No more now, darling Debo, except tons of fond love from
Paddy
I say! Great news about the book. You’ll do something that’s a bloody marvel, mark my words.
18 January 1980
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
I was in foul London, dropped into WH Smith to buy the sort of mags which are my drug & there facing me on a shelf called BEST SELLERS was Shanks’s Europe [1] in paperback. Oh good. I bought one (imagine) because it’s so light & handy & you never know I might have a read. You would have been so pleased to see the display. What a thrill.
Last night I went to AN OPERA. The second in my life. It was a plan of Andrew’s in aid of the Putney Hosp for Incurables & good Cake came & turned it into a gala. One forgets between seeing her what a star she is & what incredible & wicked charm she has got. The Swiss conductor panicked & struck up ‘God Save The Queen’ when she was still walking round the back to get to her box & I heard her say Oh God & she flew the last few steps dropping her old white fox cape & didn’t turn round to see what would happen to it.
She does a wonderful sort of super shooting-lunch dinner, brought from Clarence House & handed round by her beautiful footmen in royal kit, between the acts; the cheeriest thing out. We were a bit stumped though because when she’d gone home we had to go to the Savoy & have a second grand dinner with the organisers. It was a bit of a test forcing down sole after Cake’s richest choc mousse. It’s tough at the top, I can tell you.
Now I shan’t go away again for ages because I must sit & work. The Editor [2] came (you didn’t know I’d got one did you, well I have) & looked over my prep & didn’t throw it in the fire which I thought he certainly would but told me to get on with it so I must because it’s haunting me.
What I can’t think is how people start books so I looked at two when I was staying at the Wife’s. One was Whyte-Melville & began something like ‘That’s a natty suit’ & the other was a thriller which began ‘The body lay face down on the track.’ Won’t do, do admit. So I looked at yours. ‘A splendid afternoon to set out.’ NO GOOD TO ME. Bother. Do send some suggestions.
Do you know about the museum in Austin, Texas? [3] Well, don’t throw anything away, doesn’t matter what, they’ll have the lot. They’ve got all Evie’s stuff, & Osbert [Sitwell]’s, & letters saying things like ‘Arriving on the 2.14 on Saturday so much looking forward to seeing you’ are put under glass and revered. I saw five big cardboard boxes with MITFORD written on them, asked to see, & they were Decca’s notes for her two most boring books (Trial of Dr Spock and Kind & Usual Punishment), big sheets of foolscap saying Call Helen 8 a.m. Well, really. So when I talked to her I said I’d seen them. She said she was about to throw them when Austin offered her $10,000 dollars for the twaddle. Amazing, eh.
Much love
Debo
I’ve found some good quotes in the D of Portland’s bumper book, [4] but the best is good old Hobbes who said ‘Reading is a pernicious habit, it destroys all originality of thought.’
[1] DD’s name for A Time of Gifts, from the Scottish expression ‘to use Shanks’s mare’ meaning to walk.
[2] Richard Garnett (1923–). DD’s editor at Macmillan.
[3] The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which holds an important collection of manuscripts of twentieth-century British, American and French authors.
[4] William Cavendish-Bentinck, 6th Duke of Portland, Men, Women and Things (1937). ‘A too discreet memory of what must have been a very charming man, married to the famous Winnie, whom I saw aged ninety-something, dressed in pale pink tulle, smothered in jewels and made-up to the eyes, at a Court ball – a sight never to be forgotten.’ (DD)
[February 1980]
Mani
Darling Debo,
Here’s a beginning. ‘Chap I. Our crest is a mouldywarp and you may well ask what that is as I did, well, it’s a mole and a more unsuitable emblem for my sisters and me it would be hard to hit on.’ [1] I’ll do better in my next.
Thank you so much for your letter, it’s just what I needed, packed with splendid stuff and many laughs, so you’ve nothing whatever to bother about, re the book, I mean. Just let it rip. Now. If you want a pal to go through the thing during or afterwards, I’m your man. You probably want nothing of the sort; but I always let a stern though friendly eye peer through it, usually Joan’s, sometimes several, just to get the full works. The thing is, they’ve got to be fond of one, know what one likes and give one a touch on the shoulder or elbow when one inadvertently puts something down one would regret rather. I get so close to the stuff (my own, I mean) that my eye and ear get a bit out and a detached loved one can be a godsend. I don’t mean grammar or style or syntax because the publishers will do all that and, anyway, in your case, the less it’s mucked about with the better.
