In Tearing Haste Read online

  Above this, Dartmoor is dotted with rings of druidical stones or jutting at a slant from a sea of red bracken, and above this bracken, like chessmen or T’ang (ah oui!) objects, peer the heads of wild ponies the size of large dogs, gazing as though mesmerized, as one approaches cautiously. Most are bay but others are black, chestnut, roan, grey, dappled, skewbald or piebald in bold geographical designs, one or two practically striped like zebras, many with blond flapperish manes & tails. One raffish grey stallion, obviously of standing and authority, has one of his mad eyes surrounded by a piratical black patch. Up you creep till suddenly they are off helter-skelter in a flurry of flying hoofs and horsehair, the burglarious stallion taking advantage of the disorder by attempting to inflict the last outrages on minute mares at the gallop: the foals pounding anxiously after them are so small that they only make a ripple on top of the bracken. At a safe distance they freeze again, as in grandmother’s steps. They must have been caught and branded and let loose again, and now various owners are rounding them up by their brands for the annual pony fair in Chagford later this month. They are broken-in & sold as pets or for children or for circuses – formerly to costermongers and – too awful to think of, after their free and dashing life on the moors – sent down coalmines; or, worse still, shanghaied on to tramp steamers for Belgians to munch.

  I went on one of these raids yesterday: Mr French, a local stable owner with a well-nigh incomprehensible Devon accent, & a ragged gang of farm boys on steeds & self. It was a long job. The stableman warned me that these ponies were contrary and artful buggers. The afternoon wore by in stealthy encircling advances through the bracken, long waits in the howling wind with nothing to do but stuff with blackberries, and sudden gallops, whips cracking like mad while the boys made shrill noises like barking dogs & owls hooting. At last we had about a hundred cornered in a lane, kicking, leaping, whinnying and trying to clamber over each other. Thirty were picked out by their brands and we set off through a ten-mile labyrinth of lanes as the sun was setting, half of us in front to block escape routes at crossroads. Night had fallen by the time we drove this cavalcade of pigmies through the streets of Chagford. The aborigines emerged, beer mug in hand, from brightly lit pubs to watch these artful buggers pound by. It was past ten when we trotted them into a field where three sleek elderly giants were already grazing. They raised their heads in amazement as though a horde of Teddy Boys, stunted with gin, had suddenly rocked’n’rolled into the Athenaeum. (What lies ahead of these problem ponies? Will they settle down?) I’m glad to say that by the time we left them there in the dark, one of the fogeys was diffidently rubbing noses with the little patch-eyed stallion (looking no bigger than a dachshund) which I thought particularly decent.

  Lots of love,

  Paddy

  P.S. I had dinner with Mrs Basil Seal on the way back, and was pleased & flattered at her learning the saga of Mr Maugham via you; but sorry she had written back saying all his wrinkles spelt nothing but kindness & benevolence.

  [5 November 1956]

  Easton Court Hotel

  Chagford

  Darling Debo

  I’ve just got your letter from Sardinia. It’s a lovely letter, only marred, as was your last one, by this business about pall-bearers. You tell me all about enlisting wonderful John [1] & Xan, with never a hint of asking me, when I am exactly the right medium height, own a dark suit and a measured tread, and would really look sad (not that your other candidates wouldn’t). So please put me down, should I outlive you and there are still any vacancies. I’ll do a ‘PLF writes: –’ in The Times if you like and say that all our wishes go out to your widow, Baroness Nairne [2] etc.

  I’m still chained to this never-ending book, it is nearly finished and marvellous. I think. I wish Edensor House was three miles away – I could tittup there in the evenings on Flash, on whose back I pound rather aimlessly across the moors, which grow steadily bleaker and more menacing as the days draw in. It’s just the sort of place where, some windy night, I might help some poor and infirm old woman bent double under a load of sticks, who would turn out to have supernatural powers and grant three wishes . . . But not a soul so far. I ought really to have two older brothers who had already ridden that way and not only not helped her, but mocked her age & infirmity.

  With lots of love

  Paddy

  [1] Lieut.-Col. John Silcock; the Devonshires’ land agent at Lismore for many years.

  [2] DD’s ‘Wife’, Katherine Mersey.

  12 November 1956

  Easton Court Hotel

  Chagford

  Darling Debo,

  I say, how exciting about that baby. [1] I do think you are clever. Have you thought of names? Boys: Tarquin, Clovis, Comus, Spiridian. Girls: Pomona, a minor rustic goddess of orchards and walled gardens. But perhaps Geo., Harry, Betty, Peg and Polly, etc are safest.

  I would simply love to come for the chatting, when I’m out of this literary forest. My egress is being held up a lot by this Crete film. I’ve just been to another one, trying to instruct Cypriot waiters (who are dubbing – as they say – the voices of Cretan guerrillas) to talk in a Cretan dialect, which is about as hard as telling a Bakewell gamekeeper to talk like a Co. Waterford poacher. I’m going to do all the Greek-speaking bits done by Dirk, i.e. he makes the shapes with his mouth, laughs superciliously, lifts his eyebrows or shouts at the top of his voice – all in dead silence – while I, concealed in a bush, make all the noises . . . rather an intimate relationship. But most of it is in English. It’s all very queer.

