Billa and Joan once had a row at Kardamyli about Bruce Chatwin’s death from AIDS. Billa had been less than sympathetic, but when she got back to England she wrote to apologize. The best night of her stay, she said, was the last one, when she was in her bedroom sitting in her knickers and Joan came in and they talked as they did in the old days when they were young. Billa said she felt so sorry for the young of today. She herself had taken lovers and slept with a man who was wildly promiscuous without having had to care about the consequences. Joan replied that she did not remember their AIDS talk very much, but did not think Billa could ever be boring. In later years Billa had founded the Norfolk Churches Trust and was an upholder of all things traditional, but together with Coote Lygon – the third member of the trio of friends Paddy called ‘the three Musketeers’ – they had shared so much of their lives since their debutante days and their wild parties. Billa often mentioned how she had broken the candelabra and come crashing down from the Dumbleton ceiling. They had supported Coote through her family scandals – the disgrace of her father, Coote’s late and wretched marriage to Robert Heber-Percy, and the death of her alcoholic sister Mamie (the beautiful Julia of Brideshead Revisited): ‘What a very very sad family – all the brothers dead & no-one to continue the Lygons who were so interesting. Poor poor Coote – she is brave and wonderful.’19
Joan, who was having trouble walking, wrote again:
Is the delay for your cataract op due to the NHS or does the surgeon not think it’s ready? If the former please darling have it done privately and I will pay for it. I’m having mine, I think, done at the beginning of Aug. but have to see the surgeon first. It would make me feel less privileged if I could help you. I would love it & it would make me feel really happy. I have so much unaccustomed money now and long to give most of it away & why not to friends instead of charities which usually turn out to be helping missionaries or gun-running. Do agree, and there’s no time to be lost, & don’t tell anyone . . .
I couldn’t face another hip op. at my age so just hope it won’t go wrong again. I go about with morphine in my pocket but they won’t help me to be able to move.20
And when Billa came to Greece, ‘A bit of French or English cheese would be more than welcome (for me to pay for) & please don’t bother about anything else, it’s hard enough getting oneself here!’21
When old friends wrote they reminisced about their rich mutual memories. A former debutante like Joan, Celia Paget had briefly worked for Cyril Connolly on Horizon and had received a proposal from George Orwell after the sudden death of his wife, but her reply had been equivocal. In a letter to Joan, Celia wrote about her recollections of Dick Wyndham’s house at Tickerage, ‘the intellectual treasure hunts (you won one of them), the bluebell wood,’ and about Dick Wyndham himself, ‘a very special person, and I miss him still’.
Another of my treasured memories is of the day when you and Paddy turned up in the New Angleterre – delightful name – when I was staying there. You were off to dine in the Embassy and invited me into your room to chat while you were dressing, where I recall the following conversation:
J. I can’t possibly wear this dress – it’s hideous. I knew it was going to be very hot, so why didn’t I bring a single cotton dress? – that’s what interests me.
P. Joan, this jacket hasn’t been cleaned – it’s spotted like a leopard.
J. Can you believe it, someone has been into the room and removed the centre of my brooch, it doesn’t [look right] without it, and I can’t wear this dress without a brooch. Well, we shall go off looking like the Ugly Sisters.
Of course you went off looking as beautiful and immaculate as ever, leaving me [to] roar with laughter at all our doubts, which I suppose is why I remember it so well.22
‘Biographers are the bane of one’s life here as usual,’23 Celia wrote drily. She lived in Cambridge, where it was difficult to avoid them – from that point of view Kardamyli was easier. Any enquirer turning up at Joan’s door uninvited would have been turned away – she could be unforgiving to anyone who even took her photograph without her permission. Occasionally researchers wrote to Joan but she would pass the letter over to Paddy: he was less discreet anyway.
