Now for the brief and not very exciting saga that connects goodbye to you on the deck of the Eros in Portofino and these dank pastures: dinner on the train with Stuart Hampshire, his/Freddie’s son, [1] and Isaiah’s stepson, [2] travelled through the night in luxurious wagon-lit parcel post, out into a bright but colder Paris, dinner with Nancy, then two days at Gadencourt where the Smarts were Normandy-logged by Nasser, [3] and Russell Page & his wife [4] were staying, back to Paris, & luncheon with Kitty & Frank [Giles] (I am amused and pleased to see how Joan has taken to the former, & to the latter also. I must say, the trip has drawn my fangs, too. I think all this gorgeous matiness may be the cause of much of the defence mechanism of facetiousness melting – or has custom merely equipped one with shock-absorbers?) At the airport we met and flew with Vivien Leigh & Mr Beaumont [5] (she clutching a neatly packed shrub hot-root from Portofino) with happy & cheering news of you installed in the castelletto. How nice she is. A hilarious dinner with Peter Q, Sonia [Orwell] & Cyril Connolly, then to that curious nightclub I took you to for a moment after that dinner at Scott’s, where I saw ‘Rock ’n Roll’ for the first time; it looks exactly like ordinary jiving.
Joan’s house, [6] which we went over next morning, looks tip-top, and could be made charming – you must come and see it and advise. Joan thinks aubergine stair carpets. It will be wonderful to have somewhere for both of us to assemble scattered books, clothes, papers etc. and a proper base to be nomadic from. It’s rather demoralising, always returning to improvisation.
I set off here the day after arriving in London, and have immersed myself in an Augean accumulation of work, only sneaking out for a couple of hours every day, whenever the rain stops, to tittup round the moors and lanes on an amiable black horse that lives hard by, usually getting soaked by sudden showers or by crashing along overgrown rides where each of the millions of leaves one collides with seems to shed a couple of table-spoonsful of rainwater. There are very steep hills separated by swift tree-arched streams running with water as dark as Guinness, overgrown with red rowan berries, Lords and Ladies run to seed, ragged robin & willow herb dribbling with the spit of cuckoos long flown, and dank woods thick with lichen, so that the branches are like green coral where many a fox could be decadently gloved in magenta. [7] Primitive stone bridges, as uncouth and angular as in early heraldry, span these streams, ringing hollow underhoof, and the dampness, darkness and greenness of the woods give them a submarine and legendary feeling, as though one should be dressed in full armour under shoals of green-haired mermaids drifting through the oak branches on slow and invisible currents to the sound of harps.
Dartmoor, which starts a mile or two away, is dotted with druidical stones – dolmens & cromlechs in gap-toothed rings or slanting monoliths jutting from a sea of red bracken – and above this bracken, like chessmen and T’ang objects, peer the heads of wild ponies, the size of large dogs, gazing as though mesmerised as one approaches cautiously at a walk. Most of them are bay, but others are black, chestnut & roan, white & grey, dappled, skewbald or piebald, in bold geographical designs, one or two practically striped like zebras, many of them with blond flapperish manes and tails, one raffish grey stallion, obviously of authoritative standing, has a mad eye surrounded by a piratical black patch. Up you creep till, with a sudden mass decision, they are off helter-skelter in a flurry of flying manes & hoofs, the burglarious stallion taking advantage of the disorder by trying to inflict the last outrages on minute mares at the gallop, the foals pounding anxiously after them and so small that only a ripple over the top of the bracken indicates them. At a safe distance, they freeze again, as in grandmother’s steps. Most have been apprehended at some time during the last few years, branded and let loose again by various local people with some claim on them, and expeditions are now in progress to round them up for the annual pony-fair that takes place in Chagford later this month. The ones caught are then broken & sold as pets, for children or for circuses, formerly to costermongers, and alas! too awful to think of after this free & dashing life on the moors – dimgloomed in northern coalmines, or worse still, it is rumoured, shanghaied onto tramp steamers for Belgians to munch. The molars of Madame Lambert and Father de Grunne and André de Staercke closed on them . . . [8]
I went out on one of these raids yesterday with a local stable-owner with a Devonshire accent almost as incomprehensible as that of his Dumnonii ancestors who fought the Romans here; also eight farm boys on horses of various degrees of culture, a ragged equestrian troop of the kind one seldom sees out of Ireland. It was a long job, because, as the leader warned me, these ponies are contrary and artful buggers. It was a mixture of stealthy encircling advances through the bracken, long waits in the howling wind stuffing with blackberries, and sudden gallops, cracking whips like mad while the boys made shrill noises like dogs barking and owls hooting, till we had about a hundred of them cornered in a lane at the moor’s edge, kicking, leaping and whinnying and trying to clamber over each other. Thirty were picked out by their brands and off we set home in a miniature stampede, along a ten-mile labyrinth of trough-like lanes as the sun was setting, horsemen going forward to block escape routes at crossroads. Night had fallen as we drove these artful buggers through the lamplit streets of Chagford, aborigines emerging glass in hand from pubs to watch the bewildered pigmies pound by. It was past ten when we herded them galloping into a field in which three sleek elderly giants were already grazing. They stopped and raised their heads in amazement as though a horde of teddy boys stunted with gin or cigarettes had suddenly rocked and rolled into the Athenaeum. (What lies ahead of these problem ponies? Will they settle down?) I’m glad to say that by the time we left them there, in the dark, one of these fogeys was diffidently rubbing noses with a shaggy newcomer about the size of a dachshund, which I thought particularly decent.