  HORSY INTELLIGENCE: On one of these rural rides yesterday afternoon, my horse (Flash) stopped at a gate and an immense carthorse came thundering over the grass to rub muzzles. They alternately put their nostrils end to end – not a very good fit, owing to the size of the newcomer – and blew hard, sending out great clouds of steam as it was a frosty evening. They seemed very keen on this and I’m thinking of taking it up.

  Stranger still, in the middle of last night – at 2 a.m. – I heard a cavalcade of horses trotting and cantering under my window, jumped out of bed and peered out like Old Mother Slipper Slopper, but it was pitch-dark and windy and nothing to be seen, eerie, like smugglers or highwaymen or a troop of hired assassins off for an ambush with dark lanterns. I told the rather credulous maid Barbara about it next morning, who said it must have been ghosts or – rather wittily I thought – nightmares. It turned out in the end to be a fast set of Dartmoor ponies. Sometimes on very windy and cold nights, they come tooling down – ‘It must be terrible cold for them up there’ – and clatter about in the villages, waking all the dogs and setting cocks crowing prematurely. There have been times when swarms have even galloped through Exeter in the small hours, whinnying in the Cathedral Close and causing many a citizen and minor canon to sit up in the dark with their eyes rolling in wild surmise.

  Lots of love from

  Paddy

  [1] DD was expecting her younger daughter, Sophia, born on 18 March 1957.

  [1956]

  Easton Court Hotel

  Chagford

  Darling Debo,

  I hunted yesterday, the first time since the war, and enjoyed every second of it. Scarcely any jumps, which was a comfort, except a few ditches over which nimble Flash sailed as lightly as a moth. It was a lovely day of bright rainy sunlight, what they call a fox’s wedding in Northamptonshire. There were only about 15 people, all squire farmers and their mates, a bit dull, but very nice and friendly. All except one, perhaps, who I later learnt was not quite all there. After pounding for miles I found myself stationary beside him outside a spinney inside which a lot of yelping, horn blowing and whip cracking was going on. He was a great lantern-jawed, sombre man on a huge horse. Just in front of us, turning his back on all the flurry in the wood, sat an idle hound smothered in filth and, as it were, with legs akimbo, gazing from one to the other of us with benevolent interest, his tongue lolling amiably and occasionally scratching behind his ear with his right paw. After abo
ut 10 minutes the silence began to weigh, so I pointed at this hound with my borrowed crop and said, in a voice that wasn’t my own: ‘That hound’s taking it very easy.’ My companion roused himself from a brown study, his great mug swivelled slowly in my direction and fixed me with large bloodshot eyes; but uttered never a word. In County Kildare he would have clapped spurs to his steed and given me two black eyes.

  The going was very fast; hell for leather; but no foxes were killed. Our cavalcade now and then made a very impressive noise, as troops of heifers, fifty strong, kept joining us and hammered along through the bracken at our sides. They seem very keen. Anti-bloodsport flocks of sheep, however, dispersed at once with massed baaa’s of protest. Towards the end, ten of those ponies I’ve mentioned before – (they look rather dismal at this time of the year, embedded in sodden bracken, blinded by their manes and always wringing wet) – joined the hounds and careered along in their midst. This particular gang were black, white and marmalade skewbalds; in fact, slightly larger hounds, looking like hounds’ uncles at a rather hearty parents’ match. Lots of seagulls wheeled about mewing overhead, enjoying an inland holiday. We ended up following the hounds and the ponies round and round a wood till it began to get dark, and then chucked it. I trotted home with the hunt secretary and his simple face was puckered with surmise. ‘Funny kind of a fox, that last one’ he kept murmuring between meditative puffs at his old briar. ‘Didn’t seem able to make up his mind, somehow . . .’

  Do (please) write to London (Travellers) as I think I’ve practically finished here. I hope to see Nancy in the capital. Andrew has been writing and speaking up manfully. [1] I do envy him his certainty.

  Love from

  Paddy

  [1] Andrew Devonshire fervently supported Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s contentious policy of military intervention during the Suez Crisis and had made it the subject of his maiden speech in the House of Lords.

  [April 1957]

  13 Chester Row [1]

  London SW1

  Darling Debo,

  Do take care of Sophia. The great thing, I’m told, with children of that age is to see they are not stolen away by gypsies and replaced with a changeling, while the rightful baby is stained brown with walnut juice and brought up to rob hencoops and tell fortunes, and heaven knows what besides. Fancy that nurse threatening to put her outside for the crows . . .

  I feel rather gloomy, and long to be out of this wretched town.

  Lots of love from

  Paddy

  [1] PLF and Joan’s London house.

