In Tearing Haste

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Capt Jones: (paralysed with shyness) ‘ “You’ll remember my kisses”, Your Excellency, “when I have forgotten your name”.’

  Enough of this. Strike up the fifes and drums! (Thackeray, Rose and the Ring)

  Tons of love, darling Debo, and v many thanks again,

  Paddy

  [1] ‘A delightful man, rather formal-looking, piercing blue eyes, a cheerful face. Extremely gifted for languages, drawing, painting and talking. He loved buying houses – Tuscany, Thailand, Malaysia – doing them up and selling them after a few years’ sojourn. Much in our life as he was a great friend of Joan’s brother, Graham.’ (PLF)

  [2] PLF’s mother, Muriel Eileen Ambler (1890–1977), came from a family with links with India. Married Lewis Leigh Fermor in 1909.

  [3] Mark Bence Jones, Palaces of the Raj: Magnificence and Misery of the Lord Sahibs (1973).

  Christmas Day [1976]

  Benares

  Hotel Clarks

  Varanasi

  BenaresIndia

  Darling Debo,

  Well, we did have a time in the Himalayas, and as usual, I think it was the greenhorn – viz. me – who enjoyed it most, and it would have been perfect if poor Robin [Fedden] hadn’t felt so rotten in the middle of it. I expect you’ve heard all about our adventures by now; anyway, I sent Joan enormously long letters – rather like the ones from Peru – which I’ll get done in several copies, and send you in the fullness of time. [1] Please tell Andrew that I missed him enormously – when together we managed to inject a frivolous note into things which I didn’t quite pull off on my own. We all broke up in Delhi: Robin returned to England – Carl Natar and Peter Lloyd [2] had already gone – and Renée and her newly arrived friend, Rosemary Peto, [3] and Myles Hildyard [4] buzzed off to the south of the subcontinent, bent on temples; and I returned to the hills again, heading for Simla.

  This was marvellous. I managed (on advice, and by help of, Penelope Betjeman, [5] in a letter waiting there) to be allowed to stay in a seldom-used Government guest house, which was the Hot Weather haunt of the Governors of the Punjab – huge, rambling, half country-house, half wooden-beamed cottage, flagpole on lawn, monkeys from Jakko Hill overhead clattering all over the red corrugated-iron roof – I thought they were gigantic rats, when I heard the noise on the first night – but saw them trooping along the roof next morning holding each other’s tails like the Banderlog in The Jungle Books. There was a weeping willow on the lawn, grown from a cutting from one over Napoleon (Bonaparte’s) tomb in St Helena.

  My bedroom led off the gallery looking down into the ballroom. The décor designed by R. Kipling’s father – enormous beams, chandeliers, displays of Afghan swords, spears, shields, helmets still on the walls, the lances of disbanded Cavalry regiments with threadbare pennants crossed – a very haunted place. The only other occupant was a nice sad chap from Perth, Western Australia, called Stan Hardisty, advising the Himalayan government about apple growing. We were dining together one night, talking about the faults of Indian fruit-tree planting and eating a blazing hot curry, when he put his fork down and said earnestly that they did not use enough spice, which seemed to me odd, as I was on fire. It took me some time to twig that he meant the Indians didn’t plant their trees far enough apart. He had an odd experience last year, he told me. He was born with a hare lip (since operated, but just detectable), and so was his little son. They were going for a walk on Jakko Hill when a she-monkey started jumping up and down and screeching; she had a hare lip too. Making urgent signs for them to wait, she went trapezing up to the top of a deodar, and came hurtling down again, with a tiny monkey in her arms, ALSO with a hare lip, which she held up chattering joyfully.

  The town – or village – half Surrey architecture, half baronial – goes on forever, along a sharp ridge, with roofs tumbling away into canyons on either side, dominated by Jakko Hill, with hundreds of mountain ranges whirling away in all directions like a half-created world rising from primordial smoke – then level layers of blue mist, a dazzling sky and on the N Horizon, the snowy peaks of Kulu, Spiti & Lahoul where we have just been climbing, all gleaming & flashing; and the mountains of the Chinese–Tibet border. Viceregal Lodge – now a seldom-used sort of Indian All Souls – rather impressive: four posters floating above the clouds . . . But never a European face in the lanes, everything rather run down – old eyes might well up. In former days, much revolved round amateur theatricals at the charming little Gaiety Theatre, where I found three photographs (1930) of my sister Vanessa [6] playing the lead in The Constant Nymph, still hanging on the wall of the dress circle, the names all neatly inscribed; and in Simla Past and Present [7] there are nice mentions of my mama on the same stage: 1917 Two Sisters, ‘a wordless play in which . . . the beautiful Mrs Fermor held the audience breathless’. I like the wordless actresses and the breathless listeners . . . and again, in 1918, in a review called ‘High Jinks’ where Mrs F sang ‘Oh, Johnny!’ and ‘The Kipling Walk’. I wrote about all this lingering fame to my ma. She was pleased.

