‘Edith and Sachie and both Osberts and Vita
All packed into Rose’s four seater.’
Nice about the weight of the Queen’s tiara, and you hiding yours, [1] like sneaking one’s tie off when nobody else is wearing one.
Ages ago, I went to a party given by Brig. West. Everyone was tightish. Daph, still Bath, was curled up in a ball next to a chair where Duff C[ooper] was sitting, covered in medals and decorations. Daph was wearing a tiara, as they’d all been to a Court ball. Daph was so rapt in talk and laughter that she didn’t even notice or pause when Henry [Bath], on the point of buzzing off with Virginia, said, ‘I think I’d better take that’, neatly uncoiled the bauble from Daph’s hair, and slipped it into the pocket in the tail of his tail coat, and stalked away. Daph was amazed a bit later by its absence, until we reassured her. I thought for a moment that it might have been later on the same night when I came and collected you from a ball at the Savoy, and took you on to another in Chelsea – whose? – a lovely evening.
No more for the moment.
Lots of love
Paddy
Was the ball at the Savoy given by someone called Christie-Miller? A yearly event? One year, they say, David Cecil [2] was hastening to it along the Strand, when a tart stopped him and said, ‘Would you like to come home with me, dear?’ and he answered, ‘I can’t possibly. I’m going to the Christie-Millers’.’
[1] The Devonshire diamond tiara, a large and imposing piece, was made in 1893 for the 8th Duke’s wife. ‘My grandmother-in-law, Evelyn, Duchess of Devonshire, was Mistress of the Robes to Queen Mary for 43 years. Together she and Queen Mary weathered long hours of tiara-ed evenings. After one particularly lengthy engagement, Granny was heard to say, “The Queen has been complaining about the weight of her tiara . . . the Queen doesn’t know what a heavy tiara is.” I once wore this tiara to a dance at Windsor and realised when I arrived that I was the only one so bedecked. As soon as I could, I took it off and shoved it under a sofa.’ (DD)
[2] Lord David Cecil (1902–86). Scholar, biographer and Professor of English Literature at Oxford.
1 May 1996
Mani
Darling Debo,
Talk about Fermor’s echo being silenced through too much water, the whole landscape here has changed because of the winter-long deluge. It’s turned into what Xan called I.J.S. (‘I.J.S.? What’s that?’ ‘Impenetrable jungle, Sir!’ It always worked.) Wild grasses and flowers and weed have shot up a yard, the branches droop laden with leaves and blossom, so one stoops through a foot-wide space between the two. The cats have gone mad tearing about the I.J.S., ambushing and pouncing on each other, thinking they are lions. I must say, they look just like them, though smaller, of course.
There are sudden woods of wild glads of a poignant hue, also tortoises are coming out and courting each other, sounding through the glades like guests in horn-rimmed spectacles embracing at a cocktail party.
Joan and I have decided to give this place to a wonderful institution called the Benaki Museum, [1] who long for it, one lives in it for as long as one of us, still surviving, is still on the scene, then they take it over and look after it forever. They are terribly nice – well they must be, to hanker for such an odd place.
I got made a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, [2] which I must say I’d never heard of, but it means one can slip a minute rosette, I believe purple, into one’s buttonhole before tripping down the gangplank at Orly.
Now. Five minutes to the post leaving. Keep in touch. Love
Paddy
[1] The museum in Athens was founded in 1930 to house Greek works of art from prehistoric to modern times.
[2] PLF was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite in 1992 and Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 2002.
[July 1996]
Mani
IN A FEVER TO CATCH THE POST
Darling Debo,
This is only a rushed line to say how dreadfully upset I am for you – and for me, in a different degree – by the sad sudden news of Decca’s death, and I’m dashing down these lines of commiseration, against time.
The other day I came on a bulging folder, absolutely crammed with her letters, and mine too, diligently typed out – from when she was getting ready her Philip Toynbee book. They read hilariously, and I suddenly wished the correspondence hadn’t petered out when it was all over. My last glimpse of her, I think, was when you and she were singing ‘Grace Darling’ to the amazed Bruce Chatwin in that Thai Restaurant in Passionate Brompton.
