In Tearing Haste

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  [5] Alberto Giacometti (1901–66). The Swiss sculptor, painter and draughtsman was born in Borgonovo, near the Italian border.

  [6] Christopher Montague Woodhouse, 5th Baron Terrington (1917–2001). As head of SOE in Crete, he played an important part in organising partisan resistance. Conservative MP 1959–66 and author of many books, mostly on Greek and British history.

  [7] ‘What little town by river or sea-shore, / Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, / Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?/ And, little town, thy streets for evermore / Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell / Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.’ John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1819).

  * Semi-nomad shepherds, speaking a Latin dialect.

  * Spanish dialect of the Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella, and settled in the Levant, sheltered by the Sultan.

  * The right-wing resistance, EDES, was commanded by Napoleon Zervas. The left-wing, ELAS, by ‘Áris’ Velouhiótis.

  * Greek nomad shepherds of the north, not on good terms with the Vlachs.

  * ‘The Unwritten Mountains’: very wild and remote and so-called because, being unsafe for strangers, especially officials, they were never subjected to a census, either Roman, Byzantine or Turkish.

  * Koumbáros in Greek – sýnteknos in Cretan dialect, the name for someone who has been your best man at a wedding, or godfather at a baptism, a bond considered as close as a blood relationship.

  * A local leader in the 1821 War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire.

  20 May 1973

  Lismore Castle

  Co. Waterford

  Darling Paddy,

  I’m writing this in the aeroplane to Paris, where I’m hurrying to because Diana is nearly at the end of her tether because poor Nancy is so terribly bad, desperately ill and completely miserable. It is so awful. Then one reads articles which say there is no need for a cancer patient to suffer pain any more. Well, you try. She’s not easy to help I admit as she fights every yard of the way – I’d have given in years ago wouldn’t you. Incredibly brave I suppose, and I know humans cling to life even when frightfully ill but I’m sure she is exceptional.

  Later, Frogland, 21 May

  Well, Whack, the poor French lady is very poor. I’m sitting in her nice light room, garden all lilac & moon daisies, but what’s the good of that when she feels so foul.

  There is a school hard by, & sitting all day in the window I am deafened by the screams of the beastly scholars. As soon as they are let out by their unfortunate teachers there is a noise like the Heythrop bitches leaving Redesdale’s Gorse on a breast-high scent. They take a lot of stopping, bells ring time & again before they are persuaded indoors & a merciful silence comes.

  Much love

  Debo

  P.S. Eddie Tennant, my grandson, aged just six, said Granny I had a dream last night of BARE WOMEN, tits & bums Granny, bums & tits. Granny did you hear, BARE WOMEN TITS & BUMS . . . What would Lady Redesdale have made of that.

  25 July 1973

  Chatsworth

  Bakewell

  Darling Paddy & Joan,

  Thanks vv much for your incredibly nice letters, & t. gram. [1]

  It has all been so supremely FOUL for poor Nancy. 4½ years of pain without a let-up, 23 doctors all charming to talk to & quite hopeless at doing anything for her.

  Some of the funniness will live in the books, won’t it, but we shall miss her dreadfully – the instigator of jokes. My father was the same & when those two were together all those years ago it was the acme of entertainment. How deeply unfair it is that she should have had this ghastly illness when she had always taken such care & lived a strictly disciplined life.

  The funeral at Swinbrook was strange in that it seemed absolutely normal for her to be buried there when most of her real life had been in France.

  Please keep in deepest touch.

  Much love to you both from

  Debo

  [1] Nancy Mitford had died on 30 June.

  5 April 1974

  Chatsworth

  Bakewell

  Darling Whack,

  EUREKA! I’ve found yr classic re Somerset Maugham & the sheets. Do you need it? Shall I get it photo-ed & send it? RSVP.

  It was in the maw of letters of yours, Xan’s, Diana’s, Woman’s, Emma’s, Stoker’s, Sophy’s, my mother’s, Wife’s, Andrew’s, Aly Khan’s, Ann Fleming’s, Daphne’s, Uncle Harold’s, Evie Waugh’s, J Kennedy’s, Decca’s & so on & forth, all higgledy piggledy unsorted & muddled to death.

