Sardis, Aphrodisia, Priene, the Meander Valley, Ephesus, Didymus, Smyrna, and on up the Aegean coast, bathing by full moonlight in creeks and coves, till we got to Troy. A tremendous jumble but it made one’s heart thump all the same, standing on those crumbly grass-grown battlements with the wind driving cloud-shadows across the Scamander valley . . .
Well, next day we got to Channakalé – the ‘Channack’ of the Dardanelles, where the Hellespont is about a mile across, steep ridges of Asia on our side, and of Europe on the other. I’d always longed to have a try swimming across, and, suddenly confronted, couldn’t very well wriggle out. I’d been given the name of a boatman who might show me the way, and finally found one, and next morning, with Ahmad, a nice deep-sea fisherman, brother of the Channack Hotel owner, Joan and I set off up the Asian coast to Abydos. We weren’t allowed to land because it was a military zone, so we almost ran the skiff aground and I dived in, not far from where HMS Goliath was sunk in 1915 (the whole straits are full of sunk men o’ war from the Gallipoli campaign). I slogged along after the skiff, Joan and Sevki shouting encouragement and instructions across the stern. One has to cross either in the early morning or in the evening, as a wind blows up in the late morning and at noon and makes rough waves. It should take just about an hour. It was 9.50 a.m.
It seemed quite easy at first, the landmarks – lighthouses, mountains, minarets, forts etc – changed places with heartening speed, and the dreaded current didn’t seem too strong. A huge Russian tanker, Bogomiloff, loomed from the north leaving a strong wash behind it which kept lifting me up and dropping me again. Then the Gooriah from Tunis, next the Dâmbovitzà from Constantza, a Rumanian liner, and from then on there was always a ship or two and often several. Ahmed stuck a red Turkish flag with the crescent in the stern slot and, when we looked like being run down, waved another one.
Only when I thought we were halfway did I start to feel the dread current. The water suddenly became choppy and ruffled, and hard to make headway in. Joan and Sevki of the hotel kept sending encouraging cries: ‘Only ten minutes fast now and you’ll be through!’, so I toiled on but could see, by the speed of the scene-changes on shore, that the current was beginning to carry me downstream. Two or three miles away, the ridge on the Ægean was Gaba Tepe, the ‘Anzac Cove’ of 1915.
I was swimming sidestroke and began to notice a strange fluctuating hiss, a very eerie sound, like an echo in a vast dark room, under my submerged left ear and I thought it must be the grinding of pebbles and silt at the bottom of the sea. The surface current flows S.W., but, under this current, another one flows the opposite way, and I thought the noise – brought about by the narrowing of the channel at the Dardanelles a mile downstream – might be the shock of the two currents colliding. (A few days later, in one of those wooden palaces on the Bosphorus, I mentioned this to Nuri Birgi, the nice Turkish ex-ambassador to London. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said. ‘It’s Russian submarines. I often hear them here at Scutari. They’re supposed to surface, but they don’t – or only one in every 30 or 40!’) So here I was, about a mile S.W. from Leander’s and Ld B’s crossing places, a mile N.W. of Xerxes’ and Alexander’s boat-bridges, on the track of the Argo on the way back with the Golden Fleece and next to Troy; but too concerned about the current to think of all this, except in fitful snatches. A vast castle was advancing from the S.W., with great round bastions with crescent flags; and two mosques – one of them with a minaret topped with a green spike, sliding upstream as well. It was Kilid Bahr, much battered – but all in vain – by our naval guns in 1915; immediately opposite Channack at the narrowest point of the whole Channel.
Joan kept shouting ‘Are you all right?’, and smiled cheerfully; and I was, though getting rather tired. I felt she might be sitting on her hands to avoid wringing them.
I churned away like mad, the fort and the mosques vanished, but it still looked a discouraging distance to the European shore: the Asian one, meanwhile, my kick-off point, had faded into the distance. The current took me past a row of bathing huts, followed by a derelict hotel, then there was nothing ahead but open country and sea – sheep, hillsides, pine woods and dried-up torrent beds; and, infuriatingly, with the sudden widening after the narrows, it all seemed to be sliding away westward and out-of-reach and I had grim visions of being whirled out between Cape Helles and Kum Kale. For this bit, the chart says – or I think it does, it’s a bit indistinct: ‘Current 4 knots at times’, and, all of a sudden, there was a strong counter-current upstream, indicated on the chart by minute arrows. But it was no help.
I tried swimming on my back, but what with the clash of currents, the steamers’ wash, and, by now, the midday waves, I couldn’t keep direction, so thrashed on as before. I was very tired, but I must have made some headway at last; things began to look up when Ahmed cut off the skiff ’s engine to avoid running aground. There were pebbles underfoot, and Joan shouting ‘You’ve done it!’, and soon I was stumbling ashore among slippery boulders and green seaweed, a couple of hundred yards upstream from a wooded headland and a ravine full of poplars.
I sloshed back into the water again with a gravelly handful of Europe, and was hauled aboard with joyful cries, feeling exhausted but jubilant; dressed in the little cabin, drank some tea brewed by Ahmed, then followed by a slug of whiskey brought by Joan, and we headed back full tilt to Channack and Asia, where Xan and Magouche were waiting with a bottle of champagne; they had followed our course with binoculars from the hotel balcony, like Zeus and Hera from the clouds above Tenedos.
I had got to the other side at 12.45 a.m. after swimming for exactly 2 hours and 55 minutes. I’m still not quite sure how far it was but I think 3–4 miles. Sevki of the hotel said I got out at aplace called Havuzlar (‘pools: Avuzlar’ on the chart); but I think it was further down, about a mile, at the mouth of a stream called ‘Suyandere’ or Soğan dere – ‘Onion Valley’, also famous from the Gallipoli battles.
Too tired to eat any luncheon, and Joan ditto psychologically, we slept like logs, telephoned for tea and toast, and up came delicious Welsh Rabbits instead. But my limbs had turned to stone, so I slunk creakily off to a charming hammam and lay on the marble slab dissolving and watching, on the other side of the perforations in the dome, the daylight fading and then turning black, while a burly masseur was taking me apart and then reassembling me by trampling up and down my spine like an elephant; and I emerged into the dusk feeling light as a feather and strolled to the end of the lane and smoked a thoughtful hookah there in a café, half an hour of total felicity, watching the twinkling lights and reflections in the narrows, and thinking that, tho’ I was only the most recent in a long list of copycats, I was certain I had beaten all records for slowness and length of immersion; a wreath no future swimmer is likely to snatch at.
Well there we are, Debo, what a rigmarole to inflict, put together from what I put down next day. Do you mind if I crib it for an article? [1]
I do hope this gets to you in time for Yule at Dingley Dell [2] – it brings all fond wishes for Christmas to you, and to Andrew, and all you and yours, ed il vecchio zio Cobley e tutti quanti, [3] and tons of fond love from
Paddy
I feel a bit out of breath after all the above and I bet you do too.
[1] PLF published an account of his feat in the Independent, 7 March 1999.
[2] PLF spent many Christmases at Chatsworth, which he called ‘Dingley Dell’ after ‘the abode of Mr Wardle in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, famous for its Yuletide feasting and fun’. PLF to DD, 28 November 2002.
[3] ‘Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all’. PLF translated into Italian the English folk song ‘Widdecombe Fair’, and enjoyed regaling friends with his rendition (see p. xvi).
Mani
[Why no gnus?]
12 February 1985
London
Darling Paddy,
Yes, Sorry, HOPELESS not to have written (a) re Hellespont & now (b) yr very old birthday. [1]
Pressure of Business is the reason, & having had to do a piffling little piece on Bolton Abbey for some artist lads at Bradford (a mag). It came between me & everything for ages. Now it’s done & posted thank goodness, & very bad as well.
Business is Pleasure of course but takes nonetheless time for that.
Anyway the Hellespont & the above & below currents, Joan in the boat & the time it took & the success of the whole boiling & now you’re 70, just too extraordinary for words. So congrats on that & don’t do it again, eh.
Before I get on, a few questions.
If you saw a notice saying DIM PARCIO what country wd you be in & what does it mean?
Olives. You know how when you buy them they are green or black? Well, are they the same kind treated differently? What happens? RSVP (Or are they Cox’s Orange Pippins & Beauty of Bath?)
David Harlech’s death in a motor accident is the FOUL news here. You simply can’t imagine how awful the funeral was. In a little cold dark chapel on a hill near Glyn (Harlech, where they lived). The churchyard full of people as the chapel was wee. Those poor children going through it all again as their mother was killed in like manner. And now the children’s children, heaving backs in grey suits sobbing & clinging to each other & the raggle taggle but completely charming mothers & the unmarried one called Alice with brilliant yellow dyed hair, Mary & Lees [2] & her vast untidy sons & Jackie Onassis & Teddy Kennedy, [3] she just the same as ever, he stout & broad as Henry VIII, scarlet face, thin aeroplane sort of suit completely filled by his body, not a patch on his bros I’m afraid.
Andrew is in Ireland, fishing & loving it because there are some fish this year. But the real reason he’s enjoying it is because he is so well. No refreshing drinks for some months & he is cheerful & even fishing himself (which he hasn’t done for years, just watched the others). So isn’t that GOOD.
When they were all fishing I had some Loved Ones for a weekend at Chatsworth – Nicko Henderson & his excellent wife, [4] R Kee, the Mlinarics [5] & blessed Arthur Marshall. [6] I do love Nicko Henderson. He’s a new friend. We meet on the board of Tarmac, can you imagine.
The other day we gave a dinner (Tarmac I mean) & Nicko & I asked the guests & the idea is to get top politicians & one or two industrialists & some of the Tarmac pros to talk to each other about the State of Things.
What wd Lady Redesdale say, asking a lot of people to dinner who I’ve never met. No women except me & when you’ve eaten a bit someone taps on a glass & says now we’ll hear what you all think & everyone (except me of course, too stupid) spouts out a lot of tosh about dollars & exchange rates & employment & unemployment & some of them talk in that new language which is incomprehensible but it is FASCINATING, a new world to me as you can imagine. (A paper belched out by their office about some huge scheme said something was a revolving evergreen facility. Well, what is it?)
So I asked Mr Thatcher, [7] & he came, imagine. He kissed my hand & talked to me about You Aristocrats so I said I wasn’t one & he had a G & T & all was well with the world.
Uncle Harold came. I wd have given much for a camera when U Harold, D Thatcher & the Chairman of Tarmac were squeezed on a ridiculous little sofa (private room at Claridge’s). U Harold oiled up to Mr T like anything to make up for going for his wife in the H of Lords.
Nicko & I are going to America with our employers in April. What a thrill.
I shall think of 1000 other things when this has gone, but there we are.
Much love
Debo
[1] PLF celebrated his birthday on 11 February.
[2] Mary Ormsby Gore, Lord Harlech’s older sister, and her husband (Alexander) Lees Mayall (1915–92), ambassador to Venezuela and Vice-Marshal of the diplomatic corps 1965–72. ‘When Lees was serving at our embassy in Paris, he left me with an abiding memory. Aly Khan gave a big dinner at the Pré Catalan after Longchamp races and at 2 a.m., when nearly everyone had left, Lees was still dancing, alone, with his eyes shut, holding a single delphinium at arm’s length.’ (DD)
[3] Edward Kennedy (1932–). Elected to the US Senate in 1962, filling the seat vacated by his brother when JFK became President.
[4] Nicholas (Nicko) Henderson (1919–). Diplomat and writer. Following his retirement in 1982 as ambassador to the United States, he was appointed a director of Tarmac, the leading supplier of building material. Married Greek-born Mary Cawadias in 1951.
[5] David Mlinaric (1939–). Interior designer, decorator and friend of the Devonshire family. Married Martha Laycock in 1969.
[6] Arthur Marshall (1910–89). Humorist, writer and broadcaster best known for being on the BBC panel show Call My Bluff. ‘At Chatsworth one day, he and I walked across the lawn, heavily populated with people listening to the Sunday band. Someone spotted Arty, then at the height of his TV fame, “Look, it’s Arthur Marshall. It can’t be. It IS!”, and rushed up for an autograph and chat, so delighted to meet the man who made everybody laugh.’ (DD)
[7] Denis Thatcher (1915–2003). DD once asked the Prime Minister’s husband how he kept up with his wife. He replied, ‘Love and loyalty my dear.’ The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley (Fourth Estate, 2007), p. 781.
19 February 1985
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
A headline in The Lady re theatres:
NEW PLAYS
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Well, even I know that’s not a new play.
And a headline in the Farmers Weekly:
BIEN VENUE – A GOOD RAPE
I think that’s all for now.
Much love
Debo
Mani
Darling Debo,
About DIM PARCIO, I give up. Do explain.
Olives. There are between 50 and 100 different kinds, black, deep purple, dark green, pale green, and some – never seen them – almost white. ALL the ones down here (the best in the world) are purply black, not very big, but marvellous. After picking ( Joan, Léla and some village women, with Petro, our Léla’s hubby, sawing and pruning in the branches) they are loaded in sacks, the teams of donkeys take them to the old press in the village, a terrific grinding and clatter, then out streams – first trickling, then a gush – the jade green oil, which we dip bread in and munch in ecstasy. It tastes bitter at first, but perfect in a few days; then it comes back to the house (clippety-clop) in things like flat-sided milk cans and is poured into a vast metal circular tank, which lasts us for a year, and plenty to give away. The rest we sell. Léla splits some of them and marinades them in brine, for hors-d’oeuvres for a week or two. Table olives are much bigger, beautiful smooth ovals, kept in their own oil, which lasts forever. These are obtained by grafting, which also changes the shape of the leaves – much longer and floppier.
I love your description of the Tarmac PR luncheon. Revolving evergreen facility, indeed.
We’ve got a fellow-writer called Bruce Chatwin [1] staying, v nice, tremendous know-all, reminds me of a couplet by O Goldsmith:
‘And still they gazed and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.’ [2]
He’s a great pal of Jackie Onassis.
Please keep in touch, and tons of love from
Paddy
[1] Bruce Chatwin (1940–89). The writer, who had been a friend of PLF since 1970, spent seven months in a hotel in Kalamata writing The Songlines (1987). After his death, his ashes were brought to Greece by his wife Elizabeth and buried near PLF’s house in the ruins of a Byzantine chapel that he had always loved. He had become Orthodox at the end of his life.
[2] ‘The Village Schoolmaster’, from Oliver Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village (1770).
Lismore Castle
Co. Waterford
Darling Paddy,
All v jolly here & exactly as ever. We’ve been coming 38 years & lots of things are unchanged, various patches of damp & such like I mean.
Americans take it in the summer & it seems they aren’t too keen on holes in the carpets so we’ve got to explain that it’s smart to have them. Uphill work.
Clodagh [1] is still afloat, & Mrs Farquhar, [2] 83 & 86 now. One has lost a bit of a vocal cord & the other has had a stroke but goes on the same as ever & said furiously when you’re 90 they take away your driving licence. I rather wish they’d done that at 86. She can’t see a thing & is all over the shop.
I’ve been asked to review the newly republished (paperback) of the D of Bedford’s killing book called How to Run a Stately Home. [3] He is a card. I’m enjoying doing it. *
Much love
Debo
DIM PARCIO = NO PARKING in Welsh. Rich, isn’t it.
I’m going to America with Tarmac. We’re looking at quarries, sandpits & concrete blocks. Imagine what a help I shall be to them. The wonderful thing is having Nicko Henderson on the board, a boon companion if ever there was one.
[1] Lady Clodagh Anson (1902–92). A spinster neighbour of the Devonshires at Lismore. ‘Andrew’s Granny Evie and Clodagh’s mother were connected by marriage. She was the only person I knew of Anglo-Irish background who was accepted by the inhabitants of Lismore and beyond as one of themselves. She kept unusual hours and did not wake till lunchtime. She loved her garden, but it was often dark before she was ready to start work, so she gardened by the headlights of her ancient car and when the battery failed she wore a miner’s lamp so as to be able to go on weeding late into the night. She was a regular churchgoer to the magnificent Church of Ireland cathedral in Lismore. When the service started at 10.30 she always half an hour late and came in with a clatter of banged doors and dropped books. It was decided to start the service at 11, to give her a chance. She made the same noisy entrance at 11.30. The service wasn’t delayed any further or the congregation would have missed lunch.’ (DD)
[2] Elizabeth Farquhar; an outspoken neighbour of the Devonshires.
[3] Reprinted in Counting My Chickens, and Other Home Thoughts (Long Barn Books, 2001), pp. 150–2.
* For the Field not the Times Lit Sup. Surprised?
4 April 1985
Lismore Castle
Co. Waterford
Darling Paddy,
Bruce Chatwin. OH how unfair you knowing him. He wrote a book (if it’s the fellow I think it is) which I so adored I’ve never really felt like another. [1] You know what I mean, like my Dad & White Fang. [2]
How ghoul if he’s a know-all, but I wd like just to see & smell him to see for myself. Or is it like meeting royal people & actors, better not? Have you always known him?
I’ve got my Deity here, John Smith, [3] the genius of the Landmark Trust, & his well-named wife Christian. We’ve done the rounds in a day, the Lodges, Youghal, church, deanery & Sir W Raleigh’s dump, Ballynatray, & home via Dromana.
Cheered to see smoke coming out of a chimney at Ballynatray but oh the sadness of the little church. You know the one where they had to dig up one grave to plant another body & there used to be bones all over the place. It’s an impenetrable thicket of laurels, brambles & sycamores now, no bones to note, & they’ve taken the roof off the church (it used to have a fireplace with a brass surround, do you remember?) & filled the doorways with concrete blocks, really dog in the manger behaviour, just because THEY don’t want to get in doesn’t mean ONE doesn’t.
The Garda lads (three of them who go everywhere even with me now) looked at it amazed & said Sure t’would be easy to restore, well it wouldn’t but no English policeman would say that wd they.
Clodagh came to lunch. J Smith was suitably riveted. J Smith VERY IMPRESSED at me knowing you.
Anyway it’s Chatwin I want to know about & of course your arrival in England & coming to Chatsworth.
Much love
Debo
[1] On the Black Hill (1982), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award.
[2] DD’s father, Lord Redesdale, like his fictional alter ego Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s novels, was said to have read only one book in his life, Jack London’s White Fang, which was so good that he had never wanted to read another.
[3] John Smith (1923–2007). Financier and philanthropist who founded the Landmark Trust in 1965 to preserve unusual historic buildings, which are then let out as holiday homes to the public. Married Christian Carnegy in 1952.
24 June 1985
As from White’s or
Mani I suppose
Darling Debo,
Jock [Murray], fearful of my slipping between his fingers, keeps on thinking of new and vital things to be done, so I’m STILL not off; but I’m going to try and make a break for it, back home by the weekend. I feel smitten down by a sort of melancholia, rather a rare thing with me, and for no specific reason, except everything seeming gloomy and hopeless – I dare say subconsciously banks, hostages and rain have something to do with it. But I long to slink off.
No more now except lots of love and thanks to you both from
Paddy
27 August 1985
Mani
Darling Debo,
When we got back, there was a disco opening at the top of our road 400 yards away and, as our valley acts like a megaphone, the mad jittery racket after sunset was hell unloosed, and we thought we were going mad. Well, it continued for a fortnight, during which not a soul went there, and suddenly there was silence; and now they are gone. We thought we might have to draw stumps forever. It was a close shave.
Two or three weeks ago the telephone rang, and it was Coote Lygon, shyly announcing that she and the Mad Boy had decided to get married. [1] It’s the best news one has heard for a long time. Hip hooray! I can’t think of a better presiding spirit for Faringdon. The only thing is, I hope Rosa [2] doesn’t slip strychnine into her soup.
Scarcely anyone has been here, and I must say, I don’t blame them in August. But tomorrow John Julius and his Mollie [3] appear for a week, which we are looking forward to in our rustic isolation; then a dribble of guests all through September, and on 1st October we meet Xan and Magouche for a tremendous sight-seeing ramble of baroque towns, churches, Schlosses, and so on, in S Germany and Austria, which I love. I slightly dread one aspect of this trip: while in Blighty, probably through guzzling so at Dingley Dell, I put on five kilos, as I discovered to my dismay stepping on the scales when I got back. Well by dint of abstinence, clean living and swimming about a mile a day, I’ve managed to drop eight, and it’s still going down. I emerge svelter and browner from the waves each day. But what will Germany do to all this? With the terrible example of everyone all round one wolfing it down like ogres?
I’ve just been reading Loved Ones and enjoying it very much; but was rather mortified to see that the Derek story, ‘No, that wasn’t the name’, didn’t come in. [4]
One of the cats killed a snake last night, quite long, with orange, black and white spots. It looked terribly dangerous but the book says it’s a harmless rat-snake, and indeed, halfway along was a huge bulge, which must have been a rat. It resembled those pictures of pythons or boa constrictors digesting bison in The Wonder Book of Nature.
Do send news; tons of love from
Paddy
Joan did enjoy her stay with you.
In the Introduction to my new book – the ‘thanks’ part – I’m thinking of putting ‘– also to the proprietors of the Stag Parlour near Bakewell, for revision’. [5] That’ll make them scratch.
[1] Robert Heber-Percy and Lady Dorothy Lygon married when they were both aged seventy-three and parted a year later.
[2] The cook at Faringdon, the house that Robert Heber–Percy inherited from Lord Berners after they had lived there together for eighteen years.
[3] John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich (1929–). Historian, only son of Duff and Diana Cooper, married Mary (Mollie) Philipps as his second wife in 1989.
[4] See PLF to DD, 6 August 1980. Diana Mosley’s pen portraits of friends included a chapter on her former brother-in-law Derek Jackson.
[5] PLF worked in a downstairs room at Chatsworth, known as the Stag Parlour, ‘for fevered sessions’ of revision on Between the Woods and the Water.
7 December 1985
Mani
Darling Debo,
Now. (a) What did you think of the Annie book? [1] I thought Mark made a very good job of it, though I would have left out the harrowing letters, especially Ian’s, when things started going wrong. What about you? (b) How did the Nancy book [2] go?
(c) How are you? More later.
(d) About two months ago, Joan and I flew to Frankfurt, where Xan and Magouche were waiting, in order to start a giant baroque journey next day, so settled in a smiling hamlet on the banks of the Rhine in a huge castle called Johannisberg where dwells a marvellous Russian Pss Metternich, [3] a pal of Magouche’s. The most fabulous Hock in the world is made there, and most of next morning was spent in catacombs scooped out of the castle rock; there were spacious halls here and there, with tables and candles and rows of gleaming glasses and bottles, a sort of competition was afoot, where we sat and sipped various nectars beyond compare, then sped down the Rhine to another Schloss, inhabited by a frightfully nice Scotch Pss of Hesse that her familiars call ‘Peg’, [4] you probably know her, very funny and welcoming. She was in a bit of a wax about Tony Lambton’s book, [5] thinking it inaccurately rotted all her people-by-marriage (‘and why did Stinker Lambton say I was like only a rather jolly vicar’s wife, instead of just a jolly one?’) After this castle-life, we went seriously to work, scouring the Rhineland, Württemburg, Swabia, Franconia, Bavaria and Saxony for these extraordinary churches, which I still haven’t entirely taken in, tho’ I gaze at their pictures non-stop. The trompe l’œil ceiling paintings are perfectly summed up by a pre-war French song (‘Quand notre cœur fait boum!’) [6] of which some of the last lines are:
Et le bon Dieu dit BOUM
Dans son fauteuil de nuages. [7]
These gave cricks in the neck in uncounted staggering intervals.
Well, it was a wonder. We darted into the Tyrol and out again, slept in a lorry drivers’ hotel in Salzburg (no others available), then back to wonderful Passau, where two other rivers – the Ilz and the Inn – join the Danube from either side, under flatiron-quays piled high with architectural wonders, and turn the river for a mile or two into a tricolour with their differently hued currents. I love the Danube, and feel bound up in it since my early days, a sort of honorary merman.
We followed it slowly downstream to Vienna, where those Lippizaner horses were only exercising in the Hofburg (they had just got back from a visit to Blighty – did you go and see them?) instead of going through their fascinating and neurotic paces at home. We went and had delicious coffee and squashy cakes at Demel: that Regency Rumpelmeyer’s in the Kohlmarkt next door.
We broke up here, the Fieldings back to Spain, Joan to Blighty, me to Hungary, after an unflawed month. I went to Budapest, * to see old pals, and one especially. Do you remember my reading aloud to you and Andrew a bit about swimming with a pal down a river in Transylvania, being taunted by two pretty reapers on the shore, and our jumping out and giving chase over the stubble? He – Elemér von Klobusiçky, called ‘István’ in the book – plays a tremendous part in vol 2 of Shanks’s Europe.
Well, I wanted to show him the relevant bits of the book and find out if he approved; also hoped for a laugh or two. He lives in a sort of workmen’s tenement block of flats on the E outskirts of Pest. I telephoned again and again with no answer, so took a taxi for miles in the pouring rain. Monoglot taxi had no idea of the district (called Centenarium), but I managed to spot it in the end from a former visit, pretty bleak in the pouring rain, a semi-skyscraper on a bombsite with an old laundry, rubbish, graffiti and prams without wheels. Found his door, with two new names, and his, faded and illegible, on a peeling strip of adhesive tape. But no banging produced any results, the whole area was abandoned. An old crone pottered along in the end. ‘Uncle Elemér bácsi?’ She made signs of his having bust his leg months ago, being in hospital. I left a telephone number, and slunk back in the gloaming to my dismal hotel. Called to the telephone, there, on the other end was the rather pretty girl, head of the Communist cell for Elemér’s former block, who, in spite of E’s 85-year-old ultra reactionary stance, had rather a crush on him (I took them both out to lunch three years ago). She told me he smashed his leg in August, since when he had been in a military hospital W of Buda (as an ex-hussar from the Great War, I suppose!).
So next day I got a friend, Dagmar, wife of my Hungarian writer pal Rudi Fischer, [9] to drive me there, in some rather nice leafy hills. But, when we arrived, a gaggle of nurses told me he’d left that morning for an old folks’ home in Pest. So back we went – still pouring and many miles now – to a pretty grim, prison-like building outside but not too bad indoors, where I found Elemér’s quarters at last, a room with five other old boys, rather nice. It was dark again and I had difficulty spotting which he was. He was asleep, tired after all the moving. When I woke him and the lights went on, he looked v drawn, top teeth out, white stubble, but still recognisably good-looking, aquiline, & pink cheeked. The sad thing was he couldn’t recognise me! When I said ‘I’m on the way to Greece’ he said, again and again, ‘In Greece lives my old friend Leigh Fermor. Greet him from me.’ (We’ve been in constant touch, till three months ago.) ‘But, Elemér, it’s me!’ ‘No, no, you are too young. Give him my love.’ Dagmar had stolen off by now. We talked a long time – he still only a quarter convinced it was me, still using the third person, as though I were absent. I’d brought him lots of whiskey, tea, coffee, books etc from Vienna, but don’t think he twigged they were for him. I asked about his sister Ilona, who lives in Transylvania – he’d forgotten her married name and address, also his son’s, who lives in Düsseldorf. This good-looking chap, Miklos, [10] hadn’t been for a bit, but his daughter-in-law, a Frog Pss Caroline Murat, had, twice. He really wasn’t taking in much, so I had to tear myself away at last, as I felt I was tiring him. I buggered off, feeling very wrung by it all. Eclipse of a Honvéd Hussar! I’ve a terrible fear he won’t emerge, or last very long . . . But I’m glad I saw him. I’ve found everyone’s addresses and have written. He was a tremendous friend. You’d have loved him in palmier days – he was so funny. The nurses were very nice and all adored him, even the Bolshevik matron. The place was miles from anywhere, it was pouring cats and dogs, no taxis anywhere, pitch dark, so I slumbered in a wicker chair in the porter’s lodge for an hour, till a doctor gave me a lift to the middle of town.
I flew to Sofia next day and found it horrible. The intervening 51 years had changed the cheery little Balkan capital into the HQ of a dim and remote Soviet province with huge scarlet hoardings everywhere displaying the faces of the leaders in frames the size of tennis courts. I had meant to explore the whole of Bulgaria in a hired car as a refresher for Vol III, but caught a bus to Salonika instead (three sodden hours at the Bulgarian-Greek customs while oafs fumbled through one’s effects like slow-motion rag-and-bone men), then over the Greek frontier to Mount Athos. Paradise.
