In Tearing Haste

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  [6] ‘Nancy used to tease me mercilessly about the tuberculin gland in my neck, which she said would put off prospective suitors as it “hubbled and bubbled” at night. She sang to the tune of a popular song, “The hounds and the horses, galloping over the land, all stopped to hear the hubbling and the bubbling of the gland”, which induced tears.’ (DD)

  [May 1956]

  Gadencourt

  Pacy-sur-Eure

  Darling Debo,

  Your letter was a marvel and a lovely fat one. I revelled in every single word, and laughed a lot and love your flat-out, headlong way of writing. It plunged me back in Lismore – staying there and all the fun, jokes and everything were by far the nicest thing for me this year – and also gave me a dash of the gloom of an exile wandering far away from Eden. I say, what do you mean about me not liking gardens? I love them, and that one especially, in particular with a glass in hand and the key lost, lawns in stripes, but some grass under trees so long that one gets back slightly late for dinner, festooned up to the knees in cuckoo-spit.

  Alas, I ought to resist the temptation to implore you to come to Paris now, as I am bombarded by my publisher daily to have the manuscript of the book [1] in within the fortnight, or else it won’t be able to come out this year – and I’ve only got this house till the end of June. However, if you did come to Paris, I need hardly say that I’d be there faster than an arrow from a bow . . . I thought of trying to get you to come and stay here, but it wouldn’t be sensible at the moment, as I’d have to be closeted with this blithering book in a muck sweat of creative fever, leaving you and Joan alone all day in double agony of shyness. BUT, I do hope you’ll be in London for the last half of June, when I’m coming over purely on pleasure bent, and rather hoping to be practically inseparable from your side. DO PLEASE TRY! We could do innumerable glorious things. I long to do lots more dancing for one thing, and make you stay up long past bedtime, also to take that river steamer to Greenwich. Do let me know about this, and what hopes there are. I do hope you haven‘t got a million beastly thwarting plans! The truth is I worship & long to see you, and keep thinking of things to talk about.

  The sun pours down here and I scribble a lot in the garden, planning to arrive in London brown and gimlet-eyed, ready to win friends and influence people. Two swallows flew into my room this morning and circled round for twenty minutes. I suppose it’s too late, but it would be nice if they built a nest against one of the beams that cross the ceiling. The windows would have to be left open even in a deluge. One of them kept banging against a window instead of flying out. I put it in my pocket, went out to the lawn where some people were. I said ‘Watch me throw a stone over that enormous tree’, took it out and threw it up into the air. It fluttered up into the firmament and everyone was amazed!

  Do please write at once and tell your plans, and an autobiography of your immediate past.

  With lots of love from

  Paddy

  A published report recalls in 1952 that fornication was responsible for over 32,000 illegitimate births. So THAT’S what it’s caused by! I’m glad they’ve put their finger on it at last . . .

  [1] A Time to Keep Silence (1957). An account of PLF’s sojourns in monasteries in France and Cappadocia, where he retreated to work on his first book The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (1950).

  2 June 1956

  Edensor House

  Bakewell

  Darling Paddy,

  V nice to get a letter. V v sad to leave Ireland. The Wife and I are so overcome with shyness, we find it difficult to speak to strangers, even dogs, just like you & I did when we felt funny about going to a restaurant.

  It is midwinter here, quite a nice day for February, & one needs woollen knickers. The Wife has got on orchid pink, it will get dirty in the coal dust of the industrial north.

  When are you coming to England, what I mean is when are you really coming, not saying one day & meaning something quite else. Then I can get on with my plans for going to Greenwich by boat etc. Get yr travelling Wit Sharpener on in good time.

  Let one know all.

  Much love

  D Devonshire

  8 June 1956

  [Postcard]

  My address of Ensor Lodge was a v bad shot. It is Edensor House, Bakewell, Derbyshire.

  Al Khan [1] was v v good & came to Harvey Nichols to buy stays & stockings & gloves. He knows unexpected things like how gloves shrink. I looked in the pig house here – what do you think I found? A little pig. I’ll show you if you come here.

  Wife & I were sitting, thinking no ill of anyone when what should my eye light on but that great fat green book you wrote, [2] so

  I had a look in it. Meanwhile I’ve got to page 18 of Hide & Seek. [3]

  Do you always spell Tues Teus, is it Greek or something?

