Well, after that, on to Nafpaktos (Lepanto), where I again left the others, and went for three days up into the Aetolian mountains, to the Kravara – the remotest villages in Greece, where all the villagers used to be trained from childhood to feign lameness and distortion, in order to go begging all over the world. I collected some amazing stories, also a vast glossary of their very peculiar thieves’ cant. Then to Athens. All this was a revisiting of places I had been to two years ago, but about which I had lost the notes. I got very much more this time, and it was well worth it. After a few days in Athens, I came out here, to the painter Niko Ghika’s house – quite empty, very romantic and beautiful, on a headland of the island of Hydra opposite the Argolid peninsula of the Peloponnese.
No more now. I’m working hard on this new stuff, and will be here certainly, for three weeks: so would you write me any news ℅ Poste Restante, Hydra, Greece, and, if in any doubt about time, duplicate to the British Consulate, Athens.
Γειά σου, γειά σου, καὶ ἡ Παναγία μαζί μας! [Goodbye! Goodbye! And may the Virgin be with us!]
Yours ever
Paddy
[1] Ivan Moffat (1918–2002), screenwriter and film producer. It seems likely that he had expressed interest in making a film of one of PLF’s books.
[2] Publishing executive Cass Canfield (1897–1986), president and publisher of Harper’s.
[3] George Psychoundakis (1920–2006), shepherd, writer and war hero. During the Second World War he served as a dispatch runner between resistance groups and SOE units in occupied Crete. Afterwards he wrote his memoirs, which PLF translated into English and helped to arrange their publication by John Murray under the title The Cretan Runner (1955).
[4] The Hon. Gustaf ‘Taffy’ Rodd (1905–74).
[5] PLF was collecting material for his book on Greece.
[6] PLF misquotes Childe Harold. He had apparently forgotten that he had already described a visit to Zitza in another letter to JM written more than two years before, in March 1951.
[7] In 1803, the women of Souliot climbed the bluff above the convent, performed their national dance, and then leapt with their children into the void in order to escape capture by ‘the red-shawled Arnauts’, the Albanian followers of the notoriously cruel Albanian brigand, Ali Pasha.
[8] Judith Anne Dorothea Blunt-Lytton (1873–1957), who was known as Lady Wentworth, lived at Crabbet Park in Sussex. She was the only surviving child of the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922) and his wife Lady Anne King, the daughter of the 1st Earl of Lovelace and granddaughter of Lord Byron.
[9] Alexandros Mavrocordatos (1791–1865), statesman and diplomat involved with Byron at Missolonghi.
To Freya Stark
August 1953
Island of Hydra
c/o Niko Ghika
Dear Freya,
Thank you so much for your nice letter & invitation. As La Mortola [1] is bang on the way home, I think I’d love to stay one or two nights there when my parole away from England expires. How ungracious that sounds! But what I meant was, even if dead broke & crippled one would be able to do it so easily, while Asolo [2] would need a bit more planning: though, I must say, not much!
I’m longing to hear more about Ionia. What is the best book about the Greeks of Asia Minor? Old Prof. Dawkins [3] knows a lot about them – I go and stay with him sometimes at Oxford, he’s eighty-two and quite tireless. I long to know more too, about the modern (up till 1922) Greeks of Turkey – especially the Lazi of Pontus & Caucasus and the Turkish-speaking (but Greek and Orthodox) Karamanlis of the interior.
Tom Dunbabin, [4] my old Cretan colleague, has written a first-rate book The Western Greeks on the Greek colonies – up till circa 500 bc – of Sicily, Campania, Apulia & Calabria. [5] But I long for a book about the Byzantine and post-Byzantine Greeks of southern Italy, from when Robert Guiscard [6] overthrew the Katapan of Bari till today. Do you know of any? They still speak a kind of Greek, I believe, in villages near Taranto and Lecce, and I would like to go there – also to Cargèse in Corsica, where there is an eighteenth-century Greek refugee colony from the Mani.
I very much want to hear more of your theory of Byzantine tradition among the Turks – it was obviously enormous, and I’ve been touching on it from time to time in the book I’m on at the moment, but rather nebulously, as I don’t really know much about it. I wonder where to look. Von Hammer? [7] Yes, the honest Turks are heavy and dour, aren’t they, as though the leaven had been forgotten when the dough was being kneaded in central Asia. But I do resent their presence in Byzantium!
Joan – who is here, & sends love – leaves in a few days to drive about in Italy (central) with Maurice Bowra & a friend, while I stay on here two to three weeks or so, perhaps reuniting with her, perhaps both returning separately. But it would be lovely to halt at La Mortola on the way back. I’ve just been trudging through Epirus, Acarnania & Aetolia, – trois fois vainqueur j’ai traversé l’Achéron, [8] swimming in it each time!
Hoping to see you in about a month, & love from
Paddy
[1] FS’s family home at La Mortola, on the Italian coast not far from Ventimiglia and five minutes from the French border.
[2] FS recovered from the exertions of her travels at her villa in the hamlet of Asolo, in the Veneto.