Joan, Graham, Michael Stewart and I all arrived here (in the Mani) on the same day, then Artemis Cooper [11] turned up in search of details about wartime Cairo. The next day I had horrible news from Crete about Manoli Paterakis – see Joan’s post-war photo in The Cretan Runner. He was my guide and closest Cretan friend in the island, hand in glove in all sorts of risky junctures, a man in a million, two years older than me, v. funny with a hawk nose, piercing eyes, and vast knowledge of the mountains. His was a goat-herding family. He had fallen and been killed. I dashed to Athens, caught a plane to Canea, and drove with two old friends to Koustogérako, one of the highest-perched villages in Crete. The whole of the Resistance Movement seemed to have gathered on the stone steps, and there was poor Manoli in his open coffin (one embraces the brow of the dead here, cold as the clay). His wife and children absolutely swollen with weeping. After the burial, his brothers took me under a walnut tree and told me what had happened. Some of the young chaps in the village had teased him, in a friendly way, ‘Eh, Uncle Manoli, you can’t hunt ibex any more like you used to!’ (They are very shy rare animals – forbidden to hunters now – and M was the best ibex shot in Crete.) Next day, before dawn, he dashed up the White Mountains, very high. Other, later climbers, lost sight of him but heard a shot at dusk, and went down again. When he didn’t appear next day, a search party climbed up, and at last found a large shot ibex on a ledge. Peering down a precipice, they saw Manoli’s body 300 feet below, and totally inaccessible. He must have been hoisting the ibex on his shoulder – slipped and fallen into the chasm.
Among other adventures (including General Kreipe) we had tried to sink two tankers in Heraklion harbour. The plan was to swim out to them, stick magnetic explosive ‘limpets’ on their sides, press a button, swim away again, and buzz off. We were hiding among some wreckage in the harbour, getting ready to disrobe when a patrol of two Germans approached, with one torch. They stopped, didn’t move for a few seconds, then quietly moved on, and we hastened stealthily away, blessing our stars that at least we were dressed. They must have seen us, we thought. But no alarms were raised. We slunk off to the hills next day, tails between legs.
A few years ago, when we were invited to New York as guests of the Cretan Union of America, on the last evening they took us up the Empire State Building with the 5 o’clock traffic thundering below. I saw a pensive look on Manoli’s face, and asked him what he was thinking of, and he said ‘I’m just thinking that back in Crete it would be just about time to go up the folds and feed the ewes.’
Christmas draws nigh, and I hope it’s a happy one for you, darling Debo, and tons of fond love from
Paddy
[1] The Letters of Ann Fleming, edited by Mark Amory.
[2] Selina Hastings, Nancy Mitford, A Biography (1985).
[3] Princess Tatiana Vassiltchikov (1915–2006). Married Prince Paul Alfons, last Prince Metternich-Winneburg, in 1941. Schloss Johannisberg was almost totally destroyed by bombs in 1942. After the war the Metternichs rebuilt the greater part of the castle and made it their permanent home.
[4] Margaret (Peg) Geddes (1913–97). Married Prince Ludwig of Hesse and the Rhine in 1937. Their house at Wolfsgarten was a centre of entertainment and culture after the war.
[5] Antony Lambton, Elizabeth and Alexandra (1985). An account of the Grand Duke of Hesse’s two daughters who married, respectively, the Grand Duke Serge, brother of Tsar Alexander III, and Nicholas II, last of the Romanov Tsars.
[6] ‘When our heart goes boom.’
[7] ‘And the good Lord says boom / In his throne of clouds.’ Charles Trenet, ‘Boum’ (1938).
[8] In 1937, DD drove with her mother and sister Unity through Austria to stay with Janos von Almásy at Bernstein Castle in the Austrian province of Burgenland.
[9] Rudolf Fischer; language editor of the Hungarian Quarterly, guide, philosopher and friend to PLF for many years. In Between the Woods and the Water, PLF acknowl edged his debt to Fischer’s ‘omniscient range of knowledge and an enthusiasm tempered with astringency’.
[10] Miklos von Klobusiçky (1946–). Married Princess Caroline Murat in 1967.
[11] Artemis Cooper (1953–). Granddaughter of Duff and Diana Cooper. Author of a forthcoming biography of PLF, of Cairo in the War 1939–1945 (1989) and, with her husband, historian Antony Beevor, of Paris After the Liberation 1944–1949 (1994).
23 January 1986
Mani
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Yes I know, HOPELESS, specially as I got such a fat one from you. I was haunted by that man you hunted from pillar to hospital & didn’t know you but knew your name. OH old age, the foulness of it.
Anyway thanks for that & the rest in that letter. It was a treat. The trouble is I’m trying to start a new book. [1] I can’t think of anything else but I can’t do it, so the result is NOTHING. Nothing done which ought to be done & everything left undone.
The first sentence is very trying, you’ll admit. Famous Authors (that fraudulent thing in America which explains how to be one) says write ‘the’ on a bit of paper (well what else could it be on) & then put down some more words. I ask you. Then I thought ‘well ’, as all interviewees on the wireless begin. No good. And ‘like’, and ‘it came to pass.’ No good either. So I looked at a few ghoul vols, no help. I think it will be ‘if ’, like Kipling, but the nub of the ensuing sentence is Dutch to nearly everyone, not to you because you know everything & not to my editor (R Garnett) because he knows everything, but to 99% of the fools who read books.
It’s going to go like this: ‘If you live in the same place for a long time you become hefted to your hill like an old sheep. The surroundings slowly but surely take hold & become part of you, the known familiar earth & water, trees & buildings, their shapes, colours & smells . . .’ and so on.
Hefted . . . well of course you know. Do you think The Dear Reader will like louping ill, orf, yellowces, scrapie, fluke, foot rot, worms & udder clap (udder falls off)? [2]
And what will they make of earblight, brown rust, eyespot &, worse, SHARP eyespot, septoria, take all, yellow rust, net blotch, snow rot, rhynchosporium, loose smut, glume bloth and bunt? [3] Do you think they’ll chuck it?
The trouble is the subject is so huge & has been on the go since 1550 that it could make many books but it is NOW I want to write about because I don’t think anyone has, much. An estate I mean.
Anyway it’s taking up the slack with knobs on & I squirm about trying to do it & not succeeding.
J Murray’s list came with ‘the impatiently awaited . . .’ Didn’t have to pay much attention to know what that would be.
My m in law doesn’t die, nor I’m glad to say, does Sybil Cholmondeley, now 92. You could say the same for poor old Diana Cooper I suppose & I know she is longing to.
Much love
Debo
[1] The Estate: A View from Chatsworth (1990).
[2] Diseases in sheep and goats.
[3] Cereal crop diseases.
28 February 1986
Mani
Darling Debo,
‘Wheat-ears covered the furniture, and one of the Swedes, well-versed in the English terminology of his passion, explained as we strolled from specimen to specimen the differences between turgid ears and the common bearded kind; then we surveyed the Polish variety and appraised the spikelets and the awns, the median florets and the glumes.’ Who wrote that, and in what book? Answer inside envelope. [1]
Smashing first sentence, don’t change a thing, apart from removing either ‘known’ or ‘familiar’ as they are both doing the same job. Otherwise, tip-top. But don’t remove a single one of the earblight, brown rust list, down to udder clap. One nearly swoons away with the magic of the language.
Well that was a nice letter. I was beginning to pine a bit, as so many of the people who once used to write to me are dead or dying. When I got back from Kalamata this evening, Joan told me my Hungarian pal Rudi Fischer had rung up from Budapest to say that my other old Hungarian friend Elemér – the one I hunted down in the Old Folks’ Home – died three days ago, after a fall and pneumonia, but kindly looked after and not Dickensian, as one would dread in an Iron Curtain country. I wish he could have read all I’ve written about him in the forthcoming vol, he would have laughed.
Now. Have your copy of Time of Gifts handy. I remember seeing it in the bookcase behind where you sit, so reach back, and look up page 95, bottom two paragraphs, and overleaf. [2] Then read the following sheet, which is copied from a P.C. I got the day before. It’s all so queer. I got it Xeroxed this afternoon to send to two or three. The rucksack had been Mark Ogilvie-Grant’s.
A lovely week in Athens with Barbara and Niko, with a party for – can you beat it? – my 71st birthday. Do write some more, it cheers one up.
Tons of fond love,
Paddy
(Postcard – franked in England – Hounslow, 10 Feb. 1986. Verso of P.C.: ‘Cheers! From the Pubs of London’)
Herrn Patrick Leigh Fermor
Kind Sir! I was thrice fortunate on my trip to the erstwhile capital of the BRITISH EMPIRE. I discovered the velvety smoothness of Guinness, the exquisite taste of gourmet steak and kidney pudding and your magnificent magnum opus, A Time of Gifts. You will perhaps be surprised to hear that my late maternal grandfather Alois Schoissbauer figures in it. Indeed, he was none other than the pimply youth who ‘borrowed’ your rucksack rife with manna in Munich. He is clearly recognisable for he often told me the tale. You will no doubt be interested to know that it (the rucksack) later concealed all his belongings when he fled across the Alps from Tyrol to Switzerland when the Nazis wished to incarcerate him in a KONZENTRATIONSLAGER, not as a Jew * but as an anti-social element. I later inherited the Rucksack and carried it all the way across Asia to Peshawar where it was stolen by an Australian hippie, at least so I have been led to believe.
Respectfully your obedient servant,
Dr Franz Xaver Hinterwälder,
Professor of Farsi and Pashtoo, Firdausi School of Oriental
Languages,
Kirchstetten, Nether Austria
As an attentive reader I was able to discover from A Time of Gifts that your LXXI birthday is approaching next Tuesday. Permit me to take the occasion to wish you the compliments of the season. [3]
[1] From Between the Woods and the Water, p. 109.
[2] The passage describes how, in early 1934, PLF’s rucksack, containing his passport and travel journal, was stolen from a Munich youth hostel.
[3] The writer of this hoax card has not been identified.
* which he was not, being a Bavarian and a Roman Catholic.
25 September 1986
Mani
IN HASTE
Darling Debo,
When the Kalamata earthquake happened, I was having a quiet ouzo up in the mountains with Desmond Shawe-Taylor [1] and Chloë Obolensky, [2] and noticed nothing. Joan was down at the house, playing chess outside with Dimitri O, [3] when the chessmen started moving about on the board, with a sort of subterranean rumble below. Kalamata is badly stricken, much of the population living in tents, poor souls, and at least half the houses with big red crosses on the door, meaning ‘uninhabitable: to be pulled down’, some of them look all right, but are chaos inside, others have tumbled down completely. It’s all right now, with the mild autumn weather; but what about winter? People in the seismological know forecast more shocks round the corner.
An Italian skin-diver disappeared last week and was found days later stuck in a cave, with his face eaten away by fish. In the little pool, by the chapel a hundred yards from here, a v rare and v small turtle has appeared; black with yellow spots, and a long spiny tail. No mate, so a spinster or a bachelor. I saw him half an hour ago, nibbling a floating fig dropped from the overshadowing tree.
Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] Desmond Shawe-Taylor (1907–95). Chief music critic on the New Statesman 1945–58 and Sunday Times 1958–83.
[2] Chloë Georgakis (1942–). Theatre costume and set designer. Married to Leonid Obolensky 1964–80.
[3] Prince Dimitri Obolensky (1918–2001). Professor of Russian and Balkan History at the University of Oxford. ‘He was an enchanting companion on the hills of Euboea, in the meadows near Oxford, or in the foothills of the Mani in the southern Peloponnese.’ PLF, The Times, 7 January 2002.
1 October 1986
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
That earthquake. What a rotten thing. The shaking chessmen, how terrifying. And the poor Kalamata-ites, such frightening pictures on the telly.
So, WELCOME for the Book Party. [1] I’m hoping like anything to come to it & so is Andrew.
Much love
Debo
[1] Given by John Murray for the publication of Between the Woods and the Water.
Andrew’s 67th birthday
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
The most unexpected thing over Christmas was my sister Woman, even a nonner reader than me, sat glued to your effort, sometimes both the books (sort of) in her hands at once. * Do be pleased. Now she’s blazed the trail I might have a go.
A mag called Derbyshire Countryside says it believes on GOOD AUTHORITY that the proprietors of the Stag Parlour near Bakewell are Andrew & me. A good bit of detective work, eh.
Now I must take Richard [Garnett] to look at things like a gate post I’m very fond of. I wonder if he’ll see the point, he doesn’t always, he’s so logical & that particular gate post isn’t. Then we’re going to the site of the National Hedging & Walling Competition which took place on a farm near here in Oct ’85. Hedgers & wallers came from all over. They had to do a chain each. Well, I thought, a cut & laid hedge was a beautiful thing but just a cut & laid hedge. I had no idea of the different styles, for instance Welsh is totally unlike Northamptonshire. They’re for keeping in (or out) different animals, see; steers & sheep & all the variants of them, v local like the breeds, some sheep being more escapist than others. So the result is like knitting patterns, same idea of making a bit of stuff but gone about in a different way. Or basket work. So clever it defies description.
Anyway 15 months have passed since these geniuses have done their work & we’re going to see what the hedges look like now.
I expect you’re yawning with boredom by now so I’ll spare you a descripo after we’ve seen them.
Andrew has gone to Constantinople with Anne [Tree] & one of her daus. I have been in two or more minds as to whether to ring him up & tell him Uncle Harold has conked, to get a telephone call there wd make him in a fever of nerves. Anyway I have cleverly made them have the funeral on Mon instead of today which is what was threatened, so he’ll be back as planned.
The Macmillans are all at war with one another, the saddest thing that can happen to a family I think. Much non-speaking & jealousies, some are drunk, some have been drunk & aren’t any more, some have a glimmer of charm, but most none. When you think of Aunt Dorothy, & the old boy for that matter, it’s odd. She WAS charm.
GOOD NEWS. Jim is going to do the Bachelor Duke. [1] Apparently he’s long thought of it & we never dreamed he would but have stalled over others who wanted to do it. So now I’m pleased, no one is more suited to the job, do admit.
I bet you haven’t read all this. Now to the Gate Post.
Happy New Year.
Much love to you both
Debo
We’re doing terrific clearing in the garden, the impenetrable thickets of self-sown yew, holly, sycamore & foul Rhododendron ponticum, so you can see things a bit. Lo & behold we discovered a statue I had never seen before. Knocked from its plinth, engulfed in rhodies. So I rushed for the Bach D’s Handbook & there I found it, an Athenian altar, that’s the plinth for the statue which obviously never belonged to it. The altar is 4th or 5th-cent BC, he says, & has got a civic (according to the BD‘s Handbook) inscription. Oh do come & explain it. A bit of a thrill, finding it.
[1] James Lees-Milne’s life of the 6th Duke of Devonshire was published as The Bachelor Duke (1991).
* Like shooting with two guns without a loader, quite a feat.
[Undated]
Dumbleton
Darling Debo,
Do you remember when I came to Dingley Dell to stay, when Uncle Harold and Sybil Cholmondeley were the only others, except you and Andrew. Andrew went off to inspect some young people, I can’t remember where, only that he had got a badly torn shirt, which caused worry. Mr Macmillan and I went off for a walk, and, after a few moments, a pheasant flew across the path, and I said, ‘What a lovely pheasant!’ Mr Macmillan said, ‘Yes. And we’re very lucky to have them.’ I asked him why, and he said, in that slightly cavernous voice, ‘It’s entirely due to the Roman occupation of Britain. The junior officers were very fond of them, and collected them in large numbers. I believe there was a certain amount of rivalry about which centurions had the most or the handsomest birds. It went on for centuries. In the end, of course, in 410 A.D., in the reign of the Emperor Honorius, the order came for all the legions to be recalled to Rome, but they weren’t allowed to take their birds with them, so, very reluctantly, all the centurions let their birds go. There must have been thousands of them. Anyway, they survived the Picts and the Scots, and the Saxons’ invasion.’
He had a wonderful knack of delivery, half-solemn, half light-hearted.
Tons of love from
Paddy
16 March 1987
As from Flat 2, 51 Lennox Gdns, SW3
Or messages left midday at White’s Club.
Keep in touch!
Darling Debo,
Two weeks ago a nice man rang up and said ‘Sir Something Greening here. The Queen was wondering whether you and your wife could dine at Windsor on April the 7th and stay the night?’ Joan, having picked up the phone in her bedroom, said ‘I can’t. I’ll be in hospital, [1] but he can,’ so threw in one. I was surprised, and wondered if you and Andrew could have had a hand in it – or Deacon? I long to meet beforehand, and learn about the reefs and shoals.
Tons of love,
Paddy
Here’s a snatch of imaginary overheard conversation from notebook.
‘He has no scruples at all.’
‘Oh really? I just thought his voice hadn’t broken . . .’
[1] For a hip operation.
Mani
Darling Debo,
WHERE IS YOUR PRIMROSE McCONNELL NOW? And what is it? A kind of gardening tool, a cattle breeder’s handbook, a classified list of subspecies of potatoes, a pneumatic jack for tractors? A kind of effervescent hairwash? [1] The only McConnell in the DNB is William McC (1833–1867) an illustrator, who did pictures for various publications, viz. The Months and Upside Down; or, Turnover Traits. Could he have been her father? Is it a picture or a BOOK? The latter doesn’t sound very like you . . . But there’s no mention in the Oxford Companion to Literature, and the only McC in the Encyclopaedia Britannica is a small town in Illinois. Admittedly our Enc. Brit. is the 11th edition, published early in the century.
You see what I’ve been reading. C Russell says it might end in the Chatsworth library unless Debo has it buried with her. Is it a heart-shaped locket with a spring and a faded curl inside? I’m counting on a P.C. pretty soon, to put me out of my agony.
I am enjoying these letters. You and Daph get a marvellous set of dewdrops, and Diana [Cooper] a deluge. One gets a pretty clear picture of what he was like, but do tell about him a bit.
It’s suddenly summer here. Masses of swallows, but not a single tourist yet. Joan hobbles further and further every day and in a month or two will fling away her ashplant (one of the twisted ones from the Kenilworth rare-cattle show) like a Lourdes pilgrim. She is busy clipping a rosemary hedge with heavy shears at this very moment, so all goes well.
What news?
Lots of love,
Paddy
[1] PLF was reviewing Letters of Conrad Russell, edited by Georgiana Blakiston (1987), in which he read that Russell (1878–1947), a Somerset farmer and the fourth son of Lord Arthur Russell, had willed to DD his copy of The Agricultural Notebook, a standard work of reference for farmers, first compiled by Primrose McConnell in 1883.
DD shooting at Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire. ‘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’
DD in her sitting room at Chatsworth
Ann Fleming in the blue drawing room, Chatsworth, 1966
Diana Cooper
Philip Toynbee and Jessica Mitford, 1966
Andrew Devonshire and PLF in Peru, 1971. ‘We had been included, as minor amateurs, in a mountaineering expedition in the Andes’
Jacket design by John Craxton for A Time of Gifts (1977)
Niko Ghika and PLF in Corfu with a tabletop painted by PLF showing Greek and Latin names for the winds
PLF at Dumbleton
Joan Leigh Fermor at Tramores, Andalusia, staying with Janetta and Jaime Parladé
DD and her working sheepdog, Collie
HRH the Prince of Wales and Sybil Cholmondeley on her ninetieth birthday, 1984
DD with her sisters Diana Mosley (centre) and Pamela Jackson (left), 1980s
PLF and Xan Fielding at the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Crete, 1991
Joan Leigh Fermor in the Mani
Elisabeth Frink (left) and DD at the installation of Frink’s War Horse, April 1992
DD with her granddaughter Stella Tennant, Chatsworth, 2006 (photograph Mario Testino)
From DD’s letter to PLF, 23 September 2006
DD and PLF. Edensor, February 2008 (photograph Bridget Flemming)
7 June 1987
Lockinge Manor
Wantage
Darling Paddy,
It has SORT OF ended up in the Chatsworth library, if you count the few books I like & have in my sitting room or bedroom. I was amazed when it turned up after dear old Conrad died. Inside is written After my death this book is to be given to Debo With love Conrad Russell, XII night 1947.
Oh how IGNORANT you are, you who I thought knew everything.
P McConnell BSc FGS, Yeoman Farmer, North Wycke, Southminster, Essex, made the 9th edition in 1919, revised & enlarged & dedicated to Captain Primrose McConnell MC who of course was killed in action on the Salonika front in 1918. 1st edition 1883. It contains EVERYTHING & how to do EVERYTHING from explaining Gunter’s Chain to how much stoking a man can do in a day (poor man, an awful lot), Ville’s Dominant Ingredients of Manure, the classification of Wheats, Germination Data, points of the Kerry Cow, diseases of sheep (sturdy, braxy, scab etc. I expect you know how to deal with these).
So you see why I preferred it to jewels. [1] Of course I was too stupid to take him in properly. I knew I loved him but didn’t know why. He was IT. Daph darned his tweed hat of sheep colour with bright red wool & he was so pleased. Don’t you love the snap of him sewing up his cheese.
I’m trying to get on with my book & have boldly sent the bits on the Game Department & Agric Shows to R Garnett & await his fiercely critical comments in terror because if he says it’s hopeless I CAN’T begin again. Now for ‘Woods & Farms’, squeezed between Tarmac AGM & some queer Social Events like a dance at Cliveden on election night given by J Goldsmith, [2] & tons of people to stay including the American Amb & ten attendants. Nicko is coming here in a minute & we buzz up to Chatsworth to have six American concrete people to lunch tomorrow, Tarmac-induced. The head concrete man has got a piano in his aeroplane & he plays ‘My Way’ to the sky as he floats around his quarries. Do admit one gets hold of some odd people in Life’s Rich Tapestry.
Much love
Debo
[1] Conrad Russell had asked DD whether she would prefer to be left jewels rather than the handbook.
[2] James Goldsmith (1933–97). The billionaire businessman gave a dinner before the dance at which DD found herself sitting between her host and a media man, who, ‘in the way of such people, didn’t turn up until the pudding – MURDOCH. Goldsmith had blue, eagle eyes that bored into you. They were one of the weapons that contributed to his presence and charm.’ (DD)
17 September 1987
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I’ve been in Pittsburgh, setting off yet another exhib of drawings from here. I boldly addressed 600 grown ups in a tent & rattled on for ¾ of an hour. Poor them. But you know how polite they are, they never stirred.
I was killed by kindness & am home ½ dead but re-amazed by their interest in things like this old dump.
Everything pounding along here v nicely. The Pss of Wales comes on Sunday to see to a thing to do with National Parks. What shall we feed her on, always a worry as she prefers the fridge to the table I’m told.
Much love
Debo
27 September 1987
Mani
Darling Debo,
I was horror-struck when shown that Daily Mail interview, done six months ago, and forgotten. The maddening thing is, it’s mostly my fault, viz. given after luncheon and a great deal too much to drink. The interviewing lady wanted to hear all about parachutes, generals, Crete, etc. I said I couldn’t go on about that, as it’s such stale news, so we drifted off into embarrassing things about childhood years etc. The interviewing lady was perfectly nice, and wanted to be nice, so the fault for all that hugely embarrassing stuff is one’s, more’s the pity. A sharp lesson. [1]
The day after it appeared, someone rang up whom I last saw when we were both nine. (N.B. Break off at this point, and, though it’s against all your principles, read one page – p.4, and ½ p.5 – in the Introduction, letter to Xan, in A Time of Gifts. I think it’s high up on the right hand wall of Andrew’s Englishman’s room. One always spots one’s stuff, like a cow with a lost calf, fields away.) Well, as I was saying, the chap on the phone was a fellow juvenile delinquent or semi-loony in Maj Truthful’s School at Salsham-le-Sallows – really Maj Faithfull’s at Walsham-le-Willows – in Suffolk. It was fascinating, all the details he remembered about that extraordinary place. I was deeply in love with the gardener’s daughter (aged 10), called Eileen Fairweather. He said she was fearfully pretty, so that’s nice. But he finished by saying ‘We have another remote link. I’ve moved back to Suffolk recently to be on the spot for our first grandchild, Kate Heywood-Lonsdale, Amanda’s [2] niece.’ He must have gathered that you and I are pals. I can’t remember him at all.
Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] PLF, interviewed by Lynda Lee-Potter, revealed that he had run wild as a boy. ‘When people first met me I made an excellent impression . . . It was only bit by bit they realised they had a fiend on their hands. At home I was always allowed absolute freedom. I always had total confidence based on nothing whatsoever. I was never diffident, and not being frightened of things is frightfully important.’ Daily Mail, 9 September 1987.
[2] Amanda Heywood-Lonsdale (1944–). Married DD’s son, Peregrine, 12th Duke of Devonshire, in 1967.
31 October 1987
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Hope you’re OK. It was FOUL not seeing you when you were in the land of the living. Actually the living are fast dying. R Heber-Percy, and now my Benefactress of Swinbrook [1] & lo & behold she has left me the Mill Cottage, so wills are thrills & mills there’s no doubt.
It needs Seeing To. I went down there last week & reminded myself of the olden days, same apple tree thank goodness, & I measured my bedroom, 7′ x 8′, just the right size.
I’m struggling with my book. I’m on the farms now & enclose the bit about the sheep sale for your editorial eye. Throw away.
My dear Wife is here. She has been knocked about by the gale. Her woods are a sad sight she says & the noble garden cedars have curtsied & are in heaps on the ground. Unscathed here.
I’ve been in America with Nicko Henderson. A better travelling companion you couldn’t find, ne’ery a cross word in spite of days spent at cement works & hovering over quarries in a helicopter. The door burst open three times, you can imagine my screams. Then dinner with the cement-ers. Quite testing.
Roy & Jennifer Jenkins [2] are staying here. She is head of the National Trust & their AGM is in Buxton. He has become head of Oxford & had to make heaps of speeches in Latin, well you know all that. I think they’ve made him a lord & she is certainly a dame & so it goes on.
Emma is here. Her rugs were a huge success at Chelsea Crafts Fair, no wonder I say. [3]
Much love
Debo
Really & truly the captions in F Partridge’s book of photos [4] are v embarrassing. How could she fall for that.
[1] Marion Buckland; a friend of DD’s aunt Dorothy Mitford, and a keen member of the Girl Guides. ‘Apparently she had no dependants. She left me the Mill Cottage and the adjacent Mill, with the option to buy the Swan Inn from her executors, because she thought I loved the place and its associations more than anyone else.’ (DD)
[2] Roy Jenkins (1920–2003). Bon viveur statesman and political biographer – a combination rare in public life – who, according to his friend Sir Nicholas Henderson, depended greatly on the support of his wife, Jennifer, whose judgement and quiet charm brought her a successful career in the public and private sectors. Created a life peer in 1987, in the same year that he was elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford.
[3] Emma Tennant made and sold hooked rugs.
[4] Frances Partridge, Friends in Focus: A Life in Photographs (1987). The caption to photograph 179 reads: ‘The Duchess of Devonshire gracing Ham Spray with her company during a bottling session of some Spanish wine.’
Mani
Darling Debo,
I don’t expect you’ve read any of that book [1] yet. I do wish you would; what’s the good of writing them? I promise that there are lots of jokes you’d like. Take a leaf out of your sister Pam’s book!
I can’t tell you what a heap of letters was waiting, and it keeps on growing, all to be answered. This one doesn’t count, as there was none from you (nor expected: only later), and it’s all the result of publication.
It’s marvellous bright autumn weather here. I charge about the mountains every afternoon. They are covered with cyclamen and crocuses. There is a bit of sensation here at the moment. Some human remains – quite recent ones – have been discovered in a bag of fertilizer under a bridge near a mountain village, but only a third of a person. A baker disappeared from a nearby hamlet four years ago. The rather sinister boulangère said he just walked out on her one night and never came back, so speculation abounds.
Tons of love from
Paddy
[1] Between the Woods and the Water.
28 November 1987
Mani
Darling Debo,
Tip-top, your page about the sheep sale! Lots of pace and brio. You are clever. I wondered whether the last bit, about Botticelli etc, was a bit Philistine; [1] but I think it’s OK, we don’t want you travelling under false colours if you know what I mean. The rest is spanking. Do send some more.
When your letter arrived, I had just finished writing one to Mark Amory, oiling out of reviewing Frances Partridge’s book, because I’m v. fond of her, but wouldn’t have known what to say about the captions. Gracing the bottling party was pretty rotten.
I am alone here and I wish my third vol. of Shanks’s Europe was spinning along like yours.
Keep in touch, and tons of love
Paddy
[1] DD ended her description of a sheep auction with, ‘I would give a lot to see [the auctioneer] on the rostrum at Christie’s. He would make the Bond Street dealers sit up and look sharp or the Rembrandts would walk away, here come the Botticellis, sound in reed and udder, change the tup and you’ll get a van Gogh . . .’ The Estate, A View from Chatsworth, p. 48.
28 January 1988
Mani
Darling Debo,
We went to stay for ten days with Janetta and Jaime over les fêtes, in a warm and spacious borrowed house between Arles and Les Baux. It was lovely and I listened to the carols in Provençal that I was wild about half a century ago. [1] An enormous ram drew a wicker cart up the aisle full of bondieuseries followed by twenty thoroughly shaggy shepherds in scratchy cloaks, each with a kid or a lamb in his arms, till the whole place was full of baa-ing and bleating. It was all a glorious change. I walked for miles and miles in the Alpilles, then trudged round the Palace of the Popes at Avignon. We ate till we could hardly move at that marvellous restaurant in Les Baux – the Oustau de Baumanière – but no more expensive than that beastly lunch at the Ritz. I sat in cafés, watching others buy delicious things for dinner at the market stalls, lulled by the clink of boules as I sipped a drone’s Pernod . . .
