[3] Ann Fleming had sold her husband’s library, consisting mainly of books that had made a contribution to technical and intellectual progress – ‘books that made things happen’ – to the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
9 November 1970
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
A quick thing to say if by ANY CHANCE you find yourself in England for Christmas DO come here.
It will be incredibly dull, but you are needed, as per. Much love
Debo
28 November 1970
Mani
Darling Debo,
You’ve got no idea how braced I feel! After a few days rough stuff from the mountains – wind, rain etc – it’s suddenly changed to golden September sunlight, no wind, not a cloud, smooth blue sea. Seeing was stripping, charging down the steps, diving in and soaring through the sapphire depths like a dolphin. Now here I am on the terrace all of a glow. Not bad when it’s Dec. the day after tomorrow!
I do wish I could come for Christmas but I don’t seem to be coming back for ages. But should I, I’ll be there swift as an arrow from the Tartar’s bow (Wm Shakespeare). There would be an eerie rattle on the streaming window as the wind hurled round the building on Xmas Eve: –
And if you ever hear drops
Fall on your window pane,
You’ll know they’re just my teardrops
Falling for you like rai—in . . .
(Jack Smith, The Whispering Baritone, circa 1928)
Two days gap. Summoned away.
Well, now I actually have had a December bathe, and a thrill of triumph runs through my frame.
The situation here is pretty rum. There are now twenty cats stalking about the building. Oddly enough, they don’t get in the way at all, but it’s v strange to see them at meal times, crowded round their porringers, all those tails waving in unison. Joan hasn’t had the heart to chuck them in the briny, so here we are. Must give some away. Now Aymer Maxwell has given us a puppy. I brought it back, eight weeks old, from Euboea where he lives. He created like anything in the car, but calmed down for a week in Spetsai, where I took him to stay with Diana Cooper and her circle, then drove to Patras to meet Joan returning from Finland. We dreaded the encounter with the cats. The older ones all cut him dead, but all the younger set worship him, gambolling and embracing on the terrace all day, allowing themselves to be dragged about by the scruff, lining up to snuggle into his basket when shadows fall. He is more fan-ridden than Rudolf Valentino, and wonderfully unspoilt. Name, Troilus. Breed, nondescript, but very handsome, pale marmalade in colour with white spots and a bold white flash that loses itself among Gladstonian wrinkles between the ears when they are puckered in puzzlement, which is practically the whole time. This brings the total of legs in the house – including Joan & me, and the couple who look after us & two sons, but not counting the mice or the centipedes (of course) – to 96. When A Maxwell comes on Saturday, 98. I wish you were looming, to make 100 . . .
17 June 1971
(Lady Mosley’s 61st birthday)
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
It is truly ghoulish of me not to have written ages ago to thank you & Joan for your vvv kind invitation for Sept.
The thing is I’ve been dallying & dallying because Ivan the Terrible (Andrew. He is either Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great according to his mood) is vaguely thinking (did you know?) of joining you in viewing the Fine Stands of Timber on your mystery trip to Peru. [1]
Anyway, I suppose that’s nothing to do with it but the bitter thing is it doesn’t look too good. Sophy goes back to Dread School around 13 Sept, then there’s the Sheep Sale & the Jacob Flock Owners’ Open Day here on 18th & the next day I go to Austria for the 50th anniversary celebrations of Organised Haflinger Breeding. I suppose you think the foregoing are proofs of on-rushing daftness but I can’t help it, it may be my age of course but it’s better than (a) taking to drink/drugs or (b) bagging very young men for lovers, admit. I now prefer horse shows to lovers & I’ve never liked drink – no doubt wd be a sucker for drugs but have only tried when in extremis, viz. when I had a baby which immediately died & the dr fainted & was found by Ivan stretched out in the hall. But that was many & many a year ago.
So, Whack, ALAS, I must say no. Don’t think you’ve finished with me please, I mean sometime like March would be incredibly pleasant, eh.
Emma & Toby have gone to live on their farm in Scotland for good & are loving it. They’ve got a marvellous new baby called Stella [2] who’s got limpid blue eyes.