Anyway, tons of commiseration, darling Debo, and love from
Paddy
Wednesday 9.15
[1996]
Mani
IN UNBELIEVABLE HASTE
Darling Debo,
Could you really bear us for Christmas? It’s not only a marvellous idea, but solves all. Please don’t have second thoughts.
My thought in bed this morning was: –
Q. How can people vote with their behinds?
A. By remaining seated during a standing ovation.
Your review of Jim’s book [1] was tip-top.
I’ve got to break off now, as a rock nuthatch has got into the studio and is flying round and round and banging against the panes and hovering desperately in ceiling corners. Ladders and a blanket needed.
Love
Paddy
Late Special. Got him! He’s up and away and it’s a lovely sunny morning.
[1] James Lees-Milne, Fourteen Friends (1996). DD wrote that Lees-Milne’s portraits of friends were ‘compulsive reading . . . He notes the faults as well as the virtues of his mates, but he does not criticise, and loves them in spite of all. Lucky people.’ Counting My Chickens, pp. 135–6.
10 December 1996
Mani
Darling Debo,
How lovely, being one of your pin-ups in the Oldie! [1] What a shame you weren’t there for J Betjeman’s welcome to Poets’ Corner. I loved it (all except the speech-making part, which had me rather rattled). [2]
Last week, during a lull after a morning of intermittent thunder, there was suddenly a blinding flash and the loudest double report or explosion I’ve ever heard, so dashed over from the studio to the house to find Joan and Ritsa [3] gazing across the valley in wild surmise, where a cloud of leaves, dust and smoke was swirling out to sea. All the lights had gone off (it was an overcast morning), telephone off, and all the street lamps along the road. Then a downpour, real buckets, set in, and lasted for 24 hours. It was a sort of thunderbolt about 200 yards away, and very shaking but nothing has been found. It seemed very eerie that night, deluge outside, the glimmer of candles within, like a stranded ark, containing nothing but us two bipeds and four puzzled cats stalking about the shadows.
Longing for Christmas!
Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] Along with PLF (‘the best company I know, the cleverest and the funniest. They say he is a very good writer’), DD’s other pin-ups were the 6th ‘Bachelor’ Duke of Devonshire (1790–1858); her sister Diana; Flanagan & Allen and the Crazy Gang; Sybil Cholmondeley; Screaming Lord Sutch; and Elvis Presley, ‘the greatest entertainer of all time. He made opera singers sound hopeless.’ The Oldie, 1 December 1996.
[2] PLF gave the address at the unveiling of a memorial to John Betjeman at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey on 11 November.
[3] PLF’s cook and housekeeper.
2 January 1997
Dumbleton
Darling Debo,
That was a lovely Christmas. I loved the carol singing, my only worry being that nobody now ever sings my favourite, viz.‘The Holly and the Ivy’.
I’m sitting in this house, looking out at the snowflakes tumbling into the orchard below, where fifty sheep graze on frost-bitten tussocks of grass. Beyond it stands the old mill this house is named after, the broken wheel, iced solid, and the millstream iced over. Only a thin ribbon of water survives in motion, the rest is locked under a lid of ice. Two hundr
ed pigeons live in the top part of the mill, and flutter out and in. Beyond the stream, which is called the Isborne (the only river in the kingdom, it seems, which flows due south to due north), in a field, stands a neighbour’s sturdy horse, rugged up – one rug yesterday, but two today, I note: also grazing. But what about water? The Isborne is wired off, and the two troughs are frozen solid. Joan says they melt it by licking it with their warm tongues, then lap it up. How odd it is that horses never seem to lie down for forty winks, but just stand there come wind come weather, doing a Frink . . . Beyond it, the Cotswolds fade away into cotton wool.
