To Lawrence Durrell
24 November 1954
Οἰκία Χατζηκυριάκου-Γκίκα ἐν Ὕδρᾳ
[c/o Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, Hydra]
My dear Larry,
. . . I felt very jealous of Joan’s adventures with you and Maurice [Bowra] early this summer, and long to see you both. Joan left last week alas, but I’m sticking on in Niko’s house as long as he’ll let me – it’s the best bit of high-level cadging I’ve done for years, a real haul. I wish you’d come over and stay for a bit. It’s a perfect Shangri-la for work, and at last I’m getting a move on, and feeling excited. How are you getting on? I imagine the Cyprus Review takes one hell of a lot of work – do send a copy or two. I’m so glad they got you to do it – I first learnt by that nice bit about it in The Spectator. It must be a very delicate business. I do wish the whole thing was settled. It makes both the English and the Greeks conduct themselves like complete lunatics, and grotesque caricatures of themselves.
I’ve just got Xan’s new book Hide and Seek, a very lively and dashing account of wartime adventures in Crete; also Daphne’s autobiography Mercury Presides (good title!) [1] which is rattling, splendid stuff, not a bit the niminy-priminy society memoir you would think, but hell for leather, a mixture of lyrical charm and touchingness with a clumsy, rustic tough edge to it which is most engaging and terribly funny. Rather like the letters of Lady Bessborough or Caroline Lamb, [2] half-sylph, half-stablehand.
I’m so glad you met Xan and my old friend Arthur Reade. [3] I’m terribly attached to him, though I haven’t seen him for years. The book which I translated from the Greek of our shepherd-guide in Crete [4] will be coming out soon (The Cretan Runner, Murrays). I think it’s tip-top, a real primitive, [illegible] Douanier Rousseau [5] kind of war-book.
No more now, but I’ll write again as soon as the stuff arrives. Lots of love to Eve and Sappho. [6] [George] Katsimbalis is due back any moment from phenomenal adventures in America, France and England that I burn to hear. They should be quelque chose!
love
Paddy
[1] Her memoir of life as one of the ‘Bright Young Things’, reviewed by Evelyn Waugh: ‘The childhood is admirable. The adult part is rather as though Lord Montgomery were to write his life and not to mention that he ever served in the army.’
[2] Henrietta Ponsonby (1761–1821), Countess of Bessborough, had numerous lovers. Among her admirers was William Lamb, later Viscount Melbourne, who married her daughter Caroline (1785–1828). Lady Caroline Lamb conducted a scandalous affair with Lord Byron.
[3] The SOE officer Arthur Reade, who served with PLF and Xan Fielding behind the German lines in occupied Crete. His son Patrick was PLF’s godson.
[4] George Psychoundakis.
[5] The naive French artist Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) was known as Le Douanier Rousseau, a reference to his job as a customs officer.
[6] Durrell’s daughter by his wife Eve.
To Diana Cooper
3 January 1955
Hydra
ΧΡΟΝΙΑ ΠΟΛΛΑ ΚΑΙ ΑΓΑΠΗ ΚΑΙ ΧΙΛΙΕ∑ ΕΥΧΕ∑ ΔΙΑ ΤΟ ΝΕΟΝ ΕΤΟ∑ 1955
[‘Many happy returns (as they say here), love and 1000 wishes for the New Year 1955’]
Diana darling,
It was lovely to find your Betjeman booklet [1] when I got back here from the Peake fleshpots of Athens, and thank you so much for them. One or two are rather hell, I think – have you read them yet? – rather embarrassing jaunty high Anglican stuff (. . . it gives a chance to me, To praise our dear old C. of E. etc.), one or two of them charming. Very pretty Piper drawings. But there’s a terrible note of the headmaster beginning a confirmation class with the words ‘Now do remember, God is such FUN!’ (I say, talk about gift horses in the mouth. Especially when I haven’t sent you one yet, because of being out of touch with contemporary literature! I’ve been cudgelling my brain for a month and feel inspiration will come soon.)
