In Tearing Haste
Page 1
DEBORAH DEVONSHIRE
The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire was brought up in Oxfordshire with spells in London. In 1950 her husband, Andrew, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, inherited estates in Yorkshire and Ireland, as well as Chatsworth, the family seat in Derbyshire, and Deborah became chatelaine and housekeeper of one of England’s greatest and best-loved houses. Following her husband’s death in 2004, she moved to a village on the Chatsworth Estate where she now lives.
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR
Patrick Leigh Fermor is of English and Irish descent. After his stormy schooldays, followed by his walk across Europe to Constantinople, he lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago, acquiring a deep interest in languages and remote places. He joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania, fought in Greece and Crete where, during the German occupation, he returned three times. Disguised as a shepherd he lived for over two years in the mountains, organising the resistance, and led the party that captured and evacuated the German commander, General Kreipe. He was awarded the DSO and OBE, and made Honorary Citizen of Heraklion, and later of Kardamyli and Gytheion. He now lives partly in Greece in the house he and his wife Joan designed and built on the southernmost peninsula, and partly in Worcestershire.
CHARLOTTE MOSLEY
Charlotte Mosley lives in Paris and has worked as a publisher and journalist. She is the editor of Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford, The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh and The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters.
In Tearing Haste
Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor
Edited by
Charlotte Mosley
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by John Murray (Publishers) An Hachette UK Company
Copyright in the letters of Deborah Devonshire © Deborah Devonshire 2008
Copyright in the letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor © Patrick Leigh Fermor 2008
Copyright in the compilation, footnotes and editor’s note © Charlotte Mosley 2008
The photographs are from private collections unless otherwise credited. All rights reserved.
Drawings of the view from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s house (page xvii) and Lismore Castle (page xxi) by John Craxton
A CIP catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-1-68137-187-0
v1.0
Cover illustration: Nathan Gelgud
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Contents
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Acknowledgements
Editor’s Note
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR by Deborah Devonshire
DEBORAH DEVONSHIRE by Patrick Leigh Fermor
Index of Names and Nicknames
LETTERS 1954–2007
Index
In memory of Joan and Andrew
Acknowledgements
It is unusual for a book of letters to be published during the lifetime of its authors and this one has greatly benefited from their contribution. My first thanks, therefore, are to Debo and Paddy for being unfailingly generous with their time and memories.
I owe a huge debt to Helen Marchant who typed all the letters, not only at record speed but with preternatural skill when it came to de -ciphering Paddy’s handwriting.
I am particularly grateful to Artemis Cooper, who is preparing a biography of Paddy, and to Olivia Stewart for her help with the photographs.
I would also like to thank the following: Ginnie Airlie, Stuart Band, Anne Pauline de Castries, Caroline Cranbrook, Derry Moore, Katie Edwards, Anne Egerton, Ian Else, Magouche Fielding, the Clerk to the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, Bridget Flemming, Nicholas Henderson, Hussein Hinnawi, Kate Kee, Jeremy Lewis, Jean-Noël Liaut, Elizabeth Longman, Mary S. Lovell, Michael Mallon, Sophie Caroline de Margerie, Peter Miller, Diane Naylor, Charles Noble, Henri and Sybil d’Origny, Jane Ormsby Gore, Andrew Parker Bowles, Andrew Peppitt, Christine Robinson, Serena Rothschild, Penelope Skarsouli, Mary Soames, Archie Stirling, Mario Testino and Teresa Wells.
Editor’s Note
Patrick Leigh Fermor’s first sight of Deborah Mitford left a lasting impression. She did not even notice him. It was at a regimental ball in 1940 when he was a twenty-five-year-old officer in the Intelligence Corps and she the twenty-year-old fiancée of Andrew Cavendish, recently commissioned into the Coldstream Guards. She had eyes only for her husband-to-be.
They met again as acquaintances at parties in London in the early 1950s, but their friendship truly blossomed in 1956 when Paddy took up a long-standing invitation to stay with Andrew and Debo – by now the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire – at Lismore, their magnificent neo-Gothic castle overlooking the Blackwater Valley in County Water-ford, Ireland. This fairy-tale setting with its rich historical associations cast a spell over Paddy’s romantic spirit, stirring his love of pageantry and heraldry, of wild open country and odd encounters, of archaic language and local lore. He also fell for Debo. It was not an exclusive love – he was devoted to Joan Eyres Monsell, the woman who was to become his wife – but a deep, platonic attraction between two people who shared youthful high spirits, warmth, generosity and an unstinting enjoyment of life.
