‘And lo! The sward was pocked with wombats’ holes!’
We found drunken tears streaming down our cheeks, and had to chuck it for the night. . .
Penelope’s Catholicism has obviously split the household. [2] There is a certain amount of doctrinal bickering and smart rejoinders, surreptitious reading of the Catholic Herald (quickly stuffed under a cushion if John comes into the room), and sudden withdrawals by Penelope into her bedroom, of which I caught a glimpse – a grotto of images, rosaries, crucifixes, and sacred hearts. It’s a sort of microcosm of Reformation England inside out.
London, next day . . .
The fortnight in Rome was one of my happiest for ages. You are more fun to be with, travelling about, exploring etc., than you can possibly imagine, and turn everything to magic. Do let’s do it again . . . Darling Diana, try not to be so desperately lonely and miserable, and, if you find yourself becoming so, remember how passionately adored you are by so many people, and think of happy times to come. You seem a miracle of guts & stoicism to me, and one could weep at the idea of you being unhappy and lonely. I really do adore you, and you are far too precious to everyone for the idea to be at all bearable. . .
Many, many thanks now again, Diana darling, for being such a heavenly companion in Rome and Florence, and please take tremendous care of yourself, for all our sakes! Also, if poss., do write almost at once.
Fondest love, hugs, devotion, etc.
Paddy
[1] Norah Fahie, Lady Diana Cooper’s ‘secretary-gardener’.
[2] Betjeman became attached to Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, sister of the Duke of Devonshire, whom Betjeman’s daughter Candida Lycett Green would describe as her father’s ‘other wife’.
The visit to Betjeman inspired Paddy to write this parody of his style, first published in the Cornhill magazine in the summer of 1954.
‘In Honour of Mr John Betjeman’
by Patrick Leigh Fermor
Eagle-borne spread of the Authorised Version!
Beadles and bell ropes! Pulpits and pews!
Sandwiches spread for a new excursion
And patum peperium [1] under the yews!
Erastian peal of Established church bells
(Cuckoo-chimes in Cistercian towers!)
Bugloss and briony border our search. Bells
Toll the quarters and toll the hours.
Unscrew the thermos! Some village Hampden
Swells the sward. Fill the plastic cup
For a toast to Brandon, to Scott and to Camden,
To dripstone and dogtooth, with bottoms up!
Herringbone-tweed (one more? Shall we risk it?)
Mimics the moulding from neck to knee.
(Ginger beer, and a Peek Frean biscuit?)
Then here’s to Pugin with three times three!
Basketed bikes on the lych-gate leaning
(Headlamp and rearlamp, pump and mac!)
Bask in the sunshine, the privet screening
Raleigh and Rudge [2] till we both get back;
Back from the church where the rood screen false is
Bogus both squint and architrave.
Lord! Let an Old Marlburian’s Dolcis [3]
Quicken the echoes of the nave!
Let an Old Marlburian Veldstchoen [4] waken
Ghostly incumbents along the gloom,
And the rattle of anthracite long since shaken
Out with the slag in the boiler-room.
Raven-black sway the phantom cassocks,
Ruby the silk of an M. A. hood;
Sweet is the incense of fragrant hassocks
And tiger-lilies and Ronuk’d [5] wood . . .
Sarum-chants of celestial cities,
Rustic anthems in harmony
Quavering rune of the Nunc dimittis,
Gaslit groan of Abide with me!
Back to the lamplight, back to the crumpets
Under the cliff by the seaside path
An Old Marlburian treads through the limpets
Home through the sunset’s aftermath.
The 7.10 whistles, and helter-skelter
Wild foam flies by the wayward sea;
Bladderwrack pops under Lotus and Delta [6] . . .
Holy Saint Pancras, pray for me!
[1] Anchovy paste, traditionally spread on toast, marketed as ‘The Gentleman’s Relish’.
[2] Bicycle manufacturers.
[3] Shoe retailers. Betjeman had been educated at Marlborough.
[4] A form of welt used to make shoes weather-resistant.
[5] Brand of wax used on floors.
[6] More shoe retailers.