How nice Sophy’s little group was! Alastair marvellous and two dream children. [1] I am wearing your handsome Yuletide tie, and long black stockings you sent two years ago. We had lovely walks, as usual, in the woods about the Ho. – Jim [Lees-Milne], Pat [Trevor-Roper] and I, revelling in the wintry beauty of it all. I remember doing the same with Nancy years ago, and saying the woods must have been pretty well the same when they were the edge of Sherwood Forest: no change from what Gurth and Wamba, the two Saxon shepherds in Ivanhoe, gazed down on, and she cried, ‘Oh, surely not the Rhodies, Whack?’ [2]
Well, there we are, darling Debo, and thank you and Andrew very, very much and tons of love from
Paddy
And also from Joan.
[1] DD’s grandchildren Declan Morrison (1993–) and his sister Nancy (1995–).
[2] Rhododendrons did not become popular on English country estates until Victorian times.
Leap Year 1997
Mani
Darling Debo,
Coote’s barn party was lovely [1] – a hundred people there, and more, and deafening noise when we arrived, the whole of the West Country really, Coote presiding splendidly and roundly at the top table.
I had a long chat with Daphne’s Christopher, [2] who said Daph was fine (and so she sounded when I rang her up), but Joan got him at one of the place-shifts, and had an extraordinary conversation with him. He said he’d gone to see Daph a few days earlier, and asked her what she did in the evenings, and D. said ‘Oh, the three R’s, you know.’ ‘What, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic?’ and she said, ‘No, darling. Reading and R-r-remembering rogering!’ Rather fast.
It’s been very cold here, and raining too, but now glorious, billiard table green on all the olive terraces, so brief and precious to us, scattered with scarlet, purple and mauve flowers, Adam’s Blood, and snowdrifts of daisies.
I’m in the studio. Three cormorants looking somehow very disreputable, have just flown past, and out to sea. No fish for us.
One feels a bit out of things, so please write. Tons of love,
Paddy
I’ve got a marvellous new hearing aid, recommended by Deacon, called Hidden Hearing. I’m surrounded by ticking clocks, crashing seas and deafening blackbirds which have been in eclipse for ages.
[1] Dorothy Lygon celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday in March 1997, a non-leap year.
[2] Lord Christopher Thynne (1934–). Daphne Fielding’s son married Antonia Palmer in 1968.
10 July 1997
Mani
Darling Debo,
A few days ago Joan bumped and slightly split a rib against something. It’s getting better, but agony if she makes a sudden movement. She won’t see a local doctor, but has long chats with Christian Carritt [1] on the telephone, so we have bedside games of Beggar-my-Neighbour and Word-Making-and-Word-Taking (an old-fashioned and much better Scrabble). I go for long wonderful swims in the cool of the evening, and stride about the oak-woods up the mountainside. No flowers now till the first cyclamen and Autumn Croakers, but the withered grass is a golden, lion-coloured hue, marvellous with evergreen ilex and olive branches, especially from afar, giving the landscape a legendary, rather biblical look. Last night I stalked across a treeless slanting plateau and the setting sun sent my shadow across it for about a mile. It felt very queer. Nothing but tortoises about, dashing for cover like speed-kings at my approach.
I not only didn’t see you, but nobody while in Blighty, but got on with some work. The evening before we left I was buying a paper at that stall on the south side of Sloane Square when an Irish piper struck up in the middle and a small crowd was assembled there round a veiled statue gesticulating like a madwoman under the tarpaulin, so hastened across and found Christopher Thynne, as per, snapping everyone. He said the figure on the plinth was Sir Hans Sloane (Hans Place, Sloane St, etc), a famous collector, benefactor and botanist; it was removed (I think) from the Physic Garden. The gathering were all descendants or fans, and I did twig from the jerseys and the pearls that they were all more or less Sloane Rangers. C. pointed to a group by the flower-seller’s shed – all Sloanes of riper years. Their MP, Alan Clark, [2] was going to unveil it and say a few words, but I had to hurry off. I’d like to have seen that, as I don’t know what he’s like. I caught a glimpse of Andrew at Pratt’s looking rather old fashioned and formal in an old school tie. Then away next morning.
Tons of love,
Paddy
[1] Christian Carritt (1927–). ‘A selfless, funny and charming London GP loved and relied upon by all her patients, many of whom became her great friends.’ (DD)
[2] Alan Clark (1928–99). Diarist and Conservative politician, MP for Kensington & Chelsea from 1997 until his death in 1999.