  There is one old Englishwoman called Hermione Montague – one of four stayers-on from the Raj in Simla – who made Simla Past seem very real. She’s 86 – my mother’s age – looks rather like Diana Cooper, very funny, spry, and charming, a great beauty of yore and still. Stan Hardisty and I asked her to dinner at our joint – candles & blazing fire in the ex-Governor’s huge dining room, bearers in smart puggris. The electricity failed while we were having coffee, so we wandered all over the building, candles in hand. In the ballroom, I asked her: who were the best dancers in her heyday? She said, ‘Well, there was Hamilton Thompson, in the Guides Cavalry – always known as the Black Rabbit, I can’t think why – and the other – the other, my dear, was called Brocas Howell.’ I knew she was going to say that name a second before she uttered it, and chimed in simultaneously. I’d heard lots about this tall, fair, heart breaker of late Edwardian, early Georgian days, from my mother, who must have had a bit of a soft spot for him. Mrs Montague admitted she very nearly eloped with him from Jullanadar in 1913. ‘He was such a charming fellow . . .’ She WAS surprised when I answered simultaneously, lots of wonder and laughter in the shadowy ballroom! She lives in a rambling house on Elysian Hill, full of pictures of dashing relations in kilts and turbans, pig-sticking spears, snaps of herself grasping gymkhana cups, five old Moslem servants, the curtains almost permanently drawn. She gave me a charming watercolour of an officer being carried in a palanquin, for my mother; and five other pictures of a vanished India, for me. You’d have loved her. She was full of ancient gossip straight out of Plain Tales from the Hills, by R. Kipling, a closed book to you, alas.

  I scribbled away happily in this mountain eyrie for a month and, a few yards from the shady nook on the lawn where I had set up my table, was a deodar tree with a gravestone at its foot, inscribed on it was: ‘the grave of / Coonah / the faithful dog / and affectionate companion / of Lady Gomm / through 12 years / May 11, 1851’. Six years before the Mutiny.

  I descended from the hills, spent a night in the waiting room at Amritsar, surrounded by sleeping figures like the sheeted dead, who resurrected with me to catch the early train to Lahore, over the Pakistan border, the old capital of the Punjab. The 1000 nights and 1 night! A mosque with the biggest courtyard in the world, a huge red Moghul fort, lanes and alleys of sinister romance, and ‘Zam-Zammer’ – the cannon beside which Kim met the Lama. Then to the Sikhs’ golden temple at Amritsar, and on to Amballah. (I was roughly following the trail of Kim & the Lama, in fact, which has long been an obsession.) This was a haunted town, an overgrown ex-cantonment, full of old bikes and cars rotting and rusting in the sun. I spent hours in the English cemetery there, entered through a gothic octagon, rather like those gates near Lismore. All overgrown with fern and brambles, mynahs and parakeets in the peepal branches and creepers everywhere: ‘Our darling Bertie, aged 6, 1842’, ‘Jack and Cissie Rigley, 1870’, ‘Willm Orlebar Harvey, 2nd Lieut. Royal Munster Fusiliers, Feb 1898, aged 22. Je n
’oublierai jamais’, ‘Our darling Dody, infant son of Sgt & Mrs Duncan, Black Watch, 1903’, ‘Farrier Major Smith’, ‘Bugle Major Turner’ – I was looking at the cracked and overgrown tomb of the last when an enormous hare jumped out, gave me a look, and loped off into the near-jungle, going to earth behind a tilted obelisk, commemorating the death by cholera of 17 officers, NCOs and men of the D of Albany’s Highlanders in 1840. Meanwhile a troop of about 200 buffaloes was shuffling by beyond the railings in a vast dust cloud, attended by nearly naked drovers, v slowly!

