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Patrick Leigh Fermor

Page 52

by Patrick Leigh Fermor


  Yrs ever,

  Paddy

  [1] William Blacker, Along the Enchanted Way: A Romanian Story had just been published by John Murray. It was reviewed in The Spectator on 8 July 2009 by John de Falbe.

  [2] PLF’s review appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on 30 August 2009.

  To Deborah Devonshire

  20 January 2010

  The Mill House

  Dumbleton

  Darling Debo,

  It’s too queer. The day before yesterday the entire landscape was wrapped in snow and ice with deposits of snow 2 feet thick piled on everything, and the only things that seemed to be moving were smallish dark birds that shot past the windows too fast to be identified. All was hushed and immobile. Then yesterday, the whole landscape was bright youthful green – not a speck of white anywhere, everything back to normal, traffic surging past at the crossroads, animal life back to normal. Now today, it’s half-and-half, and v. unsatisfactory.

  While I was writing, the telephone suddenly rang. It was Christian Carritt full of arrangements for next week, in a hurry, no other bumf in sight, so I scribbled this extraneous matter down, now enclosed. Apologies for intrusion.

  But, to continue, I found myself sneaking away from the Antarctic scenery outside by dipping furtively into In Tearing Haste, and enjoying it almost as if it was a total stranger and laughing at all the jokes. Does this sort of thing happen to you at all? Do tell.

  Jeff [1] is about to drive down to Winchcombe for shopping, so I’ll give him this.

  Forgive haste and muddle,

  tons of love,

  Paddy

  [1] The gardener.

  Olivia Stewart was a regular visitor to Kardamyli and a stalwart help to Paddy in his last years.

  To Olivia Stewart

  20 January 2010

  The Mill House

  Dumbleton

  Darling Olivia,

  Thank you so much for this lovely present [an alpaca jersey]. It really is a beauty. I’ve already walked down [to] the end of the drive, an impossible undertaking two days ago: the house and everything visible round it has been caked in snow and ice and not only that, but I was still too aching and stiff from my midnight fall to do anything more than totter. But now there is much more green than white in the surroundings, and I am loosening up a bit at last.

  The only figure from the outside world was Pamela Egremont, who managed to drive here through snow and ice in a sturdy car from Sussex Street SW3, and is now ploughing through the slush to the Lake District.

  I’ve managed to do some work, on the third closing volume of my youthful trilogy. I was feeling rather apprehensive about picking up after a long pause. I’ve been v. worried about this, but to my great relief, the part already written of this last stretch is not nearly as hopeless as I feared it might be, so perhaps it will all be OK in the end. I wish my writing had not deteriorated so.

  Right at the beginning of this scrawl, I should have thanked you for your angelic help in all the arrangements for my arrival and return. I wonder where you are now – one of the great capitals of Europe, I enviously expect. I can’t tell you what a help Christian has been too – in fact everyone – Rita, Jeff, Hamish. . .

  Jeff is just off to the post, so I’ll glue this up.

  Tons of love

  Paddy

  Please forgive this frightfully untidy and unreadable letter!

  In the spring of 2011 Paddy was diagnosed with cancer of the throat. An operation was performed at a hospital in Athens to remove the tumour. By then ninety-six years old, he chose to refuse further treatment. He was able to return to Kardamyli, and talked excitedly about resuming work on the third volume of his trilogy, completing the story of his great walk begun in A Time of Gifts. But only a few weeks later another operation proved necessary. On 9 June, Paddy left Greece for the last time, hoping to see his friends in England before the end. He arrived at Dumbleton that night, and died the next morning.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  John Betjeman (1906–84), popular poet, writer, broadcaster and advocate for Victorian architecture, knighted in 1969. He married Penelope Chetwode in 1933, but the two became estranged after her conversion to Catholicism in 1949. As a schoolboy at King’s School, Canterbury, in the 1930s, PLF had heard Betjeman lecture long before they met.

  Lyndall Birch (b. 1931), daughter of the journalist Tom Hopkinson and the novelist Antonia White. She had married Lionel Birch, Hopkinson’s successor as editor of Picture Post (a man only five years younger than her father), but the marriage failed after only a few months. When she first met PLF, in 1958, she was living in Rome.

