Joan
Page 30
Then, in May 2011, Paddy had a cancerous tumour removed from his throat, but the cancer soon returned. Not long before he died he told his friend Philippa Jellicoe who was staying with him that there was going to be a great tragedy. He returned to hospital where he was looked after by the Kenwards. When he could not speak, he communicated by writing notes on pieces of paper. What was Joan like, he asked James, her great-nephew. Olivia, the Kenwards, Elpida and a nurse managed to get him back to England where, on the morning of 10 June 2011, Paddy died in Dumbleton. When Olivia had asked him what he wanted for his funeral service, ‘Same as Joan,’ he said.
Sources
Archives in Public Collections
Joan and Patrick Leigh Fermor
John Banting
John Betjeman
Maurice Bowra
Tom Driberg
Lawrence Durrell
Xan Fielding
Francis Guillemard
Wilhelmine Harrod
Patrick Kinross
James Lees-Milne
Alan Pryce-Jones
Isabel Rawsthorne
Merton College, Oxford
Oxford University
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Chester-Lamb, Kate, Eventful Days, the Centenary History of St James’s and the Abbey School, Malvern (St James’s and the Abbey School, 1997)
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Clark, Kenneth, Another Part of the Wood (John Murray, 1974)
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—, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (John Murray, 2012)
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De-la-Noy, Michael, Eddy: The Life of Edward Sackville-West (Arcadia Books, 1999)
Delmer, Sefton, Trail Sinister (Secker & Warburg, 1961)
—, Black Boomerang (Secker & Warburg, 1962)
Devonshire, Deborah, Wait for Me! (John Murray, 2010)
Devonshire, Deborah, and Leigh Fermor, Patrick, In Tearing Haste, letters ed. Charlotte Mosley (John Murray, 2009)
Dinshaw, Minoo, Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman (Allen Lane, 2016)
Eade, Philip, Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016)
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Green, Martin, Children of the Sun: A Narrative of Decadence in England after 1918 (Constable, 1977)
Guillemard, F. H. H., The Cruise of the Marchesa to Kamschatka & New Guinea (John Murray, 1889)
Hillier, Bevis, Young Betjeman (Cardinal, 1989)
—, John Betjeman, New Fame, New Love (John Murray, 2002)
Hodges, John Richard, Dumbleton Hall: The Story of a Victorian Country House (privately printed, 2014)
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Kingsley, N. W., and Hill, Michael, The Country Houses of Gloucestershire (Nicholas Kingsley, 1989–2001)
Knox, James, Robert Byron (John Murray, 2003)
—, introduction and selection, Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster (Frances Lincoln, 2008)
Lancaster, Osbert, With an Eye to the Future (John Murray, 1967)
Laski, Marghanita, preface by Juliet Gardiner, To Bed with Grand Music (Persephone, 2009)
Lees-Milne, Alvide, and Moore, Derry, The Englishman’s Room (Viking, 1986)
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—, Fourteen Friends (John Murray, 1996)
—, The Milk of Paradise: Diaries, 1993–1997 (John Murray, 2005)
—, Diaries 1971–1983, abridged and introduced by Michael Bloch (John Murray, 2007)
Leigh Fermor, Patrick, Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (Penguin, 1983)
—, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (Penguin, 1984)
—, A Time to Keep Silence (Penguin, 1988)
—, Three Letters from the Andes (John Murray, 1991)
—, The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (John Murray, 2005)
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Articles
Hardy, Henry, ‘Maurice Bowra on Patrick Leigh Fermor’, Spectator, 17 December 2011
Hastings, Max, ‘Demob Unhappy, the Ex-Officers Left Behind After VE Day’, Spectator, 16 May 2015
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Footnotes
* The train still runs on the Torbay and Dartmouth Railway.
* Patrick Leigh Fermor, loving pedantries, made notes on Joan’s father for his entry in the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: ‘If the name was ever written with a hyphen, it appears to have been dropped in practice, as it is absent in Burke, Who’s Who, and Debrett’s Handbook, and though the two names are written together neither Graham or your sisters have ever used the hyphenated form.’
* Bertram Cartland and his wife, Polly, were the parents of the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland.
* Wickhamford Manor was Lees-Milne’s childhood home.
* This ballet was choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska to music by Francis Poulenc, and premiered in 1924.
* Maurice Spurgeon Green (1906–87): journalist at the Financial Times and Times; editor of the Daily Telegraph, 1964–74.
* The identity of Jeanette is unknown.
* Other bridesmaids included: Baba Beaton; Lady Violet Pakenham, who later married the novelist Anthony Powell; Joan Buckmaster, the daughter of Gladys Cooper; and Margaret Whigham, subsequently Margaret, Duchess of Argyll.
* Sydney Dobell (1824–74) and fellow poets were members of the Spasmodic school, which typically used extravagant and intense language and situations, full of passion and anguish.
* PLF always maintained that The Station, Byron’s book about these travels, was the book that inspired him to carry on from Constantinople to Greece. When he set out on his great walk across Europe he had Ogilvie-Grant’s rucksack on his back.
* Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949): Belgian symbolist poet and playwright.
* Peter Rodd and Nancy Mitford married in 1933.
* Oscar Wilde’s former lover Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas) was a friend of John Betjeman.
* There is no bay at Bradwell.
* The ‘Boeuf sur le Toit’, a fashionable gay nightclub, was named after the famed nightclub in Paris.
* Aly is unidentified.