[3] Richard MacGillivray Dawkins (1871–1955), Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford; Director of the British School at Athens, 1906–14; Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature, 1920–39.
[4] Thomas (Tom) James Dunbabin (1911–55), Australian classicist and archaeologist. During the war he held the rank of lieutenant colonel and served as an SOE field commander on Crete, where he played a key role in organising the local resistance and earned his DSO. He used the Greek codename Yanni and was also known to locals as O Tom. He died in his mid forties from pancreatic cancer.
[5] The Western Greeks: The History of Sicily and South Italy from the Foundation of the Greek Colonies to 480 bc (1948).
[6] Robert Guiscard (c.1015–85), Norman adventurer, captured the city of Bari in 1071, after a three-year siege. For the previous century the city, on the Italian Adriatic coast, had been ruled by the Byzantines and administered by a katapan (governor).
[7] Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), author of Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches (10 vols., 1827–1935).
[8] ‘I have overcome death three times.’ The Acheron is a river in Epirus, believed by the Greeks to be a branch of the underground River Styx, across which Charon transported by boat the souls of the dead to the underworld.
‘Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron; Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la fée’
Gérard de Nerval, The Chimera (1854)
The vivacious society hostess Ann Fleming would become one of Paddy’s close friends and most regular correspondents.
To Ann Fleming
undated [October/November 1953]
c/o British Consulate
Athens
Darling Annie,
I say, what a lovely and cheering letter! Very many thanks for it, coupled with apologies for delay in answering. I got it just on the brink of leaving for Crete fresh from quake-struck Cyprus. [1] Joan suddenly appeared, just in time to nip a fearful cafard [bout of melancholia] in the bud, and off we went to Crete, trudging over rocks like scimitars or jolting about in mule-saddles, drenched to the skin half the time, eating a dozen meals a day, lest Cretan village hospitality should be offended, and putting down raki and wine by the hogshead – expanding, as you might guess, like dirigibles, our breath deteriorating and our eyes dwindling and turning scarlet, and finally vanishing. Phew! But there were lots of compensations, lovely dances by booted mountain thugs bristling with daggers, every one blazing off feu de joie [2] and some tremendous singing. On the last night we sat up till eight in the morning, to the tunes of a Cretan lyre, a lute, a fidd
le, and a zither, and were loaded on board with egos boosted a mile high, several stone heavier, and completely drunk. For a day or two, our hangovers will be so real and positive, it will seem almost as though we were four people instead of two . . . But they will gradually fade away, leaving nothing but a fragrant memory. We only got back to Athens this morning, so our footsteps are still dogged by our ashen, accusing and malodorous doubles. . .
Clarissa was quite invisible here, shrouded in dazzling ministerial convalescence; [3] but I saw lots of Bridget [4] who thought Greece was really tremendous. Another white ladyship, Baba Metcalfe, [5] came later, vying in marble blankness with Pallas Athene herself. It’s been a lovely summer, full of movement, excitement & fun, and justifying a minimum of work as a guilt-remover . . . Joan is planning a wonderful party when we are back, in about three weeks, which will be nice for all of us. I’ve got to stop in Rome to collect my luggage there (I’m shivering in tattered and filthy summer drill, having come here for three weeks and stayed nearly four months), then I hope, in about ten days’ time, Chantilly for two to three days, & London. I do hope you won’t have vanished to Goldeneye? [6] Love to Ian – we’ll all be meeting almost at once; and thanks again for writing that nice letter!
Love from
Paddy
(also from Joan)
[1] In September 1953 the Paphos district of Cyprus suffered a destructive double earthquake.
[2] A rifle salute fired by soldiers on a ceremonial occasion.
[3] Clarissa Eden, wife of the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden.
[4] Lady Mary Bridget Parsons (1907–72), daughter of the 5th Earl of Rosse.
[5] Lady Alexandra ‘Baba’ Metcalfe (1904–95), daughter of the Marquess of Curzon. Her husband ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe had been best man when the former King, Edward VIII, married Wallis Simpson.
[6] The Flemings’ house in Jamaica.
Paddy came to know Lady Diana Cooper in 1951, and would maintain a correspondence with her until her death almost four decades later. According to her granddaughter, ‘each discovered that the other was the sort of person they liked best’. His letters were written to amuse and entertain her; they were affectionate and not a little flirtatious, despite the twenty-three-year difference in age between them. ‘Being alone with you is what I like best, a delight of which I can never tire,’ he had written to her in March 1953. Paddy usually addressed her as ‘darling’; she addressed him as ‘Paddles’.
The letter reprinted below was written after Duff Cooper’s death on 1 January 1954.