Biographical researchers might not have been welcome, but friends always were. Even if old friends found getting to Kardamyli too difficult, new ones continued to arrive. Among them was Joan’s nephew Robert, who came with his wife Bridget and their two young sons, Ben and James. Robert’s interests had changed from fossils to ecology and raptors; his work was in preserving the environment in international and local communities, concerns which were sympathetic to Joan’s own view of the world. After lunch, Paddy, who had never welcomed children to the house before, used to tell the young boys stories. Near the end of his life he wished he had had children of his own.24 The impression Joan now made on small children was of someone rather ancient, but loving and motherly. As she walked in her espadrilles around the several layers of the house and its outside corridors, she seemed to belong to a different age from the one they were used to. She wore large, thick-rimmed spectacles wherever she was. In Greece her clothes were more suited to a warmer climate: linen slacks of cream or beige; a vest or blue-and-white-striped T-shirt; in the evening, a thin blue cardigan with wooden buttons. When Paddy talked, she remained gently berating and encouraging: ‘Oh Paddy . . .’ Her voice had a gentle creak in it, and her accent was rather old-fashioned and upper class, it was such a very long time since she had lived in England permanently. As she grew older Joan avoided cooking, but she always made the bitter orange marmalade which Paddy liked, as well as serving crispbreads spread with roe from scavenged sea-urchins and making her own lemon vodka using lemons from the garden. The tray for adult drinks was beside the door leading into the corridor, and in the evening she watched, drink in hand, while her young great-nephews made their final race to Jellicoe’s Leap – a jutting rock from which one could make a highly tricky landing into the sea, a jump supposedly patented by the Jellicoe family. Joan gave the children all the attention they wanted: what they remember most is her kindness.
Joan never shut off her imagination. For years she had kept a blue exercise book for quotations which appealed to her:
Men live in the cosmos like mice in a great house, enjoying splendours not designed for them. (Plotinus)
Truth, like love & sleep, resents
Approaches that are too intense. (WH Auden)
By the early 1990s, Paddy and Joan had already started to think about what might happen to the house after their day. As the house at Kardamyli had been paid for principally by Joan’s money, she gave her nephew Robert first refusal.
Dear Robert
Do you & Bridget really want this house when we are dead, too feeble to cope or in a loony bin, very soon now? We don’t want to sell it but always thought it would be a dreadful white elephant for any friends or relations to be responsible for it, only suitable for an elderly writer who would use the books, the things I mind most about. We have thought of leaving it to some Greek institution or charity but now think that wouldn’t work though Paddy still has a few more ideas about that. We are worried that until you both retired (& I don’t see why you ever should) it would be abandoned & goodness knows what would happen to it then. The bad thing for you is that the death duties might come to £3 or 400,000 as the whole thing has become rather valuable now but perhaps Martin M[itchell] & our lawyer can put that down & there would be more money coming from the Trust I hope.
I would like you to have it as I think you would love it & look after it well & be a great help here with the ecology & minerals etc, but it would be a great change for you living here.
Much love to you all
Joan25
After great consideration, Robert reluctantly turned the offer down. His sons were still at school and he wanted them to have a home in England to return to. Greece was too drastic a move.
Among their friends was Jon van Leuven, who came from a Texan
oil family of Anglo-Dutch descent and had degrees in Spanish, French and physics from Yale. Half Jon’s life was spent in Gothenburg in Sweden, the other half in the Mani where for twenty years he lived in a tiny shepherd’s cottage in the village of Holy Wisdom at the very edge of an escarpment high above Kardamyli. (They were connected by a long track leading from one level to another or by a very long and twisting road.) Jon, a tall, lean, gently humorous man, was full of wholly improbable plans which could never be realized – like the enormous, empty hole in the ground he had dug in his garden one summer as a swimming pool – before being distracted by some other plan just as impossible. Like Paddy he was multilingual but with the addition of Scandinavian languages. And like Paddy he could talk for hours on end about anything, for everything in life was potentially fascinating. He was also immensely well read although he drew the line at P. G. Wodehouse. Whenever Paddy insisted on lending him a Bertie Wooster or a Blandings Castle novel, Jon always, as if by accident, forgot to pick it up when he was leaving.