  Sir (Cecil) Maurice Bowra (1898–1971), classical scholar and Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, renowned as a wit, often vicious. He was devoted to Joan but not as friendly towards PLF.

  Marie-Blanche (‘Balasha’) Cantacuzène (1899–1976), artist, a princess from one of the great dynasties of eastern Europe. Her family owned a house in Bucharest and an estate in Moldavia, near the Bessarabian border. In 1924 she had married a Spanish diplomat: he had abandoned her while serving as ambassador in Athens, where PLF met and fell in love with her in 1935.

  (Charles) Bruce Chatwin (1940–89), travel writer, novelist and journalist. He had known PLF and Joan slightly since 1970, and they came to know each other well when he visited Kardamyli in the winter of 1984/5 and stayed for seven months. After his death from an AIDS-related illness in 1989, his ashes were buried at a chapel nearby, at his own request.

  Cyril Connolly (1903–74), a close friend and admirer of Joan’s. PLF referred to him satirically as ‘The Humanist’.

  Deborah (‘Debo’) Vivien Cavendish (1920–2014), née Mitford, the youngest of the six Mitford sisters, who married Andrew Robert Buxton Cavendish, later 11th Duke of Devonshire (1920–2004) in 1941. PLF had first spotted her at a ball in 1940, though then she had scarcely noticed him. In the post-war years they became close friends, and he was a frequent visitor to the Devonshire seats, Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Lismore Castle in Ireland. The correspondence between DD and PLF over a period of more than half a century was published as In Tearing Haste, edited by Charlotte Mosley, in 2008.

  Artemis Cooper (b. 1953), writer, daughter of John Julius Norwich and granddaughter of Duff and Diana Cooper, married to the military historian Antony Beevor, whose books include Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (1991). Her biography of PLF, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, was published in 2012.

  Diana Cooper (1892–1986), née Lady Diana Manners, famous beauty and socialite, the youngest daughter, in theory, of the Duke of Rutland (in fact, daughter of the Hon. Henry ‘Harry’ Cust). In 1919 she married the Conservative politician and writer Alfred Duff Cooper, who was appointed British Ambassador to France in 1944, and eventually made Viscount Norwich; she preferred to remain known as Lady Diana Cooper, claiming that Viscountess Norwich sounded too much like ‘porridge’. She and PLF became close friends in the early 1950s. In the words of PLF’s biographer, ‘Paddy and Diana each discovered that the other was the sort of person they liked best.’

  Alfred Duff Cooper (1890–1954), 1st Viscount Norwich, politician, diplomat, author, and British Ambassador to France, 1944–7.

  Lawrence Durrell (1912–90), poet, novelist and man of letters. Though British, he lived most of his life abroad, in Corfu, Crete, Egypt and France. He came to know PLF during the war, while serving as a press attaché to the British embassies in Cairo and Alexandria.

  Pamela Egremont see Pamela Wyndham-Quin

  (Henry) Robin Fedden (1908–77), writer, diplomat and mountaineer. In the 1930s he served as a diplomat in Athens and taught English Literature at Cairo University. Henry Miller thought him effete. After the war, he worked for the National Trust.

  Alexander (‘Xan’) Fielding (1918–91), writer, translator, journalist and traveller; met PLF while serving behind enemy lines in Crete during the war, and they became close friends. Before his marriage to Magouche Phillips, he was married to Dap
hne (1904–97), née Vivian, ex-wife of Henry Thynne, 6th Marquess of Bath.

  Agnes (‘Magouche’ also known as Magouch and Magoosh) Fielding (1921–2013), née Magruder, then Gorky, Phillips and finally Fielding, was the daughter of an American admiral and widow of the Armenian-American artist, Arshile Gorky.