While Diana Cooper was in Athens, Paddy based himself in her house by the sea near Bognor Regis. The letter that follows describes a visit to Lady Wentworth, the eccentric châtelaine of Crabbet Park (see note 8 on page 77). An account of this visit appears in his book Roumeli, though there it is conflated with an earlier visit.
To Diana Cooper
22 March 1954
West House
Aldwick
Bognor Regis
Darling Diana,
I bought 200 of these titanic sheets of paper at Lechertier Barbe [1] in Jermyn Street last week, as nib-coaxers when pen paralysis seems imminent, and I must say it seems to work like magic – you just glide along like a figure-skater on a perfect rink, leaving a wonderful track of conceits, tropes, paradoxes, thrusts, sallies and apophthegms . . . It’s a pity most of it has to be pruned away next morning.
Your catalogue of places in Greece turns me green with envy, nostalgia, and feelings of frustration at not being there too, trudging along among the rocks and asphodel (which must be smothering everything by now – marvellous in the mass, a sort of pale haze over the country, but so disappointing individually), and knocking off after culture for delicious retsina under plane trees. I think that, after olives & cypresses & vines, which are more symbols than plants, plane trees come next on my list of favourites. It always means there’s water near – emblems of salvation in August! – and, in a village they are the heart of everything, sheltering those little colonies of rush-bottomed chairs and round, tin tables where all the old boys wile their days away over coffee and amber beads. Often, several yards of their circumference, right up to the first branches, are whitewashed, which looks marvellous. Then, a labyrinth of huge peeling branches patched and mottled like pythons, and millions of those complicated leaves producing a Marvellian [2] penumbra, and all on such thin and flexible threads of stem that the faintest suspicion of a wind sets up a liquid mysterious whispering. You ought to be there in mid summer to see them really come into their own as public benefactors. Do you know the first thing the old boys under them ask you when you’ve arrived in a muck-sweat, had a drink, lit a cigarette and come to after some appalling climb? It’s: ‘What do you think of our water?’ They go on about it like Connolly or Waugh over Cheval Blanc. [3] I had a French guidebook once which said in the preface – ‘C’est surtout l’eau qui excite la gourmandise des Grecs.’ [4] It’s the same throughout the Levant. I believe that the Turks used to have tremendously grand water-parties in the past. They would settle on carpets and cushions in the cool of the evening in the garden of some palace on the banks of the Bosphorous with hookahs and tchibooks – those cherry wood pipes with straight stems six or eight feet long – and a Circassian or Caucasian girl playing the baglama (a sort of dulcimer suitable for damsels) while beautiful youths of equivocal status carried round trays laden with blood-red and gilt cut-glass carafes from Prague filled with different waters, which the Vizir would offer in turn to the beys and pashas beside him on the grass: ‘Try this one, Selim – it’s from the snows of Bithynian Olympus!’ or ‘One of the Sweet Waters of Asia . . .’ ‘And this one, Cadi Effendim, is a rather rare one from the Taurus mountains.’ ‘This little fellow arrived by caravan last week from Azerbaijan.’ ‘That’s just an ordinary Armenian.’ ‘What do you make of this, gentlemen? It’s one of the Bulgarian tributaries
of the Danube, a spring called Studena Voda . . .’ Just think of all the water snobbery that must have gone on, the expertise and beard-stroking and rumblings and kissed fingertips and cries of Bismillah! [‘In the name of Allah!’] and gurks of approbation! The gatherings would go on till moonrise, when the guests would be helped to their little private caïques by turbaned negroes and rowed reeling home, lulled by the sound of flutes, to the Golden Horn. . .