Love from
Paddy
[1] ‘ “Pastre dei mountagno,” etc. sung with Guy Branch and Balasha Cantacuzène before the war.’ (PLF)
Chatsworth
Bakewell
How did the telly week go? [1] RSVP.
All v good here, no other news, which is good news. Much love
Debo
[1] PLF was being interviewed by Melvyn Bragg for The South Bank Show, broadcast on 28 January 1989.
8 July 1988
Mani
Darling Debo,
Well it’s all over! The TV visitation, I mean. A team of three came out for two days first, cased the joint, hired quarters, commandeered transport etc, then there was a bit of a lull till the Director [1] came back again. He stayed with us up here. The only thing was he was terribly tight a lot of the time, after having been a Double First, loved and then cast off (because of the demon D). He played chess a lot with Joan, and very well; but when later the others arrived and occasionally rode over him roughshod, he would weep on her shoulder: ‘They all hate me so.’ He was far the nicest and most gifted. Eventually all eight were assembled in the village. We gave them a feast up here, and made them as happy as we could with wines, spirits and grub (they were v grateful. Apparently some of their ‘subjects’ treat them like dirt. The US Celebrity, John Updike, [2] during a week gave them neither bite nor sup. They had to send miles for a cup of Nescafé). Melvyn Bragg came out for 2½ days, to do the ‘key interview’. He seemed much nicer than in London. The ‘interviewing’ went on all over the house, on mountain tops, in grottoes and caves, Byzantine churches, some in a caïque in search of the entrance to Hades. George Psychoundakis [3] came over for three days from Crete. Anyway, it seems they shot and taped enough for several hours, and were constantly patting one on the back. They even got Joan to appear for a few seconds (she hates it). We strolled across the terrace, then down an avenue of cypress and rosemary hedges . . . Well, it was all so cheery and congenial in the end that we all felt rather abandoned when they buggered.
Tons of love, dearest Debo, from
Paddy
[1] David Cheshire (1944–92). Television director and producer.
[2] John Updike (1932–). The South Bank Show interview with the American novelist was broadcast on 28 October 1990.
[3] George Psychoundakis (1920–2006). Cretan resistance fighter who served as a dispatch runner for SOE. Author of The Cretan Runner.
27 May 1989
Mani
Darling Debo,
We had a marvellous journey in the Yemen for much of last month, and the beginning of this, with Xan and Magouche, flying from Cyprus in the evening, leaving the sunset over Taurus Mountains to the north, then darkness falling over the desert, with first Medina, then Mecca twinkling below. I hadn’t quite realized that the country is all mountains, with spectacular fortress villages like Bastilles, standing in the Empty Quarter and Thesiger-land. The inhabitants are the nicest imaginable, full of jokes and kindness – they must be nice, as their very pretty children are without fear, dash up and shake hands or simply slip theirs into yours to lead you about and show you things, and never beg, but they do murmur ‘Kalam! ’ (Arabic for ‘pen’) in a pleading chorus. Forearmed, we distributed them by the dozen and won all hearts. The only trouble was Ramadan. We hadn’t reckoned with it, they snooze all day, but when the sunset-gun goes, and all the muezzins in all the minarets start wailing together, everyone makes whoopee all night. They wait for the bang with all spoons poised over plates of delicious soup; then chew a mild hallucinogen called kat all night (which puffs out their cheeks like Derbyshire Neck) and smoke hookahs till daybreak. I got unpopular by halting the hired Range Rover in villages to buy headdresses to be turned into tablecloths, and Xan to buy melons. I urged that textiles last longer, Xan replied, ‘Yes, but they don’t taste as nice.’
Lots of love,
Paddy
18 December 1989
Mani
Darling Debo,
A little while ago, John Julius Norwich sent me the marvellous alphabetical verses which he and I have both been after for years. I knew only the first two lines, An Austrian army awfully arranged / Boldly, by battery, besieged Belgrade. They are early 19th century, and the author is unknown. I tried to do something similar, but starting with Z, backwards, in a style which is much freer in every sense of the word; it takes a rather racy turn, here and there, as one was more at the mercy of alliteration than meaning. It was worse, but I’ve bowdlerized it here and there with that lovely BLANCO fluid. Anyway, I send it with all greetings for the Winter Solstice – it’s too late for Christmas, and too un-Yule like.
I’ve got a lovely suggestion for twin vols for your false door in the library, not mine, alas, but in a glorious book called Remainders, by Eric Korn:
J’accuse by Emile Zola
Emile Zola by Jack Hughes.
(Nancy would have liked that, with her passion for the Dreyfus case.) He also suggests Morgan Forced Her by Howard Zend.
It’s a wonderful December here. Joan and I went on a picnic today under the olive trees. (We’ve just finished our harvest. Not up to much. No rain for months.) In spite of the rainlessness, it was billiard table green under the branches, with a flock of snow-white goats grazing, a vast sweep of blazing sea below, and a single cloud. I hope it stays; for Christmas, poor old Niko Ghika is coming, with John Craxtonr [1] to hold his hand, and Niko’s Portuguese maid to help.
Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] John Craxton (1922–). Distinguished British artist, member of the Royal Academy, who illustrated the dust jackets of PLF’s books and who settled in Crete in the early 1970s.
FÊTE CHAMPÊTRE
‘ZUMMERZETSHIRE ZIDER’ – ZONKED, Zen-zombies zig-zag . . . Zippy
Young yobs, yahoos, yeastily yap – yelp – yell – yowl ‘Yippee!’ Xerodermatic xiphoid xenophobes X-ray Xantippes, While wanton, woad-wet, wasp-waisted whip-wielders wallop willing whipees.
‘Vain, vapid voluptuaries vie vacuously’ (Voltaire)
(Underground, Uniate underdogs unlace used underwear . . .)
Toxic, tipsy, tympanists tirelessly tap trite tattoos,
Sleazy soloists suck straws, swig sherry, swill shandy. Some stir stews,
Rousing red-headed, roughneck, ravenous Ribena-fed retinues.
Quaint, quirky queues quaff quarts. Quiet, questing queens
Pathetically pursue puce pederastic palanquins,
Obsessively out-Oscaring Oscar’s otiose
Notions. Now noisy nymphomaniacs nobody knows
Misguidedly manhandle mildly mascara’d matelots.
Look! Lords lambaste ladies! Ladies lords lacerate!
(‘Kossacks kidnap Kappelmeister!’ ‘Kalmucks kibosh Kate!’)
Jeep jangles jeep, Jehu jolts Jezebel, Jack jostles Jill,
Idle idiots imbibe ideas idler imbeciles instil.
Harmless homosexual hedonists hold heterodox heyday,
Gracious gay gadabouts gather, gracefully going grey.
Furtive fops follow fleetingly-flaked-out fairies’ feuds,
Eager ears eavesdrop. Every eye extrudes.
‘Dentist deflowers dons, dairymaids, duchesses, dingos, dudes . . .’
(Cling close! Clasp cobber! Cool! Clap clear clinch concludes . . . !)
Bogomils * broach bashful burglars, but bent buglers bungle blast,
And all, after acid’s acrid aftermath, abscond aghast.
Inam 9891.01.32
Romref Ghiel Kcirtap
* Bulgarian heretics. They gave up marriage and giving in marriage, and turned towards their own sex. They are the originals of the old English ‘Buggers’, who were here, till blanco’d out and replaced in the cause of propriety.
2 January 1990
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I was just thinking, AGES since I heard from you & somehow we didn’t coincide in August so I was v v pleased to get yours.
The reaper has been at work over Xmas. First Stanley Olsen, [1] then both Droghedas &, worst of all, Sybil [Cholmondeley].
She spent Christmas Day with gt grandchildren, decided to stay in bed a bit on Boxing Day & the person who took her lunch up found her propped with pillows, specs on nose, book in hands, dead. About to be 96. Oh how I loved her.
I’m going to Houghton in two weeks, can’t imagine how odd it will seem without her presence. Or perhaps she will be so strongly there one will only be aware of her & the others will be the non-existent ones.
We had all the children & grandchildren for Xmas except beloved Stella Tennant who has gone to Chile to stay with Lucía Santa Cruz [2] for a few months.
Isabel Tennant, Celina & Jasmine Cavendish, [3] all sort of grown up now, are incredibly nice. Isabel & Celina are lovely but the fashion is to make the very worst of your looks. They sit at dinner with hair & face in the soup, hooped backs, & someone cleverly said they (and their peers) are heaps of wool. But they are SO nice. William Burlington [4] has got shoulder blond hair & he wears a mac two sizes too small which he bought 2nd hand some years ago. He’s called the Apparition. Also incredibly nice but you wouldn’t give him a lift however hard it was raining.
My book is finished & has gone off to Macmillans. What a wonderful feeling. A year late.
LONGING to see you. Please enlarge on London dates. I shall have to come to London sometime re illustrations for my stupid book. Jim [Lees-Milne] says he can’t read it, it’s above his head.
Much love
Debo
I LOVE the Bulgarian heretics being buggers & J’accuse & Jack Hughes.
[1] Stanley Olsen (1947–89). Anglophile American author of John Singer Sargent: His Portrait (1986). ‘He bicycled round London with a Cocker Spaniel in a basket on the handlebars. Having lunch with him on a wintry day, I was impressed by a big bowl of Iris reticulata on the table – typical of his unusual style.’ (DD)
[2] Lucía Santa Cruz (1943–). Historian. Daughter of a former, very popular, Chilean ambassador to Britain. Stella Tennant’s godmother.
[3] Lady Celina (1971–) and Lady Jasmine (1973–) Cavendish. The daughters of DD’s son, Peregrine.
[4] Earl of Burlington (1969–). DD’s photographer grandson married Laura Montagu, née Roundell, in 2007.
13 January 1990
Mani
Darling Debo
Your letter’s just come – ½ an hour ago – and the airport taxi is waiting under the olives. Dinner in Athens tonight. Paris next day.
Marvellous description of Sybil Ch’s death. The spectacles set the scene.
I’m writing crampedly because I’ve drawn a riddle the other side. The answer, perhaps stale – is in looking-glass writing below.
Love
Paddy
[‘Name of W. Stickers?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You are under arrest.’ Question: What will tomorrow’s headline be? Answer: Bill Stickers will be prosecuted.]
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
A typical thing. When we moved here in 1959 I had a wallpaper made for the Centre Dressing Room, a v complicated affair copied from a fragment I found in a cupboard. Cole’s of Mortimer St did it.
D[avid] Mlinaric asked if he could have ditto for a client. Yes of course. Where are the blocks? Cole’s have got them I said. Cole’s said No, they’re at Chatsworth. Never seen them, I said. Oh said Mr Hall (who runs the wondrous factory with clattering man-handled machines, health hazards all) you MUST know where they are. I sent them myself in February 1958 – two heavy packing cases. Oh Mr Hall you come & look for them, I said – he doesn’t know this place & the needle in haystack style.
Any chance of Nancy’s letters to you? [1] I would be forever grateful if you would let me photo them & I would faithfully send back, no mislaying of them I promise.
So what to do? Michael Pearman [2] had an inspiration. Jesse Grafton, long retired carpenter, lives next to him, the only living fellow in that dept who goes back to 1958. Oh yes he said they’re in the Plunge Bath. And sure enough they were. So do look in your Plunge Bath & you never know what you might find.
Much love
Debo
[1] For the collection of Nancy Mitford’s letters, Love from Nancy, edited by Charlotte Mosley (1993).
[2] The librarian at Chatsworth.
17 April 1990
Mani
Darling Debo,
1,000,000 apologies for being such a sluggard with the pen. It was ’flu first, then the utter and total torment of beginning, writing and finishing those Daily Telegraph articles, [1] the hardest thing I’ve ever done, oddly enough, and I’m afraid not very good. Anyway, I’ve faxed them off on the day I said I would and can breathe again.
Now, first things first, Nancy’s letters. I’ve had a tremendous search, and can’t find them alas alas! We were never terrific correspondents. I wish we had been, because we were sister-souls talking. I should say 10–15 at the outside. I’ll have another great hunt the moment this is finished.
Lots of love
Paddy
[1] ‘Travels in a Land before Darkness Fell’, Daily Telegraph Weekend Magazine, 12 May 1990, reprinted in Words of Mercury, pp. 40–50, and ‘Ghosts That Haunt the New Dawn’, Daily Telegraph Weekend Magazine, 19 May 1990. PLF had been sent to Romania by the editor of the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings, to report on the aftermath of the fall of the Ceauşescu regime.
10 May 1990
(My mother’s birthday, 110)
Train to London for 1 night
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Any hope of you for the dance (7 July)? [1]
So excited re your articles in D Tel.
I wonder if I shall manage them. There is a v good best seller by my bed, called Woods & Water or some such name. I’m going to read that one day.
Much love
Debo
[1] A ball held at Chatsworth to celebrate William Burlington’s coming of age.
26 July 1990
Mani
Darling Debo,
I still haven’t quite come round from that amazing thing on the 7th! It was a marvellous grand arrival there – the expanse of empty black-and-white check floor, then the great swoop of scarlet stairs, with your solitary triumvirate welcomingly halted half way up . . . It was as if the whole house had transformed into a different element, half familiar and half unknown, like a fair, or an aquarium full of resplendent creatures and any number of friendly faces, starting with Henry’s. [1] The tented acreage – those steps and the normally outdoors reclining statue and dog being indoors gave a real through-the-looking-glass feeling. The whole thing, that array of people looking after us, everything being marvellous and on time, as though being painlessly managed with a magic wand – there were so many openings for things being held up, or going wrong. None did and, for me, the whole thing dissolved into one of those golden Turner radiances. I know you weren’t too keen on the Masque, but it was lovely it being from an Inigo Jones drawing in the Library, and as for that thunderous Beethoven accompaniment to the fireworks, words spring so abundantly to the nib that I’ll spare.
The great thing was that you and Andrew spread such a feeling of enjoyment and warmth and fun, that it seemed to affect everything else. It was only later that it occurred to me that I had told my entire life story to Madame de Vogüé [2] last time, the only one, I’d sat next to her, but it didn’t seem to matter. Part of the previously golden Turneresque mist was that I lost touch with all nearest and dearest – couldn’t find you or Robert, sat and had long chats with Coote and Billa. [3] What was strange was that it seemed simultaneously to last for ever and to be over almost at once. Like Wellington’s battle comparison. It all looked fantastic, driving away, looking back on bridge and river, the big tent, the full moon high up, a few decorative alabaster clouds floating discreetly, some people strolling under oak trees, and dawn beginning to break. It was still total glory. I’ll never see anything like it again, nor will anyone, and many many thanks to you and Andrew,
And tons of love from
Paddy
[1] Henry Coleman (1947–). Butler to the Devonshire family since 1963.
[2] Maria Cristina Colonna (1941–). Married in 1966 Count Patrice de Vogüé, owner of Vaux-le-Vicomte, the seventeenth-century chateau outside Paris that inspired Versailles.
[3] Wilhelmine (Billa) Cresswell (1911–2005). Architectural conservationist. Married the economist Roy Harrod in 1938. ‘For many years she and Roy were an import -ant part of university life at Oxford. After she was widowed and returned to her native Norfolk, she made a big impact on the tide of interest in the preservation of the best buildings as founder of the Norfolk Churches Trust. Thanks to her, and her friend the Prince of Wales, this organisation flourishes.’ (DD)
30 July 1990
Mani
Darling Debo,
JJ Norwich’s daughter Artemis and her husband Antony Beevor have just left. He’s writing a book about wartime Crete, [1] so is doing a round of old hands. Both are extremely nice. He described his very reserved Wykehamist father and equally reserved mother trudging back from the polling station on election day:
He ‘By the way, what did you vote?’
She ‘Labour. What about you?’
He ‘Conservative.’ (Pause) ‘I say, we needn’t have gone!’ Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (1991). Winner of the Runciman Prize.
14 September 1990
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Wife has found a frightful mistake in The Estate. It wasn’t Mrs Pettitoes who was a Berkshire, but Pig-wig. [1] The result of pure laziness on my part in not checking. I am horror-struck. I expect it is full of such slips.
The next two weeks are going to bore everyone stiff, the hullabaloo arranged by Macmillan for pushing it under the noses of all. They’ll be sick of my ugly mug & worse voice by 27 Sept when it’s supposed to burst on an unsuspecting world which will have had enough already.
Someone has sent us a video of the fireworks at the ball, amateur, & taken from over the river. He & his friend did a lot of talking which comes over better than Beethoven, they said things like I bet this cost a bit WHAT? I BET THIS COST A BIT & such-like prime comments.
Andrew says (he is a news-on-telly addict) that some American soldiers in Arabia have applied for danger money. Do you think you & Xan & Andrew & everyone we know could ask for some back-dated ditto? My word you’d be rich.
Much love
Debo
[1] Two characters in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Pigling Bland.
23 October 1990
Mani
Darling Debo,
The bad news, of course, is about Xan, the dread disease running riot, everywhere, when thought to be only what’s called a spot. He went into hospital in Paris day before yesterday, for some preliminary treatment, and came out two hours ago ( just been on telephone). He sounds v cheery and high-spirited; Magouche, when alone on the blower much less so, naturally enough. It really is a bugger. They’ve got hold of a lovely flat, in the Place des Pyramides, where Joan of Arc, all gold, waves a flag on horseback ¾ of the way down the Rue de Rivoli. We’ve just been talking about it. It’s bang opposite the Hôtel Regina, where I spent the first night in my life abroad with mother & sister, aged nine, a marvellous palace it seemed to me, with lav paper with pictures on and a serial story, so one had to read on. Each sequence took about 10 sheets which must have entailed a huge turnover.
Please keep in touch, and tons of love from
Paddy
I’ve come across this, in an old notebook: –
Nurse (to Iris Tree, when v ill) Lady Diana [Cooper] is here. Do you want to see her?
Iris Not in the least. But I want her to see me.
As from, but really c/o Wife at Bignor
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Thanks so much for yours. OH XAN. It is foul beyond words. I never thought of him as a cancer person, somehow one can imagine some people getting it & others as non-qualifiers, but one forgets the indiscriminating way it strikes. YOU YOU & YOU, taking no note of age, sex, upbringing, mode of life, profession, where you live. It is like ‘Oranges & Lemons’, down it comes & there you are. I keep thinking about him & only hope ‘they’ don’t allow it to hurt. Ghoulish for you & Magouche & all who love him. Oh bother everything to do with bodies when they go wrong.
Home via Woman, lunch in the pub at Swinbrook to view my kingdom, & then next day DON’T LAUGH a Lit Lunch in Leamington Spa for my stupid book at which I have to speak to the unlucky audience for ¼ of an hour. So do a Chinese cook (written a book on his art), Lady Donaldson on P. G. Wodehouse & Michael Holroyd on Shaw. [1] Do admit the terror. I kick off I think (they always start with the worst & end with the star) & I’m going to say BOOKS how I hate them – as an avid non-reader it is awful to have added to their number etc etc. The trouble is a bookseller is giving the lunch so I do hope he/she/it won’t mind. Wouldn’t be asked again so it doesn’t matter much.
Then I dig in at home for a bit to struggle with a children’s book about farm animals [2] which a publisher wants very soon, wouldn’t suit you.
Much love
Debo
[1] Frances Donaldson’s life of P. G. Wodehouse was published in 1982, and the second volume of Michael Holroyd’s life of George Bernard Shaw, The Pursuit of Power, 1898–1918, in 1989.
[2] Farm Animals (1991).
Mani
Darling Debo,
The Xan news isn’t cheering. They both sound very chipper on the telephone, but that’s as expected. Janetta says Xan is a bit better, as they’ve knocked off the wretched chemical treatment temporarily, but it can only be temporary. We are going to Paris in January, I do hope it’s the right thing to do; if one’s feeling rotten, visitors can be a fearful burden. A very minor worry at the moment is that the Daily Telegraph rang the other day and said, would I do a pre-emptive piece about Xan, and I’m finding it unexpectedly hard – he’s very difficult to pin down, a strange and rare specimen. I remember about 15 years ago, Xan telling me The Times had asked him to do one about me and he let me have a look; ‘Any criticisms or suggestions?’ I don’t think there were any, as it was a corker – ‘Can’t wait!’ I remember saying – lots of bad taste hilarity.
I know you never read, but did you see the bit about The Estate in the Spectator? I’m afraid the pen rather ran away with me about tupping and drenching, couldn’t resist it. [1]
Tons of love from
Paddy
I’ve just come across this in an old notebook: –
The operas of Benjamin Britten
Should never be actually written In ink, or sung loud
But inscribed on a cloud
With the tail of a Siamese kitten.
[1] In PLF’s ‘Books of the Year’ choice, he wrote, ‘The Duchess of Devonshire carries us helter-skelter through innumerable acres, fells and woods, into byres, auction-tents and timber-yards, up into lofts and down drains. It is full of deep rustic addiction, comedy and barnyard lore, with no dearth of tupping and drenching. A week back I knew nothing of orf, scrapie, swayback, blackleg, rattle-belly, pine, scad or scald but I’m older and wiser now.’ Spectator, 24 November 1990.
Mani
Debo –
Happy New Year to one and all, and tons of love from
Paddy
A song against dropping in, obviously inspired by a Victorian muse.
VOIX D’OUTRETOMBE
I dropped in at my neighbour’s house
At six o’clock one morning;
I thought no shame to knock him up
Just as the day was dawning.
I found him reading by the fire
After a light refection.
‘Come into my den,’ he said,
‘I’ll show you my collection.
‘This little gun is fired by steam
And shoots a silver button.
I call on sheep when day is done
And turn them into mutton.
‘This chopper’s handy on a stroll
At the turning of the leaf;
I track young bullocks to their byre
And change them all to beef.
‘This garotte’s for domestic fowls
When days are long and sultry;
In record time the noisiest coop’s
A heap of silent poultry.
‘That Sheffield poleaxe on the wall
Is sprung with tensile steel;
I waylay calves in summertime
And, suddenly, they’re veal.
‘Now this electric crossbow here
Is proving a real benison;
Its bolts convert the antlered ones
Like lightning, into venison.
‘This “Circe” razor’s just the thing
Upon a country walk
– Nothing to touch it, in a sty,
For turning swine to pork!’
‘And what’s that cleaver in your hand,
So sharp and bright and bare?’
I asked him, as, with nonchalance,
He strolled towards my chair.
‘Don’t rise,’ he said, ‘this one’s my joy!
Just the right length and weight!
It’s kept for early birds like you.
It makes them all “The late”!
‘One application does the trick –
Just watch!’ – the chamber shook;
He put the cleaver in the sink
And went back to his book.
P.S. I append some sketches which attempt to catch the feeling of the period.
18 June 1991
Mani
Darling Debo,
I’m guilt-stricken: did I ever thank you for the second Napier vol? [1] I’ve dipped into it, and it looks just as fascinating as the other; but things have been going too fast for doing more than dip.
The rush was caused by the fiftieth anniversary in Crete, which was tremendous, and a great success, the highlight of which was Xan’s return there, greeted like a long lost hero in village after village – he hadn’t been back for donkey’s years. He seemed tremendously fit and well – apart from all hair having vanished – and it was a glorious success. We – Geo. Jellicoe, [2] Xan, David Sutherland [3] (ex-commander of SBS), Nick Hammond [4] and I were given a special parade of Marines for the presentation of medals – not to be worn, alas; only stroked from time to time; and sort of blue velvet hollow marshals’ batons containing scrolls saying we were marvellous. I had to address hundreds of splendid N.Z., Aus, and British Veterans about the Cretan share in the Battle. They were dry-eyed at the end of it, but only just.
I’ve got to return to Blighty for a bit from the 24th onwards for 2–3 weeks (being allowed to doss down at Janetta’s), and will be in touch, so we must have a lovely feast. Why I’m coming back is to be made a D Litt by the University of Kent. I’m v excited as the Hood – what colour, I wonder? – is slipped over one’s head in the chancel of Canterbury Cathedral, only a stone’s throw from the place I got the sack from 1000 years ago. [5] We stop for 4 days in Paris on the way back, to see Xan and his mate.
Tons of love
Paddy
[1] Priscilla Napier, Raven Castle: Charles Napier in India, 1844–1851 (1991). PLF wrote of the first volume, I Have Sind, Charles Napier in India, 1841–1844 (1990), ‘I love the dashing style of the author, and the no nonsense absence of humbug, and the humour.’ PLF to DD, 2 September 1990.
[2] George Jellicoe, 2nd Earl Jellicoe (1918–2007). PLF had been friends with the diplomat, politician and businessman ever since they had invisibly passed each other in pitch darkness, soon after midnight, in a cove off southern Crete in 1942. Jellicoe, who had been on a raid that blew up some twenty German aircraft, was boarding; PLF, who spent the next fifteen months dwelling in caves, was landing.
[3] Colonel David Sutherland (1920–2006). Wartime commander of the Special Boat Service and deputy commander of the SAS 1967–72.
[4] Nicholas Hammond (1907–2001). Distinguished classical scholar recruited to SOE who helped to organise Cretan wartime resistance. Published a memoir of his war service, Venture into Greece: With the Guerillas, 1943–1944 (1983).
[5] PLF spent three years at The King’s School, Canterbury, the oldest school in England, and sometime haunt of Christopher Marlowe and Somerset Maugham, where he was thought, probably rightly, ‘a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness’. He was expelled, aged sixteen, after being caught holding hands with the local greengrocer’s beautiful daughter.
27 July 1991
Mani
Darling Debo,
I must have been cracked to make a putative date for lunch on the very day I was going through those extraordinary doings in Canterbury. I’m so sorry – thank heavens you couldn’t come. I ought to be locked up.
The whole thing was marvellous. I went down with Jock & Diana [Murray], and all guests and graduands were given luncheon in the main Dining Hall of my old school, and it made me feel like the Prodigal Son. We put on marvellous scarlet robes in the Treasury of the Cathedral and floppy Holbein hats, and did a slow march up the nave behind a man with a mace – the sort of thing Andrew has had to do dozens of times. Then, at the top of the nave-chancel steps the Chancellor (rather a dasher, head of BP, called Robert Horton) [1] and the other bigwigs in green and gold robes designed by the first Chancellor (viz. Marina, Dss of Kent) sat in a formidable array. The only other Dr to be made that afternoon was a nice American, Barbara Burn (DCL) [2] then three hundred BAs. Marvellous dewdrops about us followed. I would have liked it to have gone on forever, and must get a copy to read when feeling depressed. Then I had to answer – less than five minutes. A lovely Barchester-like day, tea under a shady copper-beech in the Archdeacon’s garden, ending with a great banquet at the University. A heavenly day and everyone going out full-tilt to be kind and welcoming.
Lots of love
Paddy
[1] Robert Horton (1939–). The British businessman was Chancellor of the University of Kent 1990–5.
[2] Barbara Burn (d. 2002). Doctor of Civil Law and prominent leader in international education.
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Xan. Oh what a paragon he was. How you will miss him, your best Wife and everything else. Reading the obits brought back the amazing career, & ‘je déteste les robes du soir’ [1] came through strong.
I expect he was quieter by the time I knew him, all savagery gone, like my Dad told my Wife when she said ‘I imagined you’d be so frightening, Lord Redesdale.’
I’m reviewing (don’t laugh) The National Trust Manual of Housekeeping for a mag with the smallest circulation in the world. [2]
It is good sport. You can’t imagine the horrors that go on in houses – moth, rust, carpet beetle, Byne’s disease which attacks mother-of-pearl, humidity, mould . . . I bet you’ve never heard of the infamous Bacon Beetle. Denied his favourite food (bacon, fool) because there’s no breakfast in Nat Trust houses, he goes for a blob of fat from the belly of your best stuffed-fish. Surprised?
Another cheery thing. I was in the garden talking to a friend, too loud I expect as per, when a man came up & said Excuse me I’ve read about a 1930s voice but I’ve never heard one, do keep on talking, please. So I did, lorst and gorn forever & he was doubled up and so was I & in the end he said well I’ll give you one thing, you haven’t got a stiff upper lip.
Much love
Debo
[1] Xan Fielding, who died on 19 August, aged seventy-two, was fiercely bohemian. Invited once to a ‘little reception’ in evening dress, he replied angrily, ‘I hate evening dress.’ ‘The phrase stuck to him. He got reconciled to them later on . . .’ (PLF)
[2] DD reviewed the manual for Historic House, the magazine of the Historic Houses Association, Winter 1991. Reprinted in Counting My Chickens, pp. 146–9.