  Diana Cooper looked smashing at a ball I went to, about 16.

  Just got a P.C. from Xan so my day is made.

  [1] Prince Aly Khan (1911–60). The racehorse-owning playboy, father of the present Aga Khan, was reputed to be able to handle more women simultaneously than most men can in a lifetime. His marriage to his second wife, the actress Rita Hayworth, ended in 1953. He was often DD’s host in Paris and at the Château de l’Horizon in the South of France.

  [2] The Traveller’s Tree. The book grew out of captions PLF wrote to accompany photographs of the Caribbean, taken by his friend the Greek photographer Costa Achillopoulos.

  [3] Xan Fielding, Hide and Seek: The Story of a War-time Agent (1954).

  Monday, 12 June 1956

  c/o Julian Pitt-Rivers [1]

  Château du Roc

  Fons, Lot

  Darling Debo,

  I’m sorry about Ensor Lodge.

  Yes, I’ve always had trouble with Teusday; I expect you make mistakes about different shapes of cattle cake sometimes.

  It would be lovely to have a transparent and invisible brain-sharpener that one could wear all the time, or even a small pocket one like a hearing aid, self-stropping, stainless with a set of refills.

  I set off with Joan last week in a Bentley she’s got, so old as to be practically a fossil but fast as the wind. We stopped the first night at a small town called Valençay, where there’s a huge castle that used to belong to Talleyrand. In the park are numbers of strange birds that ought to be put in the book: scores of different-coloured peacocks forever perching on pinnacles and stone urns; secretary-birds that sound more useful than they really are and glorious-coloured cranes from Sardinia and the Cape of Good Hope, with headdresses like Red Indians, and a number of flamingos.

  Lots of love from

  Paddy

  [1] PLF was staying with the anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers (1919–2001) and his second wife, Margarita, former wife of Miguel Primo de Rivera, son of the Spanish dictator.

  26 August 1956

  Aix en Provence

  Darling Debo,

  I’m terribly sorry not having written half a century ago, after telephoning you on the eve of leaving to join Xan and Daph in the South of France. Things there were such turmoil that I don’t think any of the hundred-odd people engaged on making that film [1] wrote so much as a postcard the whole time. D, X & I talked it over and decided you would have hated it. I did, rather, and buggered off after about a week.

  It was all pretty queer. First things first: Dirk Bogarde, [2] the actor who is doing one in the film, is absolutely charming – slim, handsome, nice speaking-voice and manner, a super-gent, the ghost of oneself 12 years ago. He and Daph & Xan had become bosom friends by the time I got there, and he and his equally nice manager (rather a grand thing to have?) are going to stay with them for Christmas in Tangiers. We all lived – us, the other actors, directors, cameramen etc – in a vast chalet, miles above the clouds in the French Alps, leagues away from anywhere and at the end of an immeasurable tangle of hairpin bends. The film itself, what I saw of it, is tremendously exciting – tremendous pace, action galore, staggering
scenery, with the guns of whiskered and turbaned Cretan guerrillas jutting down from every rock and miles of peaceful French roads choked with truckloads of steel-helmeted Germans bawling ‘Lili Marlene’. It’ll certainly be a thumping success, and when it finally appears at the Odeon or elsewhere, I propose to sneak in and see it in a false beard night after night. Some bits – not yet filmed, fortunately – turn Bogarde-Fermor into a mixture of Garth [3] & Superman, shooting Germans clean through the breast from a dentist’s chair, strangling sentries in an offhand manner – all totally fictitious! I’m having a terrific tussle getting them to change these bits in the film, not because I really mind, but because anyone who knows anything about the operation knows that it’s all rot. There are scores of small things dead wrong, & Xan and I are having a death struggle to get them put right, mostly for the sake of Greek and Cretan friends. It’s all v. rum. The main trouble is that once a film script is written, the authors themselves bow down and worship it as though it were Holy Writ. IT becomes the truth and anyone trying to change it (like X or me) incurs the horror of heretics trying to tamper with the text of the Gospel.