  Rudi Fischer (1923–2016), editor and scholar, a naturalised Australian of Saxon Transylvanian origin who was living in Budapest and working as an editor for the New Hungarian Quarterly when he first made contact with PLF in 1978, to draw his attention to errors in A Time of Gifts. ‘My debt to Rudolf Fischer is beyond reckoning,’ PLF would write in Between the Woods and the Water. ‘His omniscient range of knowledge and an enthusiasm tempered with astringency have been a constant delight and stimulus during all the writing of this book; his vigilance has saved it from many errors, and I feel that the remaining ones may be precisely those when his advice was not followed.’

  Ann (‘Annie’) Fleming (1913–81), née Charteris, granddaughter of the 9th Earl of Wemyss. Her third husband was Ian Fleming, later the author of the James Bond novels. They lived at Goldeneye, a house in Jamaica, and Sevenhampton, in Wiltshire. A renowned society hostess, she had friends in politics and in the literary world, and became one of PLF’s closest friends and most regular correspondents.

  Nikos (‘Niko’) Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1906–94), artist and sculptor generally considered among the best Greek artists, from a wealthy Athens family. He and PLF became friends after the war, and in the early 1950s Ghika allowed PLF to stay for long periods at his house on Hydra. After this house was destroyed by fire, Ghika built a house on Corfu. He married first Antigone Kotzia (‘Tiggie’), and then, in 1961, Barbara Hutchinson.

  Enrica (‘Ricki’) Huston (1929–69), née Soma, socialite, model and ballerina, born in New York of Italian-American parents. She became the fourth and much younger wife of the film director, screenwriter and actor John Huston (1906–87). She died in a car accident at the age of only thirty-nine.

  Barbara Hutchinson see Barbara Warner

  George Katsimbalis (1890–1978), poet and raconteur, a dominant figure in Greek literary life, immortalised in Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi (1941). PLF met him in an Athens nightclub in 1940.

  Patrick Kinross ( John Patrick Douglas Balfour) (1904–76), 3rd Baron Kinross, historian and writer, specialising in Islamic history. He came to know PLF while serving as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Cairo during the war.

  Elemér von Klobusiçky (1899–1986) was PLF’s host on his family estate in Transylvania in the summer of 1934. In Between the Woods and the Water PLF concealed his identity under the pseudonym ‘István’. ‘I admired him very much,’ wrote PLF, ‘he was tremendous fun, and we became great friends.’ They had several adventures together, including a frolic with peasant girls who discovered the two young men swimming naked in a river. PLF especially liked the fact that ‘István’ had run away to join a hussar regiment during the First World War.

  Lady Dorothy (‘Coote’) Lygon (1912–2001), fourth and youngest daughter of the 7th Earl Beauchamp, the doomed family on whom Evelyn Waugh is said to have modelled the Flytes (Lord Marchmain) in his novel Brideshead Revisited. She was a spinster until her unexpected, late marriage to Robert Heber-Percy in 1985, two years before his death.

  Sir Aymer Maxwell of Monreith (1911–87), baronet, elder brother of the writer Gavin Maxwell. He had inherited estates in south-west Scotland, but preferred sailing round the Greek islands to more conventional country pursuits. While PLF was waiting for the house at Kardamyli to be built, Sir Aymer let him use his own house in Euboea.

  Jessica Mitford (1917–96), known as ‘Decca’, writer and civil-rights activist, the second youngest of the six Mitford sisters. Her left-wing sympathies were in sharp contrast to those of her sisters Unity and Diana, who married the Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. She lived in California, where she met and married the American lawyer and civil-rights activist Robert Treuhaft.

  Nancy Mitford (1904–73), novelist, biographer and journalist, eldest of the six Mitford sisters. After the war she lived in France. She had married Peter Rodd in 1933, but the marriage did not survive, and she formed a long-term liaison with the Free French officer Gaston Palewski.

  (Charles) Raymond Mortimer (1895–1980), literary critic and literary editor of the New Statesman 1935–47.

  W. Stanley (‘Billy’) Moss (1921–65), soldier, writer and traveller, PLF’s second-in-command in the operation to capture General Kreipe. He wrote an account of this operation, Ill Met by Moonlight (1950), which was made into a film (1957) by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. In Cairo during the war he met the Polish Countess Zofia (‘Sophie’) Tarnowska (1917–2009), whom he subsequently married.