The poet Hamish Robinson, a close friend of one of Magouche’s sons-in-law, also arrived in the lives of Joan and Paddy, and often house-sat for them when they returned to Dumbleton for the summer. In his letters, Paddy always referred to Hamish as ‘that very nice Wykehamist poet’. When Paddy’s eyesight began to fade, Hamish took him swimming, and in the evening Hamish clambered around, retrieving books from higher shelves to look up poems and information and talk across languages and literatures. He also regularly acted as chauffeur, ferrying Paddy and Joan back and forth from Kardamyli to Athens airport, and sometimes from London to Dumbleton: ‘Do you want a book for the car – Mill on the Floss?’ Paddy fussed over Joan. If Hamish accompanied Paddy on the plane, he went armed with a bagful of miniature bottles to get the older man through the flight. Paddy was once stopped from taking a whisky bottle on board, so did his heroic best to down the whisky while all around him cheered. In the inside cover of the Kardamyli visitors’ book, Paddy placed one of Hamish’s sonnets, called ‘Kalamitsi’:
The water, limpid in the morning calm
Will beckon you as if it had a mill
To glittering depths open like a till
Brimming with green and gold; without a qualm
The cats sleep on in shadows out of harm
Or toy with things they did not need to kill;
Only the cypress pointing up the hill
Rejects the banished posture of the palm.
This is no paradise for idle hands
The trophies and mementoes on its shelves,
The written books and maps of travelled lands,
All tell of those who raised up for themselves
A habitation built on shifting sands:
These dreams we could not master for ourselves.
Olivia Stewart also became part of Paddy and Joan’s intimate circle. Olivia was Paddy’s god-daughter – her godmother was Freya Stark. Her father, Sir Michael Stewart, was ambassador in Athens from 1967 to 1971: ‘I hadn’t, until yesterday, gone even as far as Kalamata. Michael Stewart, who sends his greetings, is here with his nice daughter Olivia, and we went on a picnic to Ithome and Ancient Messenia,’26 Paddy wrote to Xan in the early 1980s. Olivia made a career in the film industry, in production and then as a script-writer and film consultant. As part of the household, she witnessed the Leigh Fermor domestic choreography. Each morning began with a ceremony; the conversation between Paddy and Joan always commenced, ‘Good morning, what book are you reading, would I enjoy it? Shall I give it to you next?’ When Joan and Paddy grew older and found it more and more difficult to run the Kardamyli household, Olivia gradually became indispensable. Neither Joan nor Paddy had ever been remotely practical, so Olivia came twice a year to put the house in order: change light bulbs, mend dripping taps, change fuses. When she left again, Joan regretted, the house began to fall to bits, despite daily phone calls.
In her eighties, Joan’s health began to fail. Eventually she could no longer get down to the beach to bathe. Then, in April 2002, Joan suffered what Janetta referred to as a ‘beastly crash and damaged head . . . how awful you must feel & it’s probably hurting & you are probably simply furious too, furious with yourself for doing it to your poor self. Oh how vile it is being old, & being so horribly aware of one’s own idiocy & clumsiness, etc, etc, etc.’27
On the morning of 4 June 2003, after Joan had eaten her breakfast, she said to Olivia, ‘I really would like to die but who’d look after Paddy?’ Olivia answered, flippantly, that she would. A few minutes later, Joan fell in the bathroom, hit her head and died instantly of a brain haemorrhage. Even if she had continued breathing, her wishes were unequivocal; in all the drawers of her desk there were messages saying ‘Do not resuscitate’. Joan’s body was returned to England. At the funeral at St Peter’s, Dumbleton, Jochen Voigt read from Sir Thomas Browne’s quest for the secret proof of the existence of God, The Garden of Cyrus:
The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? Or have slumbering thoughts at that time, when sleep itself must end, and as some conjecture, all shall wake again . . .
As Joan had requested, Paddy read from the Apocryphal Book of James, which George Seferis loved so much and which had also been read at Patrick Kinross’s funeral:
And behold there were sheep being driven, and they went not forward but stood still; and the shepherd lifted his hand to smite them with his staff, and his hand remained up. And I looked upon the stream of the river and saw the mouths of the kids upon the water and they drank not.