Darling Diana, I’ve not said a word so far about the trip, but you know how I adored it, and a trillion thanks. In its very different way it was as heavenly as last year, if not more. Every single inch of it was unknown to me, and I’m still thinking hard and assimilating & digesting all we saw. I do hope you loved it too – I heard a few sighs, but perhaps there were so few out of stoicism! I know Joan loved it, and I think – indeed, I’m sure – everyone else did.
Do write quickly and tell your plans. I’ve got to stick in the kingdom, mainly because of work but also because this is the critical time for the wretched Crete film, and I want to watch it like a hawk and steer them, as much as I’m allowed to, from disaster. God, the rain!
Lots of love, darling sweet Diana
and tremendous hugs
from
Paddy
xxx
P.S. I think the Cap Ferrat chapter of future reminiscences should be called: ‘How to win friends and influence people.’
[1] The philosopher Stuart Hampshire was married to Renée, ex-wife of his colleague A. J. ‘Freddie’ Ayer; her son from her first marriage was widely believed to have been fathered by Hampshire, so that he was known jokingly as ‘Julian Ayer-shire’.
[2] Earlier in the year the philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin (1909–97) had married Aline Halban, daughter of the Baron de Gunzburg, and the mother of three sons by her two previous marriages.
[3] Nasser’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal had prompted a diplomatic crisis.
[4] Montague Russell Page (1906–85), garden designer and landscape architect, married to Vera Milanova Daumal, widow of poet René Daumal and former wife of the poet Hendrick Kramer.
[5] Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont (1908–73), successful and influential theatre manager and producer.
[6] JR had bought a small house in Pimlico, No. 13 Chester Row, SW1.
[7] A play on the word ‘foxglove’.
[8] All Belgians: Austrian-born Baronne Joanna ‘Hansi’ Lambert (1900–60), née Reininghaus, hostess of a literary salon who married into a prominent Belgian banking family; Jean-Dominique de Hemricourt de Grunne (1913–2007), elegant, s
ophisticated and worldly Roman Catholic priest at Oxford University in the 1950s, who left the priesthood after his mother’s death; André de Staercke (1913–2001), former political adviser to the Belgian Prince Regent. PLF is commenting on the Belgian liking for horsemeat.
To Billy Moss
1 October 1956
Easton Court Hotel
Chagford
Dear Billy,
Back from foreign parts, & have scuttled down here to hide until I dare meet two publishers, one with a book one and a half years overdue, the other with a preface a mere six months. [1] My life story could be entitled ‘The Case of the Overshot Deadline’.
I missed Powell & Pressburger [2] in London as they are off in Corsica, shooting the Brian Coleman [3] shots, but Micky [Powell] assured me by letter that he was ‘able to put right nearly all the things I was afraid about’. I wonder how much that covers. During, & after, the days I spent watching the shooting, I wrote them three interim reports containing comments & advice and criticism, some of it very severe. They sent me typed copies of them – perhaps they did you too, I hope so. If not, let me know and I’ll send you mine & you can give me them back in London. They are posterior and additional to going over the script and bringing up all the points we raised together, in great detail. You and Manoli [4] now leap on the sentries and truss them hand & foot, but my fucking dentist’s chair, alas, remains. They seem to be in love with the scene, and it is impossible to either bully or shame them out of it. With this glaring exception, I somehow feel it won’t be too bad. By some miracle, you and I work out all right. Xan says that it’s Marius Goring [5] (who I liked v. much) who hams it up by being a sort of caricature Prussian. I tremble to think what it might have turned into without interference.
