Apart from this death-grapple, there is nothing going on here, except croquet, at which I get steadily worse, and shorter and shorter trudges in the hills all round. Two house-martins have got a nest in the eaves just above my window, and they never stop going and coming, and each time they do, their shadows cross this page (twice, since the start of this). The other major excitement is the arrival of a small flock of jet-black Welsh sheep, grazing on the long grass of the orchard below this window. Their ringleaders are two sturdy rams, black as soot, and with long twirling horns, the sort that Joshua used for bringing down the walls of Jericho.
My favourite reading is now Lemprière’s early nineteenth-century classical dictionary. [2] Here is what he has to say about the Emperor Heliogabalus:
Heliogabalus often invited the most common of the people to share his banquets and made them sit down on large bellows full of wind, which by suddenly emptying themselves, threw the guests to the ground and left them a prey to the wild beasts. [3]
Lemprière also says that Talassius was a young Roman who carried off a Sabine virgin, crying out ‘Talassio, which meant that she was now for Talassius’ (dative case?). ‘But it is more probable that the cry “Talassio”, which was used at Roman weddings, is related to our “Tally Ho”.’ Sounds a bit far-fetched. [4]
It’s suddenly pouring with rain. Foul weather for old drakes. We slink back to Kardamyli in a few days. Joan is playing chess against herself downstairs, a schizophrenic contest.
Fond love to Philippa!
Yours ever
Paddy
[1] The Jellicoes lived at Tidcombe Manor in Wiltshire.
[2] The Bibliotheca classica or Classical Dictionary containing a full Account of all the Proper Names mentioned in Ancient Authors (1788) by John Lemprière (c.1765–1824) was a readable if not absolutely reliable reference book on mythology and classical history. As he wrote in his preface, Lemprière wished ‘to give the most accurate and satisfactory account of all the proper names which occur in reading the Classics, and by a judicious collection of anecdotes and historical facts to draw a picture of ancient times, not less instructive than entertaining’.
[3] Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus (c.203–22), commonly known as Elagabalus or Heliogabalus, was made emperor at the age of only fourteen. His eccentricities made him notorious; Gibbon wrote that he ‘abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures and ungoverned fury’. His behaviour provoked public outrage, and at the age of eighteen he was attacked and killed by members of the Praetorian Guard.
[4] ‘One, conspicuous amongst them all for grace and beauty, is reported to have been carried off by a group led by a certain Talassius, and to the many inquiries as to whom she was intended for, the invariable answer was given, “For Talassius”. Hence the use of this word in the marriage rites’ (Lemprière).
Michel Cantacuzène-Spéranski still hoped for a foreword from Paddy, though by the end of the century he was seriously ill. This letter was written to his (second) wife Pamela; she replied with a letter describing her husband’s peaceful passing.
To Pamela Cantacuzène
7 February [?] [misdated 7 January] 2000
The Mill House
Dumbleton
Dear Pam,
I’m so sorry to keep on delaying, it’s far from being on purpose! I’d set this sojourn aside and look what happens.
I was asked to go and stay at Chatsworth, which I adore, and I saw myself scribbling away, but, as an ‘old friend’, I’d got a miserable room with a tiny table and a depressing window outlook into the rain-and-wind-lashed inner courtyard, as there were so many people staying. ( Joan had oiled out of it, not caring for such gregarious occasions as much as I.) So I was constantly downstairs, having fun. (The one quiet writing corner in that vast place was under repair, and swathed in sheets.) But there were all sorts of treats. The P. of Wales was there, and he’d brought a stack of caviar he’d been presented with, so we wolfed it down as abundantly as cornflakes; and, to compensate for my grim quarters, I was shoved next to the P of W’s love, [1] whom I’d never met, and enjoyed that enormously. She’s immensely nice, non-show-off, full of charm, and very funny, so that was a real treat. They set off with their boxed horses next morning, in full fig, to join the Meynell Hunt at their second covert, avoiding the meet and journalists and saboteurs, and had a wonderful day. The weather was very fierce – des vents à décorner les boeufs [‘winds to blow the horns off cattle’] as they say, howling through the woods like something out of the Brontës. All this turned back into a pumpkin when I had to leave for a doctor’s appointment in London, where it was discovered that I had cancer of the tongue (I’d had this twenty-five years ago, when it took ages of elaborate treatment), but I was whisked off to the Lister Hospital and the thing was sliced off with a laser beam next day, and I was out quite soon, feeling rather groggy and living off bouillon and yoghurt and bread and milk, and am still, now four days after, very lethargic and scatterbrained as one is after general anaesthetics, and probably writing drivel.
