In Tearing Haste

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  [2] A party given by Ann Fleming to celebrate the publication of A Time of Gifts.

  [3] Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (1986). A sequel to A Time of Gifts, describing the second stage of PLF’s walk.

  15 March 1978

  Chatsworth

  Bakewell

  Darling Paddy,

  There is frenzied activity going on here because the dump opens next week & so I’ve got a glorious team of saints setting out the shop [1] & thinking of numbers & doubling them when pricing the GOODS.

  Joanna Bigham, Jock Murray’s daughter, is queen of calligraphy & puts the descriptions of the wares on tasteful cream-coloured paper & she has got a marvellous friend who waves her long thin hands over a stall which is covered by me with ghoulish SOUVENIRS & it immediately turns into Fortnum/Dior, so clever. I love shop keeping better than anything (except perhaps pedigree stock).

  The other thrill is that the BBC television has done me & Collie working sheep & it’s coming on tonight. I rather dread it because of my awful voice, but the dog didn’t do too badly.

  Much love

  Debo

  [1] DD had opened a gift shop in the Orangery at Chatsworth.

  21 March 1978

  Mani

  Darling Debo,

  I’ve just written to Andrew, the awful thing is, I thought I already had! I’ve sent it express, jumping at the Persian idea. [1]

  Lots of kind letters from total strangers – or people not glimpsed for 50 years – keep on coming in about that book. I’m rather unspoilt about this sort of thing and glory in them. What’s more, Jock writes that it really is selling well, so that’s something to put in one’s pipe and smoke.

  It’s pouring with rain here at the moment. Joan is in Athens, and the sea under the cliff makes a noise like angry lions at feeding time.

  No more now, darling Debo, except tons of love from

  Paddy

  [1] In the event, the Foreign Office dissuaded the party from walking in Iran because of the uprising against the Shah. Disappointed, they decided to head for the Pyrenees instead.

  3 April 1978

  Lismore Castle

  Co. Waterford

  Darling Paddy,

  I had to be Alan [1] this year & bring the car & the luggage & the dogs. All went smoothly. It’s years since I’ve done it & I note progress has been made since one drove up two planks at all angles to get on the foul boat to Mull. Lady Redesdale used to take a jerking rush. It was a miracle she didn’t land in the deep. (And her car had a board out of the floor so one saw the road rushing by under one’s feet.)

  One jolly well knows one’s in Ireland when the signposts say things like Two Mile Borris, Horse & Jockey, Galloping Green & Ovens. It doesn’t smell like it used to. Dublin doesn’t anyway. I suppose peat has been out for years. There are some TERRIBLE new buildings there. Nice ones with things like Liverpool Sack Hire Company written on them look as if they’re for the high jump. How I hate change.

  This place is much the same. Someone told me a woman had committed suicide by walking all the way to the river.

  The Irish Times has got a new trick of saving everything by reprinting several pages of itself of 50 years ago, & except for a bit about Lindbergh & an inflammatory speech of W Churchill’s it’s v hard to tell when those pages end & 1978 begins.

  Much love

  Debo

  No wonder people write to you about your book. I keep glancing & see their point.

  [1] Alan Shimwell (1933–). A long-time chauffeur at Chatsworth who also loaded for DD out shooting.

  14 July 1994 [1]

  Mani

  Darling Debo,

  Don’t groan! The enclosed is just a tidier, slightly topped and tailed version of our Spanish journey, recently inflicted on Andrew. But I was so horrified, picking up a carbon copy of it – the loops, erasions, and general mess – that I sorted it out a bit, to make it more presentable. I don’t know why, because it will only be scrutinised by some archivist in 100 years time; so do please destroy the first illegible screed, and replace it by this fairer copy, all for the sake of this greybeard yet unborn.

  But before stowing it away, look at the passage marked*, for pathos. Fond love,

  Paddy

  TRAVELS WITH ANDREW IN THE PYRENEES

  Saturday 16 September 1978

  Begun at Gavarnie

  Hautes Pyrénées

  Darling Joan,

  I caught the plane from Athens to Marseilles, arrived at three in the afternoon, wandered about the Vieux Port, caught the Toulouse train at 8 and dashed to the restaurant car full of hope and greed, only to find a cheerless cafeteria as bad as British Rail – cellophane snaquettes on a TV tray with elfin plastic cutlery – and munched miserably, the only mug in the place, complaining bitterly to the nice waiter, who hated it too.