I’m terribly distressed by one thing in your letter – that you seem to have dropped the Persian Gulf Plan. I’d got so used to the idea of your stopping off in Athens on the way, and was already looking forward like anything to jaunts in Attica together, – even to a wintry descent to this now verdant isle – as if they were certainties. Because alas, I don’t quite see how I can get to Italy in the middle of this month. It’s a terribly tempting thought, though, and I haven’t absolutely chucked it. I won’t bore you with enumerating what the difficulties are, they’re too tedious to go into, but pretty prohibitive none the less. Thank heavens, dough for once is not one of them, as I’m wildly solvent for once (for me that is) except Italian currency. But, Diana darling, is Athens absolutely ruled out for you? Do please write again as soon as poss. and tell how plans have matured.
I got back from Athens on Christmas Eve, after staying with the Peakes [2] for a week, which, I must say I simply loved, though I seemed to be out of the building and on the tiles most of the time. (The point of my stay was arranging about the unveiling by the King of a monument all the English-who-were-in-Crete are putting up, and, Cyprus willing, it is to take place some time in May.) They really are the most wonderful kind and hospitable couple – tremendous fans of yours (which I think is really why they asked me) as you know. We had lots of sitting up talking about poetry, scanned by the soft hiss of the soda syphon (my favourite noise, I’m beginning to realise, and one that has been silent in ouzo-ridden Hydra for many a long month). And the baths, – I turned on those resplendent taps with some of the rustic wonder of a Red Army corporal in the Imperial quarters of Peterhof – meat; delicious, almost Chantilly standard breakfasts in bed; ironed clothes; glittering shoes. They asked me to stay for Christmas, but I thought it would be overdoing it, so crept back to Hydra with an alibi, but even so, a day later than I meant to, as on the last night, I went to a party which ended at 6. The butler came to wake me up at 7 for the 8 o’clock Nereid, [3] shook me and put a sponge on my brow – all no go. Stalwart young maids were called in to shake [me] but apparently it was like trying to raise a fallen dolmen. One of them managed to prise open a single bloodshot eye, and fled in terror . . . So I went to a dinner party of Niko Ghika’s with the tolerant Peakes, which was absolutely delicious, based on some marvellous quenelles made of thousands of mussels, and got off safely next morning, though the time of the boat had been put off to 2.00 p.m. because of fêtes. I spent happy hours wandering round that hideous but absorbing port [Piraeus], where there are not only quarters inhabited by Cretans, Maniots, Epirots, Thessalians and Macedonians, but by refugees from all the biblical region of Asia Minor – Pisidia, Paphlagonia (as in The Rose & the Ring) [4] Cappadocia, Pontus & Bithynia & from the borders of Kurdistan, all with their customs & dialects intact. You only have to march into the right café to be spiritually in the heart of Caesarea, Iconium or Trebizond. The place was looking very queer that day, because all the children were holding balloons twice their size shaped like colossal space cats with jutting whiskers and eyes like round towers. Other children – the equivalent of ‘waifs’ – were prowling from shop to shop holding antediluvian gramophones with petunia horns the size of a man-eating convolvulus and playing eardrum-splitting and cacophonous carols on records scratched beyond recognisability. They would take up positions with this apparatus outside cafés and shops till they had tortured the owners into giving them danegeld.
I got to Hydra grasping a wonderful turkey (a dead one) under my arm, like a golden goose, a present from Catherine Peake. Yanni roasted this on the great day, and I had a banquet in the drawing room, the big dining room table with lots of candles and a star-shaped pattern of uprooted sea-squills and pink geraniums in the middle, which looked nicer than it sounds. Gladys [5] and Tanty had originally been coming for Christmas, but both had cried off at the last moment (the cold? Actually it’s as warm as anything with both stoves roaring). So I had Russian Lil Heidsièck (who you never met) with her Lost Boys, an English couple called the Goschen
s, [6] and two people from the Art School. Over New Year the island filled up with Young Intellectuals from Athens, some of whom stayed with me, and we had a great party of about twenty-seven, starting at 9, going on till about 5 also up here. They were very nice indeed, and the thing was really kept together by a very talented art student with a guitar which he played and sang to with an almost JJ virtuosity. A girl, eating a stewed mussel (which had actually come out of a tin) found a minute pearl. Isn’t that strange? I had a great success with all the songs I cribbed off JJ this summer. They’ve all vanished now, the island seems rather bleak and deserted and life goes on with the faint gloom of an anti-climax.