* Francis Noel Baker (1920–2009) joined the army in 1940 and was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps. In 1945 he was elected Labour MP for Brentford and Chiswick but was always strongly anti-communist. His family owned an estate on the island of Euboea.
* Professor Eric Birley (1906–95), historian and archaeologist.
* Elma Napier (1892–1973) was a Scottish-born novelist. She moved to Dominica in 1932 and became known as a writer, hostess, politician and conservationist.
* Georg Groddeck (1866–1934), a pioneer of psychosomatic medicine.
* Nothing changes in the monastic life. Each day is the same as another, each year like the one which went before, and it will be so until death.
* Edmund ‘Mondi’ Howard (1909–2005), diplomat and historian.
* Francis Philip Raphael Howard, 2nd Baron Howard (1905–99).
* PLF probably intends Les 120 de Sodome ou l’école du libertinage by the Marquis de Sade.
* So-called by Henry Miller.
* Cyril used to say that such was the intensity of their relationship that Graham was the love of Joan’s life.
* Home of Cyril Connolly and Lys Lubbock.
* Christopher Buckley (1905–50), war correspondent and novelist. Killed by a landmine during the Korean War.
* The silly mouse gives birth and mountains are born.
* Isabel Delmer married Constant Lambert on 7 October 1947.
* The name of the monk was Henry Joseph Campbell.
* Michael Luke (1925–2005), habitué of the Gargoyle Club and author of David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years (1991).
* Schmidt’s Restaurant, Charlotte Street.
* Janetta Woolley (b. 1922); m. Humphrey Slater; Robert Kee; Derek Jackson; Jaime Parladé.
* So ardent was the Spectator for homosexual reform that it was accused of being ‘The Buggers’ Bugle’.
* Aunt Molly was an unmarried younger sister of Bolton, much loved by all the family. Anna was Diana Casey’s eldest daughter.
* Peter Kenward’s first wife was Betty Kenward, who wrote ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ in The Tatler.
* Bookshop, Librarie le Divan, rue de la Convention, Paris.
* A Greek word in common use meaning a group of friends who meet regularly for discussions and an exchange of ideas.
* Being with those you love is enough; dreaming, talking to them, not talking to them, stopping to think about unimportant things, when you’re near them it’s all the same.
* Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy (b. 1933), biographer.
* William Butterfield (1814–1900) was one of Betjeman’s favourite architects; he built Keble College, Oxford.
* Joan was to request the passage from the Apocryphal Book of James for her own funeral: ‘Now I, Joseph, was walking, and I walked not. And I looked up into the air and saw the air in amazement. And I looked up into the pole of the heavens and saw it standing still, and the fowls of the heavens without motion. And I looked upon the earth and saw a dish set and working lying by it, and their hands were in the dish and they that were chewing, chewed not . . .’
* No one had ever heard of Mrs McNab, who was probably as surprised to learn about the legacy as everybody else. She quickly sold the story of her supposed great love affair with a Scottish lord to the Sunday Express. A couple of months later, Joan wrote to Paddy: ‘That terror Mrs McNab has written you two complaining letters but saying we can have the desk. I’ve answered her and said at the end: “I’m so sorry the house is a burden to you. What a pity Patrick didn’t leave it to someone else.”’
* PLF had recently sent JB his lines about swimming the Bosphorus.
* Stephen Tennant (1906–87) was the younger brother of David Tennant. In the 1920s and 30s he had an affair with Siegfried Sassoon. Reputedly he spent the last seventeen years of his life in bed.
* Translated from the Greek by Montague Rhodes James.
Notes
Abbreviations
APJ: Alan Pryce-Jones
GEM: Graham Eyres Monsell
JB: John Betjeman
JLF: Joan Eyres Monsell; Joan Rayner; Joan Leigh Fermor
JR: John Rayner
NLS: N
ational Library of Scotland
PLF: Patrick Leigh Fermor
XF: Xan Fielding
Letters and other documents are dated where possible; ‘nd’ is used for undated; approximate dates and dates which are inferred from internal evidence are given within square brackets.
Introduction
1 Noel Annan, Our Age, p. 3
2 Patrick Leigh Fermor is mentioned among other war heroes on p. 205.
3 JLF to PLF, 24 April [1959]
Chapter 1: The Eyres and the Monsells
1 JLF to PLF, 28 May [1962] (NLS)
2 Information from Joey Casey, February 2016
3 Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli, Penguin (1983), pp. 110–14
4 Leeds Times, January 1868, quoted in John Richard Hodges, Dumbleton Hall: The Story of a Victorian Country House [self-published] (2015), p. 147
5 Family information
6 Morning Post, 26 October 1880
7 F. H. H. Guillemard, The Cruise of the Marchesa to Kamschatka & New Guinea, John Murray (1889), p. 118
8 Ibid, p. 436
9 Edward Paice, Lost Lion of Empire: The Life of ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ Grogan, HarperCollins (2001), p. 57
10 Ibid, p. 61
11 Leeds Guardian, 29 November 1935
12 JLF to Professor Stuart Ball, 11 December [1999]
Chapter 2: Growing Up
1 John Richard Hodges, Dumbleton Hall, pp. 156–8
2 Alan Pryce-Jones, The Bonus of Laughter, Hamish Hamilton (1987), p. 26
3 D. R. Thorpe, Alec Douglas-Home, Sinclair-Stevenson (1996), pp. 23–4
4 Michael Bloch, James Lees-Milne: The Life, John Murray (2009), p. 304