  Next, Dehra Dun, and back into the Himalayas at Mussoori, full of forests and the distant snows of Tibet, down through Meerut where one of Martyn Beckett’s wives [8] once lived in the square, and so back to Delhi, to meet Joan, who had taken wing from Athens. We had a v nice lunch with Antonia Fraser’s bro, Michael Pakenham, [9] then off to Gwalior where a marvellous fort scowls on a hilltop and the Maharajah has solid glass furniture, port decanters that circulate in a miniature silver train and a guest-house of the purest Oxford bags, Lalique and ukulele period. Then to the Buddhist remains of Sanchi, then by train to Lucknow, and wandered in the beautiful battered ruin of the Residency; then to Benares, viz. here. I couldn’t resist the carol service in St Mary’s Church this morning (a great change from the Burning Ghat yesterday). Congregation of I8, five of them Europeans: ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’, ‘We Three Kings’ etc. As we came out, an elephant passed with a load of hay, stowed safely sternward out of trunk-reach of yoke fellows, followed by twelve camels similarly laden, but no myrrh or frankincense. There’s a gala dinner tonight! Joan (who sends love) and I suspect it will begin with Father Krishna in a sledge drawn by white oxen.

  No more for the moment, except Happy Christmas & New Year to one and all, and tons of fond love as ever from

  Paddy

  [1] ‘Paradox in the Himalayas’ appeared in the London Magazine, December 1979– January 1980, reprinted in Words of Mercury, pp. 73–82.

  [2] Peter Lloyd (1907–2003). Mountaineer and engineer. President of the Alpine Club 1977–80.

  [3] Rosemary Peto (1916–98). After being married to 10th Earl of Sandwich 1934– 58, and producing seven children, her friendships were mostly with women. ‘Rather splendid, great guts and dash, rather like an 18th-century admiral painted by Romney or Sir J. Reynolds.’ PLF to DD, 1 February 1992.

  [4] Myles Hildyard (1914–2005). Keen amateur historian who lived at Flintham Hall in Nottinghamshire. He was awarded an MC in 1942 for his daring escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in Crete, described in It Is Bliss Here: Letters Home 1939–1945 (2005).

  [5] Penelope Chetwode (1910–86). The writer and traveller, an old friend of Joan Leigh Fermor, had grown up in northern India and often returned to the subcontinent. Married the poet John Betjeman in 1933.

  [6] Vanessa Leigh Fermor, PLF’s older sister, married Jack Fenton in 1931. They had two children, Francesca and Miles.

  [7] Edward John Buck, Simla Past and Present (1904).

  [8] Martyn Beckett often sang Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Ladies’ and accompanied himself on the piano.

  [9] Michael Pakenham (1943–). Diplomat who was at the British Embassy in New Delhi. Younger brother of the biographer Antonia Fraser (1932–).

  22 April 1977

  Mani

  Darling Debo,

  For some reason Joan has given up the Sunday Papers, and I long to see the reviews of Lady Mosley’s book. [1] You couldn’t possibly lend me any you happen to cut out – spare – to be returned at once. I enjoyed it enormously, and I must say your other sister’s too. [2] I wish you would write a book like everyone else, the abstention looks rather ostentatious; and you wouldn’t have to read it; someone else (viz. one) would do that.

  Tons of fond love

  Paddy

  [1] Diana Mosley’s memoirs, A Life of Contrasts (1977).

  [2] Jessica Mitford’s second volume of autobiography, A Fine Old Conflict (1977).

  16 May 1977

  Lismore Castle

  Co. Waterford

  Darling Paddy,

  Re books, chiefly Mitford ones. The awful thing is I’ve thrown away the reviews. I knew it was stupid at the time, sorry. Now there is a new flood re Decca’s effort. Not so rave as I expected, but good enough I suppose.

  It’s too long to go into but I shall be thankful when the mags have something else in them. One lovely thing was Private Eye, & Twiggy [1] as ‘Doreen Mitford’ whose dazzling memoirs are about to appear etc etc. She looks exactly like all my sisters rolled into one. So funny because I saw her in the flesh at a film premiere which Cake took us to, and said loudly to Andrew all that, so true.

  I went to London for the day last week, Foyle’s lunch for Diana. [2] So really nice to see her fêted. I sat one off an actress called Phyllis Calvert. [3] She leaned across our neighbour & said I know who you are, you’re Mrs Bruce. I had to say I wasn’t in case she got further into the mire, but DO ADMIT because Mrs Bruce is 83 & is famous because she looped the loop last month in a weeny aeroplane. [4]

  Later

  I’m hurrying home for Martyn Beckett’s Arabs – the bro of the Ruler of Bahrain may want a palace & Martyn has designed a winner, but to encourage him up M asked if he’d like to see a big English house & good gracious he’s said Yes & looms.