Mani
Darling Debo,
It was marvellous the spread newspapers gave to poor old Xan, tho’ some of them made it look as though he’d won the war singlehanded, with me as his loader. But I was pleased, for his sake and all his pals, not to vanish un-sung. I don’t know what one will do without him, though we only met a few times a year, owing to remote abodes. I wrote my bit about him two years ago, but when Magouche rang up with the awful news, got on to the head of that department in the D Telegraph, to add the bit about the final visit to Crete, and what a miracle it was. The head of obits. is a chap called Hugh M-Massingberd, [1] whom I’ve only met once but he was tremendously helpful, and said they had added a lot of stuff, to precede my bit, would I like to hear it? So he read it all out. There was quite a lot about Daph’s and Henry’s (first secret) wedding: [2] were they some freak kind of bigamists. Was D’s and X’s marriage valid etc? Terrible gossip column stuff, all of which he had taken out when I blew up; also, at the end of ‘writer, soldier, traveller, etc’, they had stuck ‘adventurer’, which means a sort of crook, which is just what Xan wasn’t – a paragon of correctness! – so that came out too, and several other dark jams, some of them due to people no longer knowing what words mean.
I’m so glad the dedication has given pleasure. [3] I often think it means more to the writer than the dedicatee. You come first on the page as Andrew is up front all through, and you very slowly glitter for a second in the wings. I wish the vol. was a bit less slim, but I’m such a slow coach with the longer ones, and may get run over before the current one is ready to be dedicated to anyone.
All greetings to Andrew, and lots of love from
Paddy
[1] Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd (1946–2007). Obituaries editor of the Daily Telegraph 1986–94, who introduced a new, less reverential style to the paper’s necro-logical column.
[2] Daphne and Henry Bath faced parental opposition when they announced that they wanted to marry and the ceremony took place privately in 1926. They then had a public wedding in 1927. Their divorce in 1953 covered only their second marriage and in 1955, when they were both remarried, they sought an appeal to the High Court to get the annulment extended to their first.
[3] The dedication to DD and Andrew in Three Letters from the Andes, which had just been published.
18 September 1991
Bolton Abbey
Skipton
Darling Paddy,
I loved you being Xan’s loader in the war – page more likely, like Good King Wenceslas.
HASTE, back to the grouse, MILLIONS of them. Much love
Debo
10 November 1991
Mani
Darling Debo,
The last weekend before leaving, Joan and I went to stay with Myles Hildyard at his strange and rather marvellous house called Flintham in Notts. It’s got a tall Paxtonian greenhouse, with tree-ferns etc, two stories high, jutting straight out of an equally tall library, full of splendid vols. But the point is the total niceness of Myles – do you remember he came over to lunch? The only other guest was Ken Davison, [1] whom I hadn’t seen for years. The atmosphere in the house is like Leach illustrations to Surtees, marvellous rambling stables where we went to see two pensioned donkeys of great charm. Endless walled gardens with crumbling statues. Fascinating to me was lunch 20 miles away at a house called Aubourne, of which the point was that the inhabitant, Henry Nevile, [2] was staying at Baleni – my Rumanian hangout – when war broke out, and we came back in Sept 1939 together, seen off by my pals and Lady Hoare (Bill Bentinck’s sister and the Bucharest ambassadress), [3] who equipped us with sweets and toys, and a tied-on label for Henry, as she was not quite clear about our ages: 24 for me, 18 for Henry, who had just left Ampleforth. We went over all our adventures on the way – 5 days – halting at Venice, before both heading for the Guards’ Depot in Caterham, he later than me. I hadn’t seen him for 52 years. Lots of snaps and albums. He’s now Ld Lieutenant of Lincolnshire, hard to link with the pink-cheeked blue-eyed nipper of yore, but v. nice.
After that we saw Lincoln Cathedral, on tiptoe because of Evensong; then Ld Byron’s abode, Newstead, but too late, it was closed, as shadows had fallen. Myles said, ‘Slip in, and have a look at his dog Bo’sun’s monument, we’ll keep cave (KV)’, so I slithered through a hedge, and zig-zagged through the rhodies rather furtively, but thought this is no way to trespass: the only thing is to walk slowly, pausing for the view, if possible finishing a cigar, as tho’ taking a pre-bath breath of fresh-air. The monument is very moving. I gazed unapprehended.
Lots of love
Paddy
[1] Kensington Davison, 3rd Baron Broughshane (1914–2006). Opera administrator and critic.
[2] Henry Nevile (1920–96). Served in the Scots Guards. Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire 1975–95.
[3] Lucy Cavendish-Bentinck (d. 1971). Married in 1922 Sir Reginald Hoare, British minister-plenipotentiary in Bucharest 1935–41.
27 November 1991
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Can’t think of any news. Births, marriages or deaths are the headings for my other abroad-dwelling correspondent viz. Decca but all seems quiet in those departments just now.
Smithfield [1] looms, Cake to lunch there, much raising of glasses & toasts to Tom Dick & Harry, any excuse really. I love going in her wake through the crowds, she has an extraordinary effect on the populace, the faces when she’s passed unexpectedly are v revealing, giggles, amazement, cameras too late, only getting backs of people like me. Worth seeing.
We have MUTTON & caper sauce for lunch. It’s trad now, used to be lamb, she asked for mutton, almost unobtainable unless you keep a sheep specially, for more months than usual, till Mother Nature turns it from lamb to mutton.
Tonight wonderful Dame Elis Frink & husband [2] (surprisingly to do with racing, an ex-starter I think) come for the night & a look round tomorrow, then to Manchester where she is to give a lecture & I’M GOING. Wonders will never . . . but it’s only because she’s so fascinating. Then the Prince of Wales comes, in the middle of the night from a dinner in London. I must put a trail of breadcrumbs to his room. Can’t wait up, too sleepy.
Much love
Debo
[1] The Royal Smithfield Show.
[2] Elisabeth Frink (1930–93). The sculptor and printmaker married in 1974, as her third husband, Count Alex Csáky.
6 December 1991
Mani
Darling Debo
I loved your Cake-walk description. I adore your letters, but wish they hadn’t got such RARITY value, as all my other correspondents have conked out.
Florence Nightingale had a passion for really good mutton, as distinct from lamb. It was the mainstay of her luncheon parties near you in Curzon St in the evening of her life.
Lots of love
Paddy
4 January 1992
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Christmas was a full house, 16. Very jolly. Followed by a week of pure luxury, viz. no one, so I could moon about the garden and do exactly what I fancied. Those dead days between Xmas & New Year are really good, post-less, no one where they’re meant to be & totally calm.
One evening White Mischief [1] was on the telly. Did you see it when it was a film? I didn’t, but MY WORD I was fascinated by it & can still think of 0 else. My poor old eyes have suffered from a close study of the Red Book, trying to work out who was who, from Lady Idina [2] on. What an incredible affair – the only one I ever saw – can’t say knew – was Ly Delamere [3] who used to come to Frank More O’Ferrall’s [4] Derby night dinners, & I was struck by her beauty even when pretty old, extraordinary eyes & smothered in square 1930s jewels. I wish I’d studied her properly.
Diana [Mosley] is coming soon. I do hope she’ll remember some of them. Erroll was too lovely in the film. [5] I suppose he really was. Bother not knowing him. The sort of hopeless cad I love.
We went to the dinner for the deification of the Sainsbury bros at Downing St to note the new bit of the Nat Gallery. [6]
I fell, hook line & sinker, for Mr Major. [7] Norma was somewhere else so he was alone saying How do you do. He said that, & then said How very nice to see you again, which was very nice because I’d never seen him before. He exudes GOODNESS, unheard of in a politician, eh.
I sat between old Lord Sainsbury [8] & Tim, MP. Old Ld S has always been a socialist & he said You know I’m very radical. So I said Oh yes & he went on about how when he bought a house in Suffolk in the early 30s the gardener had never had a holiday. Well I suppose ours never had, nor our groom whom I adored & spent my childhood with. If he’d had a holiday I would have had a nervous breakdown.
Anyway he was a dear old soul, 90 this year, & I gladly cut up the tough pheasant for him. He doesn’t seem to mind being very rich.
The speeches, John Sainsbury & the PM, were short & perfect. John had a slight go at Venturi the architect (who wasn’t there). I believe there had been monumental rows but all he said was that, after a slight disagreement, Venturi was heard to say Lord Sainsbury doesn’t seem to realise I’m a genius.
So that was the highlight of the autumn.
I’m back to 2nd childhood in the chicken line. I look after them myself & the intense pleasure of watching them at work & play is something I have missed, I suppose since the war.
I’m SWAMPED in eggs, so asked the farm manager for the regulations re selling them in the Farm Shop. [9] You simply can’t imagine how wild they are. It seems you have to have doctors & vets in white coats who do unspeakable indignities to the poor hens. Then you have to post away, to some laboratory, their messes – sorry, faeces. But before you consign them to the post you must check with the PO the regs re posting chicken’s messes.
When this pantomime is completed you have to grade the eggs, mustn’t be a millimetre out in guaranteed size. Then you get a Packing Station number but they don’t tell you how to do that. Then, MOST IMPORTANT, you must wash your hands before and after collecting the eggs. In my case it’s quite a trek to the chicken house, so what happens if it is cold & I put on gloves? Mightn’t there be an infection in one of the fingers?
Oh Whack what madness when ½ the world is starving & would be quite pleased to see my beautiful eggs.
I’ll keep you informed of the progress towards selling them, even if you aren’t in the least interested.
Much love
Debo
[1] The film about the infamous murder of 22nd Earl of Erroll in Kenya in 1941, based on a book by James Fox (1982), was released in 1987.
[2] Lady Idina Sackville (1893–1955). An inspiration for Nancy Mitford’s character, The Bolter. Lady Idina’s third (of five) husbands was the murdered Lord Erroll, to whom she was married 1923–30. Her first husband was Captain Euan Wallace, with whom she had two sons.
[3] Diana Caldwell (1913–87). Married, in 1955, 4th Baron Delamere as his third wife and her fourth husband. Her second husband was Sir John ( Jock) Delves Broughton who was tried, and acquitted, for the murder of Lord Erroll, with whom she had been having an affair.
[4] Frank More O’Ferrall (1904–76). One of three Irish brothers who ran the successful Anglo-Irish Bloodstock Agency. He and his wife, Angela, were great friends of the Devonshires.
[5] Lord Erroll was played by the British actor Charles Dance.
[6] The three Sainsbury brothers, John, Simon and Timothy, funded an extension to the National Gallery, designed by the post-modernist architect Robert Venturi at a cost of some £50 million.
[7] John Major (1943–). The Conservative Prime Minister had been in office for just over a year. Married Norma Johnson in 1970.
[8] Alan John Sainsbury (1902–98). The father of the three brothers, Life President of the supermarket chain, was created a life peer in 1962.
[9] In 1977, DD opened a shop in Pilsley, a village on the Chatsworth estate, to sell high-quality British produce.
31 January 1992
Mani
Darling Debo,
Marvellous letter about the PM and the banquet for the Sainsburys and their table talk. Cyril Connolly, during a reception for Gen. de Gaulle at the Fr. Embassy, and as his turn came in the queue, Gen de Gaulle, shaking hands, said Très heureux de vous revoir, [1] and C.C. was delighted (never met before). So it must be a Head of State secret device. C.C. had been given a modest form of the Légion d’honneur a month or two earlier, was wearing it for the first time on his lapel, ‘When what should I see but John Lehmann, with something the size of a pineapple round his neck on a ribbon! Evening ruined, of course.’ [2] I expect he was loved because of Mme Massigli’s [3] fondness for Lehmann. I couldn’t bear him.
There’s a storm on, howling winds outside, and no light here or in the village, so this is being scribbled by candlelight.
How fascinating about White Mischief. I didn’t care for the book, or the film, because in both Idina – Dina to me – seemed such a travesty. We must go back a bit.
When, in summer 1937, Balasha Cantacuzène (whom I adored as you know, twelve years older) and I were living in the top bit of a watermill in a steep forest of orange groves opposite the island of Poros, in the top of the Peloponnese, we saw three figures approaching under the vine leaves, one well-known, and a frequent visitor, an amusing queer Greek diplomat called Aleko Matsas (perhaps you knew him), a slim, long-legged woman in a green top, green shorts, sandals and dark glasses, and a tall rather willowy chap of my age (viz. 20) in rust-coloured sailcloth trousers. B said to me, ‘Who can Aleko have brought? She reminds me of Dina Wallace.’ Of course it was. She and her bro Buck D. L. [4] had been v kind to B (being brought out in London soon after the end of WWI by her worldly mother). Great embracements ensued. The tall young man was her son David Wallace, [5] whom she had met – for the first time since he was a baby – shortly before. He must just have come of age. All contact with Dina had been forbidden after she had buzzed off with (?) Gordon (?) Erroll? (She was called Haldeman then.) They had all three met in Athens. They stayed with us ten days including a three-day peasant feast at the mill. There was something absolutely charming about her, very pretty, light-boned, slight recession of chin, v funny and appealing too, totally unlike the bitch in the film, much better and lighter style. She was leaving in a week for Prague to meet ‘somebody I’m a bit potty about, I’m afraid, a sea-dog called Ponsonby’. I wonder why Prague, so far from the briny. She had a passion for taking snaps. I wondered what happened to them, there must have been 100, but her daughter, married to Ilk, [6] couldn’t find them when I asked her years ago.
David, who had just been sharing rooms at Oxford with Guy Branch [7] and Jeremy Hutchinson, [8] I saw a lot of later. He was dropped into Northern Greece and killed in a guerrilla skirmish with Germans, while rescuing somebody wounded. Billy W [9] was the only one to survive of them.
I’ve got to dash to the post. Lots of love,
Paddy
[1] ‘So pleased to see you again.’
[2] John Lehmann (1907–87), the poet, writer and publisher, was made an Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1958. Connolly was awarded the lesser rank of Knight in 1947. Their meeting at the French embassy took place in 1960, when Connolly was ‘much impressed by “Bonny Johnny” Lehmann’s chestful of medals’. Jeremy Lewis, Cyril Connolly, A Life ( Jonathan Cape, 1997), p. 503.
[3] Odette Boissier; wife of René Massigli, French ambassador in London 1944– 55. The ambassador in London during General de Gaulle’s 1960 visit was Jean Chauvel (1897–1979), a diplomat and – like Lehmann – a poet.
[4] Herbrand Sackville, 9th Earl De La Warr (1900–76). Labour politician.
[5] David Wallace (1914–44). Lady Idina’s elder son died in action on 17 August 1944. Her younger son, Gerard, was killed in action on 20 August 1943.
[6] Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk (1919–85). Genealogist, writer and friend of PLF since they trained together at the Guards’ Depot, Caterham, in 1939. Married in 1946 Diana Hay, daughter of 22nd Earl of Erroll. ‘Iain had a delightfully romantic cast of mind: he looked at life through a Baroness Orczy–John Buchan– Dornford Yates prism.’ PLF, Afterword to Ill Met by Moonlight, Folio Society, 2001.
[7] Guy Rawstron Branch (1913–40). Read English at Balliol College then worked for the British Council and flew with the Auxiliary Air Force, in 601 Squadron, for several years before the war. Killed in the Battle of Britain. Married Lady Prudence Pelham in 1939. ‘Guy was much admired by Maurice Bowra and Isaiah Berlin. The sort of person that everyone fell in love with.’ (PLF)
[8] Jeremy Hutchinson (1915–). ‘A brilliant QC and one famous for his skill, balance and witty enjoyment of life.’ (PLF) Brother of Barbara Ghika. Created a life peer in 1978.
[9] William (Billy) Wallace (1927–77). Captain Euan Wallace’s youngest son by his second marriage to Barbara Lutyens. His two older brothers, John (1922–46) and Edward (1923–44), were both killed in action.
22 January 1992
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
A quick line to say the P of Wales was here (as per) earlier this week & he plans a wk-end at Sandringham (which he borrows from time to time) on 10 April. He is asking the non-shooting types, some painters I’ve never heard of, dear good Angela Conner [1] etc. He kindly includes me, can’t think why. I know he’s going to ask you (blind date? Can’t remember if you know him). Anyway the house will be choc a bloc & IF you can come (you will, won’t you) you will be in my dressing room, we must squeeze in together. I told him that’s nothing new, I have slept head to tail with you & nine Spanish gardeners before now. [2]
I’ve done that wk-end twice. We tool round the wondrous Norfolk churches in the freezing April cold & this year he thinks he might get us into Holkham. [3] Just think how jolly.
So, if & when the invitation comes kindly accept & take an anti snoring pill as we’ll be cheek by . . .
Haste for post.
Much love
Debo
Fancy you knowing Ly Idina & giving her such a good reference. Of course she must have had huge charm & that did not come through in book or film. It was the story which I found so gripping.
[1] Angela Conner (1935–). The sculptress, a friend of the Devonshires since 1964, made portrait busts of several members of the family and designed a water sculpture, Revelation, for the garden at Chatsworth.
[2] ‘In 1958, I went with Paddy and others to see the Whitsun parade in El Rocio, Andalusia. There was no room at the inn, so we slept head to toe on the stone floor of a shed already occupied by some Spanish gardeners. Quite an odd night.’ (DD)
[3] Prince Charles arranged a private visit for his party to Holkham Hall, seat of the Earl of Leicester.
1? February 1992
Mani
Darling Debo,
Your letter about Sandringham. You write IF you come: can a duck swim? I suspected your kind guiding hand in all this a few days earlier. A terribly nice secretary rang and said would wife and I come for the weekend? I said, after a quick ‘aside’ confabulation, that alas, it would mean only me, as wife couldn’t, and she said, ‘Well, we’ve got one of you, anyway.’ So there we are. You know what a hermit Joan is – longs to be a fly on the wall, to hear what’s said and, above all, to learn what was eaten, which I never can remember. Thank heavens I did remember to trouser the menus on the only former occasion.
It’s very decent of you to let me doss down in your dressing room, and reminds me, in a way, of that Spanish pilgrimage to Our Lady of the Dew, 1000 years ago.
Lots of love from
Paddy
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I’ve just got back from several days in the Soft Under Belly of SW Wilts, in other words staying with Sophy. [1]
Do you know that country? Driving to Crichel [2] for lunch we passed four cars in 16 miles, the narrowest lanes you ever saw, no humans & steep ups & downs of downs & then wet valleys, so beautiful, secret & real country. I believe it all belongs to two people therefore isn’t covered with this & that foul buildings. I’d never seen that part of England before. If I was rootless & deciding where to live I’d have no doubt.
Sophy’s bit has far the best woods I’ve ever seen. One is enormous, 1500 acres. There was a lawn meet of the S & W Wilts at Fonthill House, where the ancient grandad Margadale lives.
Diana [Mosley] & I were early, as per, so the old boy asked us in & showed us his pictures & all of that, then said I’ll go out of the kitchen & let you out of the other door. He went out, forgot we existed & there we were, fatally locked in, while horses & hounds loomed. In the end a henchman saw us at a window & let us out. V comical.
On the way home I spent a morning at a rare breed chicken & ducks place, looking for amazing ones for the Prince, who fancies some. The owner is one of those specialists I love, blinkered interest in old poultry.
Let’s go together to our famous wk-end.
Much love
Debo
[1] DD’s daughter Sophy was married to Alastair Morrison, later 3rd Baron Margadale; they were living at Fonthill, near Tisbury in Wiltshire.
[2] DD was on her way to lunch with Toby and Mary Anna Marten in Dorset.
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Sandringham looms. I expect you’ve had a letter telling you to look sharp for 7 p.m. on Fri 10th & to wear a hat at church (no, that’s me now I come to think of it). Shall we somehow go together? Will you come here the night before – election night I hear now – and we’ll tool along by car? DO.
Everyone frantic here, getting ready for the house to open.
Do you know Elisabeth Frink? She’s a wonder & has become rather a friend. I went to see her new work, a life-size heavy horse, sort of Percheron type, Géricault-like bottom, & tail wound round with rope. Bronze. I have a great longing for it for the garden here . . . It’s not the sort of thing you rush out & buy after breakfast but I hope Stoker will try & persuade the dear old trustees to dig deep. I HATE her Easter-Island type heads but oh the animals are wonderful. And she is wonderful. Army bred. Her ma is the dau of a Skinner’s Horse officer. She’s 82 and very beautiful. Never saw her parents between the age of 5 & 16 except once & was shunted from boarding schools to aunts all those years. How did people survive all that & WHAT FOR in the end. I wish she was coming to Sandringham.
63 eggs yesterday.
Much love.
LONGING to see you
Debo
*
(DD)
Lis Frink’s bronze War Horse, 1991–2, was bought by the Chatsworth House Trust, and she and her husband Alex stayed at Chatsworth in April 1992 to oversee the installation. She liked the place I chose – at the end of the canal – where we positioned him with his back to the house looking across the Old Park. He travelled from the foundry in a horsebox, and was decanted into the bucket of our JCB and driven across the garden with supreme care and precision by Brian Gilbert. The horse’s ears are back, he is about to strike and bite at the same time. You are in danger if you stand in front of him. We watched in the rain. A group of prep-school boys watched with us. I begged them to remember meeting the famous sculptress and that they had seen an historic moment for Chatsworth, the War Horse being the first important sculpture bought for the garden for 150 years.
Lis Frink was once seen, never forgotten: gardener, poultry keeper, home-giver to her mother and mother-in-law, and, to my mind, the unrivalled sculptor of horses and dogs.
26 March 1992
[Postcard]
Mani
Debo
‘Sing a song of Saxons
in the wapentake of Rye,
Four and twenty eoldermen,
Too eold to die.’
Just seen this in The Times ‘word watching’. A wapentake is a Saxon land measurement. I thought the rhyme rather up your street.
Love
Paddy
10 June 1992
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I’m EXHAUSTED. Telly crew here doing a sort of documentary on this old dump, inside and out. I had forgotten how one always has to do everything three times. There is something wrong – light, sound, one’s own stupidity, etc etc – each time so the poor old wooden actress has to start again.
Your book-backs figure. I said, re Abel N Willing, it sounds a bit old-fashioned now as everyone is abel n willing for everything but it was all the rage once. True, you’ll agree.
I went to France for two glorious days with the Prince of Wales last week. A magic carpet, Queen’s Flight, no passports, no airport buildings, no nothing tiresome. We started at Vaux, then Courances [1] for the night & a long stare at the green alleys with the tallest oaks going, next day Chartres (where the English Nanny so rightly said it was a bad light for sewing). I can’t manage a religious feeling in that crowded dirty building, shuffling Japs by the thousand & that French trick of chairs instead of pews. Give me Swinbrook, or one of those magic Norfolk churches where Billa [Harrod] prays away like mad for the prince.
Much love
Debo
[1] The chateaux of Vaux-le-Vicomte and Courances owned, respectively, by the Vogüé and Ganay families.
14 June 199
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I forgot two things. Ludo Kennedy is writing a book on Scotland. [1] When in Edinburgh he asked the guide at the Castle what the most usual question from American tourists is. He said ‘What time do they fire the one o’clock gun?’
The other thing is a dozen and a half of what vegetables are gold?
18 carrots.
That’s it for now. Much love
Debo
Elis Frink has been made Companion of Honour. For Services to Reggie, I suppose. He is (was) a Maran cock who was poorly after a fight with a Light Sussex & she took him to the vet every day for a week till, alas, he conked. Do admit. It conjures up a good picture. Distinguished sculptress queuing in the vet’s surgery with a huge ill Maran on her lap. That’s what I love about her, she adores her chickens.
[1] Ludovic Kennedy, In Bed with an Elephant: A Journey through Scotland Past and Present (1995).
30 July 1992
Mani
Darling Debo,
I still can’t get over that awful stuff in the Sunday Times about the marriage of our marvellous Norfolk host. [1] Apart from the impertinence and disloyalty, and almost worse than both, was the sanctimonious, mock-sorrowful tone. I feel terribly sorry for both parties, but I’ve never even seen her, and the Prince of Wales only at that lovely weekend.
A second cause of vexation was the rotten obituary of Henry Bath in the same wretched paper, underlining what a duffer he was at school and how slovenly dressed, always mistaken for a gardener or something similar. Not a hint of the splendid looks, the originality and fun and the unexpectedness of his conversation. I saw him so seldom in recent years, and nearly always in Clubland, and always with delight, where he looked like a stag among a herd of Belted Angus.
Just before leaving England, I had a message, through Margaret, Janetta’s housekeeper, saying she also did for Dirk Bogarde, who lived just round the corner in Cadogan Gardens, and that he’d love a visit, and that he had had a stroke (only physical) and had been knighted. So I did go and see him, nicer than ever, in his bachelor flat right up at the top. His great pal Tony Forward died last year and he feels v. hopeless and bereaved, and works like mad at very well-put-together novels, since retiring from stage and screen.
No more, Darling Debo, except lots of love from
Paddy
[1] Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, which revealed that the Princess of Wales had been unhappy for most of her married life, was being serialised in the Sunday Times.
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I was on the points (as Wonderful John’s [1] dairy man says when a cow is about to calve) of writing to you when your lovely letter came.
I know, the papers are more than foul about the good prince. Rights & wrongs in both directions, I expect, but I know nothing, only guess a good deal. He has been so dignified, never one word from him. She is truly a wonder at work, she has a power of healing, King’s Evil type, and leaves people weak at the knees but strong in whatever was wrong. I’ve seen that & it is extraordinary. I don’t know her in everyday life but all say she is not easy. So, who knows.
Gill Coleridge [2] is keen on me doing an anthology of this old dump. Gt fun to find refs, from Bess of Hardwick to you in the Stag Parlour. I’m looking in any life, letters I can lay hands on. [3] An unexpected find is Sir Alan Lascelles, assistant sec to the P of Wales, b 1887. On 27 Aug 1912 he came over here & writes ‘there are some beautiful drawings & a lot of rather tiresome Grinling Gibbons carving. * As a house it is not so fine as Harewood & far less liveable in. The children’s schoolroom is hung with Sargent portraits, God help them.’ Good stuff eh.
Do look for any more of the same, please. Much love
Debo
[1] Lieut.-Col. Silcock; the land agent at Lismore.
[2] Gill Coleridge (1948–). DD’s literary agent, a director of Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd.
[3] This book project never materialised.
* There isn’t any, but never mind.
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
FORGOT
BELTED ANGUS re Henry Bath being a stag among . . .
Well, Whack, this breed is a figment of your fertile . . .
Belted GALLOWAY please. On the Rare Breeds list but still afloat, just. ABERDEEN Angus. Oh when will you ever learn. (D Devonshire, Vice President, Rare Breeds Survival Trust.)
A young American came to interview me re Decca for an IN DEPTH article in New Yorker. [1] Have you ever heard of an article being SHALLOW END but that’s how they usually end up.
All the usual questions like ‘and you were determined to marry a duke, I believe’. It really is a waste of time as they know what they’re going to put before they come.
Talk about names of things being changed, an international committee, how made up God knows, has decided that grouse are to be called Willow Ptarmigan. Beat that if you can.
Much love. DO COME back soon
Debo
[1] The journalist Arthur Lubow was assigned by Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair 1984–92, to write the article about Jessica Mitford. When Brown left to become editor of the New Yorker she took Lubow’s article with her, assuring Jessica that it would be published in her first issue of the New Yorker. In the event, Brown decided that it ‘wasn’t right’ for the magazine and the article never appeared.
30 September 1992
Mani
IN TEARING HASTE
Darling Debo,
We are setting off, this very second, to Antibes to collect a marvellous literary prize called Le Grand Prix Jacques Audiberti de la Ville d’Antibes, for A Time of Gifts in French – (beautifully translated by Guillaume Villeneuve. Nobody will read the English version any more . . .) I’d never heard of it, I confess, but it’s 50,000 francs and trails glory, they say, so we’re feeling very cock a hoop. We meet Janetta there, but not Jaime, as his mother has been taken ill in Madrid. Visions of lobster and bouillabaisse float before the mind’s eye, only corrected by remembering the Chinese saying: ‘When you see a crossbow, don’t always expect roast duck.’ Then to Paris and further feasting, followed by Prague with Coote, unseen by me since March 1934 magical and sparkling with snow.
Finally a few days in London, when I’ll be in touch almost at once. Please forgive haste.
Tons of love,
Paddy
6 November 1992
Mani
Darling Debo,
The night before we left, we had dinner with Magouche in Bruton St. Joan had to go early, so I stayed and gassed away, then decided to walk home; across Berkeley Square, into Curzon St, through Shepherd Market – my old haunt when young [1] – and into Market Mews, heading for the Sloane world. I had only gone a few paces when, on a wide black surface on the left side, I saw a strange message in huge letters in white:
‘OPRIG’, it said,
and, underneath,
‘GAGINONANUS’
What could it portend? It looked simultaneously insulting, enigmatic and vaguely improper, especially the message below. Could it be a reassuring message to the neighbours after a visit by the Soc. for the Abatement of Noise? When I got closer, all was revealed, as illustrated in the enclosed sketch fig. (1), and only when I was standing bang in front. In case you don’t get it absolutely at once, all is revealed in fig. (2), not to be unfolded until after a look at fig. (1). I noted it down on the back of an envelope, and have been struggling with the spacing of the letters ever since. [2] If on leaving your front door, passing the Curzon Cinema, and turning right into the Mews, you’ll [see it]. I hope the owner will have gone for a spin, leaving the concertina doors ajar, so that you see it as I did.
No more now, but please send news.