The great thing about our Spanish trip was the actual journeys in late December. Xan and Magouche met us at Madrid, and we drove to the Escurial, and stayed there in the bracing cold. Have you seen it? Bleak and splendid is the word, half palace, half monastery, all granite, full of dead kings, with a bell that goes on vibrating half a minute after each toll. Next night at Ávila, the coldest town in Spain (but marvellous), it looks like one’s childhood idea of Troy: a city entirely girdled by a battlemented city wall, the green hill now white under snow, with seven great gates and 88 towers. We huddled rugged-up over the charcoal brazier of our inn, sipping toddy and reading out loud. Then a swoop south to the huge Abbey of Guadeloupe, where a Black Virgin is enthroned above a high altar which is a haunt of smells and lace. Their abode above Ronda has become delightful, with thick walls, blazing fires, mountains all round, twenty minutes’ walk to the amazing town, where a wonder-bridge spans a deep chasm full of swallows. One day we climbed up into some mountains and looked down on Gibraltar and the Mediterranean & the Atlantic hanging in space, with Jebel Musa, the other pillar of Hercules, on the Moroccan side; then the Riff Mountains; then the faraway glitter of the Atlas . . .
In mid-Jan, we set off for Portugal, driving through the cork woods of Estremadura where black swine rootled everywhere, dossing down at Évora; we made a dash to the Atlantic coast at Setúbal (where the B.V. Mary rides on an elephant on one of the church walls), and across the Tagus into stately Lisbon. Next stops, Cascais, Cintra and Nazaré (back on the coast) eating prawns by the bucketful and crabs encased in shells so huge and hard they give you weighty mallets to break in like a burglar. The beautiful old city of Coimbra next, with beautiful baroque library, on through castles and abbeys – especially Alcobaça, where a trout-stream dashes bubbling through the gigantic kitchen, and Batalha, where a Plantagenet Princess Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt and mother of Henry the Navigator, lies in a splendid tomb. From Oporto we wandered upstream beside the Douro, sipping at many romantic quintas; then plunged on north, through Braga, and over the Spanish border again into the Galician mountains, to Santiago de Compostela, a maze of cathedrals, monasteries and lanes, filled, on the feast of St James the Apostle, who ended up here, with swarms of pilgrims. The place is then wreathed in smoke from a censer several yards wide, which is perilously swung by teams on the great Feast Days.
We broke up here, after a wonder trip. They drove on to León, and Salamanca and then south. Joan and I flew to Madrid and stopped a night in Barcelona, one of my favourite towns in the world.
There’s a grand hotel here called the Oriente, where they gave us an enormous suite rather cheap. We soon saw why: no lights were plugged in, rooms were choked with half-a-dozen towel-horses and hat stands, the corners of the vast bedrooms were dark with cobwebs and mousetraps ready-set, and crumbled biscuit. We ended a lovely exploring day with a feast on the Ramblas (the main street), and I saw Joan back and decided to continue my research, so had a brandy and water in a lane in which every house was a bar. The kind host stood me this. My next port of call was an Andalusian joint – I was drawn in by the sound of cl
apping, and ordered a beer at the bar, watching a party of twenty at another table, some of them gipsies, strumming guitars, singing, clapping in rhythm, and occasionally getting up to twirl and stamp out a seguidilla, malagueña or similar dance; then shouting for more drink. What a nice way to spend an evening, I thought. I was the only other customer. The host, a rather seedy, smooth and bald figure, asked what I was. Inglés I said, and he patted me on the back and pointed to an enormous moth-eaten stuffed bull’s head on the wall, over crossed banderillas. ‘You see that bull?’ he said. ‘I killed him in the ring in Valencia thirty years ago. They don’t have horns like that now.’ ‘What? You’re a matador?’ I said. ‘You’ve cut your pigtail?’ (Cortar la coleta, cribbed from Hemingway, means ‘to resign from the ring’.) More slaps on the back, then he left me. After half an hour I thought I’d move on somewhere else, plonked down on the bar the equivalent of a quid to pay for the beer I’d drunk and waited for the change. ‘£5 – in pesetas,’ the barman said. I said, ‘What rot.’ He burst into a frenzy and all of a sudden I was surrounded by all the twenty from the table, screaming and shaking their fists, closing in. I shouted ‘Where’s the gentleman who was a matador?’ – I could see him skulking in the background – and there was a moment’s silence. ‘¿What matador?’ they all cried. ‘¡Him!’ I said, pointing, ‘who killed that bull up there in Valencia thirty years ago!’ They all turned on him at this: he’d never been in a bullring in his life, except in the 7/6ds. But they soon turned back on me, including the ‘matador’. I remembered a useful phrase and cried ‘¿Where’s your Castilian sense of honour?’ ‘¿Donde esta su honor castellano?’ This gave them another moment’s pause, but only a moment. The barman, inside his rampart, stooped down and straightened up brandishing a club, three feet long, came out and started whirling it round his head, and towards me, all the others still shouting. I managed to get another moment’s silence by pointing to the club, then to the top of my dome and saying ‘¡This gentleman desires to strike me with that piece of wood (didn’t know “club”) on top of my head! ¡Este señor quiere tocarme con esta pieza de leño aqui sobre mi cabeza!’; ‘¡Si! Si!’ he cried, his eyes rolling round and round, breaking into a war dance. With really wonderful coolness (non-swanks) I smote the bar and said ‘¡Not a peseta more!’ and walked firmly and quite slowly to the door.
Two of the party followed me into the street, not to clock me, but to reason with me, as my last exclamation had been ‘¡Verguenza!’ viz. ‘¡Shame!’ – perhaps fearing a complaint. I strode off in a seething fury, found three uniformed policemen coming down a side lane, and urged them to return to the bar, which they did. The people all came out into the street, rather cowed now; but apparently this particular brand of police weren’t allowed inside premises, they were only for keeping order in the streets. They advised me to go to the police station, so off I set, feeling a bit milder, and suddenly thought, ‘What the hell!’, started laughing, and headed for the Ramblas, and was soon having a beer for about 2/6 at an amazing drugstore, full of all the low life of Barcelona. Lots of male and female tarts. As I finally left – about 4 a.m. now – you know Spanish hours – a marvellous-looking tart, eyelashes a foot long, standing between two queer pals, one tough, the other willowy, tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘¿Which of them do you want? ¿Him? or ¿Him?’ pointing at both of them in turn; then at herself, ‘¿Or perhaps me?’
Well, I mean to say . . .
When I got up to the suite, Joan was fumbling her way like a sleepwalker through the jungle of towel-horses to the bathroom, so I told her the whole saga, and our laughter must have put the wind up the mice in the wainscoting. I felt very set up by the whole evening.
No more now, I’ve gone on too long, and less legibly every second. Do send another smashing letter soon; and
Tons of fond love, as ever from
Paddy
[1] The Mitford family emblem is a mole.
13 March 1980
(My Dad’s birthday, he’d have been 103)
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Now then. What are Hoary Morning, Bedfordshire Foundling, Seek No Further, Dutch Minion, Hanwell Souring, Striped Monstrous, Reinette and Hall Door? [1] RSVP pronto. If you get the answer I will give you a prize, not quite sure what.
Woman is the undoubted star of J Jebb’s film on the Ancient Dame of France. She is amazing. There’s a good scene of her sitting on a tree stump on the banks of the Windrush reading the Chubb Fuddler. [2]
I am exactly like a headmistress about to retire, terribly boring & matter of fact & awful to look at.
Much love
Debo
[1] Varieties of apple.
[2] In Nancy Mitford: A Portrait by her Sisters, a television documentary by Julian Jebb, Pamela Jackson read out a passage from Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate (1949) describing Uncle Matthew’s annual treat: the arrival of the Chubb Fuddler, who sowed some ‘magic seed’ on the river, which brought the fish to the surface, ‘flapping, swooning, fainting, choking, thoroughly and undoubtedly fuddled’.