In spite of all this, I can’t help liking this curious couple. I really do think they want to make us and the Cretans happy about it as much as in them, & the awful conventions of the film-world, lies; and others might have been far more ruthless and unscrupulous. They will get in touch with me on return & I will keep you posted on everything. Micky has a very bad-mannered little son called Columba, who was crawling all over the location – he never answers anyone who speaks to him. One morning Emmerich [Emeric Pressburger] said ‘Good morning Columba’ and Columba spat at him full in the face. Very wittily, I think, Emmerich then produced his handkerchief and said ‘You are the spitting image of your father.’
With lots of love for Sofe & love from
Paddy
[1] The first is PLF’s Greek book, published by John Murray as Mani in 1958; the second is probably The World Mine Oyster by Matila Ghyka (trans. from the French by the author), which was published by Heinemann in 1961, with an introduction by PLF.
[2] Emeric (‘Imre’) Pressburger (1902–88), Hungarian-born screenwriter, who collaborated with Michael Powell on thirteen major films made between 1943 and 1955.
[3] Lieutenant Brian Coleman was captain of the motor-launch which spirited General Kreipe off Crete.
[4] Manoli Paterakis. ‘He was my guide and closest Cretan friend in the island,’ PLF wrote to Debo Devonshire after Paterakis’s death, ‘hand in glove in all sorts of risky ventures, a man in a million, two years older than me, v. funny with a hawk nose, piercing eyes, and vast knowledge of the mountains’ (In Tearing Haste, page 235).
[5] The English actor Marius Goring (1912–98) played General Kreipe.
To Jock Murray
9 October 1956
Chaggers
[Easton Court Hotel Chagford]
Dear Jock,
Many thanks for your nice letter. I’m delighted about A Time to Keep Silence. [1] The only change I would like to put in is in the Acknowledgements and thanks bit – after thanking you for permission to reprint (or perhaps this is redundant in this case) I would like to insert a bit thanking ‘the Hon. Graham Eyres Monsell [2] for suggesting the title’. I haven’t a copy here, but I’m sure it will fit in easily.
Heaven be praised, the neurotic literary paralysis of months has broken up at last, & dissolved into a spate of prose and I feel confident & optimistic for the first time for ages. The only thing that will wrench me from here until the Mani is finished will be that there is a chance of seeing the Bolshoi Ballet, in which case I’d come straight back next day. But there is not much hope, thank God.
Carolyn & Norman [3] have gone to Denmark for two weeks, & the hotel is comparatively empty, which is nice. I’ve rather high-handedly grabbed the small sitting room and entrenched myself there behind an inexpungeable palisade of books which frightens away all invaders. I break off for two hours’ rural ride every afternoon, back to a vast tea and the waiting foolscap.
Joan is getting a small house in Pimlico, mainly as a place for both to keep our scattered books & papers, a base for departures & caravanserai for returns, so I ought to be assembling my dispersed chattels. Would it be possible to get hold of the ones I have inflicted on you, in about a week? I’m afraid it has been a bit of a nuisance – see you soon,
yrs ever
Paddy
[1] John Murray had agreed to issue a new edition of this small book, originally published in a limited edition in 1953 by Ian Fleming’s Queen Anne Press.
[2] Joan’s brother.
[3] The proprietors of the hotel.
To Ann Fleming
November 1956
Easton Court Hotel
Chagford
Darling Annie,
I ought to have written days ago to say that, after delivering you safe home, I had another terrific hunt through the taxi and all over the floor and in and out of the upholstery of that nightclub, and not a sign of the truant earring, alas! I do hope it has turned up, or not been too grave or irreparable a loss.
How nice Cecil [1] was, cool and bland with his lemon-drop smile. Robin & Mary [Campbell] too, but a bit overcast I thought.
The trees are turning extraordinary colours, and riding along these lanes is like penetrating a cool furnace; until one gets onto the moor, where all is bleak, stricken & damned, it can be very sombre & forbidding at dusk. I almost expect, as I trot along, to be addressed by a hideous and toothless crone bent double under a load of sticks, who, if I befriended her, would be able to grant me three wishes not yet formulated. But such an event presupposes that two churlish elder brothers should have already ridden that way, and not only refused help, but derided her age and infirmity. My mind’s eye depicts two members of the Berry family, [2] so perhaps I’m well out of it.
The horse I rode (‘Flash’) stopped dead at a gate on the way home this evening and a cart-horse the size of a mastodon came pounding over the grass to rub muzzles. They then placed their nostrils end to end and blew – it was no kind of a fit, owing to the newcomer’s size – filling the frosty air with clouds of steam; but they obviously liked this so much that I’m thinking of taking it up.
MORE EQUINE INTELLIGENCE
I was woken up at 2 a.m. this morning by the hoof-beats of a cavalcade under my window sounding as eerie as smugglers, highwaymen or a troop of hired assassins making for an ambush with dark lanterns. I leapt out of bed and craned out like Old Mother Slipper-Slopper, [3] but there was nothing but darkness, wind and rain. I told all this to Barbara the housemaid this morning, who said it must be ghosts or (rather wittily) night-mares. But she came back in a minute or two, and said others had heard it – it was merely a pack of wild ponies driven off the moor by the weather. (‘It must be terrible cold up there for them, poor mites.’) It seems that in really cold weather they range through the villages in gangs, and have even been known to clatter through the streets of Exeter and whinny in the cathedral close, making many a citizen and many a minor-canon sit bolt upright and gaze into the darkness with wild surmise . . . But it really wasn’t cold enough last night for these doings to be attributed to anything but instability –
lots of love
Paddy
[1] Cecil Beaton (1904–80), fashion, portrait and war photographer, interi
or designer and stage and costume designer. He kept diaries. ‘In the published diaries, opinions are softened, celebrated figures are hailed as wonders and triumphs, whereas in the originals, Cecil can be as venomous as anyone I have ever read or heard in the most shocking of conversations,’ wrote his biographer, Hugo Vickers.
[2] The Kemsley Newspaper Group, owned by the Berry family, owned the Sunday Times, which employed Ian Fleming as Foreign Manager. PLF wrote regular book reviews for the Sunday Times.
[3] ‘Then Old Mother Slipper-Slopper jumped out of bed
And out of the window she pop’t her head.’
From the folk-song ‘The Fox’
In the spring of 1957 Paddy returned to the Abbaye Saint-Wandrille to work on his still-unfinished Greek book.
To Joan Rayner
undated [April 1957]
Abbaye Saint-Wandrille
Seine Inférieure
Darling,
All goes splendidly. This extraordinary place really does seem to do the trick. I think it is partly the atmosphere of activity, and cramming so much into the day, of the monks that shames one out of one’s selfish and brooding sloth. They get up at 5 and go to church, for longer or shorter periods, about seven times a day. Yet a moment before each office, and immediately after, the whole monastery is dotted with toiling figures in boiler-suit habits covered in dirt, oil, earth, flour or shavings. But all of a sudden, there they all are, tooling up the aisle in spotless black habits with the precision of slow marching guardsmen, followed by splendidly arranged figures in gleaming vestments, carrying candles, censers etc. – as if their only plot was the perfection of ritual & gregorian chant. The second it’s over, off they scutter. So it is from 5 a.m. to 8.30. I got off to a whizz-bang start, and have done more in three days than any ten in London. I really am sanguine about finishing soon. I’ll stay on over this weekend, then make my way back via Dieppe. It was a false alarm about having to find rooms in the village. The guest house is full of lyceéns [schoolboys] from Le Havre, but the Père Hôtelier has put me into a colossal room, usually kept for the Archbishop of Rouen, half as large again as the drawing room at Tumbledown [Dumbleton Hall], full of dix-huitième furniture, with a washing place in one curtained alcove, the bed in another, and, above the vast desk, a cloudy oil painting of Clement XIV, the Pope who dissolved the Jesuits – a charming sign of their feud with the Benedictines (they hate each other). They really are kindness itself here, and have been so warm & welcoming. Everyone remembers Eddy [Sackville-] West with great affection. I keep on remembering my first visit, and my almost daily voluminous letters to you on which AT to KS [1] was based. It really is a case of Le jardin n’a rien perdu de son charme, ni le presbytère de son éclat. [2] It’s 8 in the morning, a brilliant day, hundreds of white chestnut-candles on the great trees outside, and lilac everywhere, a cuckoo hard at it. It’s like writing in some delicious room in a remote chateau, peopled by figures called Celimène and Clitandre, instead of le Père Prieur, le Père Hôtelier, l’Hôtelier Bibliothécaire. . .
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 18