Lots of love,
Paddy
[1] As a young man, PLF lived at 43 Market Street, Mayfair.
[2] PLF sent copies of these drawings to several friends.
GAGINONANUS SPEAKS by John Wells [1]
Before the earliest burning light
Before the world that once was his
Hung turning day to turning night
Gaginonanus was and is
Gaginonanus, mightiest Lord,
Whom all the Seven Kings obey,
At whose high uncreated word
Preadamites were prone to pray
Great God of Gods, all nature’s grail,
The inward soul of every thing
Behind the Maya’s rainbow veil
Withdrawn, within, inhabiting
New gods and false as empires rise
Are worshipped, spires fall and climb,
All-seeing and with placid eyes
Gaginonanus bides His time
Like leaves the centuries are born
Like leaves are born to bud and die.
Gaginonanus smiles to scorn
The drifting aeons as they fly
Ignored, unknown, forgotten still
Gaginonanus sees their play,
The awful working of His Will
Until His dreadful Judgement Day
; *
But now, O Prig! O Lax! O Loose!
That hour is come! O sunk in crime!
Your garages in constant use,
You dare not park at any time
No cloud-etched letters skyward burn
The Blessed Ones who love Him best
Know their Great God will soon return
Behold, in these condemned last days,
Gaginonanus, Lord of All!
As saints and sages dumbly gaze
His Name is written on the Wall.
[1] Inspired by his drawing of the garage doors, John Wells sent PLF this poem.
28 January 1993
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
It was so lovely having a quick talk the other day. I’m so old-fashioned I’m still amazed that you can do that in two secs just pressing those knobs & there you are. A bit disconcerting when you answered in Greek but never mind.
My dear Wife is here. Oh Paddy she is suddenly 1000, diminished in every way. The rot started with an operation for cataract and glaucoma on one eye. It went wrong & she’s as good as blind in that one & the other one isn’t perfect. So she walks with little steps, very slowly, bent because she’s looking at the ground. Can’t read, at least she can for a few minutes & then it goes fuzzy. But the worst thing is she won’t try & be helped. There are all sorts of gadgets, magnifying glasses with a light attached & such like but any excuse not to give the thing a proper try, too cumbersome she says. Anyway that’s what unnerves me, the WILL has gone. V hard to make her laugh, you just can but not like of yore. Well that’s old age I suppose but it is horrid to see.
Masses more but for my next . . .
Much love
Debo
Mani
Darling Debo,
I was so sorry to see about Elisabeth Frink [1] and rang you up, but you were at Lismore.
Love
Paddy
[1] The sculptress died of cancer on 18 April, aged sixty-two. Her husband pre -deceased her by a few months.
24 May 1993
Long Crichel House
Wimborne
Dorset
Darling Debo
Here, embedded in the leaves and cow parsley with the nearby click of croquet balls and cuckoos in the middle distance, takes some beating. Carrington was right, in her letters, to say that cuckoos here and there give a great feeling of dimension to a landscape, and I see exactly what she meant. They’ve now gone to bed in their far-flung usurped nests.
One of the most tiresome aspects of medical matters is the hanging about. They can’t have me in Sister Agnes till tomorrow week. [1]
Tons of love to you and all from
Paddy
I went to see a film called Indecent Proposal [2] last week. Don’t miss it. I’ve been brooding on it ever since.
[1] PLF was going into King Edward VII’s Hospital, Sister Agnes, for a back operation.
[2] Starring Demi Moore as a married woman who agrees to sleep with a billionaire, Robert Redford, for $1,000,000.
SUNDAY [June 1993]
Stolen stationery
Sister Agnes really
White’s
37 St James’s St, SWI
Darling Debo,
Hooray! This morning I’ve been in the underground swimming pool for the second morning running, while a beautiful physiotherapist gyrated among the patients – three of them – telling them when to twiddle their legs and shake their hips, as though training tadpoles; and, what’s more, my stitches were taken out ¼ of an hour ago, all 27. Not stitches at all of course, but just like paper staples. They come out with a slight but transitory sting, and now twinkle on the pad at my side. All this means that departure impends – next Teusday morn, when this Golden Coach turns back into a pumpkin. Then, crawling about London for a few days. Weekend recuperating chez George Jellicoe. I’ve got to be in Athens on the 25th, to be made a doctor of Humane Letters, with Niko Ghika. Finally, home.
The point is, will you be down here at all? If so what about a feast, or a drink, or 200 slow yards in Hyde Park?
Fond love,
Paddy
Mani
Darling Debo,
It’s all very odd here. After months and months of drought, reducing all the olive-growers in the Mani to despair – there’s nothing else, only a few fishermen – the heavens suddenly opened a fortnight ago and swept the road that comes down from the main one to our bit of sea, clean away! Nothing but rubble and mud and enormous boulders and tomb-like holes ten feet deep, and acres of silt spreading into the sea at the bottom of each canyon and torrent-bed, like ogres’ ping-pong bats. Our motor-car is safely perched on our headland, thank heavens, but can’t go anywhere. We can only get to the village by muddy trudges across fields and up lanes, otherwise we’re completely cut off. But we’ve got lots to eat and drink, plenty to read and masses of logs for the fire, so, in a way, it’s rather nice.
It was my name day (Michael, here in Greece, as ‘Patrick’ always turns into ‘Petro’) – 8th Nov, the day after we got back, and, after church at the tiny chapel of SS Michael & Gabriel two fields away, half the village came here for food and drink and then music and dancing, all morning, wonderful black-coiffed crones skipping along like flappers round the drawing room, then out onto the terrace and round the fountain in a double chain, interweaving like oranges and lemons. They love it, and so do we after the initial anxiety.
What a fascinating and memorable man Canon (?) Beddoes [1] is! It’s such a rare name, I’m sure he must be a relation, or descendant, of the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849), just looked him up in the DNB. When he was still at school, he wrote a play, never published, called Cynthio and Bugboo. He was best known for a long poem called Death’s Jest Book, which was the one I’d vaguely heard of. He died at Bâle, and sounds a riveting and very strange character.
I loved our visit, too, and thank you so much. It was marvellous seeing Andrew moving about so featly, wielding his crutch like a field-marshal’s baton. [2]
Tons of love,
Paddy
P.S. I’ve reopened this, because they’ve just telephoned – i.e. this morning – from Dumbleton, to say that poor Graham has died in bed from heart failure. It’s a shock but of course a relief. He would have hated to go on vegetating, if he had realised (and he did in a sort of way) and was bewildered and depressed by it. We’ll both come back for the funeral next week – Wednesday I think – driving straight there from Heathrow and stay two days at Dumbleton, and then back here, I think. It’s a beautiful old church there, and they will certainly sing ‘Fight the Good Fight’, written by Joan’s and Graham’s great uncle, a canon of Worcester, and a favourite character of J Betjeman. [3]
[1] The Very Rev. Ron Beddoes (1912–2000), Provost of Derby Cathedral 1953– 80 and semi-retired vicar of Beeley and Edensor 1980–97. ‘He was a compelling preacher who often fixed his blue eyes on you and made a questioning sound “Hm?” to sharpen your attention.’ (DD)
[2] Andrew Devonshire had had a hip replacement.
[3] John Betjeman (1906–84). The Poet Laureate, a friend of Joan Leigh Fermor since the 1930s, admired the hymns of John S. B. Monsell (1811–75).
16 April 1994
Mani
Darling Debo,
I don’t know what’s happening to the Greek posts, your letter took a fortnight to get here, then we had to go to Athens to see a specialist – Joan had a false-alarm heart irregularity, all over now, but anxious for a moment: cardiogram first like a row of Salisbury Cathedrals, and now like a well-tended country hedgerow.
About the Nancy–Evelyn letters, [1] I’m all for. Both are tip-top, Evelyn’s always amusing and intelligent, only spoilt now and then when he seems to assume a slightly tiresome role as backwoodsman stickler. Nancy is eerily wise, always funny, often learned, or fascinated by the scent she is following, never affected or showing off. I treasure the vol. you gave and have just been dipping here and there. They are like a shot in the arm.
I must dash for the last post before the weekend.
Lots of love
Paddy
[1] The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, edited by Charlotte Mosley (1996).
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Lunch for Daph’s 90th birthday at Longleat (‘in my new penthouse suite’ said Ld Bath, [1] viz. part of that wonderful library under the roof ). It was odd beyond everything. Everyone except grandchildren pretty ancient to go with the 90 yr old and by gum there was a STEEL BAND which made such a racket you couldn’t hear yourself, let alone anyone else, which in my case was dear good Dirk Bogarde who I hadn’t seen for YEARS & Jim [Lees-Milne].
Daph was the other side of Dirk & Andrew was on her left. She was best at hearing of anyone. Coote arrived late, I didn’t hear why, & was dressed like Daph, nice snap, same robe I mean. Caroline [Beaufort], thinner, nice as ever, & a little old person with straight white hair, children’s socks in bedroom slippers. She said ‘Are you Debo?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I’m Oonagh.’ [2] Oh I did think of R Kee & the source of his Irish love. ‘Do you ever see him?’ ‘No.’ She has gone back to live in Ireland but can hardly bear the climate. So an ancient who has been with her for 40 years comes in with the brekker & every morning says the same words about the weather, ‘raining & blowing again.’ Poor Oonagh gets doured by it & her & no wonder. She said ‘I’ve got Alzheimer’s. I packed my best skirt & then thought why have I done that, I shan’t want it, took it out, & of course I did want it for this lunch & look what I’ve got on.’ ‘Lovely,’ I said. Oh dear me.
We got a kind welcome from mad Bath & a mouthful of beard & other extra hair.
His son looks normal & charming.
Much love
Debo
[1] Alexander Weymouth, 7th Marquess of Bath (1932–). Daphne Fielding’s eldest son, the hirsute, bohemian owner of Longleat House in Wiltshire.
[2] Oonagh Guinness (1910–95). One of the three blonde sisters, known as the ‘Golden Guinness Girls’, married in 1936, as her second husband, 4th Baron Oranmore and Browne. Famous for her wild parties at Luggala in County Wicklow and for her many lovers, who included Robert Kee.
Mani
Darling Debo,
I got a letter yesterday, from friends and neighbours of the sweet Northamptonshire folk I was farmed out with in WW1. She writes in a prim rustic hand, though migrated to Greenwich: ‘Please sign the enclosed book for my father as he knew you when you were a small boy. He is now 92 but saw you last when he was 16 and you were three. His name is Philip Redwood and he lived with his mother and his sister Gladys and his aunt Nellie Barker just near the Martins (brewery people who looked after me), when you lived there while your parents were in India. My father thinks you came to live there when you were one. He remembers the first time he saw you, you were sitting up in Mrs Martin’s arms. He remembers you being called Paddy Mike by them. He says you were a dear little mite, a joy to have around. He remembers clearly one evening when it was still light, hearing you call: “I don’t want to go to bed!” The last time he saw you was the day the family moved to Woolaston, where my grandmother was a nurse. He remembers you helping him to tie up some garden tools on the garden path, and you put your finger on the knot for him to stop it slipping . . . Priscilla B. Hedly.’
I’ve just sent the book off: T of Gifts, containing a description of Kaiser Bill and Little Willy being burnt on the fire celebrating peace day, carried on Margaret Martin’s shoulder – and being rushed home piggyback, because a boy, dancing around with a Roman candle in his mouth for a lark, swallowed it and died in agony spitting stars.
But it’s all fascinating and makes me come all over queer. My word, they were all nice.
Lots of love,
Paddy
Orthodox Easter [10 April] 1995
Mani
Darling Debo,
Easter morning, before everyone is up.
Just before Good Friday, a chimney expert came to alter a smoky chimney, and started by throwing petrol up it, and setting it on fire, very exciting. At the same moment, a terrific noise came up from the olive groves below the house: 100 sheep came bounding about, baa-ing in every key, and fighting for room, all with huge curly horns. They had been brought to eat up the long grass which had choked the whole place, so tore away at it for three days, then buzzed off. They were four-legged scythes, really, bleating lawnmowers. It was living in a whirl.
Tons of love,
Paddy
23 September 1995
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Now many serious questions re Charlotte Mosley’s editing of Nancy/Evelyn letters. She’s sent me the typescript. Oh dear me I sit & laugh & laugh again. Her intros aren’t there yet. Anyway, to help her with her notes I’m HOPING you’ll kindly answer the following:
What did Rose Macaulay look like?
Do you agree – or don’t you – re Chagford (and name of hotel please) that it was ‘an establishment run expressly to suit the needs of writers where Evelyn had retired to work on Brideshead’? Enlarge please.
Do you know who the love of Richard Hillary’s [1] life was?
Thanks in advance for answers to all above tiresome questions.
I haven’t finished it by the way, so I’m sure I’ll have more questions, real life intervenes as you can picture. Evie WAS odd, wasn’t he.
Much love & to Joan.
Debo
[1] Richard Hillary (1919–43). Battle of Britain hero whose face and hands were badly burnt when his aircraft was shot down in 1940. He endured months of surgery in an attempt to repair the damage and wrote about his experiences in The Last Enemy (1942), a wartime bestseller. He returned to active service and was killed in a night training operation, aged twenty-three.
Mani
Darling Debo,
I’m sorry being so slow! Now. Here we go.
What was Rose Macaulay like? I’ve had a shot at drawing her, but the trouble is, it’s nothing like (see fig. attached). The thing is that she was nearly transparent, like wax, you could see a candle through her and the shape of the skull round the eye sockets, hollow temples, and features of great delicacy and distinction, Roman nose, I think, and an expression of intense interest and humour, a bit sad in repose. Didn’t worry much about clothes, a sort of shallow cloche with bronze-coloured leaves all round it is what sticks in the mind. She was lovely in conversation, quick and unexpected, lots of laughter, hands on knees. She may have looked frail, but the first time we met I was taken to lunch by her at the Lansdowne Club. When the lift came up to the fourth floor, Joan and Patrick [1] got in, and she said ‘We’ll walk!’ When they had disappeared, she said ‘Let’s race them!’ and started off down, helter skelter like a pony. We got there first, and when the others got out she said ‘Did you have any trouble? Lift break down, or something?’ Talking, her head had a very slight tremor, as tho’ she were ‘worrying’ her interlocutor. She lived in Hinde Street – books heaped up on all furniture – in order to go to early Mass at All Saints Margaret St every morning. (If she had heard your father grumbling about smells and lace, she would have said ‘Just right for me, can’t have enough of it.’) Then she would bicycle to the Serpentine, come rain come shine, and after 100 or 200 strokes, bike back to brekker and then to work. She scarcely drank anything, but loved parties, day’s work done. You’d have loved her.
Diana [Cooper] and she were on the same cruise ship to Russia, and quizzes were organised. One of them was ‘Which would you choose, death or dishonour?’ Everyone fumbled, but when Rose’s turn came she said, ‘Oh, dishonour, every time!’ and, to the question ‘What is your most secret wish?’ she said, ‘Oh, power! Absolute power!’ Then laughter. In one of her last books, The Towers of Trebizond, a character says: ‘I never had a more social time than staying with Paddy and Joan on Hydra, but I like that.’ One was honoured! Apart from all that she was brilliant, like all people called M.
Chagford. Run by Mrs Carolyn Postlethwaite Cobb, an almost spherical v good style New England American, daughter of the chaplain at West Point. She ran this charming hotel on the edge of Dartmoor with Norman Webb, a nice Devonshire chap she had opened a home for lame donkeys with in Morocco. I think Alec Waugh [2] first discovered it, then Evelyn and Patrick Kinross. I went there with Patrick, to write The Traveller’s Tree, he to write a novel, Beloved Innocent?, about his ex-wife Angela Culme-Seymour, Janetta’s half-sister, and I often went, using the magical centre room with a blazing fire, hunting three times a week, then drinks with Carolyn at 7, she being bedridden in latter days, something to do with asthma. When she died and I went down to the funeral, Norman and Evelyn and Laura [Waugh] were almost the only others there, in Chagford churchyard. I went once again when it was run by some awful people, and wish I hadn’t. Carolyn was very funny, v kind, as good as gold, loved Evelyn. She adored having writers there, and was a true friend.
Richard Hillary. There was a love affair with Anne Mackenzie (who Xan and I were a bit keen on at different times), but she couldn’t bear to face him after being so mangled. His true love and comforter after his awful burns was Mary Booker – did you know her? – prematurely white hair, v beautiful, kind, intelligent, charming. I remember staying up dancing at the 400 until it closed, then talking to her – end of war sort of time – and thought she was wonderful. When Hillary died she married Micky Burn [3] (captured at St Nazaire raid. Colditz. Then Times correspondent all over E Europe). Haven’t seen her since. I think lots of people fell for her because of her beauty, quietness, niceness and sympathy.
Magouche arrives this evening, then we fly to Crete to put Xan’s ashes under a tree up in the mountains.
Now for a dash to the post.
Lots of love,
Paddy
[1] Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross (1904–76). Traveller, writer and journalist, best known for his life of Kemal Mustafa Atatürk. His novel, The Innocents at Home, was published in 1959. Married to Angela Culme-Seymour 1938–42.
[2] Alec Waugh (1898–1981). Evelyn’s older brother wrote his novel Thirteen Such Years (1932) at the Easton Court Hotel in Chagford.
[3] Michael Burn (1912–). The author and journalist wrote about the love affair between Richard Hillary and Mary Booker (whom Burn married in 1947) in Mary and Richard (1988). DD had known Burn, a friend of her sisters Unity and Jessica, since he used to stay at Swinbrook House in the 1930s.
23 October 1995
Mani
Darling Debo,
One detail I’d forgotten about Rose Macaulay. She had a very battered old car, which she drove fast and dangerously. It came into a long thing in rhyme that I published in the Statesman when the literary part was respectable, 40 years ago – of which two lines were (I think)
‘Edith and Sachie and both Osberts and Vita
All packed into Rose’s four seater.’
Nice about the weight of the Queen’s tiara, and you hiding yours, [1] like sneaking one’s tie off when nobody else is wearing one.
Ages ago, I went to a party given by Brig. West. Everyone was tightish. Daph, still Bath, was curled up in a ball next to a chair where Duff C[ooper] was sitting, covered in medals and decorations. Daph was wearing a tiara, as they’d all been to a Court ball. Daph was so rapt in talk and laughter that she didn’t even notice or pause when Henry [Bath], on the point of buzzing off with Virginia, said, ‘I think I’d better take that’, neatly uncoiled the bauble from Daph’s hair, and slipped it into the pocket in the tail of his tail coat, and stalked away. Daph was amazed a bit later by its absence, until we reassured her. I thought for a moment that it might have been later on the same night when I came and collected you from a ball at the Savoy, and took you on to another in Chelsea – whose? – a lovely evening.
No more for the moment.
Lots of love
Paddy
Was the ball at the Savoy given by someone called Christie-Miller? A yearly event? One year, they say, David Cecil [2] was hastening to it along the Strand, when a tart stopped him and said, ‘Would you like to come home with me, dear?’ and he answered, ‘I can’t possibly. I’m going to the Christie-Millers’.’
[1] The Devonshire diamond tiara, a large and imposing piece, was made in 1893 for the 8th Duke’s wife. ‘My grandmother-in-law, Evelyn, Duchess of Devonshire, was Mistress of the Robes to Queen Mary for 43 years. Together she and Queen Mary weathered long hours of tiara-ed evenings. After one particularly lengthy engagement, Granny was heard to say, “The Queen has been complaining about the weight of her tiara . . . the Queen doesn’t know what a heavy tiara is.” I once wore this tiara to a dance at Windsor and realised when I arrived that I was the only one so bedecked. As soon as I could, I took it off and shoved it under a sofa.’ (DD)
[2] Lord David Cecil (1902–86). Scholar, biographer and Professor of English Literature at Oxford.
Mani
Darling Debo,
Talk about Fermor’s echo being silenced through too much water, the whole landscape here has changed because of the winter-long deluge. It’s turned into what Xan called I.J.S. (‘I.J.S.? What’s that?’ ‘Impenetrable jungle, Sir!’ It always worked.) Wild grasses and flowers and weed have shot up a yard, the branches droop laden with leaves and blossom, so one stoops through a foot-wide space between the two. The cats have gone mad tearing about the I.J.S., ambushing and pouncing on each other, thinking they are lions. I must say, they look just like them, though smaller, of course.
There are sudden woods of wild glads of a poignant hue, also tortoises are coming out and courting each other, sounding through the glades like guests in horn-rimmed spectacles embracing at a cocktail party.
Joan and I have decided to give this place to a wonderful institution called the Benaki Museum, [1] who long for it, one lives in it for as long as one of us, still surviving, is still on the scene, then they take it over and look after it forever. They are terribly nice – well they must be, to hanker for such an odd place.
I got made a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, [2] which I must say I’d never heard of, but it means one can slip a minute rosette, I believe purple, into one’s buttonhole before tripping down the gangplank at Orly.
Now. Five minutes to the post leaving. Keep in touch. Love
Paddy
[1] The museum in Athens was founded in 1930 to house Greek works of art from prehistoric to modern times.
[2] PLF was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite in 1992 and Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 2002.
Mani
IN A FEVER TO CATCH THE POST
Darling Debo,
This is only a rushed line to say how dreadfully upset I am for you – and for me, in a different degree – by the sad sudden news of Decca’s death, and I’m dashing down these lines of commiseration, against time.
The other day I came on a bulging folder, absolutely crammed with her letters, and mine too, diligently typed out – from when she was getting ready her Philip Toynbee book. They read hilariously, and I suddenly wished the correspondence hadn’t petered out when it was all over. My last glimpse of her, I think, was when you and she were singing ‘Grace Darling’ to the amazed Bruce Chatwin in that Thai Restaurant in Passionate Brompton.
Anyway, tons of commiseration, darling Debo, and love from
Paddy
Wednesday 9.15
[1996]
Mani
IN UNBELIEVABLE HASTE
Darling Debo,
Could you really bear us for Christmas? It’s not only a marvellous idea, but solves all. Please don’t have second thoughts.
My thought in bed this morning was: –
Q. How can people vote with their behinds?
A. By remaining seated during a standing ovation.
Your review of Jim’s book [1] was tip-top.
I’ve got to break off now, as a rock nuthatch has got into the studio and is flying round and round and banging against the panes and hovering desperately in ceiling corners. Ladders and a blanket needed.
Love
Paddy
Late Special. Got him! He’s up and away and it’s a lovely sunny morning.
[1] James Lees-Milne, Fourteen Friends (1996). DD wrote that Lees-Milne’s portraits of friends were ‘compulsive reading . . . He notes the faults as well as the virtues of his mates, but he does not criticise, and loves them in spite of all. Lucky people.’ Counting My Chickens, pp. 135–6.
10 December 1996
Mani
Darling Debo,
How lovely, being one of your pin-ups in the Oldie! [1] What a shame you weren’t there for J Betjeman’s welcome to Poets’ Corner. I loved it (all except the speech-making part, which had me rather rattled). [2]
Last week, during a lull after a morning of intermittent thunder, there was suddenly a blinding flash and the loudest double report or explosion I’ve ever heard, so dashed over from the studio to the house to find Joan and Ritsa [3] gazing across the valley in wild surmise, where a cloud of leaves, dust and smoke was swirling out to sea. All the lights had gone off (it was an overcast morning), telephone off, and all the street lamps along the road. Then a downpour, real buckets, set in, and lasted for 24 hours. It was a sort of thunderbolt about 200 yards away, and very shaking but nothing has been found. It seemed very eerie that night, deluge outside, the glimmer of candles within, like a stranded ark, containing nothing but us two bipeds and four puzzled cats stalking about the shadows.
Longing for Christmas!
Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] Along with PLF (‘the best company I know, the cleverest and the funniest. They say he is a very good writer’), DD’s other pin-ups were the 6th ‘Bachelor’ Duke of Devonshire (1790–1858); her sister Diana; Flanagan & Allen and the Crazy Gang; Sybil Cholmondeley; Screaming Lord Sutch; and Elvis Presley, ‘the greatest entertainer of all time. He made opera singers sound hopeless.’ The Oldie, 1 December 1996.
[2] PLF gave the address at the unveiling of a memorial to John Betjeman at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey on 11 November.
[3] PLF’s cook and housekeeper.
Dumbleton
Darling Debo,
That was a lovely Christmas. I loved the carol singing, my only worry being that nobody now ever sings my favourite, viz.‘The Holly and the Ivy’.
I’m sitting in this house, looking out at the snowflakes tumbling into the orchard below, where fifty sheep graze on frost-bitten tussocks of grass. Beyond it stands the old mill this house is named after, the broken wheel, iced solid, and the millstream iced over. Only a thin ribbon of water survives in motion, the rest is locked under a lid of ice. Two hundred pigeons live in the top part of the mill, and flutter out and in. Beyond the stream, which is called the Isborne (the only river in the kingdom, it seems, which flows due south to due north), in a field, stands a neighbour’s sturdy horse, rugged up – one rug yesterday, but two today, I note: also grazing. But what about water? The Isborne is wired off, and the two troughs are frozen solid. Joan says they melt it by licking it with their warm tongues, then lap it up. How odd it is that horses never seem to lie down for forty winks, but just stand there come wind come weather, doing a Frink . . . Beyond it, the Cotswolds fade away into cotton wool.
How nice Sophy’s little group was! Alastair marvellous and two dream children. [1] I am wearing your handsome Yuletide tie, and long black stockings you sent two years ago. We had lovely walks, as usual, in the woods about the Ho. – Jim [Lees-Milne], Pat [Trevor-Roper] and I, revelling in the wintry beauty of it all. I remember doing the same with Nancy years ago, and saying the woods must have been pretty well the same when they were the edge of Sherwood Forest: no change from what Gurth and Wamba, the two Saxon shepherds in Ivanhoe, gazed down on, and she cried, ‘Oh, surely not the Rhodies, Whack?’ [2]
Well, there we are, darling Debo, and thank you and Andrew very, very much and tons of love from
Paddy
And also from Joan.
[1] DD’s grandchildren Declan Morrison (1993–) and his sister Nancy (1995–).
[2] Rhododendrons did not become popular on English country estates until Victorian times.
Mani
Darling Debo,
Coote’s barn party was lovely [1] – a hundred people there, and more, and deafening noise when we arrived, the whole of the West Country really, Coote presiding splendidly and roundly at the top table.
I had a long chat with Daphne’s Christopher, [2] who said Daph was fine (and so she sounded when I rang her up), but Joan got him at one of the place-shifts, and had an extraordinary conversation with him. He said he’d gone to see Daph a few days earlier, and asked her what she did in the evenings, and D. said ‘Oh, the three R’s, you know.’ ‘What, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic?’ and she said, ‘No, darling. Reading and R-r-remembering rogering!’ Rather fast.
It’s been very cold here, and raining too, but now glorious, billiard table green on all the olive terraces, so brief and precious to us, scattered with scarlet, purple and mauve flowers, Adam’s Blood, and snowdrifts of daisies.
I’m in the studio. Three cormorants looking somehow very disreputable, have just flown past, and out to sea. No fish for us.
One feels a bit out of things, so please write. Tons of love,
Paddy
I’ve got a marvellous new hearing aid, recommended by Deacon, called Hidden Hearing. I’m surrounded by ticking clocks, crashing seas and deafening blackbirds which have been in eclipse for ages.
[1] Dorothy Lygon celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday in March 1997, a non-leap year.
[2] Lord Christopher Thynne (1934–). Daphne Fielding’s son married Antonia Palmer in 1968.
10 July 1997
Mani
Darling Debo,
A few days ago Joan bumped and slightly split a rib against something. It’s getting better, but agony if she makes a sudden movement. She won’t see a local doctor, but has long chats with Christian Carritt [1] on the telephone, so we have bedside games of Beggar-my-Neighbour and Word-Making-and-Word-Taking (an old-fashioned and much better Scrabble). I go for long wonderful swims in the cool of the evening, and stride about the oak-woods up the mountainside. No flowers now till the first cyclamen and Autumn Croakers, but the withered grass is a golden, lion-coloured hue, marvellous with evergreen ilex and olive branches, especially from afar, giving the landscape a legendary, rather biblical look. Last night I stalked across a treeless slanting plateau and the setting sun sent my shadow across it for about a mile. It felt very queer. Nothing but tortoises about, dashing for cover like speed-kings at my approach.
I not only didn’t see you, but nobody while in Blighty, but got on with some work. The evening before we left I was buying a paper at that stall on the south side of Sloane Square when an Irish piper struck up in the middle and a small crowd was assembled there round a veiled statue gesticulating like a madwoman under the tarpaulin, so hastened across and found Christopher Thynne, as per, snapping everyone. He said the figure on the plinth was Sir Hans Sloane (Hans Place, Sloane St, etc), a famous collector, benefactor and botanist; it was removed (I think) from the Physic Garden. The gathering were all descendants or fans, and I did twig from the jerseys and the pearls that they were all more or less Sloane Rangers. C. pointed to a group by the flower-seller’s shed – all Sloanes of riper years. Their MP, Alan Clark, [2] was going to unveil it and say a few words, but I had to hurry off. I’d like to have seen that, as I don’t know what he’s like. I caught a glimpse of Andrew at Pratt’s looking rather old fashioned and formal in an old school tie. Then away next morning.
Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] Christian Carritt (1927–). ‘A selfless, funny and charming London GP loved and relied upon by all her patients, many of whom became her great friends.’ (DD)
[2] Alan Clark (1928–99). Diarist and Conservative politician, MP for Kensington & Chelsea from 1997 until his death in 1999.
Mani
Darling Debo,
I’ve just been going through all the books here in search of Ly Longford’s wonderful 2-vol life of the D of Wellington, but hunted in vain. What I wanted to find was a passage where Wellington says, thank god all his generals – Peninsula, Waterloo etc – were all out-and-out hunting men, and it was their skill, dash, eye for country and spirit that brought all the victories, saved Europe, and laid Boney low. It was in the light of England’s military debt to hunting in the past that made the MOD’s veto of hunting on vast expanses of age-old hunting country seem so ungrateful, shocking and lacking in historical sense. [1] Ranksborough and the Wissendine Brook etc could now give way to a Govt vehicle and a team of white-coated vermin operatives padding across the sward with hoses and gas-canisters . . .
Here’s something I found in Lemprière’s wonderful Classical Dictionary. (Conjure up in your mind’s eye The Rape of the Sabine Women by David & people like that – undraped ladies being carted off, and bickered over, shoulder-high, by undraped but helmeted Romans.)
‘According to Varro, Talassius was a young Roman who carried off a Sabine virgin, crying out “Talassio!”, meaning that she was now for Talassius. It is more probable that the cry “Talassio”, used at a Roman wedding, is like our “Tally-ho!”, used at a fox-hunt; and that the primary meaning of both words is unknown.’
Rush for post.
Lots of love,
Paddy
[1] The Ministry of Defence’s veto was one of the Labour Government’s first steps towards a wholesale ban on foxhunting with dogs, which came into effect in 2005.
Dumbleton
Debo,
ALL IS REVEALED! I mean those enigmatic symmetrical swirls across the landscape you sent me, those puzzling pictures of a few months ago. [1]
How do I know? At six p.m. yesterday evening we went up in a balloon with seven other people, setting off from Aston Somerville, on the way to Evesham, full of calmly grazing sheep, and drifted south, spotting the Mill House, Dumbleton Hall, Overbury, then many a meadow and stately house between the Cotswolds and the Malvern Hills, with our small river, the Isborne, glittering in its serpentine and willow-shaded bed. We drifted along till nearly sunset, leaving a deep band of smog underneath us – although it looked pure blue from ground level – which reached higher than the Cotswolds, and so thick that our huge balloon, 160 feet from basket to summit – cast a giant ghostly shadow on what looked like a hanging screen of smoke, like an ogre’s shuttlecock (not flat, like the trees and steeples below, but bolt upright), seemingly half a mile away. Then we were above it in pure pale purged ozone. All this is caused by factories and motor-cars alone, awful to think of. The promoters of these balloon trips are anti-smog fanatics, and urged it in mid-air most compellingly.
But, as we descended in a vast field near Tewkesbury, there below were spread field after field patterned just like your photos, I suppose left by some reaping or sowing farm appliance: twin tracks, with a wide arm stretching several yards, so needing very wide arcs to turn and making those wonderful symmetrical designs – not as perfect or as complicated as yours, but jolly nearly. Did you know all about it all along? Do send any further elucidation.
We subsided in the quiet eventide, drifting along tree-tops and nests and landing among buttercups and daisies and black-and-white bullocks that first scattered then recovered and came crowding back with nasty looks while we folded up and packed the vast collapsed multicoloured carcass in its tarpaulin jacket. The two farm girls who showed us the way out were very excited by the invasion, and lots of snaps were taken, then the sun set and we tooled back in the dark. End of bulletin.
Love
Paddy
All is by no means revealed, hence this reopening. It is witheringly upheld that the patterns in the fields observed yesterday are far too complex for any farm machinery to have wrought. Furthermore, it is urged, the fields observed from the balloon are just flat grass, whereas the patterns in your album are cut in standing crops, and, what’s more, there are no exit or entry marks for farm machines, or, indeed, for cunning topiarists with sickles, or shears or nail-scissors, unless they were hovering with small personalized balloons.
Do, please, shed light!
[1] DD had sent PLF a calendar with photographs of corn circles.
1 September 1998
Dumbleton
Darling Debo,
Many thanks for those mystery cornfield photographs. One of my difficulties about them is: how could visitors from outer space know so much about Art Deco? Answer me that!
I’m ¾ of the way through Frances Partridge’s Life Regained, [1] and feel simultaneously impressed and depressed by it.
It’s looking lovely here, much better than last year, thanks to the absence of rape (by Joan’s request) which made the whole landscape look like Lord Lonsdale’s waistcoat. [2]
Love
Paddy
[1] Life Regained, Diaries 1970–71 (1998), Frances Partridge’s fifth volume of diaries.
[2] 5th Earl of Lonsdale (1857–1944). Known as the Yellow Earl because of his fondness for the colour.
Dumbleton
Darling Debo,
Blake once wrote a poem which begins:
‘A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage.’
I’ve just discovered an unfinished continuation of it I scribbled in a notebook long ago. It goes as follows: –
‘Blackbirds fluttering from a pie
Cause four-and-twenty cheers on high
When a pig wanders from its pound
The angels call for drinks all round
An egg falls from the curate’s spoon
And cherubim with rapture swoon
The bed bug snug, the nibbling louse
Delight the angel of the house
When moths make holes in coats & things
The cherubs beat their tiny wings
When rodents eat the Stilton up
The Heavenly Hosts on nectar sup
A death-watch egg is hatched in teak
And there’s ambrosia for a week
When weevils raid the biscuit box
Jehovah’s brow at once unlocks
And lawns wrecked by the burrowing mole
Make heaven shine bright from pole to pole
Uncleanly Fido in the hall
Spells archangelic bacchanal.’ etc etc
The above very clumsy lines apply to the film about Chatsworth and its parasites that we saw a few days ago on TV. [1]
Love
Paddy
[1] Channel 4 was showing a six-part documentary about life and work on the Chatsworth estate which included a segment on the damage that insects cause to textiles and artefacts.
Orthodox Easter Sunday
End of April [17 April 2000]
[Postcard]
Mani
Debo,
Sarah, Dss of Marlborough, [1] hated her grand-daughter, Ly Anne Egerton and got hold of a portrait of her, blacked the face, and hung it up in her room, with the inscription: ‘She is much blacker within.’
Love
Paddy
[1] Sarah Jennings (1660–1744). Quarrelsome wife of 1st Duke of Marlborough and confidante of Queen Anne.
26 or 27 April 2000 or both.
Sto’s birthday. 55 wd you believe it.
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I’m in the dentist’s waiting room in London, soon I hope to St Pancras & HOME.
Just had lunch with Nicko because OUR FARM SHOP in Eliz St opened TODAY. [1] A great excitement, you can imagine. The last lap has been a monster push for the shop staff but there we are it’s open & an Eaton Sq dweller has already ordered her dinner for tonight for 8 people & our chef rushed round with it, all excited. Can they keep it up? Eccles Cakes going to all ex-pat northerners who exclaimed when they saw them. What good sport.
The telly are doing an hour on Nancy and her books. [2] Would you take part, be interviewed?
My sister Diana is havering & wavering, says she’s too old & wrinkled – I say don’t be so vain. Coote is going to see him. There aren’t many left who knew her well, dash it all.
Mary H[enderson] brought a picture of a cow & showed it to the butcher saying the bit she wanted. It reminded me of Woman, and Charles de Noailles’ amazement, when she slapped her thigh saying ‘Il faut le couper LÀ’ [3] re some pig meat.
Much love
Debo
Did you know Napier Alington? [4] Did Joan? Do ENLARGE if you remember him.
[1] DD had opened a London branch of the Chatsworth Farm Shop in Belgravia.
[2] ‘Nancy Mitford, The Big Tease’, a BBC Omnibus documentary, broadcast in 2001.
[3] ‘You must cut it HERE.’
[4] Napier Sturt, 3rd Baron Alington (1896–1940). Son of Humphrey Sturt, 2nd Baron Alington, and Lady Feodorovna Yorke.
5 August 2000
Mani
Darling Debo,
I can’t tell you what a time I’ve had trying to find a marvellous letter from you that was waiting for me here. I wanted to write a proper answer to several questions on it, so put it off for a couple of days and then it got itself lost – i.e. wriggled its way into the awful hayrick of papers that stand at both sides of my desk like rival towers of Pisa.
The only question I can remember was about Napier Alington. Of course, you’re just too young to have come into the hobnobbing zone, but I wasn’t. I met him first in Athens, pretty soon after I’d got there in May 1935, and had just taken up with the beautiful Rumanian I loved, who was an old friend of Napier’s (he said he liked being called that rather than Naps). He had just come from Egypt, staying with the Loraines, [1] and was travelling with Rosie Kerr, [2] who doted on him, like everyone else. We got on terribly well from the start, and it was a lovely time in Athens, packed with glamour and fun, of which Napier somehow seemed to be the centre. We went on lovely trips to Sunium, peeked at Byron’s graffito, and to Delphi. You know what he looked like from the Augustus John picture, which gets him to a T. He had a slightly lifted tone of voice, the sort that Douglas Byng [3] imitated, or aspired to, and was unbelievably funny and warm. He was a mixture of grand seigneur and, in a way, of clown, in the sense of seeing comedy whoever it was and contributing to it. As far as segs, * he was what Maurice Bowra called ‘stroked all round the wicket’. He wasn’t quite sure who his dad was – he thought perhaps an Italian, perhaps Jewish. [4] He was tricked into entering a lift shaft in a palazzo in Rome, and fell three storeys, and was broken up rather, but it didn’t show. (His host thought he was carrying on with his marchesa.) Do look him up in Bunny Garnett’s Letters of Carrington. There’s a nice description of him and Ph. Hardwicke (brother-in-law, I think) going over to Ham Spray. [5] He adored his mother, who he called Feo. His elder brother was killed in the Great War. When Napier heard the news, he very eccentrically took a gun, went for a walk in the woods, and shot his fourth left finger off which he masked by keeping the two next fingers together in a sort of point, wearing a ring with a blue stone in on his little finger. I went there (Crichel) a couple of times, it was the last weekend before I went abroad in 1940 (soon after we met at the ball). Three young girls were staying in the same room, and, fairly late, he thought it would be fun to haunt them with sheets over our heads, creeping in with loud moans (Mary Anna, Libby Hardinge and another girl called Farquharson, [6] all about 10). They adored it, sitting up and shrieking with arms clasped round their knees.
Not much solid stuff in all this rot, I’m afraid. You would have loved him. He was sent out to Egypt in the RAF – not able to fly, because so knocked about – but by the time I got to Cairo, he was already dead, having been tenderly looked after by Momo Marriott. [7]
This letter is so disjointed because of the tremendous heat. I’m scribbling away in a shuttered room, waiting for sunset to go for a long cool swim, as I did last night, watching the sun disappear on the way out, and swimming back under a crescent moon. Bliss.
Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] Sir Percy Loraine (1880–1961). High Commissioner in Cairo 1926–9. Married Louise Stuart-Wortley in 1924.
[2] Rosemary Kerr (1908–85). Unmarried daughter of Admiral Mark Kerr, Naval Attaché in Italy, Austria, Turkey, and Commander-in-Chief, Greek Navy, under King Constantine 1913–15.
[3] Douglas Byng (1893–1988). The cabaret star, famous for his female impersonations, often accompanied his own camp songs on the piano at the Café de Paris in the 1930s.
[4] Napier Alington’s biological father was reputed to be Prince Marcantonio Colonna (1844–1912), assistant to the Pontifical Throne, the highest lay dignitary in the Roman Catholic Church.
[5] Dora Carrington described Napier Alington and his cousin Philip Yorke, 9th Earl of Hardwicke (1906–74), arriving at Augustus John’s house, Fryern, ‘both half naked in vests and a ravishing female beauty a cousin of Nap’s . . . They had been swimming at Kimmeridge.’ D. Garnett (ed.), Carrington, Letters & Extracts from her Diaries, p. 417.
[6] Napier Alington’s daughter, Mary Anna Sturt, her cousin Elizabeth Hardinge and Zoë, daughter of Robin d’Erlanger and Myrtle Farquharson.
[7] Maud (Momo) Kahn (1897–1960). Daughter of Otto Kahn, the wealthy Ameri -can financier. Married General Sir John Marriott in 1920.
* My new spelling for sex – such a dull word, it would keep it out of all newspaper headlines instead of obsessing them. Xan (Gsan) owed a lot of his success to it.
19 November 2000
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
The enclosed, one page in real life but two in the photo, turned up in a drawer at Lismore, spotted by Stoker. He thought it was Betjeman & sent it to Deacon. She saw your writing & sent it to me
. . . BUT the beginning is missing. Do you remember it? Can you do it again? OH DO. Mad of me not to know it by heart, but I don’t . . .
We’ve had a series of lectures here. Last night Archives by a wonderful old gent who has burrowed deep & found such curiosities as the second-ever map of Ireland, a contemp copy of Bess of Hardwick’s will, a seal of King John re some long-lost estate & a letter from George VI to my father in law on Billy & Kick’s engagement [1] saying what an awful fellow old Mr Kennedy was when Amb here. What an extraordinary house this is. I’d never seen any of those.
The blessed Spanish amb. & wife [2] came for a weekend. What a good pair. All strangers (except Kees) in the drawing room when they arrived. I lost my head and introduced her as Mrs Thing. I’d better give up asking people to stay. She is such a sport, ended her b&b letter ‘Love from Thing’.
The stuff from the Hermitage has landed at Somerset Ho & we’re going to the opening on Mon. I guess Jayne Wrightsman [3] will be crowned Empress of All the Russias because I have a feeling she has paid for it AND she’s enabled them to do up three derelict rooms at the Hermitage itself.
Much love
Debo
[1] Both sets of parents had been against the engagement of Andrew Devonshire’s older brother, William (Billy) Cavendish, Marquis of Hartington (1917–44), to Kathleen Kennedy, sister of the future President. The Devonshires were firm Protestants and the Kennedys entrenched Catholics.
[2] Santiago de Mora-Figueroa y Williams, Marqués de Tamarón (1941–), ambassador in London 1999–2004, and his wife, Isabella.
[3] Jayne Larkin (1919–). Art patron and munificent benefactor of, among other institutions, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and Somerset House in London. Married Standard Oil mogul Charles Wrightsman in 1944.
29 November 2000
Mani
Darling Debo,
Here’s the poem, if you can call it that. We were staying at Long Crichel, and somebody wondered what the surnames of the inhabitants might represent, on the analogy of ‘Wellington’ and ‘Sandwich’. Raymond Mortimer, [1] it was thought, might be a kind of hat, and Eardley Knollys [2] a new kind of footwear (it was before Pat Trevor-Roper had succeeded to his place) and Desmond Shawe-Taylor would be a kind of harness (‘got a short tail, see?’). But what about Eddy Sackville-West, so gentle and sensitive and willowy? Desmond came out with a brilliant suggestion, ‘It would be a brand-new kind of boxing-glove.’ Applause was general, and it gave immediate rise to the attached verses.
Tons of love,
Paddy
THE LAY OF THE SACKWILLE GLOVE
I
’Twas a summer’s day at Long Crichel
And Phoebus vas shining bright,
And the ’ole of the Dorset Fancy
Vas gathered to see the fight.
II
Shawe-Taylor vas there on ’is bobtail mare
In the flashest of nankeen suits,
And Mortimer, too, in ’is beaver ’at,
And Knollys in ’is Blucher boots.
III
There vas many a bang-up Corinthian,
And many a milling cove,
But the gamest of all vas SACKWILLE-VEST,
As inwented ve SACKWILLE GLOVE!
IV
They pitched the ring on the welwet lawn,
And the gemmen vas crowding thick,
For BATTLING BEN from Blandford
Vas meeting the VIMBORNE CHICK.
V
‘Up vith yer dukes!’ cries SACKWILLE-VEST,
And their maulies met vith a bang –
And down goes the CHICK, as the BATTLER’S right
Connected ’is neb vith a clang.
VI
Now this clang vas caused by a doorknob
Concealed in the BATTLER’S right,
But nobody spies it, and everyone cries:
The BATTLER AS VUN THE FIGHT!
VII
But over the ropes jumps SACKWILLE-VEST
Vith ’is right ’eld be’ind ’is back,
And ’is left up’eld in preclusive spar,
Vot prowokes th’impending vhack.
VIII
’Is long, left daddle vas ’eld on ’igh,
Manoowering in the air
Clad in a newly-fangled mitt,
MADE OF LEVVER AND ’ORSE’S ’AIR!
IX
Forty-two rounds they milled and slogged
Like the pugs of ’oom poets sing
At the Var of Troy, and their slammin’ dukes
Fair made the Velkin ring.
X
Ben’s proboscis vas ’ammered flat
Vith many a vell-aimed stroke;
Both ’is peepers vas black and shut,
And ’alf of ’is ribs vas broke.
XI
’Is ears svole up like cauliflowers,
’is gnashers vas down ’is froat,
’Is claret vas tapped like a stove-in keg
At the wreck of a wintner’s boat.
XII
They carried BEN off on a five-bar gate,
And round the ’ERO pressed
All the covies, bawlin’ fit to bust:
‘THE WICTOR IS SACKWILLE-VEST!’
XIII
So fill up your glasses, gemmen all,
And all you milling coves,
And drink long life to SACKWILLE-VEST,
As inwented the SACKWILLE GLOVE!
XIV
So fill up the blushin’ bumpers
And empty ve flowin’ bowl
To SACKWILLE, VE SEVENOAKS BRUISER!
To bashin’ VEST, from KNOWLE!
PATRICIUS PRATUS AGRICOLA
(Written at Long Crichel, donkey’s years ago. Found incomplete at Lismore and written in full 29.XI.2000.)
[1] Raymond Mortimer (1895–1980). Critic and literary editor of New Statesman, joined the ‘Bachelors’, as the inhabitants of Long Crichel House were known, as their fourth member.
[2] Eardley Knollys (1902–91). Painter who, with Eddy Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, bought Long Crichel House soon after the war.
Mani
Darling Debo,
Here’s a picture of the small tower here and flags flying on the 25th March, when the Greek War of Independence broke out against the Turks in 1821, which ended in victory, largely owing to the unofficial influence of Ld Byron, and the scarcely less unofficial naval guns of Admiral Codrington, whose blowing of the enemy fleet to bits in Navarino Bay – referred to in Parliament as ‘this untoward event’ – set Greece free. So we fly both flags on the anniversary, but I’m told incorrectly – they should be side by side, not one on top of the other – so don’t tell.
‘The Lay of the S Glove’ was originally inspired by four lines of Regency sporting verse, which I now can’t find anywhere. It had two Apollos in knee-breeches, squaring up to each other in a ring, surrounded by gents in beaver hats:
‘With daddles high upraised, and knob held back
In awful prescience of th’impending whack
The Hero stands, and with preclusive spar
And light manoeuvring kindles up the War.’
I couldn’t resist putting it into cockney V-W substitution dialect. I wonder who last heard it? Nobody alive now, I bet, but early 19th-century books are full of it.
I do look forward to Yuletide! It’ll be my umpteenth at Dingley Dell, as I always think of it, after the snug Christmas retreat in the Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens.
Love to all,
Paddy
Dumbleton
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Darling Debo,
Christmas was marvellous and everyone enjoyed it. I even managed to get some work done in the sacred Stag Parlour. I’ve been a member for about 40 years, or I think I have.
It was decent to get the ‘Three Kings’ laid on. It’s an odd carol, written by a v High-Church Bostonian, wild about smells and lace and Rossetti, whose name I’ve clean forgotten. [1] If I’m ever asked again, do you think they could manage ‘The Holly and the Ivy’? It’s such a strange one, and so seldom heard. I’m particularly fond of it because I remember Xan singing it – with all the words, which I don’t know, in Crete at Christmas, 1942, in his strong basso profundo voice, while we huddled under the stalactites of a snug cave, roasting cheese on the ends of our Cretan daggers, delicious Cretan rarebits, washed down with tremendously strong wine out of a calabash.
It is a swizz everyone vanishing like this. I spend lots of time writing obituaries. The most recent is one of the Cretan captors of that general. Out of the original party of eleven, only two nigger-boys now remain.
Thank you many many times, darling Debo, and tons of love to all, from
Paddy
[1] The Christmas carol was written by the Rev. John Henry Hopkins Jr, in 1857.
16 January 2001
Dumbleton
Darling Debo,
Yesterday – the Ban on hunting – was a day of mourning, unbelievably depressing. The present government obviously plan to quietly strangle English history in all its aspects.
V many thanks for the glorious fake-library paper – I wish there’d been room for the Bulge-Slim vol. [1] I look on it as the summit of my literary achievement. Talking of which I’ve been sent a long article in an American literary paper of such gloriously unmitigated praise, I nearly swooned away. [2] I’ll force it on you when I can get it photo’d. Can’t resist.
Tons of love,
Paddy
What are the police going to do at Meets when the Ban becomes law. They’ll need thousands of mounted police, and miles of stabling for captured horses, let alone for raging – or icily polite – people in scarlet or black. And kennelling? It’s somehow unimaginable.
[1] One of PLF’s suggested book titles for the false library door was ‘Battle of the Bulge’ by Lord Slim. See PLF’s letter of February 1964.
[2] In ‘Philhellene’s Progress’, Ben Downing deplored the fact that most Americans had not heard of ‘the sublime, the peerless Patrick Leigh Fermor’, and set about correcting this oversight. New Criterion, January 2001.
2 May 2001
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Foot & mouth continues to wreak havoc not just for the farmers – I’m told there is no livestock between Dumfries & Blackpool – but the ripples are waves, the pathos of people who have set up teashops, bed & breakfasts etc etc even MILES from any outbreak and are going bust all over the place. It is truly ghoul. Blair pretends it’s all over, well it isn’t. [1] The contiguous cull (ladylike word for kill) is outrageous & even the govt vets are beginning to have a re-think. Too late for the millions of healthy stock which are dead & lying in rotting heaps, stinking and bursting often next to the farmhouse. IMAGINE. No figures are available (i.e. allowed to be published by the govt) of numbers of healthy animals killed.
Emma & Toby say the dishonesty & cruelty to man & beast round them is unbelievable. [2]
Andrew is havering over whether to have a new knee. A big decision, but it is v painful.
Our diamond wedding was last month & the party for the ancients in Derbyshire who have managed 60 years has had to be postponed because of f & m. So, of course, they are dying like flies & I keep getting letters saying My Dear Wife Has Passed Away. Even so 248 pairs are still on the list.
I expect the screams will be heard in Bakewell. Much love to Joan & you
Debo
[1] The foot-and-mouth crisis that broke out earlier that year was not halted until October. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair was anxious, however, to show that it was under control before the June general election.
[2] DD’s daughter and son-in-law farm on the Scottish Borders.
1 November 2001
Mani
Darling Debo,
Many thanks for Counting My Chickens! I read it clean through after dinner to midnight the day it arrived and loved it. Joan too. Your seemingly effortless breezy and unhesitating dash and funny asides at their best. Needless to say, a surprising cheer went up when I got to p. 155. [1] You are clever!
Artemis Cooper has been given the task of collecting all the detached oddments of the past years – on the same principle as yours, really – and putting them into a single vol. [2] So I’ll jolly well respond to your birthday wishes, with mine. I’ve just had a letter from somebody who is writing the official biography of Somerset Maugham, [3] and very much wants a full description of my brief sojourn, so I’ll dig out the two copies of my letters to you (tucked away somewhere) and do my best. It will be a relief to make it clear that I wasn’t horrible, which it might sound like, only tight.
It’s wonderful autumn weather here, air clear as crystal so one can see for miles and miles, even picking out the belfries on the Messenian peninsula, 20 miles away across the gulf, and the sea is very slightly cooler than it was, but I still swim in it for about half an hour every day, which apparently is the very thing for pacemakers, rather unexpectedly.
Lots of love from
Paddy
[1] The appreciation that DD wrote for PLF’s eighty-fifth birthday (see p. xv) was reproduced in her bestselling collection of articles and reviews, Counting My Chickens, with an introduction by Tom Stoppard.
[2] Words of Mercury.
[3] Jeffrey Meyers, Somerset Maugham: A Life (2004).
11 November 2001
Mani
Darling Debo,
Artemis is being a wonder. Joan hobbles with a stick, rather slowly, and I danced so violently on my name day on the 8th – Feast of SS Michael, Gabriel, Rafael and All Angels, who preside in the small chapel along the lane – that I’ve done something frightful to my right heel, and now hobble along too (temporarily) with Andrew’s smart cane. The feast day was a great success: all the crones and grey beards of the village came, and lots of young. After the mass, the feasting and drinking starts at 8 a.m. and ends with a wild mixture of Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses and Oranges and Lemons, out on to the terrace, then round the fountain. At midday they all vanish, so one can dive straight into the sea to counteract all the reckless swigging that has been going on. We’ve got a nice stand-in for the faithless Ritsa, whose son’s departure for Mount Athos has made her a bit off her nut, but Artemis has been our saviour.
No more now, except fond love,
P.
Mani
Darling Debo,
ITUPMPCISAA. [1] Nearly all my letters ought to start like this nowadays.
I did love being at Chatsworth. What a shame that Pss Margaret’s death broke it up, temporarily. I do hope it re-cohered all right. She had always been v decent to me, and I admired her spirit, which I saw put to the test in Italy. She had come to Rome for a week, and I was somehow involved in a series of outings and parties. The thing was, how to dodge reporters. Judy Montagu had arranged a marvellous ride through wild Etruscan hills, backed up by Natalie Perrone, high-jump champion and MFH of the Rome hunt. We were cantering along quietly and were just about to splash through a brook, when all of a sudden on the other side of it, 100 press photographers, who must have been crouching, suddenly shot up and flashed all together in a rather terrifying way, like a series of broadsides. Horses started rearing etc. A cry of ‘Come on!’ went up and Pss M simply charged on galloping and waving her stick and they scattered like chaff, and we all pelted after her for a mile or two among the trees and the Tuscan tombs, and picnicked quietly in a ruin.
We stayed a couple of nights in Athens on the way out, where we were joined by kind Olivia Stewart, Michael, the Athens Ambassador’s daughter, who is a brilliant film-producer in Rome, an angel of kindness who was a great help in our domestic plight.
It was windy, rainy and wild at first, but all of a sudden, today, not a cloud in the sky and masses of blackbirds as if someone had rashly opened a pie.
Lots of love,
Paddy
[1] I Take Up My Pen Clad In Sackcloth And Ashes.
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
We’ve been in London for Cake’s funeral. [1] What a poke in the eye for the MEDIA that all those people queued night & day in the freezing wind to see the lying in state. They had to admit . . .
The funeral itself was one of those incredible performances which can only happen in this country – palace, army, church all at their tiptop best. My poor friend’s [2] steely face made us all realise how much he loved her and relied on her.
We were taken up front, as it were, in the Abbey. I think it must have been a mistake, anyway we had a wonderful view of everything. Bang opposite that wretched little Prime Minister & the frightful Cherie. Prescott [3] looks like a bare-knuckle fighter of Sackville Glove fame from the East End. Perhaps he is. I don’t know. The King of Spain was the pick of the foreign royal people, followed by a funny little chap I couldn’t place who turned out to be the Sultan of Brunei.
Four soldiers carried velvet cushions with her orders, sparkling diamonds galore. Perfectly beautiful and all in slow motion.
So that was that. We were lucky to be there.
Much love to Joan and you from
Debo
[1] The Queen Mother died on 30 March, aged 101.
[2] Prince Charles.
[3] John Prescott (1938–). The Labour politician became Deputy Prime Minister in 1997.
8 May 2002
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I’ve been looking at old (very old) papers re when I was in Washington during the Cuban crisis in the days of Pres Kennedy. You had sent a telegram to me at the Embassy there – ‘Blimey we’re in trouble, ’arf a ton of rubble. Love Fermor.’ That must have cheered me up.
I had lunch with Lu Freud the other day. What an extraordinary man, he is exactly the same as he was when 25 & now he’s 80, bounding upstairs, darting down the street. Painting away like billy-o & a huge exhib going all over the place to mark his 80th birthday. He’s got a grand house in Kensington Church St with a garden planted in 0 but bamboo so you think you’re in an endless forest.
Much love
Debo
Lady Cranbrook [1] (THE most wonderful woman, dau of Ralph & Coney Jarvis) sent me some amazing beans to plant. All colours of the rainbow, sort of piebald, skewbald, spotted etc. She got them off a market stall in Greece. Her son works at something with Mt Athos monks, who grow ditto, so she asked him to get her some for the Prince of Wales. MT ATHOS GET THEIRS FROM SUTTONS.