The Fr Lady Writer is far from fit, but she’s back in Versailles. She’s seen twenty-two drs (including quacks) ranging from the Queen’s to an Indian osteopath & he was the only one who helped at all, & none of them has (a) found out what is the matter with her poor leg or (b) hit on a cure. Isn’t it foul. [3]
Much love, & do keep in deepest. From
Debo
[1] Andrew Devonshire joined PLF on a month-long expedition in Peru, setting off at the beginning of August 1971. ‘We had been included, as minor amateurs, in a mountaineering expedition in the Andes: Andrew as a botanist in charge of plant specimens, and I as the guardian of the Primus stove.’ (PLF)
[2] Stella Tennant (1970–). DD’s granddaughter became a supermodel in the 1990s.
[3] Nancy Mitford had been operated on for liver cancer in 1969 and was suffering from Hodgkin’s disease. Her condition remained undiagnosed until shortly before her death in 1973.
23 September 1971
Mani
Darling Debo,
I feel a bit lost here, quite alone at the moment, with nobody to boast to about all our Andean doings. I can’t get over how creditably we did, bearing our earlier trepidations in mind. I hope Robin [Fedden] bore out all our vainglorious assertions.
I had a lovely few days before finally buzzing off, raging happily about the metropolis like a soldier on leave: saw two films, a sophisticated French one at the Curzon about a young shaver who goes to bed with his mother, among others: [1] and an endless, awful one called Bloody, Bloody Sunday: [2] endless close-ups of enlarged pores and lustfully quaking shoulder blades and empty bottles that left the viewers (Diana Cooper, Annie, old C. [3] and self ) racked with gloom and tedium. But we cheered up over dinner at an old haunt of Annie’s, but new to me, called Pastoria’s, just south of Leicester Square – almost empty and terribly nice. The headwaiter asked Diana if she had a dog concealed within her drapery, she said ‘No, a fox – a Mexican fox.’ As the H. waiter was a Mexican, and they were thus compatriots, all was well. I expect you’ve heard that, a few weeks ago, his colleague at the Ritz said she couldn’t have the dog in the restaurant, and she flummoxed him by saying, ‘Call the police’, and was allowed to finish her meal with the little blighter asleep in her lap. She really is first-rate officer material as far as initiative goes. She was in tip-top shape, I thought, and there was lots of carefree laughter.
I flew to Athens two days ago for the funeral of our old friend Geo. Seferis, [4] the poet. Joan, hot foot from Samarkand, Bokhara, Tashkent and Tiflis, arrives tomorrow with her bro Graham.
I’m still chewing away at our Andean past. Do tell Andrew I’ll send a copy of my artless account of our adventure when typed, corrected, & re-typed – in about three weeks, I think, what with the va-et-vient, if you follow me. [5]
Many thanks again, darling Debo, and tons of love from
Paddy
[1] Louis Malle, Le Souffle au cœur (1971).
[2] Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). John Schlesinger’s film about a triangular love affair starring Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch and Murray Head.
[3] Caspar Fleming (1952–75). The ‘strange, gifted, unhappy son of Ian and Ann Fleming’ (PLF) was named after Admiral Sir Caspar John, son of the painter Augustus John, whom Ian Fleming admired. He was known as ‘Old Caspar’ from Southey’s poem ‘After Blenheim’ (1796).
[4] George S
eferis (1900–71). Poet, essayist and diplomat. Greek ambassador in London 1957–62 and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963.
[5] PLF circulated his account of the Andes expedition, based on letters he wrote to Joan, to his fellow participants and various friends. It was eventually published in 1991 by John Murray as Three Letters from the Andes.