  Suddenly, between Arles and Tarascon, it started to get mysteriously dark: it wasn’t only the cuisine that was awry: the moon over the Alpilles was vanishing fast until there was only a sliver of it left, and then none at all. ‘Et la lune fout le camp, par-dessus le marché,’ [2] the waiter croaked in the dark. It was a total eclipse neither of us had heard anything about, and rather eerie.

  After the Mani, Provence and Languedoc looked very green and beautiful in the recovered moonlight and I slumbered on until the kind waiter shook me awake at Toulouse – ‘Vite! Vite! N’y a que quatre minutes!’ [3] We galloped to a faraway platform with all my stuff, I jumped in and snoozed till we hissed into Pau at 3.30. Found a taxi at last, which took me five miles beyond Pau to the frightful NOVOTEL which is worse even than its name, a hideous and heartless complex in a wasteland with nothing in sight except a giant supermarket, a clump of petrol-pumps and a flyover. (It was the RV Andrew had wired to Athens, in all innocence.) Slept till 10 a.m. and found an army of German businessmen arriving for an industrial fair. So I started the trudge to Pau – no taxis, and no buses on Sunday – but got a lift on a truck and spent a solitary and happy day mooching about the town. A lot of it whispers of Victorian and Edwardian villeggiatura and English libraries and a vanished foxhunt, all gone now except for winter steeplechases. But there is a handsome spiked and towered castle above the tree-shaded Cade de Pau (a tributary of the Adour) full of tapestries and armour and memories of Marguerite de Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret and, above all, of Henri IV, who was born in one of the castle rooms and rocked in a cradle made of half a turtle’s shell trimmed with silver and gold, nestling now under a panoply of fleurs-de-lys. Bernadotte, the French revolutionary general, Napoleonic marshal and, finally, Charles XIV of Sweden, was born just down the lane.

  For lunch I had one of the trout that abound in these mountains and a sort of cassoulet – very good – washed down with Jurançon, a delicious dry white wine from hereabouts, which has irrigated and illuminated all our travels; at night, red and roughish Corbières, from a hundred miles or so further east, takes over. Then to the Béarn museum – I tried dropping the final N of Béarn, like Madame de Guermantes, [4] but met only blank looks, as though I were a bit wanting – and pondered the stuffed bears there, which they say are extinct, and querns, flails, sickles and rakes; then moved on to the rather charming Musée des Beaux Arts. I made friends with the lady of the Roncevaux Hôtel (half the price of our miserable shelter) which I slunk back to after dinner and a Fernandel film. Spent more of Monday buying odds and ends – a compass, a small rucksack – then back just as Andrew burst into the NOVOTEL in tearing spirits, bringing the good news that Xan was arriving from Spain next morning. So we were at the station at 10 a.m., only to learn that part of the tunnel had fallen in (just missing Xan), and he only arrived at noon. We feasted joyfully and caught the late-afternoon train to Tarbes and Lourdes, then on to Luz-Saint-Sauveur.

  In Pau the weather had been perfect, and has continued so, but a thin haze had veiled all the Pyrenees, an excellent omen; they say clarity presages
rain. We were soon zooming along deep wooded gorges with spikes and beech-forests turning russet above streams and waterfalls, reaching the little town of Gavarnie as the sun was setting. (It seems the caricaturist Paul Gavarni took his sobriquet from here. It became our base on Renée’s advice. It was the Feddens’ HQ long ago, and she had given Andrew lots of old marked maps from the time when Robin was preparing The Enchanted Mountains.) [5] It’s much more of a holiday resort than it was then, but it is pervaded just now by a valedictory fin-de-saison mood unnaturally prolonged by the miraculous weather. The only snag was the unobtainability of pack-animals. Troops of tourists amble and tittup up the valley and the beasts’ owners charge the earth, so what hopes. The Cirque de Gavarnie is an amazing three-quarters of a circle piled on three rock-bands in succeeding tiers with wonderful echoes and a waterfall that beats Sumatra. My ice axe was pinched in five minutes. Also, that lovely spiral-ash-plant, bought at Kenilworth cattle show.*