  A telex came of likes & dislikes. We’ve got to welcome him with Fruit Juice, Nuts & Toffees. Quaint. I must keep Collie’s shadow off his food, & only just stopped the new cook from putting a ham in to soak. I don’t want Martyn to have his head cut off.

  Cowslips galore. Made friends with two County Council workmen who are doing a marvellous job of opening up paths round the lodges (for the tourists, oh pathos) & I asked them how they get to work – ‘We BOIK, under our own steam’. More people ought to do that, & happiness might set in.

  I quite see about not having to read my own book, but I may have a shot at yours. What a wait.

  Keep in deepest. Much love

  Debo

  [1] Lesley (Twiggy) Hornby (1949–). Like the Mitfords, the 1960s supermodel and actress had blond hair and blue eyes.

  [2] A Foyle’s Literary Luncheon was given for the publication of A Life of Contrasts.

  [3] Phyllis Calvert (1915–2002). After a career in films, the actress starred mainly on the stage and television.

  [4] Mildred Mary Petre (1895–1990). The world-record-breaking aviatrix and motor racer had looped the loop in a two-seater De Havilland Chipmunk.

  6 December 1977

  Mani

  Darling Debo,

  ’Tis the pen of the sluggard! I wish I hadn’t let all these days pile up before writing. You must think I’m an ingrate; but I won’t compound my misconduct by burdening you with excuses – all of them tip-top, and absolutely watertight! It was lovely coming to stay, and culling those mushrooms and observing the tremendous progress made by you and Collie. I could watch that performance for ever. [1] Also, you were a true saint to appear at both those parties for one’s book. I loved them, and the last one, with all that noise, must have been very surprising for the staff in the Ritz, [2] and very good for them, after endless solemn banquets for the boards of city companies. All this, and too kind words said and written about A T. of G turned the stay into a glorious sojourn, largely thanks to you; and v many thanks, and with knobs on.

  We had a lovely drive across France and Italy with Coote in her car – gazing at rose-windows and flying buttresses and eating our heads off at various serious and starry restaurants across Champagne and Burgundy. You’ve no idea how lovely those vineyards looked, with all the leaves russet and golden, clothing the hillsides for miles and miles as geometrically as designs on candlewick counterpanes. We stopped two nights in Grenoble, then crossed the Alps in a downpour after a draughty watershed night in Briançon, and coiled down into the Lombard plain, swallowing pasta by the furlong now, instead of chicken in half-mourning surrounded by button-mushrooms peeping through the beige. In Tuscany we stayed with Ian W
higham, who I don’t think you know, except through my going on about him year after year. He’s a glory, immensely funny and intensely nice. You’d love him. We had a rude shock in Brindisi; while we were having a pre-ferryboat supper in a trattoria, thieves made off with Coote’s car. When we emerged, there it wasn’t. It was found gutted of all its contents – had been up to the roof with things for the house, plus all one’s garments assembled over the years – surrounded by odd socks scattered in the mud, letters whirled there in their haste by the robbers – on a rubbish dump on the outskirts. We hunted in the mire and brambles for hours, gazed on by the unhelpful louts of Brindisi . . . It was a blow. Endless hours were spent in different Carabinieri headquarters, while they typed with one finger. They are proverbially thick-witted. ‘Do you know how to burn a carabiniere’s ear?’ Italians ask each other. ‘Ring him up when he’s ironing his trousers.’ Anyway the car still went, so we came here, and marvellous it is (you know what I usually insert here. Take it as read, but do act on it). I’m hard at work on Vol II. [3] Chastening to think you’ll never read it or its forerunner, but good for one I expect.

  When I arrived here, a letter from my sister Vanessa told me that my mother had died suddenly and peacefully five days after I’d set out. Thank heavens I’d been down to Brighton frequently. She’d had two strokes, memory very faulty and another might have reduced her to vegetating, which she would have loathed. We’d had several laughs and she had managed to read my book twice, and was frightfully bucked by my mentioning her learning to fly, in the Introduction. She was nearly 88.

  Joan sends love, me too and fond hugs,

  Paddy

  [1] DD and her Border Collie were practising for a television programme. ‘Her handling of sheep dogs is marvellous to watch; with short whistles and a few syllables she makes him guide, lead, head off, and then halt a flock of 20 sheep. It looks close to sorcery.’ PLF, Daily Telegraph, 31 March 2000.