Patrick Leigh Fermor’s first sight of Deborah Mitford left a lasting impression. She did not even notice him. It was at a regimental ball in 1940 when he was a twenty-five-year-old officer in the Intelligence Corps and she the twenty-year-old fiancée of Andrew Cavendish, recently commissioned into the Coldstream Guards. She had eyes only for her husband-to-be.
They met again as acquaintances at parties in London in the early 1950s, but their friendship truly blossomed in 1956 when Paddy took up a long-standing invitation to stay with Andrew and Debo – by now the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire – at Lismore, their magnificent neo-Gothic castle overlooking the Blackwater Valley in County Water-ford, Ireland. This fairy-tale setting with its rich historical associations cast a spell over Paddy’s romantic spirit, stirring his love of pageantry and heraldry, of wild open country and odd encounters, of archaic language and local lore. He also fell for Debo. It was not an exclusive love – he was devoted to Joan Eyres Monsell, the woman who was to become his wife – but a deep, platonic attraction between two people who shared youthful high spirits, warmth, generosity and an unstinting enjoyment of life.
Debo was the youngest of the six beautiful Mitford sisters, whose exploits and extreme political opinions made them household names; she was also the most well-adjusted. The family’s rather isolated upbringing in the Oxfordshire countryside, immortalised in Nancy Mitford’s novels, suited Debo and she considered her childhood to have been happy. Unlike her sisters, she never resented not being sent to school – dreaded the idea in fact – and followed them into the schoolroom where they were taught by a succession of governesses. From her mother, Lady Redesdale, who after her own mother’s death had taken over the running of her father’s household at the age of fourteen, Debo inherited an excellent head for business and a natural talent for organising, qualities that proved useful when, in 1950, Andrew inherited the dukedom and the vast Devonshire estates. In 1959, he and Debo decided to move back into Chatsworth, the family’s magnificent house in the Peak District of Derbyshire, which had not been redecorated since the First World War and had been occupied by a girls’ school during the Second. Andrew devised a way of paying off the death duties that were owing after his father’s death, amounting to some eighty per cent of the estate, and Debo threw herself with gusto into restoring the house and reopening it fully to the public. She started shops and a restaurant, a children’s playground and a farmyard, helping to transform a debt-ridden inheritance into a thriving enterprise. In the early 1980s, she embarked – rather unexpectedly given her claim never to have read a book – on a writing career. The House, an account of the restoration work, was the first of ten highly individual books she has produced about Chatsworth and the estate.
When Debo and Paddy began to write to each other, in 1954, Paddy’s reputation rested on an impressive war record and two books: The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands and The Violins of Saint-Jacques, his only novel. He had spent most of the war in Crete where, after the Allied retreat from the island in 1941, he was among a small number of British agents who stayed to help organise resistance to the Nazi occupation. In 1944 he led the successful abduction of Major-General Heinrich Kreipe, the German commander in Crete, a daring operation that won him the DSO. The exploit became famous, not because Paddy himself has ever written or even talked much about it, but because in 1950 his second-in-command, William Stanley Moss, published a best-selling book, Ill Met by Moonlight, which was later made into a film.
After the war, wanderlust took Paddy to the Caribbean, Central America, France, Spain, Italy and, most often, to Greece where he and Joan decided to settle in 1964. They built a house in the Peloponnese, in an olive grove overlooking the sea, camping for two years on a plot of land while the house, which they designed themselves, rose up around them. With its classical and oriental features, and a cloistered gallery that leads into a huge, light-filled drawing room opening on to a terrace, the building fits so well into its surroundings that when a white goat wandered in one day, followed by six more in single file, they looked quite at home as they trooped across the floor, into the gallery, down twenty steps and into the landscape again, neither the goats nor the house seeming in any way out of countenance. *
Mani and Roumeli, published in 1958 and 1966, revealed Paddy’s deep regard for his adopted country and were well received, but A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, the first two volumes of a projected trilogy published in 1977 and 1986, made him known to a far wider reading public. His extraordinary account of an eighteen-month journey on foot across Europe, from Holland to Constantinople, which he embarked on in 1933 at the age of eighteen, is the stuff of a Bildungsroman; but whereas in coming-of-age novels the youthful protagonist emerges wiser but often disenchanted by the tough process of maturity, Paddy’s real-life journey did nothing to dent his infectious enthusiasm and capacity for wonder.