Worse still, Joan has got to have a slipped retina operation in a few days’ time. We were expected back in Greece three days ago. What a hope.
My original idea in taking up my pen was to [write] about Alan Pryce-Jones’s death [2] – I learned about it at Chatsworth, and now I’ve got to prepare a speech for his memorial service in two to three months, at his son David’s request. But not till I have done yours.
Did I ask you if you had read Dimitri Obolensky’s book, [3] which I think awaits you in Greece? If not I will send you a copy – it has had golden reviews.
I hope you are both well!
Love Paddy
[1] Camilla Parker-Bowles, later Duchess of Cornwall (b. 1947), married the Prince of Wales in 2005.
[2] Alan Pryce-Jones died on 22 January.
[3] Bread of Exile: A Russian Family (1999). After Obolensky’s death in 2001, PLF wrote that he had been ‘an enchanting companion on the hills of Euboea, in the meadows near Oxford, or in the foothills of the Mani in the southern Peloponnese’ (Daily Telegraph, 7 January 2002).
Paddy agreed to write a foreword to a Folio Society edition of Ill Met by Moonlight. Then he withdrew in favour of the SOE historian M. R. D. Foot: the matter was ‘too delicate’ for him to tackle. A week later he telephoned to say that he had been thinking about it, and felt that there were things he would like to say: the coup had, in his view, been diminished by being reduced to the level of a ‘tremendous jape’, and he hoped to restore the balance by providing something of the context for the enterprise. He did not wish to interfere with Foot’s foreword (now redesignated an introduction), but would contribute a ‘short’ afterword, describing his own experience. It would be 500 to 1,000 words. It eventually emerged at 6,500 words, all of which, as the editor at the Folio Society has recalled, ‘had to be wrested from him in hand-to-hand combat, so anxious was he that nothing could be misinterpreted’.
To Sophie Moss
4 April 2001
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dearest Sophie,
I’m so sorry and contrite about being so late in writing and answering you and Gabriella and Pussa. [1] Please transmit my contrition to them. Lovely letters waited for me here with glorious drawings of Polish architecture and fauna – and here I am writing over a month late.
I was terrifically relieved to hear from that nice lady at the Folio Society that the foreword to Ill Met was not in a terrific hurry. It was a great stroke of luck because all of a sudden people started dying all over the place, and I seem to be turning into a sort of latter-day Bossuet, with the Oraisons Funèbres. I had begun the foreword but have put it off for a month (thanks to Folio) until the decks are clear. I want it to be all right, and not done in a hurry. My writing gets steadily slower. What makes it even slower, is that much of it has to be in Greek, which seems to get more clogged with the passing years, instead of flowing like spring-water.
It’s been wretched weath
er here. Joan and I feel like Mr and Mrs Noah in the ark. Rain coming down for forty days and forty nights, with no sign of a dove with a twig in its beak, let alone a distant glimpse of Mt Ararat to perch on, and only two members of the animal kingdom, two tabby cats who love Joan but can’t make up their minds about me, after five years. The villagers, of course, love this downpour – it means no drought in August – so the longer our faces, the wider their smiles.
Please give love and apologies all round, and tons of love
from
Paddy
[1] Her two daughters, ‘Pussa’ being a family name for Isabelle.
To Pamela Cantacuzène
22 April 2001
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Pam,
I was very upset by your letter, and rightly, as I am entirely to blame, while you have been an angel of patience. This is only a short letter, which I got very late owing to mov [ing] about, not because there’s little to say – there is lots – but only to let you know how very sorry and penitent I am about my failure to pen down the foreword.
It’s not through idleness or anything like that; it’s from letting myself get bogged down by a score of things.
The point is, I want this foreword to be very good, or as good as I can make it, because of our mutual concern and involvement in the Cantacuzène family. I have made several false starts, none of them seem to gel properly, so I’ve put it off each time to have another shot. I suppose I don’t write as quickly or as readily at eighty-six as I did in earlier years. I suppose having a pacemaker last year is an indication of slowing up. But I do feel the same about the foreword, and I really will do it. I wish it were now, but I am heading for a book launch – Time of Gifts in Magyar – in Budapest, and almost as soon as I get back the 60th Anniversary of the Battle of Crete looms where I have got to write ghastly speeches as Vice-President of the UK Veteran Soc.
But I have great hopes of this summer. Meanwhile, don’t lose hope and please forgive
love Paddy
Rudi Fischer had written to PLF commenting on the attacks by the terrorist group al-Qaida of 11 September 2001, and the response to these.
To Rudi Fischer
10 October 2001
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Rudi,
My papers are in an even worse turmoil than usual, with the result that I can’t remember whether it [RF’s letter] contains some specific questions that need answering. Anyway, I bet it will turn up the moment I have posted this!
We got back here three weeks ago. It seems like the day before yesterday. Have you noticed that when one gets to a certain age, a month only seems to last a week?
Shortly before we left London, I discovered that two pairs of sailcloth trousers I’d bought in a hurry at Captain Watts’s Nautical Shop, [1] next to my publishers in Albemarle Street, are several inches too long. I took them back one afternoon to see if I could change them, but it seemed that it would take a week or two. Could anyone alter them? They suggested the huge shop John Lewis, tailoring department, in Oxford Street. The lady in charge there said they couldn’t alter outside clothes, as I had suspected. But she recommended some small jobbing ‘seamsters’ at 20 Haunch of Venison Yard, not far off. I found it at last, through an archway leading into a dark, cobbled [word missing], full of broken crates and rubbish, and odd and empty houses, some windows broken, some boarded up – nothing to do with the smart Bond Street-Mayfair world in which it was embedded. No. 20 opened after much tugging on a bell. Inside, one iron staircase led up into a long noisy room, with about ten wild-looking men who had dropped their stitching and slicing to listen to the strident voice, punctuated with martial music, on the loudspeaker. It sounded like Arabic except that there was no glottal stop, as in cockney and Glasgow and Mecca. I asked what it was and after a pause, one said, half-heartedly, ‘Persian’. A bearded elder took the trousers over and said ‘tomorrow’. When I got back to Janetta’s flat in passionate Brompton, [2] Joan told me the afternoon’s frightful news from New York. When I went back to H. of V. Yard, the wireless was even louder, a sort of braying, with more martial music. I said: ‘Persian, again?’ and they said, with wide smiles, ‘No, next door.’ ‘Syria?’ ‘No.’ ‘Lebanon?’ ‘No.’ ‘Pakistan.’ ‘No.’ ‘AFGHANISTAN?’ ‘YES!’ They all started laughing. I said, ‘What’s going to happen?’ And they all pointed to the ceiling, said ‘Allah knows!’ The trousers had been beautifully altered.
All very queer! I don’t have any opinion about routing out bin Laden, [3] let alone his being handed over. The whole key to South Afghan life is the code called Pakhtunwali or Pashtunwali, which revolves round the sacredness of [the] guest, especially if they are on the run or hiding . . . It’s like the code of bessa in Albania, omerta in Sicily and bushido in Japan. I quite agree with your thoughts on ‘cowardly’ attacks, for kamikaze onslaughts. [4] What a gaffe, too, to go on about ‘Crusades’ . . . [5]
Θεὸς μαζί μας! [God be with us!]
Please forgive this rotten scrawl. I’ll do better next time. Joan sends her love to you both, and so do I.
Paddy
[1] Captain O. M. Watts, ships’ chandlers, was at No. 7 Dover Street, W1.
[2] In the nineteenth century the Brompton area of west London became known as ‘passionate Brompton’, on account of the large number of actors who lived there.
[3] Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida’s leader.
[4] RF had suggested that it was mistaken to label those who were launching suicide attacks cowards.
[5] President George W. Bush used the word ‘crusade’ on the day of the attacks, and again on the national day of mourning a week later. His use of the term raised fears among Muslims of a Holy War.
Emma Tennant is Debo Devonshire’s eldest daughter. In her reply to this letter, Lady Emma wrote ‘Lovely to hear from you & specially on the gripping subject of the Agenbite of Inwit / Inbite of Agenwit, one of the best word jokes ever made’ (ET to PLF, 24 April 2002).
To Emma Tennant
2 April 2002
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dearest Emma,
Help needed! Years and years ago, walking beside the Derwent, you asked me if the Inbite of Agenwit, mentioned in the early paragraphs of a book I had just published called Roumeli, had anything to do with the Agenbite of Inwit, [1] and I said yes, it was a sort of joke, based in the I. of A., and applied to the tedium of officials stuck for years in the same provincial outpost and having to listen to each other’s jokes for year after year; what one might just as well call Conker-bane. [2] You obviously knew all about the I. of A., fresh from Oxford and Eng. Lit, and I suppose I must have done too, or else I couldn’t have made misuse of it as I did.
Well, Joan was reading Roumeli yesterday, and asked what the A. of I. was taken from; and I had clean forgotten too. I’ve been hunting through dictionaries of quotations, Webster [’s], the Oxford Companion, and the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I’ve drawn a total blank. Then I thought of looking up ‘Inwit’ in the Shorter (but pretty large) Oxford dictionary, which did at least mention the word ‘Inwit’ [‘Iywit’?] and ‘Conscience’, but nothing which was any help about the source, except, bleakly, the word ‘Wyclif ’ in small capitals; and hope sprang! It meant it was much later than I had been thinking. I’d imagined it must have been a century or two earlier, but it was obviously part of the Lollards’ hatred of the Latin mass and Bible, a vernacularisation of remorsus conscientiae. I made a dash for ‘Lollards’ in the Encyclopaedia and found masses of fascinating stuff about their dissident literature but not a word about the A. of I.! What can it have been – an essay, a book? You are the only person who has ever mentioned it, or asked what I meant by the I. of A., or knew anything about it. Hence this appalling rigmarole. Do, please, send a brief word, and unpucker our brows.
No more for the moment – too serious! – except many thanks in advance, and all hail to you both.
>
Love, Paddy
P.S. T.B.Y.F.: [3] I remember where I first set eyes upon the words, and I have just looked it up. It’s Ulysses, J. Joyce, page 14 of the Bodley Head, line 9. ‘Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of Inwit. Conscience. Yet here’s a spot.’ (He wasn’t giving anything away!)
I believe there is another equally brief mention, much later. Needles in haystacks. [4]
[1] The Agenbite (or Ayenbite) of Inwyt (meaning the ‘again-biting of inner wit’, or, in modern parlance, the Prick of Conscience) is the title of a confessional prose work written in a Kentish dialect of Middle English in 1340 by a Benedictine monk, Michael of Northgate.
[2] ‘If a joke is worth making, it is worth making often, think some; other more fastidious ones suffer more acutely from the Inbite of Agenwit’ (taken from the opening paragraph of Roumeli).
[3] ‘Think Before You Flush’, here meaning, I should have thought of this before writing.
[4] The phrase occurs three times in the text of Ulysses.
To Sophie Moss
24 January 2003
The Mill House
Dumbleton
Dearest Sophie,
Thank you so much for your letter and lovely card – most of them are rather depressing. And all wishes to you, and to Gabriella and Pussa for 2003. I’m so sorry being such a sluggard with the pen, but everything will get a bit clearer later on, and we’ll have a lovely feast in London. I had a lovely Christmas at Chatsworth, just like something out of Dickens, including a whole troupe of carol singers from the village with lanterns, singing all one’s favourites, including one that Xan was very attached to, viz. ‘The Holly and the Ivy’. My favourite too.
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 50