In a note serving as an introduction to the book, Paddy wrote that he had made only minor changes before the publication of the original letters, cutting out one or two irrelevant passages, topped and tailed it a bit but not much, and generally tidied it up to make it more presentable as a kind of memento of the journey. This was nonsense: as ever, Paddy was incapable of preventing himself from tinkering, and the original letters were in fact completely rewritten.
But it was not only Paddy who continued to travel. Joan shared his extraordinary wanderlust and just as he returned from South America, she went off to Samarkand:
Darling Paddy,
A rushed word, written with trembling hand before catching train to sister Diana, to say I suddenly seem to be going to Samarkand with Patrick [Kinross] and Alan P.J. on the 3rd. I feel a proper swine doing this without you but you know how I’ve always longed to go & God knows if there will ever be a chance again. God knows if it will be nice anyway as a dreaded package tour, 25 people organised by Connoisseur, so it should be cultured at any rate. Alan P.J., his Swedish boyfriend & his next potential American millionairess, Gladys Charles, who unlike the other one is charming by all accounts, & Patrick are the only ones I’ve ever heard of. Patrick said, ‘Why not come?’ & I of course longed to but of course no place as filled up months ago & then someone yesterday chucked & so P has arranged for me to go. Can you forgive me? We should go to Persia next in any case . . . Long to see you. The rumours are that you and Andrew leap to the top of every peak leaving others gasping below.
Tons and tons of love my darling & I’ll write a newsy little letter but must get this off by London post. xxx Joan8
They had barely got back to Kardamyli before they left again, this time for Turkey. ‘Our fleeting visit to Turkey was glorious & we pine to go back & see more,’ Joan wrote to Patrick Kinross on their return. Patrick had made innumerable visits to Turkey and knew the country well. In 1964 he had published a biography of Ataturk. As a result of his writings and his knowledge of the country he came to enjoy a reputation in Turkey almost unique for someone British.
Old friendships meant a tremendous amount to Joan – she almost lived through her friends – yet she had already lost so many of her generation. When Maurice Bowra had died in 1971, John Betjeman wrote to her. Joan replied, ‘I am most touched by your writing to me when you must be so miserable yourself. Of course life without Maurice will not be the same, something so good and vital and strong has disappeared as well as one’s oldest friend and I think of him the whole time.’9 John Betjeman had unveiled a plaque to Auden in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner only a month before Cyril Connolly’s death in November 1974. Now, in June 1976, shortly after Paddy and Joan had returned from Turkey, Patrick Kinross died unexpectedly. Joan wrote to Janetta who had briefly, by Patrick’s marriage to Angela Culme-Seymour, been his sister-in-law but was always his friend.
It’s so dreadful about Patrick. I feel utterly sad & miserable. He was really the last rock left in London, always so welcoming & generous & a marvellous friend all one’s life, never changing except to get nicer & nicer. I can’t bear the idea of never being in that lovely grubby friendly house again with Patrick bursting into one’s room in the morning with plans for the day [. . .] Paddy was on his way to stay with him but was intercepted at the airport by the kind thoughtful Coote who rightly couldn’t bear the idea of Paddy arriving at the house to find Patrick lying in state [. . .]
I will quote what Paddy says about Patrick. Masses of people came (you probably saw in Friday’s Times). Bier covered with flowers & such a beautiful Palladian church inside. I was shoved in a front box pew with John Betjeman; sun pouring in through leafy ivy-laced windows. John’s address from the pulpit excellent, a bit wobbly but v. moving. I’d been asked to choose the lessons: first Isaiah 35, read by P’s brother, second (by me) that lovely passage from the Apocryphal Gospel of St James that George Seferis loved so much. I got permission from the Vicar to read anything so uncanonical. Everyone said they were bowled over by the strangeness of it & the aptness [. . .] motion, then stasis, everything seized up like a fresco on a trecento Sienese religious pastoral: then released into action by the last verse; & all thought Patrick would have liked its lack of orthodoxy . . .* After the church, Lucy Lambton drove Coote & Miranda & me to Kensal Green, where the cremation seemed to be over in 5 minutes; then back to P’s house where he had left in his will that a party should be given for all his close pals, & there they all were & it was great fun, just as he would have liked.