  H Acton [1] is here. He & I are in despair, all the French Lady’s letters are there of course but completely muddled with the aforesaid heaps. Oh me.

  Luckily ALL hers to Mark Grant have landed back here, a vast pile from 1930 on. Good. Poor Harold is so fuddled by the nicknames, but we can sort them out. Two sisters come tonight thank God & our after dinner game will be sorting. The sad thing is the weather is so beautiful & one longs to be out.

  Now it’s the 9th of April, sorry.

  The sisters came & went. Harold goes today. He is taking with him a suitcase of sort of bombs, letter bombs. Of course the Lady never wrote one without a monster barb somewhere but they are so good & so funny.

  I found Evie Waugh’s re the full pot by his bed – he went on to Renishaw & faithfully didn’t tell Osbert [2] about ‘the strange Trove of Edensor – they wot not of the pot’. [3] Did you see C Connolly sold one of those Bridesheads, on nice paper & numbered, for £800? How MAD.

  Sophy is going to Florence in Sept so we will all go & torture Harold in his lair, which I’ve never seen – I suppose you have.

  He is a dear old soul, but taking him for a walk is a bit unnerving. He is tipped forward all the way & one waits for the crash. Andrew loves him. He is in v good spirits, except worried by the budget & says we may have to leave here.

  I’ve put a room as a Shrine to Nancy – all her books, furniture, pictures. It looks quite nice & people make a bottleneck studying the manuscripts. What would she think.

  Eddie Tennant has been here without a keeper, completely wild & v v nice but oh children are tiring. They always want to DO something & when the food comes they don’t want to eat because they just have (chocs, you know), then wolf something, then sick it up in the lift. I love him & he is Lady Glenconner [4] to the life, face I mean.

  Much love & to Joan

  Debo

  [1] Harold Acton (1904–94). The historian and novelist, a close friend of the Mitford sisters, was beginning research on a biography of Nancy Mitford, published in 1975.

  [2] Sir Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969). The writer lived at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire and was a neighbour of the Devonshires.

  [3] Evelyn Waugh’s letter to DD, in which he reassured her that no one at Renishaw had shown any curiosity about the unemptied chamber pot, is reprinted in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), p. 493.

  [4] Elizabeth Powell (1914–). Eddie Tennant’s paternal grandmother married Christopher Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner, as his second wife, in 1935.

  10 May 1974

  San Stefano

  Corfu

  Darling Debo,

  You are a marvel, finding that letter (and I’m lower than the dust answering so late, and will spare you the watertight complexity of my excuses).

  Poor Graham, Joan’s bro, stayed three weeks, and there were only three sunny days the whole time. He left last week and we came here to stay with Barbara and Niko Ghika, where it’s pretty rainy too – thank God in a way, otherwise it might have seemed like a private punishment reserved for us. It’s a charming house, built by Jaime, our old companion of Andalusia days, for Jacob Rothschild; [1] he only comes for three weeks every summer, so the Ghikas squat there whenever they want – she’s done marvels furnishing it, and Niko enlarging the buildings where necessary – and having friends to stay. The only other person here is someone I’ve heard of for years and always longed t
o meet, viz. Dadie Rylands [2] – is that a name to you? Cambridge’s answer to Maurice Bowra? You’d love him – not necessarily only because he’s such an authority on W Shakespeare, but because of the natural ebullience, high spirits, enterprise, & unexpectedness. He’s 72, never out of the sea, even in wind and rain, and walks so fast and far – actually running sometimes – over these damp mountains that all pant behind him. He was a great beauty when young, and I can well imagine that those blue eyes conquered all (Lytton Strachey, chief victim).

  Barbara’s dog charges into my bedroom every morning, jumps on the bed and curls up, and is then turfed off, always on the stroke of eight. It is known as the Ceremony of the Fleas.

  Tons of fond love,

  Paddy

  [1] Jacob, 4th Baron Rothschild (1936–). Elder son of 3rd Baron Rothschild and Barbara Hutchinson (who married, thirdly, the Greek painter Nikos Ghika). Financier, philanthropist and lover of the arts; first chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund 1992–8, chairman of the National Gallery 1985–91. Married Serena Dunn in 1961.