DD, aged twenty, on her engagement to Andrew Cavendish, 1940
PLF in uniform, 1944
DD on Grand National winner Royal Tan at Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford. The horse was given to her by Prince Aly Khan after its racing career had ended
PLF (left) and Dirk Bogarde, 1957. The actor played PLF in the film Ill Met by Moonlight about the daring abduction, led by PLF, of General Heinrich Kreipe in Nazi-occupied Crete (photograph Harry Gillard)
Producer Darryl F. Zanuck and Juliette Gréco filming The Roots of Heaven (1958). PLF wrote the screenplay and spent several weeks on set in Maroua, Cameroon
DD in the dining room at Chatsworth, 1950 (photograph Norman Parkinson)
Daphne and Xan Fielding, Crete
Joan Leigh Fermor by PLF, 1946
PLF (left) and DD (centre) at El Rocio, Andalusia, 1958
PLF and the actress Iris Tree in 1959 at Castello di Passerano, Lazio
The writer and historian Robert Kee
Princess Margaret (centre) and PLF (on the gray) dodging reporters on a ride in Tuscany. Behind PLF is Judy Montagu and next to him champion horsewoman Natalie Perrone
DD and Andrew (back centre) with their children: Sophia, Emma and Stoker. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is seated next to DD’s mother-in-law, Mary Devonshire. Chatsworth, 1960
DD seated next to John F. Kennedy at the President’s inaugural parade, January 1961 (photograph Life magazine)
PLF and Nancy Mitford picnicking at Lismore, 1961
Joan Leigh Fermor with PLF (standing back left), Cyril Connolly (back right), Maurice Bowra (centre) and the historian Ernst Kantorowicz. Hydra, c.1958
DD and Eddy Sackville-West, 1964. The writer and music critic was a neighbour of the Devonshires at Lismore
PLF at home in Mani, c.1986 (photograph Derry Moore)
‘Not a house in sight, nothing but the two rocky headlands, an island a quarter of a mile out to sea with a ruined chapel, and a vast expanse of glittering water, over which you see the sun setting till its last gasp. Homer’s Greece, in fact.’
27 November 1971
Chatsworth
Bakewell
Darling Paddy,
The news here is that Andrew went to hosp for over three weeks & he has come out a DIFFERENT PERSON. So much better, funny, clever & sympathetic – like he really is & not the Hyde of Jekyll and –. He has stopped refreshing drinks of alcohol [1] & lives on stuff called Schloer (apple juice) & Ribena (which looks dangerously like claret) & grapefruit juice (which is a first course at dinners in Chesterfield, so bitterly unfair). I can’t tell you how well he’s getting on on this strange diet. He was v poorly indeed when he went into hosp with ghoulish depression, a thing I never wish to see again.
We went to dinner with the Beits [2] to see Alf ’s cinema he took of friends between the wars. It was riveting. My bro [3] figured – I had completely forgotten how good looking he was. The Pagets [4] look just the same now. So does my sister Diana. The Droghedas [5] & Cecil Beaton are better now than then BUT the tragedies were Randolph Churchill [6] (Adonis of 1st water), Bridget Parsons and Mamie Lygon [7] – almost unbearably sad to think what wrecks they are/were.
Three Pagets were at dinner & they made me sure it’s better not to dye hair & do makeup now we’re all old. Liz had a dress which somehow fell apart when she sat down & there were her old legs – what for I asked myself & looked away. Rose (whose face is lovely) had a black dress, the sort described as a sheath in the fashion mags, split up one side to her thigh & then, you see, she’s forgotten she’s got a hefty tummy & it doesn’t do. Better not go in for that sort of thing, don’t you think.
I’ve written an article about Haflingers for Riding & one about the goat I liked best for the British Goat Society’s Year Book. Two publications which I feel you may not subscribe to.
Much love
Debo
[1] Andrew Devonshire’s stay in hospital was one of his periodic attempts to give up alcohol. He wrote in his memoirs that ‘drink has run in the Cavendish family for generations’. Accidents of Fortune, p. 100.
[2] Clementine Mitford (1915–2005). Posthumous daughter of DD’s uncle Clement Mitford. Married Sir Alfred Beit in 1939.
[3] Tom Mitford (1909–45). DD’s only brother trained as a barrister and used to pay his sister Nancy a shilling an hour – a large sum in those days – to argue with him. ‘He joined the Territorial Army, then the Queen’s Own Westminsters, and served throughout the North African and Italian campaigns before transferring to the Devonshire Regiment when Germany capitulated. Because he had many German friends and affection for the country, he did not wish to participate in active service there and was sent to the Far East. He died of wounds in Burma, in March 1945. My parents revered his intelligence – he was the peacemaker in the family; they and my older sisters never got over his loss.’ (DD)
[4] Three of the five beautiful daughters of 6th Marquess of Anglesey: Caroline (1913–73), Elizabeth (1916–80) and Rose (1919–2005).
[5] Garrett Moore, 11th Earl of Drogheda (1910–89). Newspaper proprietor and Chairman of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Married Joan Carr in 1935.