  Well, I baled out of this mountain madhouse after 7 days and retreated to a minute Provençal village called Auribeau, where I stayed in the pub and scribbled all day (against time) in the priest’s leafy garden overlooking a forested valley along which flowed a swift and icy river with deep green pools dappled with the shadows of leaves where I splashed and floated between paragraphs for hours among the dragonflies. There was never anyone there except occasionally a solitary fisherman with a straw hat and never a bite. *

  Then everything changed 100%, when Annie Fleming went to stay with Somerset Maugham [4] (not Willy to me) at Cap Ferrat, where he inhabits a gorgeous villa. It was a concerted plan that she should try and wangle my staying there for fun, for a few days. She duly got me asked there to luncheon, and afterwards, as if by clockwork, Mr Maugham asked me to stay several days and everything looked like a triumph of Annie’s engineering and plain sailing. But there were rocks ahead. (Do you know Somerset Maugham? He is 84, and his face is the wickedest tangle of cruel wrinkles I have ever seen and so discoloured and green that it looks as though he has been rotting in the Bastille, or chained to the bench of a galley or inside an iron mask for half a century. Alligator’s eyes peer from folds of pleated hide and below them an agonizing snarl is beset with discoloured and truncated fangs, but the thing to remember is that he has a very pronounced and noticeable stutter that can seize up a sentence for 30 seconds on end.)

  All went better and better – a sort of honeymoon – as the day progressed. But at dinner things began to go wrong. Two horrible and boring guests arrived (publishers) called Mr & Mrs Frere. [5] Mr Frere made some sweeping generalization and

  Me ‘I love generalizations – for instance, that all Quakers are colour-blind (you know the line) – or that all heralds stutter!’

  Mrs Frere ‘Stutter?’

  Me ‘Yes.’

  Mrs Frere ‘How do you mean, stutter?’

  Me ‘Stutter . . . you know, stammer . . .’

  Later on, after that fatal 8th glass of whisky, I was in trouble again: – Somerset Maugham ‘It’s a c-c-confounded nuisance t-t-today b-b-being the F-feast of the As-as-as-assumption. N-none of the g-gardeners have d-done a s-s-stroke . . .’

  Me ‘Ah yes! The Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin! Just after the Pope gave out the dogma a few years ago, I was going round the Louvre with a friend of mine called Robin Fedden [6] (who, by ill luck, has a terrible stammer) and we paused in front of a huge picture of the Assumption by (I think) Correggio (ah, oui ) & Robin turned to me and said “Th-th-that’s what I c-c-call an un-w-wwarrantable as-s-s-sumption”.’

  There was a moment’s silence, the time needed for biting one’s tongue out. When bedtime came my host approached me with a reptile’s fixity, offering me a hand as cold as a toad, with the words: ‘W-w-well I’ll s-s-say g-good-b-b-bye now in c-case I’m not up b-by the t-time y-you l-l-leave . . .’

  Annie helped me pack next morning, and as I strode, suitcase in hand, to the door, there was a sound like an ogre’s sneeze. The lock of the suitcase had caught in the sheet, leaving a jagged yard-long rent across the snow-white expanse of heavily embroidered gossamer. I broke into a run and Annie into fits of suppressed laughter.

  As a result of bullying by Annie & Diana Cooper (who turned up in the area, where I had settled in a horrible hotel, soon after) I was asked by W. S. M. to a meal of reconciliation and amends, where we met as affable strangers. It was really a gasbag’s penance and I, having learnt the hard way, vouchsafed little more than a few safe monosyllables.

  The rest of my short stay in that area was spent with D. Cooper, Annie, Robin & Mary, [7] & Hamish [8] (who were all staying with Mrs Fellowes). [9] I hate it – the Côte d’Azur I mean – and will never set foot there again.

  I’ve taken rooms here for a week – ending tomorrow – in a pretty, retired midwife’s house, in whose garden I write. This ravishing town, full of chimes of bells, fountains, peasants playing boules in the shadow of lime trees and splendid decaying palaces and churches, is a wonderful disinfectant after that awful coast. All is splendid or dilapidated, nothing smart.

  In two days time I set off on the great yacht Diana has borrowed [10] with D[iana], Joan, Alan Pryce-Jones [11] and a couple called Frank & Kitty Giles: [12] Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily. It really would be a kind act were you to write c/o British Consul, Cagliari, Sardinia. Meanwhile, please give my love to Andrew, to Emma & Stoker (angels in human form) & to your Wife.

  Lots of love from

  Paddy [13]

  [1] Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A romanticised version of the daring abduction, led by PLF, of General Heinrich Kreipe in Nazi-occupied Crete, based on the book by PLF’s comrade William Stanley Moss (1950).