28 July 1997
Mani
Darling Debo,
I’ve just been going through all the books here in search of Ly Longford’s wonderful 2-vol life of the D of Wellington, but hunted in vain. What I wanted to find was a passage where Wellington says, thank god all his generals – Peninsula, Waterloo etc – were all out-and-out hunting men, and it was their skill, dash, eye for country and spirit that brought all the victories, saved Europe, and laid Boney low. It was in the light of England’s military debt to hunting in the past that made the MOD’s veto of hunting on vast expanses of age-old hunting country seem so ungrateful, shocking and lacking in historical sense. [1] Ranksborough and the Wissendine Brook etc could now give way to a Govt vehicle and a team of white-coated vermin operatives padding across the sward with hoses and gas-canisters . . .
Here’s something I found in Lemprière’s wonderful Classical Dictionary. (Conjure up in your mind’s eye The Rape of the Sabine Women by David & people like that – undraped ladies being carted off, and bickered over, shoulder-high, by undraped but helmeted Romans.)
‘According to Varro, Talassius was a young Roman who carried off a Sabine virgin, crying out “Talassio!”, meaning that she was now for Talassius. It is more probable that the cry “Talassio”, used at a Roman wedding, is like our “Tally-ho!”, used at a fox-hunt; and that the primary meaning of both words is unknown.’
Rush for post.
Lots of love,
Paddy
[1] The Ministry of Defence’s veto was one of the Labour Government’s first steps towards a wholesale ban on foxhunting with dogs, which came into effect in 2005.
Monday [May 1998]
Dumbleton
Debo,
ALL IS REVEALED! I mean those enigmatic symmetrical swirls across the landscape you sent me, those puzzling pictures of a few months ago. [1]
How do I know? At six p.m. yesterday evening we went up in a balloon with seven other people, setting off from Aston Somerville, on the way to Evesham, full of calmly grazing sheep, and drifted south, spotting the Mill House, Dumbleton Hall, Overbury, then many a meadow and stately house between the Cotswolds and the Malvern Hills, with our small river, the Isborne, glittering in its serpentine and willow-shaded bed. We drifted along till nearly sunset, leaving a deep band of smog underneath us – although it looked pure blue from ground level – which reached higher than the Cotswolds, and so thick that our huge balloon, 160 feet from basket to summit – cast a giant ghostly shadow on what looked like a hanging screen of smoke, like an ogre’s shuttlecock (not flat, like the trees and steeples below, but bolt upright), seemingly half a mile away. Then we wer
e above it in pure pale purged ozone. All this is caused by factories and motor-cars alone, awful to think of. The promoters of these balloon trips are anti-smog fanatics, and urged it in mid-air most compellingly.
But, as we descended in a vast field near Tewkesbury, there below were spread field after field patterned just like your photos, I suppose left by some reaping or sowing farm appliance: twin tracks, with a wide arm stretching several yards, so needing very wide arcs to turn and making those wonderful symmetrical designs – not as perfect or as complicated as yours, but jolly nearly. Did you know all about it all along? Do send any further elucidation.
We subsided in the quiet eventide, drifting along tree-tops and nests and landing among buttercups and daisies and black-and-white bullocks that first scattered then recovered and came crowding back with nasty looks while we folded up and packed the vast collapsed multicoloured carcass in its tarpaulin jacket. The two farm girls who showed us the way out were very excited by the invasion, and lots of snaps were taken, then the sun set and we tooled back in the dark. End of bulletin.
Love
Paddy
All is by no means revealed, hence this reopening. It is witheringly upheld that the patterns in the fields observed yesterday are far too complex for any farm machinery to have wrought. Furthermore, it is urged, the fields observed from the balloon are just flat grass, whereas the patterns in your album are cut in standing crops, and, what’s more, there are no exit or entry marks for farm machines, or, indeed, for cunning topiarists with sickles, or shears or nail-scissors, unless they were hovering with small personalized balloons.
In Tearing Haste Page 35