  We climbed up to the Cirque along the main valley next day, and back in a wide sweep through the forests; there was a slightly bolder march to the north next day and we got back in the gloaming. The third departure was upstream, threading valleys with a final haul over slippery acres of scree to the Pass of Boucharo where we had planned to spend the night, but missed the hut, so, down again and up next day as far as we could get by car to the same col. (I had meant to make a solitary higher loop through rocks and small glaciers to a famous upper pass called the Brèche de Roland, but the driver advised against it and I’m glad he did as night would have fallen, and it’s rather dangerous.) From the col where the unmarked border runs, we plunged down the Spanish slope into the old Kingdom of Aragon: it was very exciting, scree at first, then zigzag paths, then green bowls of Alpine meadow, sometimes with cattle grazing and sometimes with chestnut horses; then through wonderful woods of pine and forests of beech going gold and red, and whitebeam, juniper and giant box, everywhere full of birds, choughs wheeling in the pass, eagles high overhead and, on a low rock, a huge goshawk perched, as in Japanese pictures. On a steep slope we ran into a cheerful Cockney chap from Uckfield in Sussex, covered in tattooing, studying birds, and heading north to pick grapes in the Bordeaux country for fifty quid a week, a bed and all found.

  This breakneck descent brought us into an astonishing valley, the bed of the Ara River, crossed by an old rainbow-shaped bridge next to a ruined Romanesque church at Bujaruelo, and a rough inn with chorizo, black beans and wine like the purple ink my mother sometimes wrote in, and forest people with Aragonese smugglers’ faces. We slept under the beech trees and set off downhill, dropping into the Ordesa Canyon, where huge mountains towered on either side. Below these overshadowing woods a deep gorge of green glacier-water rushed through troughs of twisting rock and deep cliffs and rapids. Then, suddenly, our path was full of turmoil; silver-grey cows with fawn and cream patches, furry cloven ears and sulky white muzzles, were all in an awkward muddle, lowing for strayed calves and climbing on each others’ backs along the narrow path: massed mooing, horns clashing and bells clanking, goaded by hoarse drovers, the whole steep place was full of uproar and echoes.

  They were coming down from their summer to their winter pastures. We struggled through them and found a new set of drovers hanging about round another old bridge called the Puente de los Navarros: hollow-cheeked men padding about in espadrilles with flat berets tilted over their eyes, and armed with long goads. ‘¿Had we seen the herds?’ they all shouted in chorus: ‘¿Los ganados?’ The dust and the noise emerging from the canyon soon unpuckered their brows.

  Beyond the bridge the country suddenly opened in a great amphitheatre of mountains like the Bad Lands of Arizona and we advanced through a dream-like late afternoon down a gentle valley with haymakers raking and spreading the hay in newly-shorn water meadows where the sun turned the poplars to flames. We came on a wedding feast where all were blotto and were given wine under a plane tree while we watched them dancing slow and ceremonious jotas of great beauty.

  We trudged on to Torla, which juts over trees and the river on a buttress of rock. There was a grim windowless church with a tall belfry in a maze of cobbled lanes. One or two arched doorways had escutcheons over them, all the houses were roofed with slabs of schist, as in Thrace, and everything smelt of hay, smoke and cows. The herds we passed in the canyon soon flooded into the village, houses and yards and fields filled up with them, and the rest bumped on to the next day’s fair at Broto, a few miles further down, to be whisked off to Huesca and Saragossa. We slept at the small and only hostel called the Ballarín in a room giving on a steep fall of stone roofs and chimneys. The barkeeper had a very distinctively marked dog, which he said was English like us. ‘¿What kind?’ ‘¡It’s called a Bay-arg-lay!’ he told us: a beagle . . .

  In the morning we climbed about the steep left side of the Ara, beginning with lovely fields and hazel-woods, then beech and pine-forests with that tremendous circle of mountains to the east and the gap above them – the Brèche de Roland – which I long to cross one day. It was terrifically hot and we slept high in the woods for an hour after eating the lunch we had brought in our pockets, plunging down to the river in the late afternoon where another wonderfully hoary rainbow bridge spanned a deep and reedy stream which, as it was dammed a little further down with enormous boulders, was quite still. I dived in, shot twenty feet to the bottom, then to the top again, transformed into an ice-cube. We went back to the town with the returning local herds, stuffing with blackberries all the way, then to bed early with an alarm clock borrowed from the hotel people. The Spaniards are marvellous with their directness, their manners, their lack of graspingness and their concern.