[1] Caroline Jarvis (1935–). Suffolk farmer and campaigner on rural issues, awarded an OBE in 2007 for Services to Red Meat in East Anglia. Champion of British farmers and scourge of the supermarkets. Married 5th Earl of Cranbrook in 1968.
30 November 2002
Mani
Darling Debo,
Senile decay must have fired a sighting shot across my bows, or I wouldn’t be writing this! Did you ask me to Dingley Dell this year or next? Or neither? You see what a muddle I’m in! Please send a calming P.C.
I went for what must be the last swim of the year last week, 20 days after Guy Fawkes! Wonderful calm autumn days till then – half-an-hour’s side-stroke towards the island and back, then a lazy hour a-sprawl on the pebbles, finishing Twelfth Night and starting The Two Gentlemen of Verona (first time) by W Shakespeare: and then suddenly it all came to an end in deluge, thunder and lightning, and cats and dogs coming down daily from dawn to dusk. And there are plenty of the former, viz. cats, indoors as well. A honey-coloured kitten strolled into the house two years ago, grew up, fell in love with a village tom, gave birth to six kittens then vanished into thin air. They are black, gold, orange and lemon skewbalds of the utmost beauty. Joan and I sit by the fire – plenty of logs from the olive harvest – while I read aloud from Carry on Jeeves. Meanwhile, the kittens – downholsterers and interior desecrators to a kitten – demolish all.
Much love,
Paddy
4 December 2002
Chatsworth
Darling Paddy,
YES Christmas THIS YEAR galloping towards us at relentless speed.
I keenly suggest that you hire a car from Sunny Dumbleton because the trains have become ghoul – sometimes they just say NO TRAINS like when MEAT’S ORF in restaurants in the war.
I wish you’d got a fax. It is a life saver when wondering whether Christmas this year or next.
We all die for you – don’t not come.
Much love. HASTE.
Debo
(Me saying haste now – it’s usually you.)
Sunday [June 2003]
Dumbleton
Darling Debo,
I loved the service, [1] sunbeams streaming in and the sound of flocks baa-ing and lots of birdsong coming in and filling in all the gaps in the liturgy and wild flowers everywhere. It’s a mercy having so many letters to write, because there are so many. The worst part – one of them – in sudden separations like this one is the resemblance to an interrupted game of tennis, when all the balls served get lost in the long grass, and masses of arguments and jokes getting cut in half in mid-act, if you see what I mean.
I’m scribbling away in Joan’s old room, looking down over the lawn where we all hobnobbed afterwards with those trees spreading shadows as clearly outlined underneath them as dark maps spread over the lawn. Beyond them are a row of v old apple trees spreading their branches espalier-wise, like family trees. They must have been supported by a wall once, now gone.
Darling Debo, I’ll write later on and make more sense. Till then tons of love and to Andrew and to you all, from
Paddy
[1] Joan Leigh Fermor died on 4 June, aged ninety-one. A service was held at St Peter’s Church, Dumbleton, on 12 June.
14 August 2003
Dumbleton
Darling Debo
Many many sympathies about the sad Diana news, [1] though I know it must have been the end of anguish and anxiety as well as sorrow.
The thing that struck me in those obituaries was that the whole thing was completely beyond the writers’ grasp. They had never had to tackle such a conundrum before – the flagrant political unorthodoxy, the lack of subterfuge or hypocrisy and the v high style, guts and calm dismissiveness – all these were things the obituarists were quite unable to deal with, however much editors may have egged them on. Also, they were fascinated and, in a way, spellbound by the figure they were writing about – the beauty, the wit, the brains and the civilised bent for literature, the arts, etc. Quite often this made the condemnation ring flat and perfunctory, and, somehow, feeble. Some of the nice bits, I feel, Jim [Lees-Milne] must have had a hand in. What is Mrs de Courcy [2] like? I wish the editors had shown better photographs, the extremely beautiful and serene ones.
I thought so much of you these days, as all friends did. I wish we had managed to have dinner at Christian [Carritt]’s. I’ve just been staying two nights again while she took me under her wing at doc after doc and now see, hear and munch like a basilisk, a Red Indian and a grinding machine, or ogre.
Tons of love, darling Debo, from
Paddy
I long for Greece, but it looks as if I’ll have to hang about a bit more.
[1] Diana Mosley died after a stroke on 11 August, aged ninety-three.
[2] Anne de Courcy, author and journalist on the Daily Mail, wrote a biography of Diana Mosley published in 2003.
17 or 18 August 2003
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Your letter was extraordinary. The one which hit all nails on head. THEY can’t believe in such a person so honest, straightforward & not pushed or pulled by fashion or views or anything else, as original a product of another age with standards which remained with her till she died.
You are the friend to whom all this shone out & you saw how bamboozled the journalists must be when they are surrounded by the very opposite sort of people.
Wit – perhaps not, it always strikes me as the quick & not kind remark. Nancy YES but Diana I think not. She was very very funny but that’s slightly different eh.
It is so odd to have lost someone who was always there. The childhood cry of the seventh, straggling to keep up on stubby legs, of WAIT FOR ME, lives with me. She couldn’t.
Now for Swinbrook. The much licked pews, [1] the unbearable memories of the olden days, the Post Office reached by donkey cart, the two-penny bars & acid drops, the village idiot, the blacksmith’s shop, Nanny’s fabric gloves clutched in the back of the Daimler just before I was sick. Oh well.
Thank you for a wonderful letter, exactly bang on.
Much love
Debo
[1] Diana Mosley’s ashes were buried in the churchyard at Swinbrook; it was here that, as children, DD and her sisters used to lick the pews during services.
12 September 2003
Dumbleton
Darling Debo,
I’m busy packing, off tomorrow. I wish I’d managed to go up to Dingley Dell, but something always cropped up, and now I’ve got to go back home after the longest absence for years. It will seem strange. The place is being looked after by a charming Wykehamist poet called Hamish Robinson [1] who loves camping and writing in empty homes with lots of books, so it’s a godsend.
I hate packing more than anything in the world. I bet I’ll forget lots of important things.
Please give fond love to one and all.
Paddy
[1] Poet in residence at the Wordsworth Trust and author of The Gift Returned (2005).
23 September 2003
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I telephoned like anything, no reply, & I realised you’d GORN. The swallows have been in a frightful fuss like you & packing & now they’ve gone, to join Christopher Gibbs [1] in Morocco I suppose. In a bitter cold May, Mrs Ham used to say in her gloomiest mood ‘I can’t think why they come’. Anyway the summer’s over.
I’m glad you’ve got the sea. What a comfort. I know you’ve been longing for it.
And the poet. Is he still there with your books & his pen? Talk about pens, I still pick one up to write & tell Diana about her funeral.
I expect you feel the same about Joan. It is so odd them suddenly not being there.
Perhaps luckily you & I haven’t got long to go – I can’t believe we shall never see them again, or Woman, or Muv & Farve. Though Muv used to worry about getting through all the Chinese before she found any kindred spirit.
Here we rattle on as per. Andrew is very infirm, walking is slow, difficult & painful, but the political rows are keeping him going & he watches the telly sideways (to do with his eyes which don’t work properly).
Our exhibition (250 THINGS from here) opened in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago.
The hotel Stoker & co stayed in has 3000 bedrooms & another 1000 are being built. Our lot were on the same corridor but couldn’t visit each other as the distance was about like Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner.
I’m told your book is on its way. [2] What an excitement. Shall I try to read it? Advise, please.
Much love
Debo
[1] Christopher Gibbs (1938–). Arbiter of taste and antiques dealer to the stars, had sold his family home in Oxfordshire to live in Morocco.
[2] Words of Mercury.
New Year’s Day 2004
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Here we are, all of it, a sort of sainthood has descended on you quite rightly. [1]
Your peers are a rum lot but life is full of peculiar people. I couldn’t find it in The Times, there were others all beautifully listed but no sign of you. Clever Andrew, who has only got ½ of one eye, did find it. You are called Overseas. Well I don’t know. Anyway a million congrats and v much longing to see you soon.
All love & more congrats from
Debo
[1] PLF received a knighthood in the New Year’s honours list for services to literature and Anglo-Greek relations. DD had sent him a newspaper cutting with the full honours list.
Very early April [2004]
Mani
Darling Debo,
5.55 a.m. Here I sit in the studio, warm as toast, tho’ it’s a nippy morning, because I’m hosed in your wonderful ribbed woollen stockings, absolutely intact in spite of many a winter and many a mile. The best present ever! Why I’m pre-cockcrow like this is: I woke up bleary eyed, peered at the clock, saw it was 9.20, leaped out of bed, bathed and dressed like lightning, then, flinging doors and shutters open, expecting a radiant cold morning, found it still black as a bag. Sleepy eyes had got the lengths of the two clock hands the wrong way round. Confusion of this kind had been brought on by two things: the hours changed a few days ago into summer time, and Elpida, the girl who does everything, starting with brekker, had turned up the same morning with her face covered with red blotches. It was chicken pox, so she’s in hospital for 10 days, as it’s harmless for children – when, I think, I had it – but much more serious for grown-ups. In a way, it’s marvellous; all these dark hours in hand, while sodden slumber still enfolds the world, perfect for what I’m doing this very moment. I’ve been dogged by the guilty feeling I never wrote to say thank you for my lovely sojourn at Dingley Dell. I absolutely loved it.
I know why the Queen was so particularly nice. Before the Honours ceremony at B Palace, a v handsome tall military courtier bore down on me, in blue with a purple fringed sash, red stripe and box spurs and lots of gold on his shoulders, and said, ‘I know all about you! David Airlie’s [1] just been talking to me. Don’t worry! I’ll look after you,’ and did. Obviously, knowing our sovereign likes to scatter a few kind words to the honoured ones, but can’t always think what, he told her that it was my birthday, and she suddenly said, ‘Many happy returns of the day’, and hence my nearly swooning away.
A few days ago was the National Day, anniversary of the raising the flag of defiance of the Turks at the War of Independence. We always fly the Greek flag and the Union Jack on the same pole, and it’s rather a business, climbing up embedded rings to plant the mast into its sockets. Well, we had only just climbed down, when, gazing up at the fluttering display, I suddenly noted that I’d hoisted the Union Jack upside down, a thing that landlubbers are prone to do; only sailors can spot it. But there are none here, we’re well out of sneering range, so I let them flutter on incorrectly.
I must go and dole out some ‘Whiskers’ and ‘Kit-E-Kat’ to the still slumbering clowder, * all piebald and skewbald in amusing patterns. They miss Joan bitterly (they are not the only ones). At first, when I got back and sat in the chair she huddled over chess problems in, they would settle all over one, then, one by one realising I was a fake, wander off. They are beginning to twig that I’m on their side at last. Under the olives round the terrace, masses of freesias she scattered there last spring are shooting up in the grass.
I am sorry about my writing. I’m going to try and reform it. I don’t know what to do about it. Words tend to shrink and huddle.
Christian [Carritt] tells me Andrew has been laid up for several days, but is better now. Please give him my love, as to all.
And heaps of love to you from
Paddy
P.S. Day is breaking. Here is an imaginary conversation (my new genre).
‘Did anyone call?’
‘No, sir. Oh yes, only that nice Dr Oblivion. He said he didn’t want to wake you up, so he went off with his Gladstone bag full of dates and names. He said you wouldn’t be needing them. And he left these flowers.’
‘What are they?’
‘Forget-me-nots, sir.’
‘They look pretty well dead.’
‘The others are rosemary.’
‘They’re on the way out, too.’
‘Yes, sir. Rosemary for remembrance . . . He said you could get hold of him any time.’
‘Oh, where?’
‘Thirteen, Amnesia Grove, sir.’
[1] David Ogilvy, 8th Earl of Airlie (1926–). A cousin of DD who was Lord Chamberlain 1984–97.
* Correct collective word.
18 April 2004
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Your mention of nice Dr Oblivion has jogged what is left of my memory. Did you know that for many years he was locum at Great Snoring in Norfolk? Much loved, & the people preferred him to Dr Dose (of Happy Families) who put z instead of s in his name. I don’t know why, a bit vague perhaps. A sort of sleeping partner & nothing like as good as Oblivion.
The dying forget-me-nots & rosemary are all over the garden here.
Both doctors have retired now. Dr O still has all your names & addresses in his Gladstone bag and Dr Doze is a bit of a pest, he keeps ringing up asking the same question again & again.
BUT Dr Christian Carritt is still as sharp as a needle and as kind as a saint. She arranged everything for Andrew at Ed VII, your adored refuge. I’m sorry to say he is far from well, frightfully depressed & sad, won’t eat etc etc. But sometimes he cheers up a bit.
Edensor House, where we lived for 12 years, is being cut up into flats. I went all over it – talk about memories. I could SEE Mr Hore-Belisha [1] sitting up in bed, shouting for newspapers as if we were a hotel. And the bed was the one where Evie (Waugh) slept & made a frightful discovery (according to him) of the filled pot in the bedside table.
And the other visitors’ room where Cyril Connolly once slept & complained to me there was lipstick on his pillow, another nail in my housekeeping coffin.
Back to the Drs Oblivion & Doze. Various groups come to see round this old dump, among them a charity to do with an illness. Can’t be sure of its name but I think it ends in heimer. Will they remember to come?
Oh Paddy, what a muddle we’re in.
Much love
Debo
Dr Doze now lives in Sleepy Hollow, next street to Amnesia Grove. He & Oblivion do an act in village halls. The song which raises the roof at every performance is ‘You Forgot To Remember’.
[1] Leslie Hore Belisha (1893–1957). The Conservative MP stayed at Edensor House on two occasions, in 1946 and 1948, when attending political engagements nearby.
[May 2004]
Mani
Darling Debo,
This is just a loving message of sympathy to you for sudden event. Poor Andrew, [1] and POOR YOU! It’s no good telephoning because you are besieged by all of us. So for the moment, nothing but fondest commiseration and constant thought from
Paddy
I heard the tidings yesterday, coming back from the old soldiers’ gathering for the Battle of Kalamata, 1841 – messages from Nicko and Christian, so learnt all news from them.
[1] Andrew Devonshire died on 3 May.
23 June 2004
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I’ve had 817 cards, haven’t counted the letters but I will when they’re answered. Andrew had such diverse interests & acquaintances from every conceivable organisation from all countries in the world.
No Eskimos yet but they’ll come. You can’t imagine how odd it is reading them. Even from the dullest person there is a sentence which is worthwhile or tells of some generosity to people unknown to me.
It is very strange here without him because he was the hub, everything revolved round him.
Most of the people who look after this place weren’t born when he found himself in charge 54 years ago. Odd thought. They’ve known no other.
So tomorrow is the memorial service at Bolton Abbey. The next day come Jayne Wrightsman, the de la Rentas [1] & an adorable Italian, [2] all part of the summer scene here for years, arranged twelve months ago. Little do they know they are to be joined by Gen Sir Michael Rose, [3] Col of the Coldstream Guards (the one who did Kosovo, hero of many) because Andrew planned a Coldstream day here & 800 present or ex-Guardsmen are coming PLUS THE BAND. So that’s my entertainment for the American friends.
It will kill me because I’ve had some wonderful letters from said Guardsmen who were with Andrew in Italy and one who was with Billy [4] when he was killed. ‘We were so angry we took no prisoners that day.’
OH DEAR what tragedies that war produced.
That’s the coming wk-end. Then London & the service in the Guards’ Chapel. Then home for the unveiling of Lucian’s amazing Skewbald Mare which our works of art fund has bought for this house. An astonishing picture, v moving. At the moment it is in my room but will have to move to the public route when it’s unveiled next week.
This feller Robert Hughes [5] is apparently famous (the one who is unveiling). Never heard of him.
Dr Oblivion may be nice but he’s a bit of a pest & has taken away Magouche’s address when I owe her a letter.
THANKS for v pleasing article. [6]
Much love
Debo
[1] Oscar de la Renta (1932–). Dominican Republic fashion designer and his wife, Annette.
[2] Federico Fourquet; Italian garden designer and interior decorator.
[3] Michael Rose (1940–). The highly decorated general was Commander of the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia 1994–5.
[4] Andrew Devonshire’s older brother, Billy, was killed by a sniper’s bullet while serving with the Coldstream Guards in Belgium in 1944.
[5] Robert Hughes (1938–). The art critic concluded his speech at the unveiling of Lucian Freud’s painting with, ‘I am filled with admiration for the man who did it and I must say I am filled with jealousy for those who possess it.’
[6] PLF wrote an account of Andrew Devonshire’s funeral for the Spectator, 12 June 2004.
23 July 2004
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I’ve never known such frenzied activity in this place as we’ve seen in the last month. Coldstream Day closely followed Heywood Hill’s Prize [1] & was soon overtaken by outdoor concerts on three successive nights with the singers Cliff Richard, Donny Osmond & Tom Jones. Ever heard of them? Well lots of people have. Fifteen thousand came for Cliff. Nine women to one man & for Donny nineteen women to one man. The stout Derbyshire behinds in the row in front of us swayed dangerously & totally happy.
One of the odd things was NO litter. Was it because they were old? Probably.
The Col of the Coldstream, General Sir Michael Rose, is a v impressive fellow. One or two ancients who served with Andrew in Italy came. I asked one what he was like: ‘Very good officer, very smart.’ Pause. ‘No, not very smart but a very good officer.’ Incredibly nice of course.
There’s a service for A at Lismore first, 4th Aug. The Mayor of Lismore will do a reading. He has the unexpected name of Khan.
Much love
Debo
[1] A literary prize instigated and funded by Andrew Devonshire, which was awarded yearly, 1995–2004, for ‘a lifetime’s contribution to the enjoyment of books’.
11 September 2004
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I’m sad you’ve GORN but glad for you now you can get back into the sea which must be a sort of heaven.
I thought the enclosed, [1] out of Charlotte’s amazing task of choosing letters from each to each of my sisters & me over 80 years, might amuse. No doubt you stayed in Harold’s dump, probably had that incredible bed/bath room? Throw.
I have been reading them, sort of proof-reading, looking for weeny mistakes & so on. They have taken me back to the olden days like nothing else could, laughing out loud & crying ditto.
Nancy’s four years of torture all came back with a bang. Dear me. Would it all have been better now, drs more merciful etc? She would have been told she’d got cancer, no more whispering in the passage with the drs, at least I do believe it’s better to know. That came from America like baring all re drink & drugs. Generally accepted now & easier for all.
Have you got Nancy/Heywood letters? [2] His are so good. I’ll send pronto if you haven’t. Send a P.C. to say Yes/No.
Much love
Debo
Just found, in a drawer from London, Andrew’s grandfather’s garter thing, been there ever since I suppose, & a tin box with my grandfather’s letter safely headed Windsor Castle to my father in the Boer War. Please picture. Will the lick on the envelope allow the DNA (or whatever it’s called) to answer the question once & for all if he was Clementine Churchill’s father? I can’t bear the idea of Bay Middleton claiming her (see Mary Soames’ book). [3]
[1] DD enclosed a copy of a letter she had written to her sister Diana in 1975 describing a visit to La Pietra, Harold Acton’s villa in Florence. She was reading the typescript of The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (2007).
[2] The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street, edited by John Saumarez Smith (2004). Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill, founder of the bookshop.
[3] DD’s grandfather, Algernon (Bertie) Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale (1837–1916), was long rumoured to have been the father of Winston Churchill’s wife, Clementine (1885–1977), the daughter of Redesdale’s wife’s sister, Lady Blanche Hozier. According to Mary Soames’s biography of her mother, another likely candidate was William (Bay) Middleton (1846–92), one of the best horsemen in Britain. Clementine Churchill: The Biography of a Marriage (2003), pp. 5–9.
17 September 2004
A.D. Mani
Darling Debo,
A propos of Dr Oblivion, did I ever send you my first hint of untimely forgetfulness? One is at sea, and at the same instant that one forgets something, a German submarine with a skull-and-crossbones flag surfaces, and fires a shot across one’s bows. Then the lid of the conning-tower opens and the top of an admiral, with monocle and fencing scars, sticks out smiling, salutes and says, ‘Gut morning! That is just a sighting shot. I am Admiral von Alzheimer. Ve vill meet again!’, salutes, and sinks . . .
Your letter was jam all through, and especially your 1975 one to Diana from La Pietra. It WAS a fascinating and eerie place. I remember his ancient parents – father in pince-nez and high stiff collar, bolt upright in their amazing furniture. Derek Hill [1] had been there the week before, and the gardeners had been raking up autumn leaves in a bonfire, next to that little circular fane beside the path. Two elderly English ladies were returning from a stroll, and one of them said: ‘What a lot of smoke!’, and Harold (imitated by Derek) said: ‘Ah! When beautiful ladies like you go by, even the Temple of LOVE send za foorth FIUUMES!’ Harold accompanied Joan and me on foot a little way down the road, and Joan said ‘What a business-like walking stick you’ve got!’ ‘It has to be,’ he said, ‘Florence is full of RRASKALLS!’
Yes, I did get Nancy and H Hill’s letters. I’m up to the neck in them now. He’s awfully funny too, and Nancy just as she talked. Joan and I went to lunch twice at the Rue d’Artois, both times with the Colonel, [2] and each time he sat down and picked up his knife and fork, he said ‘Aux armes!’, rather nice. I remembered it from his feasts in that lovely palace in Rome. The second lunch was the last time we saw her, and I can see her still, leaning with hands joined behind her on a sort of railing in the hall. I love the way she always sat up straight, hands joined in her lap, eyes sparkling.
There’s a marvellous slip of H.H.’s on p. 24, about Mrs Ham – ‘There seemed to be more and thicker black net than ever hangin’ all round. Why does she not carry a triton?’ (Note. Triton, a minor sea-god, son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, with a dolphin’s tail, sometimes a horse’s forelegs, and blowing a conch.) He obviously meant to write trident, with vague memories of the kind of gladiator called retiarius (‘netman’) who fought in the arena naked and only armed with net and trident (like Mrs H) against a fully armed and helmeted secutor (‘pursuer’). The netman often won.
Talking of Poseidon, I’m going to dash down those rough steps and dive in.
Tons of love,
Paddy
P.S. Now I come to think of it, I came to that lovely Chelsea-to-Richmond boating party, many summers ago, with a trident and intertwined net (an awful nuisance it was). It must have been the first (or second?) time we met, because I remember Andrew on the gangplank saying, ‘I know! You’re Xan Fielding’s Wife!’ But hadn’t we met at Royal Coll. of Arts with only heads disguised? Your head in a velvet hunting cap.
P.P.S. Old news of Bay Middleton in my next.
[1] Derek Hill (1916–2000). Landscape artist and portraitist to the Establishment.
[2] Gaston Palewski.
2 October 2004
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
There is such a lot going on here I don’t know which pile of paper to attack first. My fault, for starting things.
Dr Oblivion comes to see me a bit too often. I wish he would just pay attention to you, plenty on his plate I should have thought.
He plagues Robert [Kee], drives him mad.
A letter to me from Diana [Mosley] says about Robert doing Mitterrand, [1] what a good idea etc, & it’s dated 1996. So eight years have rolled & still he struggles.
I’ve been in the Highlands. Have you ever seen that country? It is too big & threatening for me & the endless evergreen trees are melancholy.
I stayed with the P of Wales in Cake’s old house, Birkhall. * That is truly fascinating, all passages lined with Spy cartoons stuck cheek by jowl, all my Granddad’s work – he started Vanity Fair & engaged Spy. [2] Curtains in tatters & the Prince won’t touch them. Cake’s hat & mac hanging in the hall. He reveres her & so won’t change anything, so right.
My bathroom was a punishment cell, freezing cold LINO ON FLOOR & I didn’t take bedroom slippers. Elec towel rail bust. Everything else supreme luxury & I loved the bathroom, back to childhood.
That will have to do for now, must get back to the piles of paper. Much love
Debo
[1] Robert Kee was researching a biography of the French President.
[2] Thomas Gibson Bowles (1841–1922). DD’s maternal grandfather, a politician and journalist, started the popular weekly satirical magazine Vanity Fair (un -related to its modern namesake) in 1868. In 1873 he recruited the artist Leslie Ward, ‘Spy’, who contributed to the magazine for over forty years. He also founded The Lady, still famous today for its classified columns advertising for domestic help.
* Called Birkhell by my old friend her chef.
3 October 2004
Mani
Darling Debo,
I long to hear more about Bay Middleton! I’ll tell you why. When I was trudging through Hungary, Transylvania and Rumania ages ago, I stayed ages with a charming Hungarian squire called Elemér von Klobusiçky, living in an old house above the River Maros. We became great pals. He was just old enough to have been a cornet in a hussar regiment in the Great War.
He asked me if I knew anything about Bay Middleton, viz. that he had been a great friend of the beautiful Empress Elizabeth, and always accompanied her out hunting, going over all the worst fences first etc. In fact, a cavaliere servente, as they say; but always with the rider ‘en tout bien et en tout honneur’ viz. nothing out of order.
Well, once he had been invited to stay at a royal hunting lodge called Gödölŏ, E of Budapest, where both the Emperor Franz Joseph and the Empss Elizabeth were staying too. He went off to a dinner party in Budapest, and after it, in the small hours, wandered about in his tails and picked up a v pretty but wicked tart, who was part of a gang of robbers. She took him, instead of to some snug alcove, to their den, where he was robbed of everything, every stitch of clothing I think down to his dancing pumps, and then left in the empty street, lost and, worse still, starkers, and was either arrested, or found a police station. Something in his extreme good looks, fine bearing and humour succeeded in impressing them. There was no common language, except his repeated murmur of ‘Gödölŏ’, so, puzzled, they wrapped him in a police overcoat and got in touch with a guard there; then, with some equerry taking care of him, they smuggled him back to the bachelors’ wing, and all was well, though the tale got about a bit, probably from his telling it. My pal had heard it from an old courtier who had been on duty there. Do admit that it’s a fascinating tale. Triumph in adversity with knobs on. He doesn’t sound too bad an ancestor to spring from. Do tell anything you know about him, I long to know.
I finished Nancy’s letters to H.H. Both of them are captivating. No more now. A dash to the post . . .
Fond love,
Paddy
20 October 2004
Mani
Darling Debo,
It’s very queer. I’d just finished re-reading your letter about the hotel where you and Sto & co stayed on the same corridor but completely out of touch because the distance was the same as from Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner – when a postcard of Hyde Park Corner, dating from c.1930, suddenly materialized. Do look at it carefully. The winged wreath-bearing lady in the chariot on top of the Wellington Arch was done from my old landlady in Shepherd Market, where I set off from on my travels, aged 18¾, a five-minute flight, or less. She was an ex-artist’s model called Beatrice Stewart, painted by Sargent, Sickert, Shannon, Stevens, Tonks and Augustus John. She was in her seventies, but walked with two sticks because of an accident, and metal leg. You could see she had been a great beauty. I loved her as she was always angelically kind to me, and forgave our noisy parties. In spite of the early date, I can spy only one horse and cart. The Artillery Monument in the foreground always makes me damp about the eyes, especially the recumbent gunner wrapped under his greatcoat and tin hat.
I keep on thinking of things I must remember to tell Joan at lunch, knowing they could make her laugh, rather like you with Diana. Letters addressed to her still arrive from distant parts, but they are dying out now, and it’s only subscriptions to be renewed or bright catalogues for pullovers and the like.
Tons of love to you, and to all at Dingley Dell,
Paddy
25 October 2004
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Lots of things. I’ve got ANOTHER book on the go, photos of buildings etc within two miles of this old dump. [1]
The inevitable introduction is necessary & one para has this line saying how The house is perfectly placed between the woods & the water (like Paddy Leigh Fermor’s book). Do you allow that? Sorry to be a bore, but it’s true, eh. RSVP one day.
And before Christmas, Amanda [Hartington] has got a carol service in Ripon Cathedral where various fatheads like myself read something from the pulpit all in aid of some Good Cause. She’s asked me to read a whack of A Time of Gifts. So I looked it up (being proud possessor of T of G). It’s called ‘Christmas 1933’, and I SHALL HAVE TO LEARN GERMAN to spit it out properly. HELP.
And how do you pronounce Bungen [2] whose inhabitants exchanged greetings? Bung em sounds a bit drear. Or it is BUngen like TUlip? The U I mean? Is the G soft or hard? Oh dear what prarblams.
And help, please, with the names of the carols? One looks like Nancy saying Eet eez too moch in her Czech-ish ladies accent of old. [3]
The last thing is the list of field names of a farm where there is a Stump Cross, a medieval object on a mound which turns out to be a Bronze-Age burial place. Having a good look at that I found the other field names & very nice they are – Dungworth Bank, Sitch, Patch, Interim Furlong, Purchased From Wheeldon, & the one you’ll like, Kine Furlong.
When did people stop calling cattle kine? Purchased From Wheeldon seems a long name for a field but that’s what it is.
V much love
Debo
[1] Round About Chatsworth (2005).
[2] DD misread ‘Bungen’ for the town of ‘Bingen’.
[3] As a child, Nancy invented a game in which she played a ‘Czechish lady doctor’ for which she adopted a thick foreign accent.