  [2] Dirk Bogarde (1921–99). The actor was apprehensive about meeting the real-life character he was playing but was soon won over by PLF’s charm and adroitness.

  [3] Muscle-bound hero of a strip cartoon which ran in the Daily Mirror 1943–97.

  [4] W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965). The writer bought the Villa Mauresque on the French Riviera after his divorce from his wife, Syrie, in 1927.

  [5] Alexander Frere-Reeves (1892–1984). Publisher, for many years head of William Heinemann, Maugham’s publishing house. Married to Patricia Wallace, daughter of the thriller-writer Edgar Wallace. ‘Frere (nasty man) made us all angry by saying that no author wrote for anything but profit, this put my voice up by several octaves as well as Paddy’s.’ The Letters of Ann Fleming, edited by Mark Amory (Collins, 1985), p. 185.

  [6] Robin Fedden (1908–77). Gifted writer, poet, traveller and mountaineer who was Historic Buildings Secretary at the National Trust 1951–73. Married Greek-born Renée Catzeflis (d. 1992) in 1942.

  [7] Lady Mary St Clair-Erskine (1912–93). Wayward daughter of 5th Earl of Rosslyn. ‘She could get away with almost anything through her charm, and was always forgiven; and there was often plenty to forgive.’ Daphne Fielding, Mercury Presides (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1954), p. 159. Married to Sir Philip Dunn 1933–44, to Robin Campbell 1946–58, to Charles McCabe 1962–9 and again to Sir Philip Dunn in 1969.

  [8] James Alexander (Hamish) St Clair-Erskine (1909–73). Son of 5th Earl of Rosslyn with whom Nancy Mitford, in spite of his homosexuality, had been infatuated when young.

  [9] Marguerite (Daisy) Decazes (1890–1962). Well dressed, sharp-tongued daughter of the 3rd Duc Decazes, and heiress through her mother to the Singer sewing-machine fortune. She owned the luxurious villa Les Zoraïdes on Cap Martin, near Monaco. Married Reginald Fellowes, as her second husband, in 1919.

  [10] Diana Cooper had been lent the 103-foot Eros II by Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos (1908–96).

  [11] Alan Pryce-Jones (1908–2000). Writer, critic and editor of the Times Literary Supplement 1948–59, who had once
been engaged to Joan Leigh Fermor. Married Thérèse Fould-Springer in 1934.

  [12] Frank Giles (1919–). Author and journalist, Paris correspondent of The Times 1953–60. Married to Lady Katherine (Kitty) Sackville in 1946.

  [13] PLF reworked this letter at a later date, providing further details of his fateful visit to Somerset Maugham. It was published in an article by Ben Downing, Paris Review, Spring 2003.

  * Perhaps because of the splashing I mentioned.

  1 October 1956

  Easton Court Hotel

  Chagford, Nr. Exeter

  Devon

  Darling Debo,

  I’ve been at this pub in the heart of Andrew’s damp duchy for about a week, ever since leaving that yacht (which was perfect), and I’m scribbling away like mad. Outside, the rain thrashes down as though out of sheer spite, and I wish there was somebody I could complain to, and have something done. I don’t mind as much as I would at other times, though, as it stops me from mooching endlessly about the moors (which I might otherwise do) instead of writing.

  It’s rather strange and mysterious country, and whenever there’s a couple of hours that look faintly possible, I go tittupping over the moors and through the woods on a black horse called Flash that lives hard by; usually getting soaked by sudden showers or by crashing along overgrown rides where each leaf one collides with seems to shed a tablespoonful of rainwater. Very steep hills are separated by rapid streams flowing with Guinness-dark water. The banks are full of rowan-berries, Lords and Ladies run to seed, ragged-robin and willowherb dribbling with the spit of cuckoos long flown. The woods are thick with moss & lichen (like Lismore), turning into the same green coral. Occasionally they open into glades where many vixens would be decadently gloved in magenta. Stone bridges as uncouth and angular as early heraldry span these streams and ring hollow under-hoof, and the dampness, darkness and greenness gives them a submarine & legendary feeling. One should be dressed in full armour under shoals of green-haired mermaids drifting through the oak branches on slow and invisible currents, all to the sound of harps, if you catch my drift.