  [2] George (Dadie) Rylands (1902–99). Literary scholar, theatre director and legendary don at King’s College, Cambridge.

  28 May 1974

  Chatsworth

  Bakewell

  Darling Paddy,

  Ireland was lovely. I do wish you had been there to study it all. Andrew has TWO police cars wherever he goes, [1] one in front & one behind. The one behind pretends not to be one at all as the fellows are in (very) plain clothes.

  I had a jolly day with a burly team of woodmen, who were doing some clearing. We got to some thick ivy & stuff & I said look out, there might be some birds’ nests in that. The foreman said ‘Oh of course you have that commitment as well.’ Do admit.

  Now I’m back to the grindstone here. Well it’s a sort of grindstone.

  I dread this book of David Pryce-Jones about my sister Bobo. [2] He seems to be set on doing it. It can’t be any good because we don’t want it so aren’t giving any of the letters etc which are so brill & give an insight to her amazing character AND he didn’t know her. The only person who could possibly do it wd be Diana, who is the best writer and the best at everything out of our lot. It will be a great pest. He has interviewed everyone who knew her who submitted to an interview. I can now divide sheep from goats, viz. those who ring up & say What do you all think about it – shall I see him? And those who see him without so much as are we for it. Top of sheep is Penelope Dudley Ward [3] (who I haven’t seen for 25 years) & she FAITHFULLY phoned to say should she or shouldn’t she & immediately said of course she wouldn’t if we aren’t for the book.

  Top of the goats (so odd of the Bible to make goats into bad things when one thinks how one worships their bodies) is my sister Decca who, oddly, is for it. She took David PJ round old gov, ancient (92) parlourmaid etc etc. Can’t see the point. And there is a strong rumour the book is to be about MISFITS & that the Amery who was hanged as a spy [4] is one of the subjects.

  Well Bobo wasn’t a misfit. She was a round peg in a round hole & was a casualty of the foul war like millions of others. He could never see or possibly describe how funny she was.

  Bother it all – how I HATE books. The marvellous thing about yours is that they never appear, such a good thing. And if by any chance one does (a) read & (b) like a book it’s so awful when it’s finished.

  Well, there we are Whack. I wish you were here.

  Much love

  Debo

  [1] After Andrew Devonshire became a minister in the 1960s, and up until 1995, the Irish Government required that he have a strong police guard whenever he was at Lismore. Following the assassination of Lord Mountbatten by the IRA in 1979, the protection was extended to DD.

  [2] David Pryce-Jones’s biography, Unity Mitford: A Quest, was published in 1976.

  [3] Penelope Dudley Ward (1914–82). Actress and friend of DD’s brother, Tom. She was in Munich in the 1930s at the same time as Unity Mitford.

  [4] John Amery (1912–45). The son of a cabinet minister, he attempted to recruit British prisoners of war to fight with the Germans on the Russian front and was hanged for high treason.

  8 June 1974

  Mani

  Darling Debo,

  A propos of the great virtue of my books being their non-appearance – beware! The present one [1] is getting so long, Jock M [2] says it may have to be broken up into vols – so you can’t count on it.

  Iris’s Friedrich [Ledebur] turns up here in two weeks time, with two strapping boys by a later bed, as Frogs say. Do you know him? I love him, he’s like a splendid old stag out of the Tyrolese forests. Last time I saw him, he peered for a minute at the bridge of my nose, then said, in his cavernous voice: ‘Dat is good! You have Attila’s Bow!’ ‘What’s that, Friedrich?’ ‘Eyebrows dat vant to meet in the middle! Ven de Spartans had a baby, dey looked at de eyebrows. If dey had no Attila’s Bow, no good! Dey just TREW DEM AVAY.’

  Heaps of love,

  Paddy

  [1] A Time of Gifts, On Foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube covers the first stage of PLF’s voyage and took a decade to write. It was published in 1977 by John Murray (as were all of his books) thirty-four years after he set out on his walk.