Debo was the youngest of the six beautiful Mitford sisters, whose exploits and extreme political opinions made them household names; she was also the most well-adjusted. The family’s rather isolated upbringing in the Oxfordshire countryside, immortalised in Nancy Mitford’s novels, suited Debo and she considered her childhood to have been happy. Unlike her sisters, she never resented not being sent to school – dreaded the idea in fact – and followed them into the schoolroom where they were taught by a succession of governesses. From her mother, Lady Redesdale, who after her own mother’s death had taken over the running of her father’s household at the age of fourteen, Debo inherited an excellent head for business and a natural talent for organising, qualities that proved useful when, in 1950, Andrew inherited the dukedom and the vast Devonshire estates. In 1959, he and Debo decided to move back into Chatsworth, the family’s magnificent house in the Peak District of Derbyshire, which had not been redecorated since the First World War and had been occupied by a girls’ school during the Second. Andrew devised a way of paying off the death duties that were owing after his father’s death, amounting to some eighty per cent of the estate, and Debo threw herself with gusto into restoring the house and reopening it fully to the public. She started shops and a restaurant, a children’s playground and a farmyard, helping to transform a debt-ridden inheritance into a thriving enterprise. In the early 1980s, she embarked – rather unexpectedly given her claim never to have read a book – on a writing career. The House, an account of the restoration work, was the first of ten highly individual books she has produced about Chatsworth and the estate.
When Debo and Paddy began to write to each other, in 1954, Paddy’s reputation rested on an impressive war record and two books: The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands and The Violins of Saint-Jacques, his only novel. He had spent most of the war in Crete where, after the Allied retreat from the island in 1941, he was among a small number of British agents who stayed to help organise resistance to t
he Nazi occupation. In 1944 he led the successful abduction of Major-General Heinrich Kreipe, the German commander in Crete, a daring operation that won him the DSO. The exploit became famous, not because Paddy himself has ever written or even talked much about it, but because in 1950 his second-in-command, William Stanley Moss, published a best-selling book, Ill Met by Moonlight, which was later made into a film.
After the war, wanderlust took Paddy to the Caribbean, Central America, France, Spain, Italy and, most often, to Greece where he and Joan decided to settle in 1964. They built a house in the Peloponnese, in an olive grove overlooking the sea, camping for two years on a plot of land while the house, which they designed themselves, rose up around them. With its classical and oriental features, and a cloistered gallery that leads into a huge, light-filled drawing room opening on to a terrace, the building fits so well into its surroundings that when a white goat wandered in one day, followed by six more in single file, they looked quite at home as they trooped across the floor, into the gallery, down twenty steps and into the landscape again, neither the goats nor the house seeming in any way out of countenance. *
Mani and Roumeli, published in 1958 and 1966, revealed Paddy’s deep regard for his adopted country and were well received, but A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, the first two volumes of a projected trilogy published in 1977 and 1986, made him known to a far wider reading public. His extraordinary account of an eighteen-month journey on foot across Europe, from Holland to Constantinople, which he embarked on in 1933 at the age of eighteen, is the stuff of a Bildungsroman; but whereas in coming-of-age novels the youthful protagonist emerges wiser but often disenchanted by the tough process of maturity, Paddy’s real-life journey did nothing to dent his infectious enthusiasm and capacity for wonder.
Paddy, like Debo, is apolitical by nature. Hitler’s Brownshirts remained on the periphery of his awareness as he walked across Germany in 1934, the year after the Nazis came to power. And there is barely a mention in his letters of the coup d’état in Greece in 1967, when a military junta seized power and suspended civil rights until parliamentary democracy was restored seven years later. Debo’s lack of interest in politics is partly due to temperament and partly to choice. After witnessing how radical politics tore her family apart, separating her parents and dividing her sisters, she decided that they were not for her.
Paddy and Debo began to correspond in 1954, not very regularly at first – there would be a volley of exchanges then silence for several months – but when something caught their interest and they knew the other would be amused, they sent off a letter in the hopes of a reply. Both were natural writers and storytellers, and kept up with a number of other correspondents: Debo mainly with her four sisters, Nancy, Pamela, Diana and Jessica, and with her two closest friends, Daphne Bath, who married Paddy’s comrade-in-arms Xan Fielding, and Kitty Mersey, affectionately nicknamed ‘the Wife’. Paddy wrote chiefly to Joan (whenever he was away from home), to his friends Ann Fleming and Diana Cooper, and to Balasha Cantacuzène, a Romanian painter with whom he had fallen in love when he was twenty. Gradually, as their circle of family and friends grew smaller, their letters to each other grew more frequent. Diana Cooper and Ann Fleming died in the 1980s; Kitty Mersey and Daphne Fielding in the 1990s; in 2003, Paddy lost Joan, and Debo lost her last surviving sister, Diana.
As writers, they were perfect foils for each other. Unless Paddy was making a plan or asking a quick question – in which case he would scribble a few lines headed ‘In unbelievable haste’ or ‘With one foot in the stirrup’ – his letters are sustained pieces of writing, as detailed and beautifully wrought as his books. With the eye of a painter, the pen of a poet and a composer’s ear for language and dialogue, in his letters he often sounds like a musician practising scales before launching into a full-blown symphony, and indeed two of his books, A Time to Keep Silence and Three Letters from the Andes, were based on letters to Joan. In complete contrast, Debo’s letters are breezy and spontaneous. Dashed off almost in telegraphese at times, they are sharp, idiosyncratic and funny. Where Paddy is dazzlingly erudite, widely read and a polyglot, Debo is defiantly (at times disingenuously) a non-reader, puncturing any intellectualising or use of a foreign word with, ‘Ah oui’, or ‘quelle horrible surprise’. Paddy has an omnivorous interest in culture, while Debo is interested in the country side, preferring country fairs to literary salons. Agricultural and horticultural jargon is the one linguistic area where she can outshine Paddy.