The thing that worries everyone a bit is that he has left the house & its contents to Constance McNab* (why not Coote or some other deserving old pal?) who bores everyone stiff. It’s thought to be out of guilt for some passing affair he broke off 25 years ago [. . .] Anyway what a shame.
*A dreadful woman.
Very much love to you & Jaime
Joan.10
‘For all of us here, Patrick was chiefly a friend and mainstay of our happiness. At his table I met friends I’ve known for the rest of my life,’ said John Betjeman at Patrick’s service.11 One of those lifelong friends – of both Patrick and John – was, of course, Joan. John himself had not only a bottomless need for love but also to share it, and he did so with the Leigh Fermors:
Dearest Joanie and Paddy,
Your ingenious lines in that gloriously complicated metre have cheered me up a lot.* I hear the waves of the Aegean softly lapping against rock, and I picture Groundsel at Dumbleton striding over his acres. And I long to put into such catching rhyme and rhythm my memories of Sir Bolton and the Viscountess and the terrified children. To-day is like Siberia and there’s every chance of Feeble [his mistress of thirty years, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish] and me being sent to Gothland in the Baltic to look at the old churches there. What a life you and Joanie have had, and how wisely and well you have spent it, where the orthodox saints look down with olive shaped eyes from the walls of the basilica and the goats leap from crag to crag and the olives are silvery. Penelope comes to luncheon to-day and I have ordered chocolate éclairs for her but not for
Yours with love, John B.12
In the late 1940s, just as the Betjemans moved to Farnborough, strains began to show in their marriage. John was decidedly Anglican, and although he had religious uncertainties, he had no doubt about belonging to the Church of England. Penelope, on the other hand, had long been attracted to the Church of Rome, and in 1947 she began to receive formal instruction in Roman Catholicism with the Dominicans in Oxford. Betjeman was deeply hurt. Relations with Penelope grew more and more distant. This was almost literally so, for while Betjeman was insular, almost xenophobic, Penelope travelled widely. Joan once dined with both Betjeman and Penelope together after he had visited Kardamyli with Feeble. Joan told Paddy that she was paralysed with horror when Penelope turned and said to her, ‘But however did John get to you? He’s so hopeless at travelling abroad alone.’ Since the mid 1950s, Betjeman had a house at Cloth Fair, close to St Bartholomew’s Church. He kept up old friendships – Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, John Rayner (whom he asked to help his son Paul find employment). And he kept up with Paddy and Joan. Alan (‘the Captain’) married again, Mary Jean Thorne from Galveston, Texas, but neither Betjeman nor Joan was impressed. However John’s feelings for Joan were now touched with regret. After all these years whenever he met Joan he would still start singing the first lines of one of the hymns written by her great-grandfather, ‘Oh worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness (Bow down before Him His beauty proclaim)’, but change ‘Him’ and ‘His’ to ‘Her’:
Darling Joanie.
It was nice to see that country-house, relief-nib handwriting of yours even though on Greek paper. I saw Paddy at Patrick’s. We met the Captain’s new bride. She seemed to rule the roost but I think the Captain will escape. I can’t tell just from our dinner party what she was like – whether there was any love there. I have an idea that the Captain is very kind and very weak. I would very much lik
e to have far closer contact and of a physical nature, with you. But then, as you know, in letters to Abroad, one gets very indiscreet. I went and filmed at the Ritz in colour lately. I thought of you. I wish I had realised I could have spoken then. Look at me now, fat, bald and finished and knighted like Sir Henry Newbolt (good) and Sir William Watson (less good) and Sir John Squire . . .
Darling Joanie, ta ever so for writing. Hope you’ll forgive my bad handwriting.
Love, John13
What Joan thought of this late declaration of love we cannot know but doubtless she had always been aware of his feelings for her and was touched.