Last weekend I went to stay with an old friend called Antony Holland, [5] who lives between Brighton and London, in a very agreeable tumble-down, vicaragy kind of house full of books. (He’s a great-great nephew of Sydney Smith’s, [6] a fact which sets all my historico-snobbish fibres a-tingle.) Do you remember I told you all about the adventure with Lady Wentworth & Byron’s slippers in Missolonghi last year? Well, we drove over again to Crabbet for luncheon on Sunday; the Hollands are the only people who are allowed to go there – she’s quarrelled with everybody else in the world except her squash-partner (ex. All-England champ), now head groom and putative ex. conc [ubine]. Antony H. tells me that another of Wilfrid Blunt’s mistresses, a Mrs Carleton, still lives in a cottage, not far away; always referred to by Lady Wentworth as ‘that woman’; do you know anything about her? [7] We first bowled past the Catholic convent [8] where Wilfrid Blunt had ‘Skittles’ [9] buried, then past sleek cavalcades of Arab steeds galloping under the chestnuts, with KEEP OUT! NO TRESPASSING! notices everywhere, suggesting mantraps and spring-guns; then the burnt-out royal (real?) tennis court where the Souls’ tournaments were said to occur, [10] and up to the house, where she is looked after by two nonagenarian female twins – ‘my twins’. The house is untidy as a barn – trunks trussed, and excitingly labelled ‘LD BYRON’S papers – LDY BYRON’S papers’ in chalk, pictures stacked, piled furniture, wallpaper, curtains etc. exactly the colour and shape of coloured Phiz or Leech: illustrations to Ask Mamma, Hawbuck Grange, or Mr Sponge [11] – gilt, faded plum and canary; v. grand and dusty. We had rather a mouldy luncheon, ending up with spotted-dog, in a room as full of papers, pictures, horsey accoutrements and favours as a jackdaw’s nest. Lady Wentworth was wearing, as usual, gym-shoes from playing squash, a Badminton skirt to the ground, a woollen shawl, a gigantic and very dishevelled auburn wig that looked as though made of strands from her stallions’ tails gathered off brambles, and on top of this a mushroom-like, real Sairey-Gamp mob-cap, [12] but made of lace and caught in with a Nile-green satin ribbon. Rather a fine, hawky Byronic face under all this, but scarlet patches on the cheeks as from a child’s paint-box; I think she’s eighty-two or eighty-three [13] – and a very thin, aristocratic, bleak voice – ‘have some more spotted-dog?’ sounding like a knell. The house is full of pre-Raphaelitish pictures of her by Neville Lytton, [14] many of them in elaborate Arabian clothes. She must have been a knockout except for those alarmingly suspicious eyes: a real vixen or Medusa glint. We had another look at Byron’s Greek costume & sword (which the British Council are asking for, to send to Sr. Chas. Peake’s Philhellene exhibition. [15] We exhorted her a lot about this) and managed to find, after a long search among draped furniture, a fascinating portrait of Byron which has never, to my knowledge, been reproduced. [16] It’s rather amateurish (unsigned), but he is so young and charming-looking in it – eighteen at the most, and full face, I do think the Peakes ought to ask her for it for the exhibition. I’ll write to them, but do mention it, if this gets you while you are still there.
After luncheon she led us, all three grasping a whiskey and soda, up some stairs to a long billiard room, where she drew the curtains, and switched on the lamps over the table, poked up a vast log fire, began chalking a cue and said, with no preamble, ‘Would you like spot or plain?’ So we began playing, and she beat us hollow, one after the other, again and again, scoring breaks of 50, 70, 90, and once, 108. It began raining and blowing hard, the wind making strange noises among the elms outside and down the chimney. No other sounds except, occasionally, a falling log or the hiss of the syphon, the click of the balls or the plop! into the pocket, with Lady Wentworth working away in silence except, now and then, ‘Put the red in its place, would you?’ or ‘Hand me the rest please . . .’ On and on it went, like something in a terrifying Norse legend, gambling for one’s life with a man-eating witch in a dim, shadowy cave at the bottom of a fjord. As the hours passed, the illusion grew. I could see Antony was thoroughly rattled too. We were losing by larger and larger margins with each successive game, and still the grim work went on, our whole life centring on the bright rectangle of green: click! . . . click-click! . . . and the wind outside blowing up to a gale. Lady Wentworth’s eyes under the lace fringes of her cap were kindling with ever more alarming sparks of triumph. It was ghoulish. At last, after twenty defeats, at 7 o’clock, Antony managed to say, in a strangled voice, ‘Lady Wentworth, I think we ought to be leaving . . .’ It must have been the counter-charm. The spell was broken! She just said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry . . .’ and all the glint died from her eyes. But if she’d said, ‘Oh, but you’re staying to dinner!’ I know one of us would have screamed, for it would have been all up. The double doors would have leapt open and ‘The Twins’ [17] magnified and reproduced a hundredfold – centuplets! would have come galloping in howling with choppers and skewers and cauldrons and faggots . . . We drove off through the blizzard with pounding hearts.