And all of a sudden all things moved onward in their course.*
The Monsell hymns, ‘Oh worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’ and ‘Fight the Good Fight’, were also sung. Joan was then buried in the churchyard, at Graham’s side.
4 November 2003
Dear Robert & Bridget
I’m very apologetic to be only writing now to thank you for your kind and consoling words about Joan. I’d put your letter, & James’ & Ben’s, in a special clutch to be answered at once – and the reverse happened. They got carried away in a rival tangle of envelopes, &, in spite of prolonged searches, have only just surfaced now, like mountaineers lost in an avalanche & suddenly turning up – thank God not [illegible] but late enough! Please forgive.
Joan’s loss wasn’t only a loss for us. Letters have been pouring in amain, & from every quarter and period. She really was loved, led by the 8 cats that liked to settle on her counterpane every morning after breakfast, and get in the way, knocking over the chessboard where she had set them out to solve some tremendous problem. When I recline in her place on the sofa to read they gather round me in a recumbent group, but, in a quarter of an hour they have all sloped off. They had realised they were being fobbed off with a fake [. . .] I’ve got Jochen Voigt, an old friend of both of us, staying at the moment. When I’ve got through a few chores I’m going to get down to finishing Vol III of the books about my youthful trudge across Europe, so it won’t be a misspent winter. It has been a lovely autumn, Joan’s favourite season.
I do hope you’ll both come and stay next year and in proper bathing time. (I went in yesterday. It was a bit nippy.) You remember what fun we all had!
Much love to you both
Paddy28
Paddy continued to live at Kardamyli and Dumbleton, and carry on his life as best he could. Arrangements were made that after his death the house would be made over to the Benaki Museum in Athens. In Greece he continued to be looked after by his housekeeper Elpida Beloyannis and in England by Rita Walker. Encouraged by Olivia he worked on Volume III when he could. There was as much mail to deal with as ever although his eyesight – as well as his hearing – was deteriorating. He also continued to receive visitors and make visits. In the summer of 2006 Joan’s gravestone was raised in Dumbleton churchyard at last, which gave him much pleasure. He wrote to Joan’s nephew – Diana’s son –
Michael Casey and his wife Joey.
13 September 2006
Dear Michael and Joey,
This is a sort of hail and farewell letter – alas. I’m off to Greece in a few days – but also to send you the snaps that Jeff has taken of Joan’s tombstone, which is in place at last, after long delays. The rather white-looking Portland stone will weather a lot in a couple of years. I think it looks very nice, and that Joan would have approved. I’ve been longing for it to be in situ.
The Ancient Greek words at the bottom – KAI ΓAIAN EXOI EΛAΦPAN – ‘May the earth rest lightly upon her’ – were an ancient saying, often murmured still at rustic funerals.
I’ve got to dash to Cumbria tomorrow, return and take wing.
Please forgive this wobbly note, and a happy autumn to you both and love from Paddy.29
Paddy missed her: how could it be otherwise? He kept with him a black and white scarf belonging to Joan, so that her feel and her touch were close by when he needed her presence. Joan was nothing if not complicated – and elusive. From being an awkward little girl standing in the midst of her cousins staring rather resentfully out of a photograph how had she changed? Perhaps in the words of Alan Pryce-Jones many years later ‘experience had already taught her to be wary’ – when he first got to know her Joan was already pursued by the press for a story. While she knew how to enjoy life, at the same time she called herself ‘schizo Joan’. And: ‘How I wish I wasn’t such a bloody bad-tempered selfish bitch,’ she once wrote uncharitably about herself. John Craxton wrote how ‘Like all adorable people Joan had something enigmatic about her nature, which combined with her wonderful good looks, made her a very seductive presence. Even in a crowd she maintained a deep and private inner life.’ And, he continued, ‘it was her elegance, luminous intelligence, curiosity and her unerring high standards that made her such a perfect muse’30 – to Paddy as well as to many others. Joan indeed had a remarkable life – and a lucky one. She had spent most of it with someone she loved. She had lived where she had wanted and, largely, despite the lack of children, which was her one great, lasting regret, in the way she wanted.
Joan Page 29