There were not only old friends to entertain at Kardamyli, but new ones too. As one generation of bohemian travellers had begun to die out, Paddy and Joan found kindred spirits in the next. Bruce Chatwin was already famous in his twenties for his golden looks, his flamboyant manner, his long walks and his conversation. Jim Lees-Milne, a neighbour of Chatwin in the Ozleworth Valley in Gloucestershire, described how Bruce ‘came in like a whirlwind, talking affectedly about himself’. He had no modesty and he showed off, but he also bubbled with enthusiasm, ‘still very young, not self-assured’.14 All the same, at the time, Lees-Milne was impressed and liked him. Although he was married, Chatwin thought he was homosexual, because of the way he had been brought up by his ‘unwise mother’.
It was Magouche Phillips who first introduced Bruce to Joan and Paddy in 1970, arriving together at Kardamyli from Patmos. Chatwin wrote to his wife, Elizabeth:
I am sitting on the terrace of Paddy and Joan Leigh Fermor’s house in the Mani. Quite heavenly here. The whole Taygetos range plunges down into the sea and eagles float in thermals above the house – a low arcaded affair of limestone beautifully marked with red karst. Olives and pencil thin cypress clothe the terrace between the mountains and the sea.15
Joan grew very fond of him. She saw ‘the point of him’: the phrase Paddy and Joan liked to use to show approval of someone. For Bruce, the attraction was not only that Paddy was a great walker, but also that both he and Joan had known Robert Byron, one of Chatwin’s heroes; The Road to Oxiana was very high on his list of great books. Chatwin had theories about the importance of walking; for him man’s restlessness was a natural condition. For a long time he had been working on a book he called The Nomadic Alternative, which was to be his great masterpiece, proving all his speculations and philosophies. When his agent Deborah Rogers read the indigestible, leaden prose her heart sank: the book, as delivered in the early 1970s, was unpublishable. It would be more than a decade before his great idea would be ready for print.
As Paddy’s success had grown, Xan Fielding had continued to struggle to establish himself as a writer, and now saw a younger generation begin to surpass him. By 1975, Xan and Daphne had been married for twenty-five years. After Cornwall they had lived in Portugal, Tangier, and in France both in the Cévennes and near Uzès in the Languedoc, close to where Lawrence Durrell lived. Over the years, however, their marriage had become more and more unhappy – not least because they never made much money. In 1977, Janetta invited Magouche to spend Christmas with her and Jaime in southern Spain, and she suggested that she pick up Xan from the south of France on the way. Daphne, meanwhile, returned to England to see her family. Daphne phoned Xan every morning, not realizing that Xan and Magouche were by then in bed together. When Xan and Daphne saw one another again, he told her that he was leaving her.
In 1978, Xan and Magouche married, and moved to live in Ronda in the south of Spain. (Daphne chanced to meet an old friend, an American millionaire, and moved with him to Arizona.) Now that he was married to Magouche, Xan had fewer financial worries and, rather than working as a translator, he was able to do something more satisfyingly creative. He began writing a book about the influence of the winds on man, and wrote to Paddy:
[Magouche] generously gets on with almost all the chores while I try to get on with the winds. I came back with another briefcase-full of notes and photostats, including some exciting new material, and I have at last fathomed the sixteen colours of the four winds of the sky, on which the long-haired monks with painted eye-lids disputed in the hospice at Jarrow.16
By the end of the decade, Bruce Chatwin was at last an acclaimed and prize-winning author. When he was working on his second novel, The Viceroy of Ouidah, Bruce rented a house in Ronda for five months. In the afternoon, he usually went to swim in Magouche’s pool. When the glowing American reviews for In Patagonia arrived, he could not resist sharing them, and would always arrive at lunch, just when there was a captive audience. Then he talked. ‘He did see himself as a sort of present to mankind. He’d come with such nice ribbons and wrapping and heaven knows what goodies inside, yet you never did unwrap it,’17 Jim Lees-Milne wrote. Eventually Xan went off climbing in the Pyrenees in order to escape the younger writer’s gloating. ‘And so everyone is much more relaxed,’ Chatwin wrote.
