In Tearing Haste

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  We came here, to the Cameroon, two weeks ago, to a second stockade. I couldn’t bear camp life any more, so took a house in the negro quarter of the town, and I am writing under a huge mango tree, with a jet-black Foulbé tribesman in the middle distance. I have hired him for a month and he is beating a rush mat with infuriating slowness and deliberation: whack! wait for it; whack! w.f.it; w! etc. The town is a labyrinth of mud walls surrounding conical thatched huts and the population consists entirely of coal black enormous Foulbés, very fine looking, clad in splendid robes – their faces slashed by ceremonial scars, and they ride horses with medieval tilting saddles and black-and-white checked caparisons down to their fetlocks. Curly scimitars glitter from the saddles. They are ruled by a feudal chieftain called the Lamido of Maroua who lives in a sort of mud Lismore on the outskirts of the town. His subjects approach him kneeling and when he sallies forth surrounded by his horsemen, trumpeters sound fanfares. He has many slaves and concubines and a subterranean jail where his prisoners lie in chains.

  The country is rolling and volcanic, full of tall mountains and deep valleys of enormous blackish boulders that look like fossilized stampedes of mastodons. It is full of troglodyte villages and fetish-worshipping primitives who never leave their caves without a bow, a quiver full of arrows and a long sharp spear. They gather all round us on the rocks, drinking in all our strange equipment, the clothes and the unfamiliar noises – ‘Roll it, please!’ ‘Cut!’ ‘Action!’ – with utter bewilderment. I think they are convinced that we are members of a strange sect connected with making the sun set, as, the moment it dips beyond the hills, we pack up.

  But of course what you want to know about is the people. It’s pretty complex, but here goes.

  John Huston. Wildly bogus, charming, complicated, boastful and ham. I like him very much and don’t trust him a yard. He has to be kept under pretty strict control; he would trample on one if he saw the faintest flicker of a flinch, and does so when he does see it. This entails keeping on the offensive quite a lot, i.e. diagnosing his weak points and, when occasion arises, hitting hard and often. This establishes an equivocal and amusing kind of truce and makes life quite fun, a rather dangerous game which both sides divine by an amused look in each other’s eyes: thin-ice work & figure skating. He sings ‘Johnny, I Hardly Knew You’ [4] beautifully.

  Darryl Zanuck. In spite of the rasping voice and the huge cigar, I think he probably has a heart of gold. The sheen of the gold is obscured at the moment by his demented jealousy of Juliette Gréco. He follows her everywhere with his eyes or in person, suspects her almost entirely without reason and attempts to incarcerate her in vain. It is quite obvious that she can’t bear to be touched by him any more. This leads to scenes and blows. Last night he knocked her out cold, then, in a fit of anxiety, threw a bucket of water over her and sobbed for an hour. It’s all rather pathetic and awful, and our world crackles with anger and unhappiness at its very core.

  Trevor Howard. Have you ever seen him? – sorry, of course you have. I only asked because I’m so ignorant in such matters. He is playing the lead – Morel, the elephant defender – and seems to me wonderful. A very nice man, but as with nearly all actors, there is something missing: – ‘A bit of a bore’ doesn’t quite cover it, somehow. It’s something missing somewhere else, which I have yet to put my finger on. He drinks like Hell, starting at breakfast, and goes through his part in a sort of miraculous trance.

  Errol Flynn. All the above strictures about actors do not apply here. He poses as the most tremendous bounder – glories in being a cad – but is intelligent, perceptive and, in a freak way, immensely likeable. We are rather chums, to my bewilderment. Sex rules his life, and very indiscreet and criticisable and amusing he is about it.

  Juliette Gréco. By far the most interesting of the lot. Extremely well read, unspoilable, wild, rather like a panther, a tremendous sense of humour. The camp is divided up into cliques within cliques, and the French one, consisting of six, to which I unpatriotically belong, is the most exciting, and, I rather suspect, the most hated. We became great pals at once. She is utterly bohemian, and incorruptible by the richest film company in the world; or so I should think. Her involvement with Zanuck is a bit of a mystery, which I have not yet fathomed. It’s queerly out of character.