I have been very much cheered up by something I have discovered today. It’s rather elaborate. From the Middle Ages till the beginning of the last century, Piraeus was known as Porto Leone, after a large, ancient, marble lion standing at the entrance to the harbour. (It had some Nordic runes carved on its shoulder by Harald Hardrada, [7] when he was in the Mediterranean.) The lion was looted and carried off to Venice by Doge Francesco Morosini in 1687 and placed outside the Arsenale where it still stands. In 1750, an Englishman from Bristol called Bill Falconer, second-mate of the brig Britannia, was wrecked off Cape Sunium. When he got back to England, he wrote a splendid long poem about his adventures and impressions of Greece called The Shipwreck. About Piraeus he says:
The wandering traveller sees before his eyes
A milk-white lion of stupendous size!
Now of course, the traveller does nothing of the kind, and what’s more, neither did he, the old fibber – the lion had been in Venice for sixty-three years! Talk about piling it on! I am positively haunted by this robust couplet, and have been repeating it aloud to myself all the morning. Do try it – in a deep voice, if possible in a West Country accent, if not, cockney, and very loud. It grows on you.
Next Day, Epiphany (written outside The Poseidon, waiting for the letter to catch the slow Pindus, which has now taken over from the Nereid) Thank heavens, it’s a lovely sunny spring day, as this is one of the great feasts of the Orthodox Church. All the shops are shut, and everyone in their Sunday best. The hideous Hydriot girls wear plastic high-heeled shoes and blinding satin dresses of apple green, scarlet, royal blue and petunia (often a combination of all four), and reek of attar of roses. They look exactly like boiled sweets. The old men, with their wicked old Albanian faces, look magnificent. Nearly all of them limp from sponge fishing mishaps: a shark bite in the thigh off the Libyan reefs in 1896, a leg carried off at Mersa Matruh in 1904, an arm at Benghazi in 1911 . . . There was a huge procession, headed by dozens of boys carrying candles and lanterns in red silk dalmatics from which socks and gym-shoes projected, and little black skull caps, their cheeks downy with the sort of moss that reindeer graze on all through the winter in Lapland. (One of them, oddly enough, was a man of seventy with a piratical black patch over one eye.) Then sailors carrying ikons of Our Lord’s Epiphany before the Wise Men of the East, and also of the Baptism (as today is also the Vigil of the Feast of the Baptism). Then a swarm of cantors groaning Byzantine anthems in quarter tones, grass-green deacons with censors, a swarm of priests in vestments every colour of the rainbow, black veils on their cylinder hats, a court of prelates, and finally the Archbishop of Spetsai & Hydra, a wicked old man of stupendous size (odd that such a tiny see should have an archbishop), a pillar of gleaming cloth of gold and chains & plaques and pectoral crosses, beard a yard long, flowing white hair down his back, wearing a colossal, onion-shaped mitre of gold and silver studded with enormous jewels and diamonds, his gold crozier topped, like the caduceus of Hermes, with two gold and twirling serpents. He’s got an appalling reputation.[1] (But one must remember that preferment in the Eastern Church goes entirely by height.) The procession wound up the hill to bless and asperge the island’s only freshwater spring, then back to the quay and along to the end of that mole that runs out across the harbour, where the Archbish settled on a throne at the heart of a dazzling galaxy. The liturgy went on, His Beatitude leaning back like a figure from [El] Greco, exchanging heavy banter, quite loud, with the other prelates. One almost expected him to take out a double Corona and slowly light it . . . Then his eyes kindled with approbation as a caïque-load of naked boys, all shuddering with cold, sailed up and dropped anchor a few yards away. The chanting soared and His Beatitude stood up and threw a cross into the sea. A huge splash, and all the boys plunged into the icy main and started swimming like tadpoles. Meanwhile all the bells began pealing, the sirens honked, and the old War of Independence cannon fired salvos. A terrific tussle in the water, till at last one of the boys splashed ashore, put the cross in the Archbishop’s lap, and drenched everyone by shaking himself like an otter-hound. His Beatitude, with eyes ablaze, kept patting his wet shoulder with a large, horny and mottled hand, repeating ‘Bravo! . . . bravo, my boy!’ again and again. The procession returned to the church, the ceremony was over, and everyone made a dash for the unshuttering tavernas and ouzo.