Paddy, like Debo, is apolitical by nature. Hitler’s Brownshirts remained on the periphery of his awareness as he walked across Germany in 1934, the year after the Nazis came to power. And there is barely a mention in his letters of the coup d’état in Greece in 1967, when a military junta seized power and suspended civil rights until parliamentary democracy was restored seven years later. Debo’s lack of interest in politics is partly due to temperament and partly to choice. After witnessing how radical politics tore her family apart, separating her parents and dividing her sisters, she decided that they were not for her.
Paddy and Debo began to correspond in 1954, not very regularly at first – there would be a volley of exchanges then silence for several months – but when something caught their interest and they knew the other would be amused, they sent off a letter in the hopes of a reply. Both were natural writers and storytellers, and kept up with a number of other correspondents: Debo mainly with her four sisters, Nancy, Pamela, Diana and Jessica, and with her two closest friends, Daphne Bath, who married Paddy’s comrade-in-arms Xan Fielding, and Kitty Mersey, affectionately nicknamed ‘the Wife’. Paddy wrote chiefly to Joan (whenever he was away from home), to his friends Ann Fleming and Diana Cooper, and to Balasha Cantacuzène, a Romanian painter with whom he had fallen in love when he was twenty. Gradually, as their circle of family and friends grew smaller, their letters to each other grew more frequent. Diana Cooper and Ann Fleming died in the 1980s; Kitty Mersey and Daphne Fielding in the 1990s; in 2003, Paddy lost Joan, and Debo lost her last surviving sister, Diana.
As writers, they were perfect foils for each other. Unless Paddy was making a plan or asking a quick question – in which case he would scribble a few lines headed ‘In unbelievable haste’ or ‘With one foot in the stirrup’ – his letters are sustained pieces of writing, as detailed and beautifully wrought as his books. With the eye of a painter, the pen of a poet and a composer’s ear for language and dialogue, in his letters he often sounds like a musician practising scales before launching into a full-blown symphony, and indeed two of his books, A Time to Keep Silence and Three Letters from the Andes, were based on letters to Joan. In complete contrast, Debo’s letters are breezy and spontaneous. Dashed off almost in telegraphese at times, they are sharp, idiosyncratic and funny. Where Paddy is dazzlingly erudite, widely read and a polyglot, Debo is defiantly (at times disingenuously) a non-reader, puncturing any intellectualising or use of a foreign word with, ‘Ah oui’, or ‘quelle horrible surprise’. Paddy has an omnivorous interest in culture, while Debo is interested in the country side, preferring country fairs to literary salons. Agricultural and horticultural jargon is the one linguistic area where she can outshine Paddy.
Much of the charm of the letters lies in their authors’ particular outlook on life. Both are acutely observant and clear-sighted about human failings, but their lack of cynicism and gift for looking on the bright side bear out the maxim that the world tends to treat you as you find it. On the whole, the people they meet are good to them, the places they visit enchant them and they succeed splendidly in all they set out to do. This light-heartedness – a trait that attracted many, often less sunny, people towards them – gives their letters an irresistible fizz and sparkle.
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Some six hundred letters between the two correspondents have survived, and many more must have been written, particularly by Debo during the first decade of their friendship. Paddy’s peripatetic life before 1964,when he settled in the Mani, meant that letters occasionally went astray. Even after making Greece his home, he was often travelling and not always able to keep track of papers. There is a gap of four years at the end of the 1990s where no letters at all from Debo have been found.
Each correspondent reacted very much in character to the editing of their letters. Debo, unconcerned about perfect style or syntax, let hers stand as she wrote them, while Paddy’s exacting standards made it impossible for him to let any glaring infelicities slip through and he has polished his, changing word order here and there, deleting repetitions and rectifying punctuation.
The choice of letters is mine and so are the excisions. As in any correspondence between friends, there were many plans for meeting, reports on health, grumbles about the weather and the slowness of the posts, all of which make for dull re-reading. Paddy and Debo also kept up a running exchange of riddles, ditties and jokes that have, on the whole, lost their freshness, and they have mostly been excluded. These cuts have been made silently and any ellipses are Paddy and Debo’s own.
One of the great advantages of having both correspondents at hand during the editing of their letters is that I have been able to draw on their memories of people and events, and, where possible, have used their recollections in the footnotes. At times, re-reading a letter evoked a longer, more detailed reminiscence and these have been added in italics in the main body of the letters.
*Patrick Leigh Fermor, ‘Sash Windows Opening on the Foam’, Architectural Digest, November 1986, reprinted in Words of Mercury, edited by Artemis Cooper (2003), pp. 126–30.