It’s a successful sunny spring day, but pretty cold. I’m writing at that pillared writing table with the let-down flap by the fire. Two crows, looking enormous, one poking about for worms on the lawn. On the other side of the house Artemis peers over the edge of her pram like a Ribston Pippin. [18] Work soars ahead. Mrs Wakefield [19] came over two days ago, and we sat over the fire drinking sherry. She was awfully nice, and I enjoyed this irruption into my bachelor solitude. She said there was some idea of you collecting and publishing old letters. Diana darling, why on earth don’t you? I’m red-hot for this! I guard your vast and wonderful coronation letter as though it were the Codex Sinaiticus, [20] and there must be masses more knocking about the place. Surely it would be enormous fun to do? If you did, and needed any kind of a fag to help, do ask me to unless you’ve got someone else. . .
I’m wildly intrigued by the extraordinary building estate that rears its portals opposite your humble wicket. The houses are incredible, John Betjeman rampant – Stratford-upon-Avon, Sandringham, Arundel, South Carolina, Uppark, [21] West Wycombe; [22] what can go on inside? Surely not just TV, for which they are all whiskered? Overcoming my natural diffidence, I had a drink in an unbelievably depressing place called the Tithe Barn Club there – it’s not a real club, you just wander in. The denizens looked boring and usual enough – retired overdraft-refusers [i.e. bank managers] for the most part I should say – but still waters run deep. I’m terribly tempted to do some anthropological fieldwork there, if only I weren’t so busy with other things. Do you think there’s a vice-ring? or smuggling? And what about all that bungalow-life at Pagham? [23] What goes on in those converted railway-carriages? I’m afraid we’ll never know.
A thrush has just started singing like mad from the direction of those beehives. He really does do it twice over, too. [24] Do come back soon, but not before having filled eyes, ears, lungs, heart with Greece, as I think it has a therapeutic quality which is close to magic, more than anywhere else in the world. I long to hear every detail of places, people etc., impressions. Even if long accounts must wait (owing to the pending pyramids of answers, whose height I’ve done so signally little to reduce!) Don’t let me languish without news of movements etc. Must stop now. God Bless you, my dearest Diana, and fondest
love from
Paddy
xxx
P.S. Two people came to look at the house yesterday, with a view to renting it. I could tell Miss W. [25] hated this by the rather skittish grimaces of collusion she made me from behind their backs. They didn’t want it though, ‘too cold’, they said, the idiots. It’s warm as toast in here. They looked frightful. Miss W. &
I decided afterwards that they were ‘a couple of real miseries’. Would it be all right if I hang in here two weeks more – that is, if nobody turns up? I’m having luncheon with JJ [26] at Joan’s on Friday.
[1] An artists’ suppliers founded in 1851 and located at No. 95 Jermyn Street, SW1. The paper itself was A3, soft and creamy.
[2] A reference to ‘The Garden’, by the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell (1621–78).
[3] One of the finest Saint-Émilion wines.
[4] ‘It’s water above all which excites the taste-buds of the Greeks.’
[5] Antony James Holland (1913–82), who lived at Old Lullings, Balcombe, in West Sussex. Paddy had known Holland since they were officer cadets together at the beginning of the war. He and Antony’s father, Michael James Holland, had visited Lady Wentworth at Crabbet the year before.
[6] The Reverend Sydney Smith (1771–1845), celebrated wit, about whom Hesketh Pearson wrote his classic biography, The Smith of Smiths (1934). His eldest daughter married the physician and travel writer, Sir Henry Holland.
[7] The Scottish artist Dorothy Carleton had in fact been dead twenty years at the time of this letter. Though younger than Blunt’s daughter Judith, she had become his mistress. When Blunt moved her into Crabbet Park, supposedly as his ‘niece’, his long-suffering wife asked for a legal separation.
[8] Actually a Franciscan monastery.
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