[1] The Archbishop of Spetsai & Hydra Condemned bestial vice ex-cathedra. (But he rogered a bay-horse Outside the pronaos And a skewbald inside the exedra).
I must stop now, Diana dearest, and get this off. Please write at once with full plans and please try and make them include Greece!
with love and hugs from
Paddy
xxxxx
[1] Poems in the Porch (1954), an anthology of verse originally written for broadcast on a weekly BBC radio programme. Betjeman himself had misgivings about whether the poems were worth publishing.
[2] The British Ambassador Sir Charles Peake and his wife Catherine.
[3] The ferry to Hydra.
[4] William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring (1854) is set in the fictional countries of Paflagonia and Crim Tartary.
[5] Gladys Stewart-Richardson, who kept a shop in Athens.
[6] John Alexander Goschen (1906–77), 3rd Viscount Goschen, and his wife Alvin.
[7] Harald Sigurdson, known as Harald Hardrada (c.1015–66) spent fifteen years in exile as a mercenary before becoming King of Norway in 1046.
Paddy first spotted Deborah (‘Debo’) Mitford – as she then was – at a regimental ball in the 1940s, though she did not notice him at the time. They came to know each other as acquaintances at London parties in the early 1950s; but their friendship took off in the mid 1950s, when they began to correspond regularly. By this time she was married to Andrew Cavendish, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, with a family of young children. Their correspondence would continue until Paddy’s death, more than half a century later. Over the years Paddy was often a guest at one of the Devonshire houses, Chatsworth in Derbyshire or Lismore Castle in Ireland.
Paddy sent inscribed copies of each of his books to Debo. ‘Look here, honestly, it’s awfully good, frightfully good,’ he would say; and she would reply, ‘All right, Pad, I will try one day,’ but she never did.
There was speculation that ‘Debo’ and Paddy had once been lovers, but those who knew them best doubted this. Their relationship has been described as ‘a deep, platonic attraction between two people who shared youthful high spirits, warmth, generosity, and an unstinting enjoyment of life’ (Charlotte Mosley (ed.), In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, 2008).
As their correspondence has been published separately, only a few introductory letters have been included in this volume, with a couple of late, previously unpublished letters towards the end.
To Debo Devonshire
26 April 1955
c/o Niko Ghika
Kamini
Hydra
Dear Debo,
I’ve just heard from Daphne on the point of departure to stay with you. Why does everyone go to that castle [1] except me?
My plan is this: there is a brilliant young witch on this island (aged sixteen and very pretty), sovereign at thwarting the evil eye, casting out devils and foiling spells by incantation. It shouldn’t be beyond her powers t
o turn me into a fish for a month and slip me into the harbour. I reckon I could get through the Mediterranean, across the Bay of Biscay, round Land’s End and over the Irish Sea in about twenty-eight days (if the weather holds) and on into the Blackwater. I’m told there’s a stream that flows under your window, up which I propose to swim and, with a final effort, clear the sill and land on the carpet, where I insist on being treated like the frog prince for a couple of days of rest and recovery. (You could have a tank brought up – or lend me your bath if this is not inconvenient – till I’m ready to come downstairs. Also some flannel trousers, sensible walking shoes and a Donegal tweed Norfolk jacket with a belt across the small of the back and leather buttons.) But please be there. Otherwise there is all the risk of filleting, meunière etc., and, worst of all, au bleu. . .
Please give my love to Daphne if she’s with you. You can let her in on this plan, if you think it is suitable, but nobody else for the time being. These things always leak out.
Love
Paddy
P.S. Please write & say if this arrangement fits in with your plans.
[1] Lismore Castle, County Waterford, overlooking the Blackwater River, has been the Irish home of the Dukes of Devonshire since 1753.
Among the Greek friends Paddy made while working for the British Council in Athens after the war was the poet George Seferis, whose work would be recognised in 1963, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The citation noted ‘his eminent lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture’.
To George Seferis
22 June 1955
Οἰκία Χατζηκυριάκου-Γκίκα ἐν Ὕδρᾳ
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 14