by Patrick Leigh Fermor
In autumn 1940, Smedley’s Hydro at Matlock in Derbyshire – a bleak, castellated and blacked-out Victorian pile, perched high above the rushing Derwent (whose mineral springs, it was said, could turn a bowler hat into a crystalline fossil overnight) – was crammed with polyglot officers of all ages and origins. It was the Intelligence Training Centre, which sounds more important than it was. The war wasn’t going well and it was thought that a ball would cheer us all up, so we did our best with balloons, chrysanthemums and streamers. Many of the officers were musical, so we had a band and it went with great brio.
Henry Howard, one of the instructors, brought over a spectacular couple from nearby: a tall, slim ensign in blues and an incredibly beautiful girl; nobody could look at anyone else. They were both twenty. There was nothing showy about their dancing – rather the reverse. We all wished we knew them, but it was out of the question: they seemed to be sleep-dancing, utterly rapt, eyes shut as though in a trance. He was called Andrew Cavendish and she was Deborah, the youngest Mitford sister.
‘Funny, Howard bringing that Mitford girl over,’ a crusty old student said when they had gone. ‘After all, this is meant to be the Intelligence Training Centre, and there is a war on.’
The war had been over for a few years when we met again at a fancy-dress drinks, and then at a party with two fast boats sailing up the Thames laden with eccentrically dressed passengers. Andrew had been through the war with the Coldstream Guards and won an MC in northern Italy. Deborah had been busy with a score of tasks, and both were at grips with bringing Chatsworth back to life. I was very pleased to be asked to stay, having already visited Lismore. ‘Our dump looms when you turn left after the church. You can’t miss it. It sticks out like a sore thumb.’
There is no need to describe that amazing house; everyone knows Chatsworth. It was an unexpected heirloom: Andrew’s older brother had been killed in action in 1944, and his father had died in 1950. This brought a stack of new duties, and new things to enjoy (and see that everyone else enjoyed). He dealt with all tasks with seriousness, speed and decision. When he served as Minister of State for Commonwealth Relations in the Macmillan Government (‘pure nepotism of Uncle Harold’s’), he did it with impressive ability.
In the country, Andrew had a genius for marking historical and family events with enormous gatherings. The house and all hotels for miles around filled up with guests, staff and tenants; vast tents went up all over the grounds, and there were fountains, music, feasting, tumblers, sword-swallowers and players of obsolete instruments. There were pageants, ballets, cantatas. It was a sort of Field of the Cloth of Gold – all to be blown away, except from memory, with the smoke of the last firework: scenes so magical that departing cars had to go several miles before they could safely turn back into pumpkins. I can see Andrew, like a tired youthful Prospero, in his study – a vast cave full of books – planning new splendours, ticking off a list of new engagements, perhaps brooding on almshouses for grey-beards yet unborn.
How different from the winds and snow of the Huantay mountain range in Peru! Andrew and I had been included, as minor amateurs, in a mountaineering expedition in the Andes. It was so congenial that the same party clambered all over the Pindus. We then tackled the Pyrenees with Xan Fielding, and were about to try the not very arduous Elburz range in Iran, when the Ayatollah came to power.
Lismore Castle, the Devonshires’ home in Ireland – built by King John, lived in by Sir Walter Raleigh and plumbed by Andrew’s aunt by marriage, Adele Astaire – looks like a castle out of Le Morte d’Arthur. I was allowed to stay (‘in order to write’) in the tallest tower, where there was no sound but the admonitory gurgle of bathwater climbing up its pipe before dinner, the flutter of a flag overhead and thousands of birds. It looked down on treetops and a bridge over the Blackwater River with a strange echo. Files of salmon shimmer upstream towards the Knockmealdown Mountains and herons glide by almost in touching distance.
In the village lived Dervla Murphy, the great travel author, and a few fields away grazed the beautiful Grand National winner Royal Tan, a present to Debo from Aly Khan. He had run four times in the great race, and had come in first, second and third, and fell only at the last fence in the fourth, which he would otherwise have won. This fine horse had fallen platonically head-over-heels in love with a very small donkey and they were inseparable. However, I made a good impression by wheedling the horse away by hours of stroking and soft talk, then furtively slipping a bridle over his head. I felt sorry for the little donkey as we went down the lane to the blacksmith’s, who welcomed Royal Tan like a prince. ‘Arrh! He’s seen a lot of crowds in his day!’ he said, and then, as an afterthought, ‘I’ll just put a light slipper on him.’
Later, there was a lot of riding through the spring woods with Debo, my wife Joan, and Robert Kee. There was a picnic under the fairy oak at Abbeyleix, and an afternoon when we were bent on having a shrimp tea. A sort of spell hung over the whole region. Nobody was at home when we went to nearby Dromana House. It was oddly silent. No Villiers, no Stuarts. There was an open window, so we clambered in like Bruin Boys of riper years. A few old letters were scattered about and a dismembered double-barrel gun and some moulting foxes’ brushes. Dusk was falling, so we tiptoed away.
Equally vain to try and reproduce the comedy of Debo’s and her sister Nancy’s exchanges, much of it schoolroom reproach. When the fire at Lismore had gone out, Nancy said, ‘I note no bellows’, and, imploring Debo to stop whatever she was doing, ‘Borah, I beg!’
Thanks to Nancy’s books we know a lot about the Mitfords. ‘Our lives were absolutely secure and regular as clockwork’ (this is Debo writing, not Nancy). ‘We had parents who were always there. An adored Nanny who came when Diana was three months old and stayed for forty years. Mabel in the pantry and Annie the housekeeper. Animals were as important as humans – mice, guinea pigs, a piebald rat belonging to Unity, poultry and goats, and the animals of farm and stable.’
Debo’s fondness for animals has never left her. Chickens seem to have been her first love, and they are still high on the list. Sheep are particular favourites; she knows all about them, every variety and breed, and she haunts sheep sales. Rare breeds abound at Chatsworth. For a time there was a whole troop of tiny horses. She is shadowed everywhere by two whippets.
Shops have always held particular glamour for her – her favourite book is Beatrix Potter’s Ginger and Pickles – and this has given rise to shops full of country food, butchers’ shops, carpenters’, shops selling rustic tackle and pretty well everything an estate can produce.
Although she hates books and has never read any of mine, or those of any other writer friends, she has written several books about Chatsworth and its surroundings. She writes with ease and speed, and wonders what all the fuss is about.
Adapted from an article written for DD’s eightieth birthday, Daily Telegraph, 31 March 2000.