Despite his early visits during the building work, Sir Maurice Bowra never saw the house once it was finished. He claimed that he refused to go back to Greece so long as the Colonels of the junta were in charge but, as Ann Fleming continued in her letter to Aline Berlin, he no longer had the physical health for so arduous a journey. Buses and taxis served Kardamyli – the first private car in the village belonged to Paddy and Joan – but from then on one had to walk through olive groves, scrub, and along a narrow cliff path; ‘the descent to the beach [is] 24 uneven stone steps and though the bathing is perfect I suspect he prefers a table where he can shout “Vino subito”.’ And there were problems with the water; Peter Quennell complained that there was hot water only once a week. Paddy suggested to Jim Lees-Milne that he might like to stay but admitted: ‘It’s not very inviting at the moment as there is a water shortage, and Joan, Graham and I pour cupfuls of water over ourselves, then leave them standing in the bath for later use. Pretty disgusting.’8
Xan and Daphne Fielding were always welcome. One August in the early 1970s when Paddy and she had gone home to Dumbleton, Joan wrote to welcome them to Kardamyli. They were using the house in Joan and Paddy’s absence:
Darling Daphne & Xan,
I’m not going on apologising for not being there as it’s always as nice staying in houses when the owners are away & I feel we are the real sufferers being deprived of you. I do hope everything is all right & that they have finished whitewashing the rooms, usually left until the last moment & nothing ready when one gets back. As you will have realised from the first moment Lela is a wonder & will order you better chickens etc from Kalamata, fish etc & I hope look after you marvellously. Let her have an evening off occasionally if Daphne can cook some eggs or something or go to the tavern run by great friend Pavos Poneireas & nice family, the son Nico was our sort of foreman; or the new smart restaurant, quite good food, Belgian wife. There is a glorious beach with icy fresh water springs in the sand & sea about 4 or 5 miles on, just before Stoupa (nice tavern for lunch). There are roads everywhere now.
Paddy & party are back from the dangerous mountain peaks, all very successful & exciting. I’ve just had a wonderful 19 page letter from him. He should be here just before I leave. Li-lows [sic] are in the cupboard in the bathroom, & goggles. Whisky & vodka in the cellar. Don’t play the gramophone as it needs a new needle which I’m bringing out. There’s a wireless in my room but needs new batteries. Be kind to the forty cats. Do please manage to stay on your way back. Surely you could leave a few days earlier. I do so long to see you.
Very much love
Joan9
Joan always apologized in advance to visitors about her cats, in case guests did not appreciate her passion. Wherever one went on the premises a cat or kitten would suddenly appear, all of them descended from a single Abyssinian which had mated freely with the village toms. Joan wrote to John Banting in 1971: ‘Cats multiply, a beautiful mixture of Abyssinian and Maniote, but too many now. Graham says they’re like having crabs.’10
Although there were fewer in later years, at one time, when Janetta Parladé was staying, she counted seventy-three of them living in warring families. Since local veterinary services were lacking, if Joan had to put them down she used strong sleeping pills.11 Sometimes, although not often, they annoyed her: ‘The cats have killed the red rump swallows just as they had finished building the enormous miraculous nest just inside the front door. You can imagine my rage and despair.’12 However, the ‘down-holsterers’, as Paddy called them because of the harm they caused to the furniture, were part of Kardamyli life: ‘It’s been wet and cold and if my writing is worse than usual it’s because I’m sitting in the sun with eight cats on top of me. Paddy has been and is working like a demon, all day & a lot of the night. He is very pleased with himself, for that & keeping thinner, & it makes me very happy.’13 Photographs of the cats were turned into postcards. One showed a cat asleep on the open pages of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, a favourite book which Paddy and Joan read in alternate years. ‘Overleaf is a little cat, which I’m sure you knew (“Tiny Tim”), great favourite of Joan and mine, now, alas, mousing above the clouds . . .’14
Joan herself was not always the perfect hostess. She admitted as much to Patrick Kinross:
I loved your letter & the eavesdropping remarks about my behaviour. It was a trial & I’m afraid I was often impatient & irritated with everyone. Thank goodness you were here but it was rather bad luck for you & I longed for you to be here too with Dadie [Rylands] and Raymond [Mortimer]. That restored one’s faith again in conversation. Paddy was upset about it especially as he had been looking forward to it tremendously. They were so nice but I am afraid they will tell Balasha I am even more cold and aloof than Bridget Parsons.15
And there were sometimes guests who could begin to outstay their welcome, or prove trying in other ways, none more so than her old friend Eddie Gathorne-Hardy. Eddie’s selfishness was phenomenal, although, as Heywood Hill wrote to Nancy Mitford, ‘Joan . . . said that she likes having him because he is so selfish that there is no doubt what he wants. A point of view, I suppose, though charitable.’16 After working for the British Council in Athens, Cyprus and Cairo, Eddie had retired to Athens, but was in the habit of making extended visits to his friends and family, whom he treated like members of his personal staff. Even Joan’s charity could be exhausted.