Much of the charm of the letters lies in their authors’ particular outlook on life. Both are acutely observant and clear-sighted about human failings, but their lack of cynicism and gift for looking on the bright side bear out the maxim that the world tends to treat you as you find it. On the whole, the people they meet are good to them, the places they visit enchant them and they succeed splendidly in all they set out to do. This light-heartedness – a trait that attracted many, often less sunny, people towards them – gives their letters an irresistible fizz and sparkle.
•
Some six hundred letters between the two correspondents have survived, and many more must have been written, particularly by Debo during the first decade of their friendship. Paddy’s peripatetic life before 1964,when he settled in the Mani, meant that letters occasionally went astray. Even after making Greece his home, he was often travelling and not always able to keep track of papers. There is a gap of four years at the end of the 1990s where no letters at all from Debo have been found.
Each correspondent reacted very much in character to the editing of their letters. Debo, unconcerned about perfect style or syntax, let hers stand as she wrote them, while Paddy’s exacting standards made it impossible for him to let any glaring infelicities slip through and he has polished his, changing word order here and there, deleting repetitions and rectifying punctuation.
The choice of letters is mine and so are the excisions. As in any correspondence between friends, there were many plans for meeting, reports on health, grumbles about the weather and the slowness of the posts, all of which make for dull re-reading. Paddy and Debo also kept up a running exchange of riddles, ditties and jokes that have, on the whole, lost their freshness, and they have mostly been excluded. These cuts have been made silently and any ellipses are Paddy and Debo’s own.
One of the great advantages of having both correspondents at hand during the editing of their letters is that I have been able to draw on their memories of people and events, and, where possible, have used their recollections in the footnotes. At times, re-reading a letter evoked a longer, more detailed reminiscence and these have been added in italics in the main body of the letters.
*Patrick Leigh Fermor, ‘Sash Windows Opening on the Foam’, Architectural Digest, November 1986, reprinted in Words of Mercury, edited by Artemis Cooper (2003), pp. 126–30.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
by Deborah Devonshire
I am told Paddy was born in 1915. Not possible! Hardly a grey hair, upright, trudging for miles up and down dale, or swimming for hours according to whether he is in England or in Greece, he is adored by my youngest grandchild as well as by his own generation; an ageless, timeless hero to us all.
I first saw him at a fancy-dress party in London. He was a Roman gladiator armed with a net and trident, and his get-up suited him very well. I had heard of him, of course. Everyone had. By 1957, the story of his exploits in occupied Crete had been made into the film Ill Met by Moonlight with Dirk Bogarde as Paddy. It is still shown on television from time to time.
It was in 1942 and ’43, living so closely to them in shared danger, that he became deeply devoted to the Cretans, and the bond between him and his old comrades is as strong as ever.
For eighteen months, Paddy and his great friend Xan Fielding lived in the mountains of Crete disguised as shepherds (I wouldn’t put him in charge of my sheep, but never mind) and in constant danger of being caught by the enemy. Then came the spectacular coup in 1944 when he and B
illy Moss, an officer in the Coldstream Guards, kidnapped the German general, Heinrich Kreipe.
Their prize was bundled into the back of the German official car: Moss drove them through a town in the blackout, Paddy sitting on the front seat wearing the general’s cap, in case anyone should glance at the occupants. After a four-hour climb on foot to the comparative safety of a cave in the mountains, they spent eighteen days together, moving from one hiding place to another and sharing the only blanket during the freezing nights. When the sun rose on the first morning and lit up the snow on the summit of Mount Ida, the general gazed at the scene and quoted a verse of an ode by Horace. His captor completed the next six stanzas. Such a duet under such circumstances must be unique in the history of war.
When he was sixteen and a half, Paddy was expelled from The King’s School, Canterbury, for holding hands with the greengrocer’s daughter, sitting on a crate of veg. What to do next? A military crammer was tried but didn’t seem to suit, so he mooned around London, making friends who lasted a lifetime. At the age of eighteen (‘and three-quarters’, he says, for accuracy) he yearned to go to Greece. He could not afford the fare so he walked there. What a lesson to young people now, who write to strangers asking for money to enable them to travel.
Years later, his walk inspired A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, perhaps the two most acclaimed of all his books, winners of endless literary prizes and translated into more languages than probably even Paddy knows. His love of Greece prompted him and his wife Joan to build their glorious house on the sea in the Mani, living in a tent and working with the masons till it grew into the idyllic home it now is.