  [2] John ( Jock) Murray (1909–93). Congenial and enterprising head of the dynastic publishing house. ‘A nimble and efficient tree surgeon and delightful company.’ (PLF)

  14 July 1975

  Chatsworth

  Bakewell

  Darling Whack,

  No news, except bumpkin stuff. The Council of the Royal Smithfield Club – top farmers & butchers from all over the British Isles, every accent from Devon to Aberdeen via Wales & Norfolk – met here on Thurs. Fifty of them. So the only room I could think of was the nursery, & there they sat good as gold on hard chairs. I offered the rocking horse, but they eschewed it, ditto high chairs & Snakes & Ladders.

  I really love those men, & it’s my last year as president. I shall miss it & them.

  Then they had lunch, then the wives were let in (so typical of England that they had to hang about till lunch was over) & of course they wanted to see the house. I said ‘I’ll meet you at the end of the tour.’ The first butcher was out in six minutes. I reminded him of Art Buchwald’s lovely article on How To Do The LOUVRE in six minutes [1] – but he’d never heard of Art Buchwald or the Louvre so I chucked it & took him to see some cattle, which he had heard of. A really good fellow.

  Much love

  Debo

  [1] One of the American humorist’s best-known articles, written in 1950, was about a fictional American tourist who tried to win the ‘Six-Minute Louvre’ race, taking in ‘the only three things worth seeing’, the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa and the Winged Victory. Buchwald described how the tourist made good time ‘under perfect conditions, with a smooth floor, excellent lighting, and no wind’.

  1 August 1976

  Chatsworth

  Bakewell

  Darling Paddy,

  Just had a visit from Lady Bird Johnson & her daughter Lynda for two nights. [1] Oh dear they were nice. I was quite overcome by such extreme niceness. You would have adored the daughter, all lively & agog for whatever was next. They were ½ dead by the time they left having seen this dump, Hardwick, Haddon & much countryside to boot.

  As they drove away I suggested Sudbury to which Lynda answered no we can’t Mother is just about housed out. What I often feel like.

  Much love

  Debo

  [1] Claudia (Lady Bird) Taylor (1912–2007). Married US President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1934. Their daughter Lynda was born in 1944. ‘They stayed at Chatsworth in the unprecedented drought and heat of that summer. I was sad that they saw the park and the Peak District brown instead of green, Texas-coloured and un-English.’ (DD)

  6 August 1976

  Mani

  Darling Debo,

  I’m beginning to feel rather excited about the Himalayas next month. (
I wish Andrew were coming.) As Joan and her hermit-bro and I are going in Jan to stay with our marvellous friend whom I don’t think you know, to wit Ian Whigham, [1] in a mangrove jungle in a Malayan creek, it suddenly occurred to me: why not hang about in India, instead of the vast expense of flying back and out again – and joining J and Graham as they pass through, taking wing for Malaya. I expect we’ll be clambering about those glaciers till the end of Oct or early Nov – so why not settle and write for two months in, say, Simla, and plum pudding in a residential hotel? I’m very excited about the idea. I do believe the hill station is deep in snow – the Hot Weather was the fashionable time. I love the idea of wandering through sheeted and dusty Government House, haunted by the tunes of Yip-i-yaddy and Tararaboomdeeay, and gazing across floors where my mum twirled when Rose of Simla. [2]

  I read a book about Government Houses in India [3] last year. One v good looking ADC of yore was Capt Ld Something Thynne; he was in charge of getting the ballroom ready – there were shady sitting-out nooks of palms and similar everywhere. The Vicereine, pointing to the darkest of all, asked the Kansâmah what it was. His whispered answer was ‘Lord Sahib’s Kissee-Kawasti’. (Kawasti = place, in Hindi. No offence meant here.) Ran says such a nook was generally known as the Kalajugga, i.e. the Dark Place.

  O the kalajuggas of the Soul . . .

  Another snatch from the same book. (Fortunately you can’t stop me if I’ve told it you before.) At a Viceregal Lodge dinner party, a v timid newly-arrived ADC at the end of the table was saying how quickly the dance tunes reached India from Blighty: the first tune the night before he’d only heard once in London. This remark chanced to coincide with a general silence, and the Vicereine called down the table and said ‘And what tune was that, Captain Jones?’