27 October 2004
Mani
Darling Debo,
I love the idea of Between the W and the W sneaking its way into the introduction. Better still, you sending a chunk of A.T. of G through triforium to clerestory in Ripon. ‘BINGEN’ is the word, and uttered just like the game, viz. BINGO, with EN instead of O. STEELER NACHT, with the CH = Ah!, sounding as a Moslem would pronounce Aly Khan’s surname.
(1) ES (2) IST (3) EIN ROS’ ENTSPRUNGEN is uttered (1) like an American Ezra Pound fan familiarly dropping his hero’s name with the second syllable docked; (2) IST like Hûst!, said by one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan, dropping his H at the sight of a Red Indian; (3) EIN is like the last three letters of the song, Clementine; ROS’ like rows and ROWS of spectators;
ENTSPRUNGEN is the county of Kent minus its K; SPRUNG is pronounced as it would be in the heart of Ilkley Moor, followed by the tail end of a chicken.
I had a sad loss last week. When bathing I use an old stick to go out to the rock I take off from, and leave it on a ledge. This time a squall blew up, and when I got back, the stick had been whirled away. In the hurry to get down the steps, I had picked up the one Andrew gave me a few years ago, the apple of my eye, black with a silver band – ‘PADDY from Andrew, Christmas . . . ?’ and the date, back in the nineties. It had become a sort of talisman. Magouche was staying and we hunted up and down the neighbouring beaches for days. It was rather like Excalibur, thrown over the mere by Sir Bedivere and caught by a mysterious shrouded arm, as in the Henry Ford illustration in The Book of Romance, one of the Andrew Lang Fairy Tale books, worshipped by me when young.
I slog along steadily here till just before Yule chez Janetta and Jaime in Andalusia and then Morocco, and will think wistfully of you all listening to ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ on those steps.
Off to the post.
Tons of love,
Paddy
Today is OHI (‘NO!’) Day, when the Greeks refused the ultimatum of Mussolini’s army in 1940, and then drove them all back almost into the Adriatic until Hitler came to their rescue.
Lots of flags, swigging, dancing in a ring and singing. Fun but exhausting.
17 November 2004
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Your German lesson is wonderful. If I get up in the pulpit in Ripon Cathedral (which is what I’ve got to do) & spout out all that, the audience, sorry congregation, will be all of a dither wondering what’s coming next.
And will have to re-study. It’s like a difficult drawing-room game but I’ll battle it out somehow. THANKS.
Now for a suggestion. Please buy more paper, use two sheets instead of one and LEAVE MORE SPACE
BETWEEN THE LINES to put your corrections etc. Good idea?
More soon.
Much love
Debo
Do you realise you’re nearly 90? ODD.
23 November 2004
Mani
Darling Debo,
I’ve just been reading an excellent book by Harold Nicolson called Good Behaviour; then wondered why I had bought it, so turned back to the fly-leaf and read: September 1975 ‘Paddy much love from Debo. So very good to get rid of a book. I loathe the things.’ I’d obviously asked if I could borrow it from your bedside . . .
Lovely talking to you last night. Lots of bustle here, as the olive harvest is on, acres of spread tarpaulin, the whizz of pruning saws and the pitter-pat of tumbling olives, and, indoors, the shifting round of furniture, everything based on the fireplace, huge baskets of logs and laying of mats and carpets. Ready for anything.
Tons of love,
Paddy
16 January 2005
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Your instructions for pronouncing the German words went down a treat. I started by saying what you told me to do & after Entsprungen I gave it up & craved their indulgence of my ignorance.
The Prince of Wales came with us & he knew just how to say those words (to the manor born as it were) & he laughed so much & then enjoyed the performance from the pulpit.
It was a very jolly evening made of course by you. Much love
Debo
14 April 2005
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
So glad I sent you that book with a sensible note in it.
I’ve had such a rackety time. I ended up in hosp with ‘a turn’, viz. not quite a stroke.
We did overdo things a bit, a long promised trip with Emma. First night at Bowood, incredibly beautiful in all ways, bluebells growing like a crop, dead level & no earth or anything untoward between them, not out yet but all promise. Breakfast in bed at 7.30 unheard of luxury in any stately. Ld & Ly Lansdowne [1] both v nice indeed but it is haunted for me by my Wife & her two bros, killed within 10 days of each other in Aug 1944, my two best friends. I didn’t know the Wife then.
Next night Wilbury. A bit of Wiltshire perfection apparently in a poor way till bought by Lady Iveagh [2] eight years ago. She has lavished all on it, so super-luxurious, four different smelling things in every drawer in my room so it’s difficult to know what’s yours and what belongs to the house when packing.
Ld Londonderry [3] came to dinner. I hadn’t seen him for years, so funny, good looking and charming. ‘I’m a gregarious recluse,’ he said.
Amazingly my sister Woman was born there nearly 100 years ago. My grandfather Bowles took the house off & on for 20 years & I suppose my mother wanted to be out of their weeny Pimlico semi-slum. She told me she & her Dad used to ride to Stonehenge, 10 miles, without a fence or obstacle of any kind.
So it had a history for me as well as its beauty. But the trouble with newly acquired houses is the electrically locked gates and all of that which take away some of the magic.
Kindness itself from Ly Iveagh. She has got a Guinness bar in the basement and a cinema. I wonder if she could get the Lives of the Bengal Lancers, my favourite film.
Then to lunch with Edward Adeane [4] in his mill built over the Avon. The sun came out & it was like England is supposed to be, daffs & willows & rushing water.
Lord Pembroke [5] was there. About twenty-five, bachelor, handsome & charming, he got a FIRST in Industrial Design at Sheffield University, do admit how original. I wish he would invent a tap which doesn’t direct water straight on to the plug so it jumps out before you’ve got enough water to wash in.
So then the wedding, [6] a total ripping success. I sat next to Brig Andrew Parker Bowles [7] one side and a sort of Elvis choir man the other.
It must have been so odd for Andrew seeing his old wife go up the aisle like that. I can’t quite imagine it, can you? I know they’re all very friendly but even so . . .
The Prince invited Henry & Joan [Coleman] & Stella (housemaid) & Keith her hubby. [8] That’s what I love about him. Henry shook hands with Mr Blair & said good luck (‘but I didn’t mean it’), Mr Howard, [9] & of course found heaps of friends.
Then home.
Got up Sun a.m. perfectly OK & slap bang went wobbly & talked like a drunk person (I’m told, can’t remember). Next thing the dr, stretcher, ambulance, hospital. Can’t remember much about that either. Room to myself, seventh floor, fantastic view of the hideosities of Sheffield out of vast hermetically sealed window.
Five doctors (or learners, some of them I suppose) at bottom of bed. The chief one was Dr Khan, not exactly Aly but sweet. Eddie Tennant, a saint, stayed with me & ruined his Sunday.
Brain scan ordered the next day. People hate them, Andrew specially loathed it. All I can say is never fear if you have to have one. They put you in a long coffin & shove it up under a cover & bang bang wallop wallop it goes, just about like the train to Eastbourne, no worse. Twenty minutes then they show you the snaps of said brain.
One looked like a dog with a big black nose, one could have been a Picasso drawing of me, a bit frightening, & the rest looked like patterns on hotel carpets, some Gothic, some flowers, quite nice.
Anyway, 0 untoward was discovered so here I am home again & quite alright except the Dr says I’m to stay on this floor [10] for two WEEKS.
But I’m thankful for mercies, like it not being a real stroke, just a warning.
So there we are. The everyday story of country folk.
The kindness in the hosp. was beyond. NHS. But the lunch was yak, I think, certainly no known meat. Perhaps the patients are all from Nepal.
Much love
Debo
[1] Charles Petty-Fitzmaurice, 9th Marquess of Lansdowne (1941–). Married Fiona Merritt, as his second wife, in 1987. His two cousins, sons of the 6th Marquess, were both killed in action in 1944 within a few days of each other.
[2] Miranda Smiley (1940–). Married to Benjamin Guinness, 3rd Earl of Iveagh, 1963–84.
[3] Alexander Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 9th Marquess of Londonderry (1937–). The unconventional peer was married to Nicolette Harrison in 1968 and to the baller -ina Doreen Wells 1972–89.
[4] Edward Adeane (1939–). Private Secretary and Treasurer to the Prince of Wales 1979–85.
[5] William Herbert, 18th Earl of Pembroke (1978–). After his father’s death in 2003, he left his job as a designer to run his family estate at Wilton in Wiltshire.
[6] The Prince of Wales’s wedding to Camilla Parker-Bowles, Duchess of Cornwall, on 8 April.
[7] Andrew Parker-Bowles (1939–). The former husband of the Duchess of Cornwall had known DD since he was a boy.
[8] Keith Mellors was houseman at Chatsworth; his wife, Stella, was housekeeper of the private side of the house.
[9] Michael Howard (1941–). Conservative MP and Leader of the Opposition 2003–5.
[10] DD’s bedroom and sitting room were on the first floor at Chatsworth.
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I rattle on here while the Old Vic is being got ready. [1] A huge job as roof & floors were all wonky. That saint David Mlinaric is giving me a hand with things like where to put baths & electric points – all the things you take for granted but must be done. He is so extraordinary, eye on ball all day, explaining to electricians, plumbers etc in their own lingo. When I think of the places he’s done – Covent Garden, National Gallery, V&A, Spencer House, ETC ETC – you can imagine the Old Vic is the smallest fry & just done out of kindness. Amazing.
Nicko Henderson has been here & Robert. It was the weekend of the concert in the park & the one & only remaining Lancaster bomber, accompanied by a Spitfire, flew down the river & lumbered along very low, making a terrific racket. There was Robert, stick in hand, looking & listening to this elephant slowly turning & offering to hit the roof of this old dump. It was v moving, all in floods of course. We asked Robert what it was like [2] & he was pre-Lancaster, flew in a Handley Something, was navigator and let the bombs go when lying more or less on his stomach in the nose of the thing. Navigation hopeless he told us. Sometimes just on ETA, often when they met ack-ack fire, they just decided to let the bombs go. ‘Perhaps we’re over Hamburg.’ ‘Oh yes I expect so.’ ‘Let ’em go.’ That sort of thing.
Jon Snow’s [3] telephone went in the middle of dinner. Of course, we all thought Blair had started another war, but no. It was his daughter saying Dad, any chance of some tickets for Glastonbury?
Now then. Robert Byron. [4] Alas I never knew him but I bet you did? Such a fascinating thing, letters galore from Nancy, Tom & Diana AND MY PARENTS to him have sprung out of the packing cases the niece is bravely sorting through. I hope to buy them, can’t wait to see. I’ll tell you the sort of stuff when (if ) they land here. [5]
There is much going on here but that’s nothing new.
Much love. Keep on keeping on
Debo
[1] Following her husband’s death, DD was moving from Chatsworth to the neigh-bouring village of Edensor.
[2] Robert Kee served in the RAF in Bomber Command. His plane was shot down over occupied Holland and he spent three years in a German prisonerof-war camp, an experience he described in A Crowd Is Not Company (1947).
[3] Jon Snow (1947–). DD met the Channel 4 News broadcaster through her sister Jessica.
[4] Robert Byron (1905–41). Writer whose best-known book, The Road to Oxiana (1937), was a record of his journeys through Iran and Afghanistan. He was a friend of the Mitford family and of Nancy in particular.
[5] DD was successful in buying the Robert Byron letters.
[August 2005]
Dumbleton
Darling Debo,
It’s too queer, when I got here 3 or 4 days ago, bang on top of a pile of letters was a card from you, that managed not to get forwarded, though long out of date.
‘Did you know’, the text of the P.C. runs, ‘that the Vikings called Constantinople Micklegarth? Well, they did. Much love, Debo’
I did know it, and have written fruity paragraphs about it in that book called Mani. It’s really Micklegard, but only a near miss. ‘Gard ’ and ‘garth’ are pretty well interchangeable, and akin to ‘grad’ as at the end of Petro- and Stalin-, meaning a ‘place’ or ‘town’ – the ‘big one’ here. Micklegarth was regularly visited by Harold Haardraada – his steeds were always in a muck-sweat – as well as Jerusalem, which he called Mittelgard, because he thought it was in the middle of the world. H.H. was later King of Norway, and landed at Stamford Bridge, hoping to capture England before William the Conqueror did; he was helped by a horrible man called Tostig, but got killed by our King Harold, who rushed north just in time, and then marched south again at high speed, just in time for William’s landing. A crowded week, ending in the Hastings arrow in the eye.
25 August 2005.
Debo, I must have written the above illegible stuff three weeks ago, in a maelstrom of old envelopes and bills and I’ve only just discovered it, and, at the same time, that unless I take care, my writing becomes totally illegible.
I go to London from time to time because of seeing specialists, who are intervening in a few of the minor things that infest the aged and turn the first quarter of an hour at any meeting of those over ninety into an Organ Recital. I ought to be getting back to Greece, so it looks as if meetings will be off till later in the year.
I’m off to spend the Bank Holiday Hol at Antony & Artemis Beevor’s house in Kent, which I look forward to. He’s a great Cretan War expert and she is my literary executor. Do send news here, when I briefly return, or, if much later, to Greece.
What news of your new quarters?
Tons of love,
Paddy
30 August 2005
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Micklegarth. I’m still surprised. I can see you aren’t. I love them all being in such a hurry, up & down England. Tostig is just the name for a horrid person.
New quarters coming along in the slow way they do. Won’t it be odd, moving.
Do you remember when Somerville & Ross had to move to a smaller house, in despair at the fact that ‘under everything there is something’.
All love
Debo
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Here is chaos. I’m on the brink of moving, trying to undo 46 years-worth of GLUT. My rooms have got cardboard boxes, one for THROW, one for KEEP, & now I see a third is needed for UNDECIDED.
Although the Old Vic is huge, it is vaguely smaller than here & there’s no hope of getting even KEEP in.
There are marvellous entertainments called car-boot sales & that’s what I need. You can buy a Rembrandt for a few quid in any old field. So why not sell a few?
The awful thing about it all is that only I can do it. I MUST go & fill a cardboard box.
Much love
Debo
Mid-November [2005]
Mani
Darling Debo,
You’ll never guess why I’m writing on this kind of paper. [1] The reason is that my alignment always seems to get tangled, like the barbed wire on the Western Front in early films. This makes a move in the direction of legibility.
I had a shock two days ago. Woke up, opened a book to read, found the print v smudged on the right-hand page, and nothing on the left hand, so got driven in haste to Kalamata. When I got there, I found I could read all these rows of diminishing capital letters with utmost ease. It had all come right, in a mysterious way, caused by something called a ‘blood-spasm’ in Greek, so all is well. I long to see Mr ffytche this time next month.
The book I was reading was Duff ’s diary edited by J Julius. [2] I thought it a bit indiscreet at first – then changed my mind, and enjoyed it a lot. I always liked Duff (I know you didn’t) and loved Diana. I wonder what you would make of it. Antony Head [3] has one entry in the index, but no mention of the funniest thing about him that Diana used to tell. When he came to stay at Chantilly, Diana showed him his quarters, and said, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to share a bath with Duff ’, to which he immediately answered, ‘All right, but bags I the non-tap end.’
Tons of love, darling Debo,
Paddy
[1] Heavily ruled writing paper.
[2] John Julius Norwich had edited a volume of his father’s diaries, The Duff Cooper Diaries, 1915–1951 (2005).
[3] Antony, 1st Viscount Head (1906–83). Minister of Defence 1955–7, High Commissioner in Malaysia 1963–6.
14 March 2006
Edensor
Bakewell
Derbyshire
Darling Paddy,
Eyes. A terrific nuisance. Have yours made reading difficult with their tunnel? [1] Or isn’t it like that? RSVP.
Mine are getting worse, inevitable I suppose, & people’s faces are dirty sponges & anyone with their back to the light is a dead loss. Colours have rather gone west, blue & green pretty well indistinguishable, never mind.
Helen [2] & I have been desperately busy putting together an exhib of Andrew’s life in SEVEN rooms at Chatsworth. Your Three Letters from the Andes is bunged between his boots & socks & filthy old coat & looks fine.
Last night was the press evening. It was JUST ready in time. They seemed to like it. Good. One room has fourteen works by Lu Freud, nine oil paintings & some drawings, a bit of a showstopper, & at the end a whole long wall of photos of the funeral procession – amazing. It will all remain for two years.
I’m having three days hard labour with a French telly crew. Because my daft book has sort of taken off in France [3] so the telly are following up the incredibly & totally unexpected things the journalists wrote after lots of interviews. What a big surprise.
The telly woman is hard work, never a smile & doesn’t seem to see the point of anything. I forced them to go to the Farmyard in the snow this a.m. & two schools’ worth of five year olds were riveted by watching a cow make a mess. Don’t think the cameraman got it but that’s typical if you see what I mean, missing the point.
Tomorrow we’ll ‘do’ Alan [Shimwell] & my hens, that’ll learn them & I showed them Madame Mère & Pauline B & Napoleon in the Sculpture Gallery [4] which vaguely cheered them. They said ‘Do you think it is time to get rid of your royal family?’ ‘Certainly not’ I said ‘we’d have a dreary old president.’ ‘That’s what we’ve got.’ ‘Yes, so you know?’ Heaven knows what the prog will turn out like.
Much love from
Debo
[1] PLF was suffering from tunnel vision. ‘It’s called Simplonitis.’ (PLF)
[2] Helen Marchant (1961–). Secretary to the Devonshires since 1987.
[3] Counting My Chickens had been published in France as Les Humeurs d’une châtelaine anglaise, translated by Jean-Noël Liaut.
[4] Marble portrait busts of the Emperor and his mother by Antonio Canova, and of his sister by Thomas Campbell.
[April 2006]
Mani
Darling Debo,
Many apologies if I’ve sent you the enclosed during the last century, but I’ve just come across it and send it in hopes of a smile. It’s a rather dated ‘Meow – meow’ campaign ‘abolishing the cat’ etc. I’m busy wading through old letters, papers etc. Writing is still rather disorderly, but I plan to improve.
Lots of love,
Paddy
AFTER LUNCHEON THOUGHTS
For an advertising campaign for KIT-E-KAT
KIT-E-KAT for Felines of Distinction . . .
(Is your cat a KIT-E-KAT? You can tell by its whiskers . . .)
Top cats eat KIT-E-KAT
‘What are the top cats saying?’
‘What’s in the MEWS?’
‘No mews is good mews, as purr usual.’
‘Purr ad ventura . . .’
‘Wise witches choose KIT-E-KAT (Quickens acceleration, more climbing power)
Cats have nine lives, but only one KIT-E-KAT!
Why abolish the cat? Give him K-E-K and watch out for the sleekness . . .
K-E-K for dreamless and refreshing catnaps . . .
Lots of love
Paddy
12 May 2006
Edensor
Darling Paddy,
Thanks so much for Kit E Cat. It is perfect. Best. V v clever and makes me rush out to buy it in spite of being cat-less (and dog-less too, odd).
Are you in touch with one Dr Mitchell, [1] chosen by his peers to write the life of M Bowra? University Coll Oxford is his grand address.
He wrote to ‘The Keeper’ Chatsworth asking to see MB’s letters to Nancy. So me being her keeper I answered & sent them, only three but never mind.
I told him that Emma’s generation when at Oxford called him Old Tragic, an interesting fact which he didn’t know but on the strength of it he’s asked me to lunch in his glamorous diner. Shall I go? I rather long to.
When people talk like that, refer to Librarians & co as keepers, I naturally think of them as gamekeepers. Oh never mind.
This house is becoming alright, better than it was when we had the Old People’s New Year. [2] I really love it. Can’t explain why but perhaps it is the atmosphere.
Much love
Debo
[1] Dr Leslie Mitchell; historian and Emeritus Fellow of University College, Oxford.
[2] ‘Paddy and Nicko Henderson had spent New Year 2006 at Edensor – the first non-family guests as I had only moved in on 14 December 2005.’ (DD)
9 July 2006
(The Usual)
Darling Debo,
How I hate using this beastly paper, but it’s the only way to remain on the rails, I’m afraid. (I must have a serious talk with Mr ffytche.) The only alternative is to use v thin paper, and have a sort of grid underneath. Anyway, to hell with it!
I’m so sorry being such a sluggard in writing. I think, subconsciously, it’s probably shrinking from this stationery. You note how upright my writing has suddenly become? It’s part of my plan to become steadily more legible. Also, note the presence and clarity of the date. In the past, one was lucky if letters had the day of the month. One didn’t seem to worry about years.
It’s been very queer here recently, but a bit better now. Tremendous heat, for which the local remedy is to keep the windows and the shutters firmly shut from the moment it gets at all light at dawn, until after sunset, when one flings them all wide so that cool air can waft about the house all through the hours of darkness. The daylight darkness is a bit eerie. I toil away rather slowly at Vol III of my stop-press youthful travel book. A French critic refers to me as l’escargot des Carpathes.
Fond love,
Paddy
(envelope torn asunder)
Real stop-press!
P.S. I had just sealed the envelope with a letter to you in it, when your last letter suddenly turned up under a pile of books, so I rent it open, and I was so amused by the contents that I couldn’t do otherwise. I’ve even been driven back on to unruled paper, so must take care.
First. How did your feast with M Bowra go? There’s lots to be said about him, most of it v good but spoilt by a streak of v bad. Anyway, a fascinating theme. Lots to be said when we meet. Maurice adored Joan and gave her all his poems, many extremely funny, some appalling – not in prosody but in content, some not to be read out loud. Joan went through them a year before she died and told me that as she knew he had given similar bundles to Pam Berry [1] and a few others, she would burn her set, which she did next day. The reason being, she said, that they could make many people utterly miserable. All v complex and best explained unwritten. But he did far more good than harm, in the sense of being a liberator from inhibitions, family gloom etc. A v. complex case. The editor of his poems behaved extremely nicely to me, wrote and said ‘would I mind if the two poems that deal with me were published’. One was harmless, the other not, so he cut them both out of the published vol. [2] Another such brand from the burning was Billa [Harrod]. So he’s a good egg. John Betj gets it in the neck, although a great friend. My own private conclusion is that Maurice could become v faintly cracked for as long as it took to write a poem, then stepped back into being a marvellously funny, cheerful fellow.
Please send news and gossip, P
[1] Lady Pamela Smith (1914–82). Political hostess. Married, in 1936, Michael Berry (created Baron Hartwell 1968), proprietor of the Daily Telegraph.
[2] New Bats in Old Belfries, a collection of Maurice Bowra’s scabrous satires, published in 2005, edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes.
29 July 2006
Dumbleton
Darling Debo,
What is very queer about tunnel vision is that one suddenly notices that one’s interlocutor (or interlocutrix) at dinner has two mouths, four eyes, and four nostrils but by a twist of one’s face, I can reduce the features to the normal quota. Sometimes I can manage more or less respectably with no ruled lines at all. It’s very wayward, and rather maddening. I think I will try and write in a very clear script, as I’m doing at the moment, as one did when very young. Thank God, I can still (touch wood) read all right, and I’m deep into the umpteenth re-reading of The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron. It’s wonderfully funny and clever. I wish I’d known him better. I met him about three times in 1938, once with Sachie Sitwell, [1] once with Bridget Parsons, and once with Mark Grant, but never well. I bet you did, unless you were still too young. Yes I did see him once more, at an exhibition of Willy Acton’s [2] paintings. He and everyone was tremendously tight.
I so hope this is more or less legible. One way of dealing with seeing double (turning Salisbury Cathedral into Cologne or rather vice versa) is to wear a patch, but I always forget.
With tons of love,
Paddy
[1] Sir Sacheverell Sitwell (1897–1988). PLF had been a friend of the writer, youngest of the famous literary trio, and his wife Georgia, since 1937. ‘When war broke out, I enlisted in the Irish Guards but they couldn’t take me for a month or so and I lived on tick at the Cavendish Hotel. Sachie and Georgia heard of this, and I was asked to stay with them at Weston, Northamptonshire, until the Guards depot had room for me. I spent Christmas there on leave: total bliss. Talk, music, fun, paper games, fascinating neighbours. It was a wonderful retreat.’ (PLF)
[2] William Acton (1906–45). Painter and younger brother of Harold Acton.
23 September 2006
Edensor
Darling Paddy,
Harvest Festival here. Alan [Shimwell] has made some little wire baskets lined with hay filled with dark brown eggs, wonderful.
Stella came. We had to be together in a photo for Vogue’s 90th birthday come Christmas. So one Mario Testino, [1] famous photographer, came in a helicopter with a crew of makeup, hairdresser, ‘fashion editor’ etc from London.
I’ve got a really beautiful dress, grand evening, given me by Oscar de la Renta, so that was my kit. They bound Stella’s legs, up to where they join her body, in tartan. A Union Jack flag hung from her waist & her top was what my father would have called meaningless.
Hair skewbald/piebald, all colours & stuck up in bits. THEN they produced ‘shoes’ with 6 inch heels. More stilts – she could hardly put one foot in front of the other, wobbling & toppling, and being 6′-tall she turned into 6′6˝.
We looked just like that Grandville drawing of a giraffe dancing with a little monkey. I was the monkey.
Fashion is as queer as folks. So that was the excitement, now down to earth with the Harvest Festival.
Much love
Debo
[1] Mario Testino (1954–). The Peruvian photographer took some of the first fashion shots of DD’s supermodel granddaughter, Stella Tennant, who married his assistant, David Lasnet, in 1999.
Mani
Darling Debo,
Is there a copy of Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, anywhere about – viz. the library over at Dingley Dell? I expect it’s not quite old or important enough, but if there IS, and a copy illustrated by his father ( John Lockwood Kipling) could you possibly get your new librarian to get a certain picture in it called The Russeldar, [1] or something similar, Hindustani for a retired cavalry soldier, I think, to take a photograph of it, and send it to me, & note the number of the page it is opposite, on the back?
This is very complicated. To bore you further, I was going through old papers yesterday, and came on a colour photograph of a pretty skewbald cat of Joan’s, fast asleep with its head on an open copy of Kim, exactly on this page, with the Russeldar plain as a pikestaff and Joan’s specs across it too; all this is on a square of sofa, with lovely details of pattern and colour, the cat flat out. It’s marvellously composed, an ideal vision of an afternoon nap, with the heroine of the scene, viz. Joan, momentarily off stage. I want to get the text opposite the pussycat correct and turn the picture into hundreds of P.C.s, which I will use for the rest of my life. I can get the cards made in Athens or Rome. It will be entitled ‘Egyptian P.T.’, which was the soldiers’ name for forty winks after lunch, when serving east of Suez. It would be wonderful if you could help with the context – nothing more, and many many thanks in advance if it can be done. The illustration’s modelled in relief clay – about 1900, perhaps a bit earlier, by Mr J L K, then photographed.
I’m going to Athens tomorrow for four days, for the memorial service of a chap called David Sutherland, who was one of the great stars of the SBS – Special Boat Service – like Geo Jellicoe, and David Stirling (with SAS), and the Embassy are most kindly sending a car and putting me up, and I’m looking forward to the outing. I wish it were only 20 minutes’ drive here from the Rectory, instead of three days. Hamish Robinson was staying here when I came, but has had to return. I’ve just been talking to Rita, who looks after everything, asking her to send me some Marmite and forgotten clothes. She’s the champion of Dumbleton skittles team, and has been covering herself and her side with glory. She’s an angel and Jeff our gardener is tip-top, so we’re in luck.
The olive harvest has begun. Ladders are propped among the branches of each tree and olives come pattering down on to coloured rugs and tarpaulin, with lots of children and dogs skipping about, and pillars of pale blue smoke from the sawn-off branches floating up into the autumn sky.
Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] ‘The Ressalder’, a native cavalry captain in the Anglo-Indian army.
[May 2007]
Edensor
Darling Paddy
Nature notes. A daft mallard made her nest in a patch of irises in this garden. I wondered how on earth she would get to the river when the eggs hatched. I thought of penning her in with food and drink so I could catch the lot and take them in the car . . . (but didn’t). Yesterday there she was on the lawn with 11 ducklings. Please picture the hazards ahead – the huge & deep ha-ha into the park, a hundred yards or more to the main road, the traffic rushing, then more hundreds of yards to the river. Crows, jackdaws, hawks and now ravens all spotting them on the open ground.
As though ordered or instructed from on high, the duck jumped down into the weedy ha-ha & all 11 jumped with her, climbed up the bank & set off for the road. My excellent neighbour Bridget [1] followed them & ran past to get to the road before they did, succeeded & stood there with her hand up stopping the traffic till all reached the other side. They hurried on such a long trek to the water, straight as 12 dies.
I know it happens every year, but do admit the power of instinct. How did she know the way? So extraordinary.
Much love
Debo
[1] Bridget Flemming (1945–). Photographer born on the Chatsworth estate; semi-detached neighbour, with her husband, Andrew, of DD in Edensor.
When this volume went to press, the two correspondents, aged eighty-eight and ninety-three, were still keeping up a lively exchange of letters.