  John (‘Jock’) Murray (1909–93), publisher, the sixth John Murray in the illustrious family firm, and a patient friend and supporter of PLF.

  John Julius Norwich (b. 1929), diplomat, writer and broadcaster, 2nd Viscount Norwich, son of Duff and Lady Diana Cooper.

  Mark Ogilvie-Grant (1905–69) was posted to Greece with the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War, but was taken prisoner in the Mani soon after landing. After the war he settled in Athens, where he worked for BP.

  Janetta Parladé (b. 1922), née Woolley, a close friend of Joan’s, and of Frances and Ralph Partridge, much admired for her beauty and intelligence. She was married to Humphrey Slater, Robert Kee and Derek Jackson, who left her for her half-sister, Angela Culme-Seymour. Eventually she would marry a Spanish aristocrat, the interior designer Jaime Parladé.

  Frances Partridge (1900–2004), née Marshall, was married to Ralph Partridge (1894–1960), and lived at Ham Spray, where, before marrying Frances, Ralph had lived in a ménage-à-trois with Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington. Ralph and Frances were close friends of Joan’s and Janetta Parladé’s.

  George Psychoundakis (1920–2006), Cretan resistance fighter, shepherd and author. PLF translated his memoirs into English and then helped to arrange their publication with John Murray under the title The Cretan Runner (1955). Later Psychoundakis translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into the Cretan dialect.

  Peter Quennell (1905–93), writer, editor and man of letters, knighted in 1993. He was editor of the Cornhill magazine, and co-editor of History Today. Once described as ‘a rampant heterosexual’, he married five times. An urbane and witty companion, he joined PLF on a walking tour in Italy.

  Joan Rayner, later Joan Leigh Fermor (1912–2003), née Eyres Monsell, photographer and muse, the second of three daughters of Bolton Meredith Eyres Monsell, MP, who became Conservative Chief Whip and then First Lord of the Admiralty, and was ennobled in 1935 as 1st Viscount Monsell. In 1939 she married the journalist and typographer John Rayner, but the marriage did not succeed, and they were living apart by the time she met PLF in Athens at the end of the war. She and PLF formed a lifelong partnership, despite his affairs with other women. Joan was devoted to her brother Graham, who succeeded his father as 2nd Viscount on his father’s death in 1969. Their mother, Caroline Eyres, had inherited Dumbleton Hall in Gloucestershire, a mid-Victorian pile said to have been considered as a refuge for the House of Lords during the war. This was sold after her death, and thereafter Joan and Graham shared The Mill House on the Dumbleton estate.

  George (‘Dadie’) Rylands (1902–99), literary scholar and influential theatre director. Elected Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, in 1927, he lived there for the rest of his life.

  Edward (‘Eddy’) Sackville-West (1901–65), 5th Baron Sackville, novelist and music critic. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1949.

  Georgios Seferiades (‘George Seferis’) (1900–71) was a poet and career diplomat, a major figure in Greek letters, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963. Seferis served as Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1962. He took a stand against the dictatorship of ‘the Colonels’ who took power in 1967, and by the time of his death he had become a popul
ar hero in Greece for his resistance to the regime. His close relations with PLF were strained by the tensions over Cyprus in the 1950s.

  Sir Sacheverell (‘Sachie’) Sitwell, 6th Baronet (1897–1988), art critic and writer on architecture, one of the three Sitwell siblings. In 1925 he married Georgia Doble (d.1980). They lived at Weston Hall, a Jacobean house in Northamptonshire. PLF was taken up by them in the late 1930s.

  Amy, Lady Smart, painter, Lebanese wife of Sir Walter Smart. PLF had come to know them both in Cairo during the war. In the 1950s PLF was often a guest at Gadencourt, their house in Normandy.

  Sir Walter Smart (‘Smartie’) (1883–1962), diplomat and scholar.

  Freya Stark (1893–1993), explorer and travel writer, had met PLF in Egypt during the war. She was awarded a CBE in 1953 and made a dame in 1972.

 

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