  We had to wake a butcher at 5.30. There was brilliant starlight above the lanes and he drove us in his van up the valley in the dark past the Bridge of Navarros to the little inn and the ruined church at the head of the valley where we had had luncheon before. The butcher – Señor Bun – woke his innkeeper brother, who lit a fire under a giant horn chimney hung with sooty and cobwebbed hams, and cooked us breakfast. It was only beginning to get light when we crossed the bridge and started up through the woods. Andrew had a moment of discouragement on the steep slope and thought of returning in order not to delay us, but we cheered him up; spirits revived, we reached the watershed at the Port de Boucharo, then strolled back into France in a cloud of choughs. It was downhill all the way through canyons and meadows and flocks and herds till the Cirque de Gavarnie was all round us again. The little Hôtel Acazou greeted us like homing prodigals. They were a charming lot; they said they were much cheered by the high spirits, laughter and noise that came from our table of three, compared to some of the gloomy blighters they often got.

  On the morrow we got a lift to Tarbes – stowaways almost – in a charabanc full of hilarious Walloon pilgrims heading for Lourdes, all of them pretty tight. They abandoned their language now and then to crack improper jokes in French, making The Canterbury Tales immediately real. Thence by train to Bagnères-de-Luchon. (We started in Béarn at Pau, and at Gavarnie, went into Bigorre; then into Aragon at Torla, and now I think we are in Comminges, not far from the famous Abbey of St Bertrand, which I’ve always longed to see. Alas, it’s out of range.)

  The little spa Luchon is now desultorily closing for the season and we spent a delightful idle day. Unfortunately the mineral baths were already shut, but we made friends with the nice scholarly fogey who was curator of the museum and we planned the morrow’s assault over a giant relief-map. There were pictures of all the well-known visitors since early last century and of the izards, the wild goats of the Pyrenees, and of ibexes looking very like Cretan agrímia; bird-life too – not only stuffed eagles, lammergeiers, wrens, ospreys, and reed-buntings, but Liane de Pougy, Émilienne d’Alençon, Cléo de Mérode and La Belle Otéro, untinted and smiling oleographs, also stuffed.

  Luckily next day la chasse à l’isard was forbidden – ‘Ces gens-là tirent sur tout ce qui bouge’, [6] the curator had warned
us. We took a taxi in the dark as far as we could to the beginning of the climb; to the point, that is, where a landslide had recently tipped the road halfway down the mountain, and crept round the top of the gap, flashing our torches as it was still pitch dark; then followed the road for a few miles to the Hospice de France, shut up now, but thriving until the land slid: the lineal descendant of one of the chief staging points kept by the Templars and the Hospitallers for medieval pilgrims crossing the Pyrenees to Montserrat and St James of Compostela. It was daylight when we got there, and an enormous barrier of mountain loomed; meadows and woods at first, then steeper and steeper rocks and shale and scree, ending in sharp saw-teeth, leaning crags and sweeps of snow. We scaled this ascent, delighted to see how much better acclimatized we were. Andrew, blessing his stars he hadn’t chucked at Bouchero, now treads the ling like a buck in spring.

  All this was on the cold and shadowy side of the range: we were among bracken and moss and wild grasses white with rime; and blasts swept down through the gaps; and when we got to what seemed the final ledge, a new, grey, forbidding and unravelled palisade towered above. We wound and climbed through a chaos of rocks and passed les Boums du Port: they are four deep tarns of dark water reflecting almost sheer precipices; chimneys, landslides and white streaks of waterfall followed, until a final interminable-seeming zigzag carried us through a cleft about three yards wide between two soaring massifs. Nearly blown off our feet, we ran through it into blazing sunlight and Spain and flung ourselves down on the hot rocks. Eating apples, we gazed down into a wilderness of forests and rocks and meadows going down in layers and many brooks and out across a great ravine to Mount Aneto, the highest peak in the Pyrenees, a jagged spike above glittering snow-fields ribbed with fragments which have rolled down into the chasms, gathering snow like ammonites. They are the famous peaks of Maladeta and Fourcanada and beyond them lay Robin’s Encantats. The other side of this barrier, which joins the Pic de la Mine via the Col del Infierno, lay the mountains of Catalonia, which had been progressively revealed on the way up, range jutting beyond range, row after row threading south-east, showing pale and paper-thin and at last not to be discerned from a ghostly film of cloud. (Somewhere beyond, to the east, lie Montaillou and Monségur and the ghosts of hundreds of Albigensians, and the shade of Esclarmonde de Foix, all burnt; and the little state of Andorra.)