  On the whole, with one or two exceptions – apart from those mentioned – I hate the lot of them. The standard of conversation and jokes is deplorable, and I sometimes feel on the brink of weeping. The staggering sums which I suppose I am earning are really not worth it. The only justification will be if it’s a really tremendous film.

  How I long for you and all my friends. So please write at once, in spite of my awfulness on the same count. Please, please, at once!

  And lots of love from

  Paddy

  [1] John Huston (1906–87). The American film director and actor, who was directing The Roots of Heaven, had chosen PLF to write the screenplay.

  [2] Trevor Howard (1913–88). The British actor played Morel, hero of the film.

  [3] Errol Flynn (1909–59). The actor’s last major film appearance was as Major Forsythe in The Roots of Heaven.

  [4] The Irish traditional anti-war song, the basis for the American popular song ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’.

  11 April 1958

  Darryl F. Zanuck Productions Inc.

  Maroua

  IN HASTE

  Darling Debo,

  This is scribbled at high speed in the hopes of shaming you into writing.

  I’m sitting under a mango tree, turning a deaf ear to an old negro whose nostrils syphilis has quite eaten away; he is trying to sell me a sheaf of fiendish-looking assegai-heads with spikes and cruel barbs and grooves for poison. He spends nearly all day trying to do this and his mumbled litany is seldom out of earshot; cries of Old Maroua: ‘Who’ll buy my sweet spearheads?’

  Lots of love

  Paddy

  Middle of July [1958]

  Paros

  As from:

  c/o Hon. Alan Hare, [1] MC

  British Embassy, Athens

  Darling Debo,

  Nine days ago Joan, Maurice Bowra, [2] his professor pal, [3] Mark [Ogilvie-Grant] and I set off at noon for this island in a hell-ship, a sort of Ægean Altmark, the decks a-cluck with poultry and awash with vomit; a black-and-white cow kept sticking its head through the dining-room porthole and mooing. This was the only nice thing. At Syra, the first island where we dropped anchor, at 9 p.m., Mark and I went ashore and made a bee-line for a wine shop that also sold kokoretsi, entrails stuffed with good things, twisted round a skewer and roasted over charcoal. We had some, then a second helping, when lo and behold! the ship was sailing away. We leapt into a dinghy, the boatman pulling like Grace Darling, but the ship churned hard-heartedly off into the night with our loved ones, leaving us feeling pretty foolish. No boat for another two days! We settled down on the waterfront, drank endless jugs of retsina and wandered oafishly along the quay. Our fancy was taken by a handsome yacht, which had moored at the quay and was locked in sleep. We pretended it was Ran’s one, on which he had set off in a different direction that morning, and began shouting ‘Wake up you beasts! Don’t think we can’t see you!’, and, like the children of Bethel to Elisha, ‘Go up thou bald head’ and so on. Shadowy figures began to stir indignantly on the deck and finally up through the opening double doors of the companionway emerged a bald pate a-gleam in the soft starlight. Lord Antrim! They had changed course, tying up there silently while Mark and I were busy drinking. Odd, eh? Ran was ashore in his pyjamas in a twinkling and drinking continued, I’m sorry to report. Our troubles were over, and we arrived in Paros in style next morning.

  Lots and lots of love

  Paddy

  [1] Alan Hare (1919–95). Former SOE operative in Albania and future chief executive and chairman of the Financial Times who was working for the Secret Intelligence Service in Athens. PLF had known him since they shared lodgings in Cairo during the
war. Married to Jill North in 1945.

  [2] Maurice Bowra (1898–1971). The legendary Oxford don, an old friend of Joan Leigh Fermor, was Warden of Wadham College from 1938 until his death and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford 1951–4.

  [3] Ernst Kantorowicz (1895–1963). German historian, author of a controversial biography of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II; he had been a friend of Bowra since they met at Oxford in 1934.