To Diana Cooper
11 January 1954
Birr Castle
Co. Offaly
Ireland
My darling Diana,
I’m so phenomenally and abnormally bad at writing letters at times like this – and the greater the loss and the fonder I am of the people involved, the more hopelessly pen-tied I become – that I rather cravenly put off doing so until it was almost too late, hoping to replace it with cables and the telephone. But, darling Diana, you have been in my mind, quite literally, practically every minute of the last eight days, and I can still think of little else. Vain regrets, but I wish I’d managed to fly to Vigo [1] – poor Diana, I hate to think of you coping all alone, and still more dread the loneliness you must be feeling, but was also a bit afraid of intruding. I wonder how much of a help it is to know how much you are adored, by people who also want to share in this and help and console, however clumsily? I keep on thinking of Duff talking away by candlelight dinner, and having to stop reading Vile Bodies out loud by the fire afterwards, to mop away the helpless tears of laughter that were streaming down his face. None of the obituaries I’ve seen quite get the point – all the vigour and fun and enjoyment and wit and irascibility and kindness. The Times I thought hopeless: priggish and lame and not very well disposed. It was lucky having Daph and Xan near at the time as fellow mutes to hold hands and send off massed waves of love and sympathy to you through the air.
They left Luggala [2] (where we all stayed for Christmas & New Year) four days ago, and I came on here. Christmas was quite extraordinary there: a mixture of nightclub, the Hons’ Cupboard [3] and the Charge of the Light Brigade, so tremendous was the pace, even for me, all day and night – hell for leather, with many a riderless chair at luncheon each day, but everyone miraculously in the saddle by sunset and streaming across the country once more, along the bottle-strewn valleys of the night . . . Here, staying with Michael and Anne Rosse, [4] all seems astonishingly quiet and mild, though all the nobs of western Ireland are assembled and blazing away, while the pyramids of dead pheasants mount up. Do you know it? Lovely rushing streams under one’s window and pretty willow-pattern trees under a rainy Irian sky; and pleasant evenings drinking round peat fires, with Bridget’s brow growing blacker with each succeeding flutter and pout from Anne . . . (mine too, a bit, I must say . . . )
Diana, I’m so glad you’ve gone to stay with David [5] in Tangier. Far, far best. Do, please write as detailed a programme as you can of your plans, in case I might make a getaway and come and see you somewhere for a few days. [6] (I’ll be at Travellers again at the end of this week.) No more now, but do write as soon as you possibly can; and remember, dearest Diana, that you are being thought of with love absolutely every instant.
With devotion, hugs, etc. from
Paddy
P.S. Bien des choses [‘best wishes’], as they say, to David.
[1] Duff Cooper had died aboard a French liner bound for the Caribbean, which put in to the Spanish port of Vigo.
[2] The house of Oonagh Oranmore and Browne, née Guinness, then romantically involved with Robert Kee.
[3] PLF refers to the linen cupboard where the Mitford sisters – all ‘Hons.’ because daughters of a peer – would gather to gossip, plot and keep warm.
[4] Lawrence Michael Harvey Parsons (1906–79), 6th Earl of Rosse, Irish peer whose family seat was Birr Castle, brother of Lady Bridget Parsons; and his wife Anne, née Messel, mother from her first marriage of Antony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon), who in 1960 married Princess Margaret.
[5] The Hon. David Alexander Reginald Herbert (1908–95), referred to by Ian Fleming as ‘the Queen of Tangier’.
[6] PLF joined DC in Rome for a fortnight.
From Rome, Diana Cooper went on to Greece, while Paddy returned to England to write, bearing an envelope filled with her letters of thanks to those who had sent her messages of condolence. This letter was written while he was staying with John and Penelope Betjeman in Berkshire. Penelope’s recent conversion to Catholicism had put their marriage under strain.
To Diana Cooper
‘Sunday’ [February/March 1954]
c/o John Betjeman
My darling Diana,
I wonder if you are in Athens yet? Anyway, here goes, a provisional letter just in case you are. Before I start, darling, there is a shaming disaster to report. When, on getting to Charlotte Street on Wednesday, I made a dive into my ragged bag for that envelope with your letters in – nothing there! I didn’t by any chance give them back to you or anything, did I? I’m convinced not, I would have remembered. Could they have fallen out, I wondered, in the aeroplane or customs, or ‘bus’ when I dug out a book? I’ve made a thousand enquiries, all with no result so far, which is the cause of my delay in writing till now, as some needed a day or two’s delay, the air people said. I can’t think how they vanished, unless someone pinched them through the torn top of my bag (in lieu of traveller’s cheques) . . . They may appear, but I’m not sanguine. I should have had them in my pocket. This is simply ghastly and I feel very ashamed, especially after your disaster over letters with Norah, [1] the Augean stables of correspondence you have to cope with, and in view of the sacredness of letters etc. I do hope there was nothing tremendously vital and irreplaceable in any of them . . . Can I, if you send me the names of the addressees, ring them up and explain why they have not heard from you? Take (quite rightly!) the blame? Most abje
ct apologies again. It’s totally mysterious and profoundly humbling. . .
It started snowing last night, and there is a North Pole landscape outside the window this morning. It’s still snowing slightly, and the cold goes straight to the bone if you stick your nose outside. But it’s rather a nice vicaragy frowst indoors: vast log fire, millions of books, strong drink appearing any moment. We had great fun last night looking up obscure poets – South Africans, Australians, Canadians, etc. – and reading them aloud in turn in the appropriate accents. We also drank a great deal of whisky, until everything we read seemed uproarious. I had to read, in an Australian voice, the following line:
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