[6] Randolph Churchill (1911–68). The DNB entry for the son of the Prime Minister records that he was drinking double brandies at the age of eighteen – a habit that did not change over the years.
[7] Lady Mary (Maimie) Lygon (1910–82). The most beautiful of 7th Earl Beauchamp’s four daughters. Married to Prince Vsevolode Joannovitch of Russia 1939–56.
In the twenties, May 1972
Mani
Darling Debo,
Please forgive this hoggish delay! I was waiting to send you a copy of my Lettres Peruviennes, describing our adventures last year, but it won’t be ready for a couple of days, so here goes.
I had an extraordinary experience three weeks ago: meeting General Kreipe [1] on a television programme, with all his Cretan captors, after 27 years. After the programme, all the Cretans – about 20 – the General & his wife (very nice), a niece of Field Marshal v. Rundstedt, and I had a huge banquet in a taverna. Lots of Cretan songs and dances, a few German folk songs sung by the General and me, after much wine had flowed. Some journalists got wind of it and broke in. One asked the General how I had treated him when he was my prisoner in the mountains and the Gen said – wait for it! – most energetically: ‘Ritterlich! Wie ein Ritter’ (‘Chivalrously! Like a knight!’). I felt a halo forming and it took me days to get back to normal. I took them out to all sorts of meals, and showered Frau Kreipe with roses when they left (she was extremely nice). She said: ‘You’re just like my husband told me you were all these years!’ (Three cheers again! Forgive me retailing these dewdrops – but nobody else can, you do see.) It was somehow a wonderful rounding off to this ancient story. I’ve just got a charming joint letter from them!
The great thing of Spring 1972 is Robert’s book! [2] I only got it three days ago, and am already halfway. It’s absolutely tip-top, and has that very special quality that only years of pain, toil and thought can instil: beautifully written, and fair and balanced to all sides, and, more than that, full of understanding, pity and sympathy for the almost insoluble ghastliness of the whole thing.
Gerald Brenan, [3] Carrington’s erstwhile love, came and stayed a few days, he’s 79, hares up the mountains like a buck in spring. He had a pretty and charming girl with him; love, but not concubinage, he told me. They are now wandering about the depths of Anatolia in a 2-seater.
[incomplete]
[1] Heinrich Kreipe (1895–1976). The German commander of the occupying forces on Crete. He was abducted from the island in 1944 by a
group of resistance fighters led by PLF.
[2] Robert Kee, The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism (1972).
[3] Gerald Brenan (1894–1987). The British writer, who lived in Spain for much of his life, had an affair with Dora Carrington in the 1920s. After his wife Gamel’s death in 1968 Brenan spent ten years with a young Englishwoman, Lynda Price.
[1972]
Darling Debo,
This is not really a letter, more an extremely rough travel diary of our adventures this year.
AN EXPEDITION TO THE PINDUS MOUNTAINS OF NORTHERN GREECE
Expedition Party:
Robin and Renée Fedden
Carl Natar [1]
Peter McCall [2]
Andrew Devonshire
PLF
Athens, 9 June 1972
We had bad news last night. We have been refused permission to climb in the Hakkiari Mountains in Turkish Kurdistan, so it’s the Pindus for us.
I met the party at Athens airport, a joyful reunion. We dumped all our stuff at the Olympic Palace Hotel and had dinner at the Platanos in the Plaka and coffee among the reeds by the Tower of the Winds.
Yanina, 10 June
We got to Preveza from Yanina and drove out past the ruins of Nicópolis and a scattering of Vlach * huts. Then we drove up into the Louros gorge, through a forest of plane trees and on into the more open Dodóni country and into Yanina at last. It’s been hideously modernised since my last visit eight years ago, all the oriental nobility has gone; but plenty of storks nest there still. We went to the Olympic Hotel; an amusing and beautiful young couple run it. Then there was a smashing dinner with Mr Nicolaïdis and two other mountaineers at the Epirote Pavilion (tzatzíki, stuffed courgettes, and so on). I talked Vlach – or rather Rumanian – to Mr Stergios; and wandered inside the Kastro for an hour. Most of the old houses have gone; but I heard some Ladino * through a shutter, then walked along the lakeshore listening to the loudest and lewdest frogs I’ve ever heard croak.
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