  *

  (PLF)

  When the others had left, Truman Capote [1] and a friend came to see us (told by someone to look in). He was very small and frail, and wearing a tartan tam-o’-shanter, and carrying an enormous woolly dog, almost larger than him, under his arm. He was very amusing and told us all sorts of stories in a rather high and fluting voice, accompanied every so often by a deep bass laugh. It was hard to think that the two sounds came out of the same small frame.

  [1] Truman Capote (1924–84). The American author, whose novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s was published later that year, was travelling in Greece with the writer Jack Dunphy (1915–92).

  22 July 1958

  Edensor House

  Bakewell

  Darling Paddy,

  V nice to get your letter with an account of falling on your feet again, viz Ld Antrim’s ship being there to fetch you away.

  Much has occurred since you left, but nothing tremendously important. I mean no new bodies to worship, it’s the same crew so far.

  Desmond [1] has given notice. They are busy with the hay. An army of workmen have moved into Chatsworth [2] & are making a great deal of dust and noise, nothing to show for it of course. It’s alternately bitter and boiling.

  My love affair with Ann Fleming prospers. Sometimes I get this sort of telegram ‘Warden of All Souls Dining Monday Please Come’ (didn’t go of course) so that should put that ancient French writer in her place.

  I went to dinner with her (Ann) the other night and sat by Harold Nicolson [3] and Angus Wilson [4] who is perfect. Andrew came, & Robert, [5] & he sat by Diana Cooper & Judy Montagu and I’m sorry to say we resorted to making a face or two at each other. [6]

  I had been to Percy St before to make sure of forcing him to come as he is such a slippery customer, and there was Augustus John, [7] goodness he is like my father both to look at and in the things he says, things like ‘Great Scott’. I told him how Emma wants to give a skeleton for a leaving present to St Elphin’s so he said she could have his, but then admitted it might not be ready by August.

  Andrew was on The Brains Trust [8] yesterday. You must say that was brave. The chairman was that v nice person with a beard in a wheelchair who we saw on the stage doing songs & things with one other person. [9]

  Give Joan my love & lots to you.

  Debo

  [1] Michael Desmond; the Devonshires’ butler.

  [2] The Devonshires had decided to move into Chatsworth and were restoring the house completely.

  [3] Harold Nicolson (1886–1968). The diplomat and politician was working on one of his last books, The Age of Reason (1960).

  [4] Angus Wilson (1913–91). The distinguished novelist had published The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot earlier in the year.

  [5] Robert Kee (1919–). Writer, broadcaster and great friend of the Devonshires and PLF. Author of The Impossible Shore (1949), A Sign of the Times (1955) and Ireland: A History (1980). Married to Janetta Woolley 1948–50, to Cynthia Judah 1960–89 and to Kate Trevelyan in 1990.

  [6] Neither Diana Cooper nor Judy Montagu, both great friends of PLF, were favourites of DD.

  [7] Augustus John (1878–1961). The painter lived at 14 Percy Street, in London’s Fitzrovia, where Robert Kee also lived for a time. ‘I met him once with Robert Kee in a Soho street. He looked me up and down and said, “Have you got children?” “Yes.” Another long look. “Did you suckle them?” ’ (DD)

  [8] The popular BBC programme, in which a panel answered listeners’ questions, had transferred from radio to television in the early 1950s.

  [9] Michael Flanders (1922–75). Actor and singer who performed in a wheelchair after contracting poliomyelitis. One-half of the comic duo Flanders and Swann.

  *

  (DD)

  Andrew loved walking and Bolton Abbey, our estate in Yorkshire, was his opportunity. He scorned Land Rovers and ritzy Range Rovers, which have replaced legs in the last twenty-five years, and often arrived at a distant line of butts before they did. But as we got older and most of the regular guns no longer came he went elsewhere in August, saying the place was full of ghosts.

  A pheasant shoot is a bait for persuading people to travel a long way for a winter weekend. Describing a shoot to a non-participant is as bad as going over games of golf or bridge, so I spared Paddy the bother of reading about it. But my gun took me from Sussex to Devon, from Anglesey to Norfolk and home via Northumberland. I loved it and all the people who went with it.