9 April 1980
Mani
Darling Debo,
Back two or three days ago after your Uncle Harold’s prize-collecting [1] visit to Athens. He was glorious. Such a relief to hear his short, funny, scholarly, charming and deeply moving speech – ex tempore, except for what looked like half a sheet of crumpled lav. paper which he peered at only once – after the booming of Madame Simone Veil, [2] foghorned from twelve pages of typescript, one predictable cliché after another. There were lots of banquets, pretty boring ones, including a solemn feast with the President of the Republic, which was nicer than it sounds, as his wife is the sister of our dead poet friend, George Seferis. All sorts of jaunts were involved. Last Monday we were all flown to Olympia, which Joan and Michael Stewart and I wandered round in the wake of Mr MacM., all of us nipping off into the pine trees for secret swigs of ouzo when the bearleading archaeologists weren’t looking. Nice grandson Adam. [3] The next day, this small party were piled into a beautiful yacht, and sailed to Salamis – where Mr M. recited yards of Æschylus – then to the temple of Aphaia on Aegina where we had a glorious banquet of lobster and John Dory under the plane trees’ shade.
A visit to Marathon followed next day and another feast, all great fun, organised by Michael Stewart and, a bit, me. The hero was a wonder throughout, v funny, particularly good on the Blunt scandal breaking the day your catalogue appeared in the Exhibition – ‘sold out and reprinted same day!’ [4] He also stimulated everyone by explaining that the war of Troy was nothing whatever to do with ‘Helen’, who was getting rather long in the tooth anyway, but all about a beautiful young mare that the Trojans had pinched from the Greeks – ‘Can’t you see her, being trotted past those old Trojans, a beautiful chestnut with four white socks and a blaze, and a flowing mane and tail? They wanted to improve their bloodstock! The Greeks came to get her back and that Wooden Horse business was just a horsebox!’
I do envy you all at Lismore.
Tons of love from
Paddy
[1] Harold Macmillan, Chairman of the British Acropolis Appeal Committee, had been awarded the Onassis International Prize.
[2] Simone Veil (1927–). French lawyer and politician, elected first female President of the European Parliament in 1979.
[3] Adam Macmillan (1948–). Son of Harold Macmillan’s only son, Maurice.
[4] ‘I was in Fort Worth for the opening of the exhibition Treasures from Chatsworth: The Devonshire Inheritance at the Kimbell Art Museum in November 1979. The scholarly catalogue was written by Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, who stayed at Chatsworth several times when working on it. I was often alone with him at meals and thought him cold, distant and uncommunicative. I turned on the television at dawn on the day of the grand opening party to see Blunt’s angular face and the sensational news of his exposure as a Soviet spy. There were hurried discus
sions as to whether the catalogue should be withdrawn. It was not and it sold like hot cakes.’ (DD)
29 July 1980
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
Will you do a v kind thing, write just how that tale goes re Derek Jackson [1] at a conference. Please. I know it’s a pest, but I can’t remember how it went.
No news. 6000 Scouts & Guides are camping in the park. Goodness knows what happens when darkness sets in.
Much love
Debo
[1] Derek Jackson (1906–82). The distinguished physicist, amateur jockey and heir to the News of the World married, as his second wife, DD’s sister Pamela 1936–51. He subsequently remarried four times.
6 August 1980
Mani
Darling Debo,
Scene A Roman palace where an international congress on nuclear physics is taking place.
Time During a morning recess between lectures, a number of years ago.
Dramatis Personae Derek Jackson and another English delegate. They are strolling under the arcades during the break.
Other English Delegate ‘I’m told we’ve got an extraordinary fellow delegate on this congress. English, too.’
Derek Jackson ‘Really? Who?’
O. English Delegate ‘Well, he’s not only a brilliant nuclear physicist, but he was a famous pilot during the [war] – covered with decorations, and all that – and rode three times in the Grand National and dashed nearly won it. It seems he’s one of two identical twins and got married to one of those Mitford girls, you know.’
Derek Jackson ‘I say, before you go any further, I think I ought to tell you that I’m the chap in question.’
In Tearing Haste Page 22