Xan found it impossible to find a publisher for Aeolus Displayed, his book on the winds, so in 1983 he turned to Paddy for advice. Paddy made some changes to the text and then sent it to Elizabeth Sifton, Bruce’s American editor. Paddy wrote to his friend a few weeks later:
I’ve been meaning to write for three weeks and now that here I am pen in hand, I can no longer find the letter I wanted, in spite of hunting high and low viz. Elizabeth Sifton’s regretful return of the winds. Damn, on both headings! Her drift was that it was a fascinating and well written book, too good in the present state of publishing to be a commercial proposition, – it looked as if she was saying it was too good to publish, though not quite that. The only serious criticism she made is that the book didn’t seem to progress, and left the reader pretty well where he started. I must say, this remark went through me like an arrow, and I can’t help wondering whether my Florentine advice altering the order of the chapters is to blame for this. I am very surprised at their not taking it on, and would like to give them a good shake. I’ve just written a letter in which I said that, considering the amount of bilge that is published, it seems extraordinary that a book like the Winds (she freely admits it too, seems soft soap) should have such a hard coming of it.18
It is a measure of Paddy’s love for Xan that he should give him such support. The book, like The Nomadic Alternative, is virtually unreadable.
Chatwin, meanwhile, had returned to his own great idea. Like Paddy in his younger days, Bruce was very good at finding other people’s houses in which to write. In the autumn of 1984, after Paddy decided to swim the Hellespont, Bruce turned up again at Kardamyli. Joan wrote to her friends Michael and Damaris Stewart:
The Hellespont was glorious but of course agony for me as I knew he would never give up. ‘Tell him to swim faster,’ the nice Turk in the boat kept saying to me. ‘I can’t,’ said Paddy, continuing his stately side stroke & being carried past yet another landing place.
We’ve had a working winter, enlivened by the dazzling Bruce Chatwin, who has been staying with us or next door most of the time. He & Paddy go for tremendous walks & he’s marvellous in the kitchen.19
The ability to cook always raised someone in Joan’s estimation, but her praise was entirely justified. The Nomadic Alternative, the book Chatwin was struggling with, at last found form at Kardamyli as The Songlines, which was published in 1987 and reviewed by Paddy in the Spectator.
Although Bruce found Penelope Betjeman impossibly demanding and almost wilfully eccentric, she had become a sort of second mother to him. Then, two years after John’s death in 1984, Penelope died in India. Around ten in the morning, she had called in on her favourite temple. She received the blessing and rode on towards a place called Khanag, and was talking her head off to her Tibetan porter when her head tilted sideways and the talking stopped.
Bruce was shattered; his wife, Elizabeth, said it was the only time she had seen him in tears. He went immediately to Kulu to scatter Penelope’s ashes. He wrote to Paddy and Joan:
Yesterday morning, her friend Kranti Singh and I carri
ed her ashes in a small brass pot to a rock in the middle of the R[iver] Beas which was carved all over, in Tibetan, with Om mani padme hum. He tipped some into a whirlpool and I then threw the pot with the remainder into the white water. The flowers – wild tulips, clematis, and a sprig of English oakleaves (from the Botanical gardens in Manali) vanished at once into the foam.20
Joan wrote to Billa Harrod saying that she had been reading Penelope’s letters, which was ‘agonizing’ – ‘I regret bitterly not going to Kulu with her – She was the most extraordinary & wonderful person & I feel so lucky to have been her friend.’21
Joan’s own family was also now touched by death. In 1972 her sister Diana, a widow for many years, sold her farm in Rutland and moved back to Dumbleton – which was home for her as it was for all the family – and built a house. She also kept a flat in London and most years she visited Paddy and Joan in Greece. Although sisters and in some ways close, as well as physically alike, they had little in common by way of interests – Diana was conventional and never approved of Joan’s bohemian friends. It had always been her sister Joan who was smart and glamorous and gained attention, but they had their memories, their past and family ties – and these mattered. In 1974 Diana’s eldest daughter Anna, who had made the curtains for Kardamyli, died. She was still only in her early thirties. In the autumn of 1985, aged seventy-eight, Diana began to lose all energy and the will to live. Her second daughter, Bridget, who was staying at Dumbleton, woke her in the morning, went away to fetch her breakfast and found her dead when she returned. Her heart had quietly failed. Bridget, whom Joan had once described to Paddy as ‘so pretty and gay and having a wonderful life with swarms of young men’ also died only a few years later. Joan never mentioned her family in her letters or her conversation with friends. It was as if she put different areas of her life into different compartments.
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