Eddie is here and driving me mad with his continual banter about food: ‘I suppose, my dear, you are giving us pheasant to-night, my dear. Oct 1st, my dear, I have to have a pheasant my dear.’ ‘I don’t think this is any good, my dear, without at least a pint of cream in it, my dear.’ ‘I hope you have stuffed the chicken with foie gras, my dear.’ On and on and on, after a week one really doesn’t know how to answer.17
Not that Eddie was completely unfeeling. When Bowra died in 1972, he wrote to Joan with his sympathy – and then told her about his own medical problems.
Eddie’s sister Anne was married to the bookseller Heywood Hill. In the Leigh Fermor archive there is a letter from Heywood Hill to Robin Fedden:
Dearest Robin,
Pardon for using my Jumbo Economy Scribbling Pad upon you. It’s a bad sign when one starts to stinge on writing paper. But I have not yet got to my late father’s stage of counting the sheets in a toilet roll. I suppose these days Andrex would win – according to telly adverts of Bonzo getting mixed up in it and rushing downstairs and out onto the patio (all anathema to you, I guess).
If I sound in cheery spirits, it’s because Eddie has been safely got away. I had an awful fear that he might be stuck here. If he had I think Anne would have gone round all the bends. He became more violently demanding as time progressed. Two days before he left he shouted at her I WANT YOU AT MY DISPOSAL THE WHOLE OF TOMORROW. ‘But Eddie I can’t,’ said Anne, ‘it’ll take me 3 hours to cook the pheasant which I’ve been keeping for you – deeply frozen – as a treat for your last day.’ FUCK THE PHEASANT, he shouted, I WANT YOU TO PACK. Jonny came down for the last two nights & cheered us up. Then on Friday morning he drove Eddie off among a welter of pee bottles, syringes & Andrex. Jonny* told us when we rang him up that evening that only the bottles had been needed. When throwing the contents of one out the window, it all blew back in Jonny’s face. Sister Anne’s sisterly love was fairly dried up by the end though absence is making the heart grow fonder . . .
With love from us both
Heywood18
When Eddie died in 1978, Paddy wrote a typically generous, unpublished obituary:
Time gradually changed [Eddie] into a Peacockian figure – for bookish analogies are inevitable – a sitter for the Dilettanti portraits with a dash of great Whiggery, a sceptic Voltairean aristocrat but not a stoic for tedium, humbug, bad scholarship, and, indeed the recent handicap of ill-health, could set the air crackling all around him with oaths and groans. He demanded much of his friends and got it, by cutting through their quandaries by never doing anything he didn’t want but repaying thei
r troubles many times over by the charms and surprises of his company.19
At Kardamyli there were thousands of books: in the library, the studio, in all the bedrooms (one of which had a set of unbound copies of Horizon – the defining magazine of its time – on its shelves), and on the shelves fitted into the largest bathroom. There were cookery books in the kitchen, and, because there was no room for them anywhere else, there were more piles of books in the basement. Joan kept her copies of Paddy’s books in her bedroom. He decorated their inside front covers and flyleaves with drawings of seascapes and seagulls. But it was the library, the great or the big room, which was at the centre of Paddy and Joan’s lives. The seating was arranged so that they could gather with guests in little groups to talk, or sit by themselves and read or write letters at the desk, or retreat to the hayáti – a seating area at the end of the room – in order to play chess. Joan loved chess, and spent hours over the board, either with an opponent or just playing against herself. She bought a small computer with chess programs when they were introduced. She also loved Call My Bluff. After dinner, the Oxford English Dictionary was taken from the shelves and the players would take it in turn to find a word no one knew; everyone had to guess which concocted definition was true, for a point, then it was the turn of the winner, if there was one, who would choose another word. When players lacked inspiration, they suggested ‘A small Mediterranean fish’ as a definition and so ‘A small Mediterranean fish’ became a kind of family joke. But, as Paddy wrote in his entry in a book of essays and photographs entitled The Englishman’s Room, books were the raison d’être of his house:
Where a man’s Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is, there shall his heart be also; and, of course, Lemprière, Fowler, Brewer, Liddell and Scott, Dr Smith, Harrap and Larousse and a battery of atlases, bibles, concordances, Loeb classics, Pléiade editions, Oxford Companions and Cambridge histories; anthologies and books on painting, sculpture, architecture, birds, beasts, reptiles, fishes and trees; for if one is settling in the wilds, a dozen reference shelves is the minimum, and they must be near the dinner table where arguments spring up which have to be settled then or never.20
Many of the books on the shelves had been given to Paddy and Joan as gifts. Among the poets were two books by Tristan Tzara (who composed a poem for her) and six by John Betjeman. No two poets could be more different. After his first visit to Kardamyli, in September 1969, Betjeman thanked Joan and Paddy individually, writing to Paddy:
What is time for? To make things as beautiful as possible as you have. I suppose that big room – the big room is one of the rooms of the world. What is marvellous about it is the arc of light – daylight or evening light. It charms and is perfect in each. It is something to do with proportion or you have an instinct . . . I doubt it comes from books.21
And to Joan:
Darling Joanie,
Oh I did enjoy myself at Kardamyli. Of course that big room, as I’ve written to Paddy, is one of the rooms in the world. It is the thought in everything you ever look at which delights me about the house(s). In that way Paddy is like Butterfield.* In proportion and use the garden is part of the architecture, he is less Lutyens and Jekyll – all the time he is himself. I’ve never seen you so beautiful, not even when with eyes as big as your cheeks and downy soft and straight, you stood in the Ritz. I’ve written to Jock [Murray] a long letter giving him news of George [Seferis] and telling him also about the house – how it is really a book of Paddy’s and more lasting.22
But on his return to England Betjeman also wrote to Wayland Kennet:
Greece was enchanting as scenery and as siting for temples, but the atmosphere of not being able to speak freely was markedly noticeable. Even I noticed it. I don’t think it could ever be like that in Italy. I don’t think it was even like that under Mussolini . . . The nastiest man I ever met in my life was the Chief Reception Clerk at the Grande Hotel in Athens, never go there.23
When Brian Howard died from a drugs overdose in January 1958 Cyril Connolly gave Joan a copy of Wheels, an anthology of poems edited by Edith Sitwell and published in 1921 when he was still at Eton, young and full of promise. The anthology was dedicated to ‘Joan with love from Cyril in memory of Charles Orange’. Wheels included a poem by ‘Charles Orange’, Howard’s pseudonym which he used because he feared he might get in trouble with the Eton authorities. Howard’s great talent was later dissipated in drink, drugs and idleness but his name runs like a thread through the memoirs of so many of his generation. John Banting wrote to Joan about his death, which he said was an accident: ‘He wanted to die in my arms and he did – held tightly encircled – with no murmur – and then I reached desperately for the heart beat which had stopped [. . .] He told his mother “If John can’t come – then Joan must”. He loved and admired you steadily.’24 Cyril Connolly also gave Joan his own books, as well as volumes by others. A Study of Charles Baudelaire by Arthur Symons was dedicated to Joan from Cyril ‘with love, love & love, 1964 June’. Tennyson’s Maud, and Other Poems was inscribed ‘Joan’s Book – O, why should Love, like men in drinking songs/Spice his fair banquet with the dust of death?’ Cyril’s last book, a collection of essays called The Evening Colonnade, appeared in 1973, when he was seventy. By then his health was failing. In November 1974, Joan received a telegram in Greece saying that Cyril had had a heart attack and was seriously ill. She flew to England immediately with Graham, who happened to be staying at Kardamyli. Paddy wrote to Balasha: ‘I drove them in, J. very upset and anxious, and saw them off at the aerodrome. I do hope he’ll be all right, but there’s not much hope it seems.’ As Cyril would have expected, and as he would have done himself, his friends kept an account of the following days in their letters and diaries. On Saturday 3 November, soon after she had arrived, Joan wrote to Paddy:
[Cyril] is getting weaker and weaker & it can’t last long now, though he is still completely lucid at times. I tried to telephone you today but the international operators this end could only say loive dint . . . & had so much trouble spelling Teddington I gave up & will try from London. I go back to-morrow as though there’s little one can do but hold C’s hand & be an extra nurse I feel so anxious away for more than a day.25
Joan organized the traffic around Cyril’s bed in the Harley Street Clinic. His complicated emotional life meant that a lot of friends and lovers came to see him but did not necessarily want to meet one another. John Betjeman wrote to Penelope:
Cyril is dying very fast. I went to see him today. Liver and no hope. Joanie and his new girl called Sheila, and Deirdre, take it in turns to watch by his bed. He sent you his love: ‘Give my love to Penelope.’ I am very proud of how much you are loved by our friends.26
Connolly’s then wife, Deirdre Craig, was in love with Peter Levi, a writer and former priest. Cyril’s own last affair, which not all his friends were aware of, was with a woman called Shelagh Levita. Barbara Skelton came over from Grimaud in the south of France, where she lived:
When I first visited the Harley Street Clinic, the first thing that struck me was the dust and the array of dead flowers, cluttering the room. Why had no-one bothered to throw them away? My visits could not coincide with Deirdre, Sonia [Orwell], Joan or Janetta’s. But Shelagh was always there until my last visit, when C. was alone. He was studying a medical encyclopaedia, when two doctors entered who were doing their rounds. Cyril addressed them querulously, ‘Why is it I’m not getting any better?’ The doctors seemed to be baffled as to what was the actual cause of his illness. ‘Was it a heart or liver complaint?’ ‘Have you ever lived in the tropics?’ one of them said. Cyril was pitifully thin but could be persuaded to drink a little glucose . . . I left the clinic crying and soon after returned to Grimaud.27
Cyril died on 26 November. His funeral took place a few days later at Berwick Church in East Sussex, a small twelfth-century church famous for its wall paintings by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Grant, who lived at Charleston nearby, came to the service and was seated
at the back of the church together with his daughter. Anthony Hobson, a bibliophile and head of Sotheby’s book division, read one of the lessons. Stephen Spender wrote in his diary that it somehow did not seem to suit Cyril that both the lesson and psalm should be about the resurrection of the body – he was so famously dissatisfied with how he looked.
The vicar who had a stick, without which he can’t stand up, talked very briefly and understandingly about Cyril and his work. We stood around the flower-covered grave, in the wet and windy cold weather, just a tarpaulin of some kind over the coffin. The person who seems most stricken is Joan Leigh Fermor. I held her arm a moment but didn’t dare speak to her. She looks 20 years older.28
Joan was named as an executrix, and Deirdre his legatee; Coutts Bank were fellow executors but, aside from his library and his papers, Cyril had nothing to leave, except his considerable debts. At four in the morning on 27 December, a month after Cyril’s death, Paddy awoke from a dream which he recorded in his notebook:
The decor of the room was very elaborate and among charming details were two enormous pink and grey poppies, in and on each of which, by an old Chinese process had been recorded a poem, and also a review by Cyril Connolly so that people sitting near the table and the vase containing them could hear snatches of both: ‘The moths turning alone on ears of rye . . .’; ‘a misplaced adjective here and there’; ‘transparent skiffs . . .’; ‘imprint limited to five copies . . .’; ‘stalks disappearing swamp . . .’; ‘Sir A. Douglas-Home’ . . . ‘each eighth pearl being black’. Unfortunately both flowers were thrown away next day by mistake, the petals of one of them were already coming loose. Saw them with the crinkly chocolate papers so their contents are now lost to us. Off to sleep now.29
Joan Page 25