  Paddy never took to shooting and a good thing too. I can’t imagine a more terrifying thought than Paddy let loose with a 12-bore in high excitement untutored in the rules of safety. But he occasionally stayed with us for a shooting weekend and came out and took it all in. After a good lunch, he was a dangerous obstacle in my butt, sound asleep and oblivious of the loud bangs immediately above him.

  He was always the star of the evenings. Most of our contemporaries had been in the army and were thrilled to meet the Cretan legend.

  12 August! [1958]

  Kamini

  Hydra

  Darling Debo,

  How clearly I spy you at this very moment, in my mind’s little eye, in shooting rig but well muffled against wind and rain, flanked by Lord [1] and two dogs straining at the leash with their tongues hanging out and breathing hard with a tweed-clad troop of well-breakfasted peers heading for the drizzling moors. I discern the glint of gun barrels and the fly-looking rough-hewn North Country beaters deploying; equally, hosts of birds enjoying the end of their hols but wondering uneasily what’s up and not knowing what’s coming to them in a few minutes’ time . . . The rain falls inexorably, zero hour is nigh . . . There is a whirr of wings . . . then bang! bang! bang! (thud, thud, thud . . .) I see faithless Ran, his sunburn almost all gone, not many yards away; not your Uncle [2] though, who must be discussing Cyprus in London; and Andrew, making all welcome and pointing out likely clumps, but gunless; Emma and Stoker looking pretty serious over their special weapons; Martyn Beckett, [3] perhaps, slightly blood-shot from the Bag o’ Nails [4] . . . I taste slugs of raw whisky by proxy, smell gunpowder, observe tweed collars turned up against wind and rain, and, as the dark and bloodthirsty afternoon wears on, matchless eyes beginning to run with the blast and bulbous or alabaster noses turning more ruby than the port they will soon be sniffing . . . I see the maids of Bolton scuttling through the downpour for lack of a way indoors and Desmond, who must have wisely thought better of his notice, arranging ice-cubes in a hollow metal apple . . . the gurgle of baths filling up . . . (Please strike out or amend anything that doesn’t apply. But admit it’s not far out.)

  It’s all very different here. I’m back in the vast white studio on our old island, scribbling away. The cicadas outside are deafening. Below, the tiled roofs go cascading down to the sea which is covered with islands and the sun rides rough-shod over all. The thing is this: don’t you think you’d better come for a bit, when there is a truce with those birds? I think we’ll be here till the end of September, I wish you would. Joan pines for you and sends love. You could bring Robert [Kee] if he would like it (I’m not sure I approve but I suppose I’ve got to lump it!) I think he’d like it too. I could meet at the airport and bring you out here after a very short gay Athenian spell. Please ponder the matter. There’s no one to see, really, except us. I’d get Mark [Ogilvie-Grant] & Coote [5] to vary the danger of boredom. It seems sad to bury the summer so soon.

  Last week Joan and I, with Alan the Spy and Roxane Sedgwick, [6] climbed to the top of Mt Olympus. It took four days, sleeping out on va
rious ledges and it nearly did us in. The last day was real hand-over-hand stuff, till at last we were on the highest point of S.E. Europe, with the whole of Greece below like a map. It was very strange and rather wonderful and the air was like whisky & soda (don’t think I didn’t hear you say Ugh). Tony Lambert, councillor at the Embassy and great bird expert, had told us to look out for some rare birds, the Wall Creeper and the Sombre Tit. We saw lots of the latter, none of the former. Numbers of choughs, though. But we were slightly under-eagled. Joan grumbled a certain amount, and said she was to be buried there if she fell down a crevasse; not lugged back by train to Athens. I made up an epitaph for her:

  Bury me here on Olympus

  In the home of the lonely wall-creeper

  But don’t take me back to Athens, please,

  Stretched out on a second-class sleeper . . .

  At an open-air hangout by the sea on our return (us, Mark, Coote, the Spy & wife and others) Coote reminisced happily about her RAF days, smoking a cigar the while. She is very good on the slang (Wing Commander = Winko, Group Captain = Groupie, etc). This evoked these lines: