Since then, everything has been rather turmoil. Joan and I are like two old motor-cars being serviced. On my last trip, to see an oculist, everyone had to change out of the Paddington train at Oxford, thanks to the flooding of the Thames, and go on by bus to Didcot, then into a train again; then out because of further floods at Reading. And during all this shemozzle, my briefcase got lost, I think pinched: there are notices saying THIEVES OPERATING NOW! BEWARE! One might be in Khartoum. Like a lunatic I had masses of documents in it, licence, passport, chequebook, and worst of all, a forty-year-old address book, so I’m back to the start. Can you imagine anything worse? Thank God, I’ve got yours, in a forty-year-old disintegrating and ragged survivor with a few very, very, early entries. Getting passports, birth certificates, etc., makes one feel one is not yet fully in existence.
This scribble must stop. It’s only to send lots of love and wishes to you all, and apologise. Please forgive!!
Paddy
To John Julius Norwich
6 June 2003
Kardamyli [1]
Messenia
Dear John Julius,
I expect Artemis [has told you] about the frightful blow that has fallen here. Yesterday morning I was chatting and laughing with Joan, having her breakfast in bed. An hour later Elpida the maid [2] came running, in floods, saying Kyria Ionnna. She had slipped in the bathroom, lost balance, fell, and struck her head so fiercely on a sort of low step that it killed her outright. No pain, thank heavens, except for survivors.
Thank heavens Olivia Stewart [3] was here, the model of speed and efficiency and organisation. With the result that we, with poor Joan, duly looked after by summoned experts, [are] flying to Athens and driving to Dumbleton, where a service will take place. Not quite sure of the day, but I’ll [illegible].
Terrible that this angelic figure – the one who could least be spared, has suddenly been carried away.
No more now, JJ, except love to both, and please tell Anne. [4] I’ll be in touch again.
Will be going straight to Dumbleton, where a funeral service is already being arranged – naturally accompanied by ‘Fight the Good Fight’ by John something something Monsell, [5] also sung at their funerals, [6] a great favourite of Betjeman.
I suddenly came on the end of the block of writing-paper, [illegible] of letter from Diana, headed ‘Laeken Palace, Brussels’, [7] with ‘stolen stationery’, pencilled underneath by Diana.
[1] Using writing paper from Château de Saint-Firmin, Vineuil, Oise.
[2] Elpida Beloyannis, the Leigh Fermors’ cook/housekeeper, who was devoted to PLF.
[3] The younger of Michael and Damaris Stewart’s daughters, a regular visitor to Kardamyli in her own right, who was particularly close to Joan.
[4] John Julius Norwich’s former wife.
[5] John S. B. Monsell, ‘Fight the Good Fight’ (1863).
[6] i.e. those of Joan’s parents?
[7] The official residence of the King of the Belgians.
To Sophie Moss
20 June 2003
The Mill House
Dumbleton
Dumbleton
Dearest Sophie,
I was – am – very moved by your lovely letter. All the last days have been a sort of trance, it was all so sudden and unforeseen . . . It culminated a few days ago in the small, late Plantagenet church here, with sunbeams pouring in through stained glass, and the sound of flocks and birdsong from outside drifting in and seeming to form a part of the liturgy, from the hills and fields.
Here’s the liturgy, itself, with a couple of paragraphs from Sir Thomas Browne we both loved, and a strange and marvellous fragment of one of the apocryphal gospels which we were put on to by the poet Seferis.
Please give my love to Pussa and Gabriella. I’m going to write soon. It’s rather a consolation to be doing it! And tons of love to you, dearest Sophie, I’ll be in London soon and will be in touch –
Paddy X
Andrew Devonshire died in 2004. Janetta Parladé had been a lover of the Duke’s and had remained close to him until the end. Paddy attended the funeral at Chatsworth, and afterwards felt that he should inform Janetta how the Duchess had reacted to her letter of condolence.
To Janetta Parladé
12 May 2004
On Chatsworth writing paper, marked ‘In the train to Paddington’
Darling Janetta,
This letter is likely to be very wobbly because the train jerks from side to side at a terrific but irregular rate.
Debo was very moved by your letter, which she read to me at the earliest opportunity. It was perfect, absolutely right in every way, not a false note anywhere. I meant to creep away and telephone you at once, but for some reason, failed totally, I got through to Alcuzcuz [1] who gave me a space-garbled Madrid number which I finally got through to and then you were heading for Alcuzcuz again, and finally I thought I’d better write. (I’ve become a bit more legible for a moment, because we are stationary in Derby for a moment.)
I came up on (we’re off again) Tuesday morning, after getting to Dumbleton after a rather hectic drive from K [ardamyli], and a Saturday devoted to a military function in Athens with Geo. J. and Philippa and a 5 p.m. next day flight. Debo said to come so I went, and I’m v. glad I did, after driving up there with Jeff the gardener and his girl. After a buffet lunch, the gathered family and a few friends moved off towards the church, which was tolling loudly every few seconds. This part moved at a slow foot pace after the car-hearse, as the whole mile was lined along both sides of the road with estate people, game-keepers, gardeners, maids in spotless aprons and Derbyshire yeomanry in old-fashioned scarlet and helmets, then a company of Coldstream Guards. All in the greatest quiet and solemnity, except that the solitary knell had changed to a sequence of slightly faster descending scales. I was in the car with Christian, [2] and in church, beside beautiful grandchild Stella [3] (who I hadn’t seen since she was five in the Lowlands, carrying a speckled Prussian hen under one arm, and one of its eggs in the other hand telling Debo, triumphantly, that it wasn’t a cockerel, as D. had thought when giving it to her, but a hen). She has turned into a rather shy and sad raving beauty, with a tear track over red cheeks when we all got up to go out to his churchyard, where Andrew was laid to rest among the trees and the Last Post was sounded. D. had planned every detail of the order of service and ritual, and it somehow managed to be simultaneously magnificent, rustic, and simple. There were huge marquees by the big fountain outside the house, and a mass of people, a mixture of a vicarage garden party and the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Only Debo and Sophie [4] left next day, and me largely wandering about hoping I wasn’t in the way, but I don’t think I was. We went for a huge walk (for me) after tea. Rather marvellous it was, and made me very glad to have gone. I talked a lot about you.
Now I’m heading for two days in London under Magouche’s roof, then she is coming south for the weekend and Cressida and Charles [5] coming over on Sunday, which will be lovely. It’s now getting about too wobbly to write, so I’ll finish this, and get it off from the Travellers or Whites. I forgot to say that it was a wonderful summer day yesterday, [illegible] and nearly static alabaster clouds and bluebells and hundreds of other flowers bursting out in those steep woods.
tons of love
Paddy
[1] The house belonging to the Parladés in San Pedro Alcántara, in the province of Malaga, southern Spain.
[2] Dr Christian Carritt (b. 1927), described by DD as ‘a selfless, funny and charming London GP loved and relied upon by all her patients, many of whom became her great friends’ (In Tearing Haste, page 313, note 1).
[3] The model Stella Tennant (b. 1970).
[4] Lady Sophia Louise Sydney Topley (b. 1957), second daughter of the Duke and Duchess.
[5] Cressida Connolly (b. 1960), daughter of Cyril Connolly, and her husband Charles Hudson.
To Tzannis Tzannetakis
20 June 2004
Kardamyli
Mess
enia
Dear Tzannis,
Please forgive me for not writing earlier to thank you for your marvellous words the other night at the Gennadius Library. Everyone was struck by your talk, and said it was the most marvellous piece of writing. The only sad aspect of it is that I am getting so deaf that I couldn’t catch whole pieces of it, and this makes me very sad, though eternally grateful. I have a hearing machine, but it seems to deteriorate and fail to transmit when I need it most. Of course I long to know what you said. The mere fact of your composition and delivery fills me with gratitude but I would give anything to follow your speech in its entirety. Would it be possible for me to have a copy? I long to read it and I would treasure it forever. I know how good it was from what everybody else said of it. I do hope my request isn’t an awful nuisance for you, but I would be grateful forever!
It was a wonderful evening, and I am still overcome by it. It was a great joy to see you and Maria, and I wish I had managed to talk to you both, as we used to in Kythera, years ago, that splendid couple of weeks when we were both going over your glorious translation. [1]
It was a very happy time. This is the third time that you have put me in your debt, for literary help. I could hear every word of your speech at the other book launching. I wish Joan had been there!
With much love to you both from your grateful
Paddy
[1] Tzannetakis had translated PLF’s Mani while in political exile under the Colonels’ regime.
More than a decade after he had undertaken to write a foreword to Michel Cantacuzène-Spéranski’s book, Paddy had still not done so. ‘I have, over the years, made a few tentative starts to the former, but they weren’t quite right; so I put them aside till the right one occurs, as when it does – and I’ll make sure it does do so – I really will get at it,’ he had written to Cantacuzène’s widow in 2003.
To Pamela Cantacuzène
18 January 2007
The Mill House
Dumbleton
My dear Pam,
Thank you very much for your very kind letter. I feel very guilty and downcast about my disappointing conduct about the book. I’m ashamed to say that the list of unfulfilled plans grows longer. I find writing more and more difficult. Literally and physically on one level. I’m slowed up by a wretched affliction called ‘tunnel-vision’, which makes putting pen to paper result in a tangle like barbed wire entanglement, which is why I am writing on this unattractive lined stationery, which does more or less make the result semi-legible. But the thought process that sets writing in action seems to become slower and more hopeless as time passes. I do hope I am wrong, but the outlook is bleak and upsetting. I wish I had either managed to produce what was needed, or confessed to the gloomy predicament earlier on. I am not absolutely in despair about all this, and hope for a change. It’s not very encouraging to say that you are at the top of an unfulfilled programme. But that, alas, seems to be the situation, and I am deeply sorry and penitent about behaving so hopelessly.
The tone of your letter is very kind, forgiving and generous, and I am deeply grateful and hopeful that things will change, but not very sanguine. I’m in England at the moment (Mill House, Dumbleton, Evesham, Worcestershire), but returning to Greece soon.
It seems ridiculous, things being as they are, to hope for a change, but I do.
Meanwhile, kind Pam, very many apologies and love.
Paddy
I will be ninety-two next month . . .
Paddy had spent New Year 2007 with his old friend Debo Devonshire, who had moved out of Chatsworth after her husband’s death, and was living at the Old Vicarage in the nearby village of Edensor. Also staying were two old friends, Robert Kee and the former diplomat Sir Nicholas Henderson, who noticed that Paddy seemed very ‘down in the dumps’, but that he rallied when Debo produced a box of his letters for the party to read. Both welcomed Henderson’s suggestion that their correspondence should be published. Debo asked her niece Charlotte Mosley to act as editor. That summer Charlotte visited Paddy in Kardamyli to discuss the book. Afterwards she wrote to Debo to say that she thought it had given him ‘a new lease of life – he feels appreciated, and it has taken his mind off Vol. III, which is clearly never going to appear. He reads out passages from his own letters (& sometimes yours) and roars with laughter.’
This letter was written while Paddy was back in Dumbleton, two days after Debo had been to see him there. In another letter to her about the book, Paddy confessed that he was editing his letters: ‘I have tempered one or two bits of ardour in case the reader would conclude I was a bit of a rotter, if you see what I mean; but crushes are hard to make look different!’
To Deborah Devonshire
September 2007 looming
The Mill House
Dumbleton
Two days after your departure
Darling Debo,
I’m feeling tremendously buoyant and bucked about the whole In Tearing Haste project. Your letters are wonderfully full of life and sparkle and jokes – and moving depths of feeling too. I’m deep in the last third at the moment and most of the difficulties seem to have centred on you, and you handled them brilliantly, thanks to being clever, kind-hearted and as good as gold. What agony a lot of it must have been!
Do feel free to hack about in my parts, whenever you think it’s soppy or embarrassing or ghastly in any other way. I’m still a bit worried about W. S. M., [1] and my rather tearing him to bits on the grounds of his rather eerie appearance. I ought to have another look sometime when we can still change a word or two.
What luck having someone as quick, clever, patient and kind as Char [2] in the middle of things! And Helen at the Old Vic! [3]
I’m now about to have a bash at those few words to be uttered at Canterbury. [4]
Please keep in firm touch. I brood a bit on the cover. I wonder if [illegible] battlements of Lismore on one side, and sea-girt olive groves and peaks of the Mani, both floating on stage, as it were, on opposite sides, with a few birds and clouds knocking about in the offing, might be any good. I expect inspiration will come crowding in.
Tons of love, darling Debo
from Paddy
I sat down to a dish of Rhubarb-Crumble with lots of plums afterwards, a perfect feast for Charlotte. I’d never had R-Crumble before. It sounds, somehow, like a contradiction. Rather good. . .
Rita [5] can’t stop talking about you all. Nor can I.
P.P.S. That nice Wykehamist poet [6] is keeping me company to Greece on the 18th Sept. Do try and come back sometime.
[1] (Willie) Somerset Maugham. PLF’s attempts to soften his comments on Maugham when this letter was published in the volume of his correspondence with DD were resisted by the editor.
[2] Charlotte Mosley.
[3] DD’s secretary, Helen Marchant, who worked at the Old Vicarage.
[4] On 9 September 2007 PLF opened a new boarding-house at King’s School, Canterbury, replacing the one where he had himself boarded.
[5] Rita Walker, the Mill House cook.
[6] Hamish Robinson (b. 1964).
Colin Thubron (b. 1939) is a highly regarded travel writer and novelist.
To Colin Thubron
undated [early 2008]
The Mill House
Dumbleton
Dear Colin,
I had a rather gloomy moment over the New Year, or just after; viz. a long piece in the Daily Telegraph listing all the worthwhile writers over the last half-century, and the gloom of a streaming cold sent me hangdog to bed, as an absentee from the list. [1]
But all changed next morning. Someone sent me the New York Review of Books with your marvellously generous and inspiring article, [2] and I have been walking on air ever since, as though I had been relaunched by a magic dock leaf, if you will forgive the mixed metaphors.
Many, many thanks.
It seems ages since you came to Kardamyli with Anne. [3] Please do it again whenever it’s convenient. I’m going back in about a month, having
lately become ninety-three years old. Or if you are ever anywhere near, do come here. I’ll be dashing to London and back pretty frequently to see doctors. I apologise for this writing – it’s barely legible, even to me, the result of an official affliction called ‘tunnel-vision’ (Simplonitis, to me).
I am about to read To the Last City, [4] which has miraculously made its way here, and I note with excitement a number of Quechua place names [5] scattered about the pages.
(Beginning to go off the rails!) [6] Must stop.
Yours ever, Paddy
[1] ‘The 50 greatest writers since 1945’, The Times, 5 January 2008. Thubron himself appeared at No. 45 on the list.
[2] In ‘A Prince of the Road’, New York Review of Books, 17 January 2008, Thubron described PLF as ‘the greatest travel writer alive’.
[3] Anne Norwich, mother to Artemis Cooper and former wife of John Julius Norwich.
[4] A novel by Thubron, first published in 2002.
[5] The Quechua are an indigenous people of the South American Andes.
[6] The letter was written on lined paper.
To William Blacker
July 2009
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear William,
I feel very upset. I finished your glorious book [1] yesterday and tried to get to Mark Amory at The Spectator, in order to review it; couldn’t get through, so telephoned Debo Devonshire, to see if she could get through on the spot, as it were. She got through, and Mark got through with the v. upsetting news that it had already been reviewed. I got the Spec. this morning, a well-written absolutely favourable review, but I feel more frustrated than words can tell. If ever a book was written to be read and reviewed by me! Mark said he would give me as much space as I wanted. But, unfortunately, the review is v. good, and neatly blocks all the points that I now can’t make. DAMN! I asked him (Mark, a friend and a very nice chap) if he could find someone else who would welcome a review from me, and he said he would look round, and keep in touch. [2] So that, maddeningly, is how things are. The book is glorious, and I long to write about it. I go to England Aug. 1st, Mill House, Dumbleton, Evesham, Worcs: tel: 01242 621 225. I’ll be there about a month. Frustration rages across the Morea.
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 51