  Monday [24 June 1957]

  13 Chester Row, SW1

  Darling Debo,

  I got a lovely letter from Emma this morning, praising a vasculum I had sent her. [1] She writes jolly well and funnily, and please give her my love. I hope it was the right size. My father [2] used seldom to be without one, and my sister and I, being snobbish and unbotanical, used to trail along a few feet ahead or behind, pretending there was no link.

  Of course there were geological hammers, cameras, butterfly nets, map cases, sketching blocks, field glasses, reference books, steel-rimmed spectacles and a vole-skin cap like half a pumpkin with side flaps as well, and pepper-and-salt knickerbockers and boots with colossal studs, which he was always oiling. The great thing, I think I remember, is to put lots of damp moss in the vasculum before setting off on a stately botanical journey.

  Please write at once.

  Love

  Paddy

  [1] PLF had sent DD’s daughter, a keen gardener from childhood, a container used by botanists to hold field samples.

  [2] Lewis Leigh Fermor (1880–1954). Distinguished geologist, author of Memoir on the Manganese-Ore Deposits of India (1909), who spent most of his working life as Director of the Geological Survey of India.

  Saturday

  [Postmarked 7 July 1957]

  Dumbleton Hall [1]

  Dumbleton, Evesham

  Worcestershire

  Darling Debo,

  Staying with Annie Fleming near Dover two weeks ago, half the English Channel flowed into my right ear and it’s been feeling pretty queer ever since. Yesterday, my fierce Orangeman doctor from Belfast thrust into it a silver ice-cream cone or scoil sign [2] fitted with electric light, and said ‘Why, you’ve got a fungus there!’ What can he mean? I see a forest of toadstools, the sort that elves shelter under in summer showers, Arthur Rackham’s world; so now weed killer is being pumped in. Rather glamorous, you’ll allow.

  They are mowing the hay here and everything smells marvellous. When this is finished, I sneak off to the village for a meditative glass of Ind Coope.

  Lots of love from

  Paddy

  [1] A neo-Jacobean house belonging to PLF’s father-in-law, Bolton Eyres Monsell, 1st Viscount Monsell (1881–1969), Conservative MP for Evesham 1910–35. John Betjeman recorded his memories of the Eyres Monsells in ‘Dumbleton Hall’, published in Uncollected Poems (1982).

  [2] The Irish school warning road-sign resembled an ice-cream cone on fire.

  12 o’clock

  [Postmarked 18 July 1957]

  13 Chester Row, SW1

  Darling Debo,

  Bridget [Parsons]’s out alas.

  But the real purpose of this letter is to tell you something I’ve just read, viz. that in ancient times in Sicily the smell of the flowers was so strong that hunting dogs used invariably to lose the scent and wander about for hours at a loss, bemusedly sniffing with half closed eyes, with the quarry happily grazing several miles off. Poor fuddled Bellman & True . . . [1]

  Lots of love

  Paddy

  [1] Two of the foxhounds in the eighteenth-century hunting song ‘D’ye ken John Peel’.

  5 August [1957]

  Hôtel Prince de Galles

  33 Avenue George V

  Paris

  Darling Debo,

  Everything’s fixed. I only finished reading the book [1] three minutes before meeting Mr Zanuck, [2] but it didn’t matter, because he burst into his suite at the Savoy like a rifle bullet saying: ‘Swell to see you, Mr Feemor, it’s really swell. I’m off to the Belgian Congo in three days, and I’ve just taken two yellow pills & three injections and don’t make much sense, so you mustn’t be sore at me if I talk a whole lot of boloney.’

  He’s tiny, with bright blue minute eyes glinting with mad intensity, a ragged sandy moustache and his injections had clearly incapacitated him from judging distances, as the colossal cigar in his mouth – as irremovably there as part of his anatomy – was snapped in the middle, one half hanging at right angles and belching volumes of smoke, like the funnels of one of those Thames steamers going under Chelsea Bridge. He must have charged into a door or a wall or perhaps a mirror.

  I can’t remember if I told you that the whole of the book is a plea against elephant shooting, in case the species becomes extinct. The villain of the book goes berserk and shoots them by the score in a sort of demon’s passion. This is obviously the bit Mr Zanuck likes best, because when I met him next day he said: ‘It’s a swell book, Mr Feemor, a wonderful book. The best bit is when they bump off all those elephants. But we’ll run into difficulties here because of all that goddam humanitarian hooey in England and America. I’d like to do the thing properly, and shoot a whole lot of them, a whole lot . . .’ his blue eyes kindled dreamily. ‘I doubt if I get permission to shoot more than a dozen.’ He looked rather dejected for a second, but then said, cheering up, ‘I tell you what we’ll do! We’ll only shoot a dozen or maybe fifteen, but I’ll put lots and lots of cameras about at different angles so it’ll look as if it were killing hundreds! But what a book!’

  There never seemed to be a second’s question of my not doing the thing, so now I’ve got to start work full steam ahead and hope for the best. It’s rather an alarming, but v. exciting assignation.

  I had luncheon with the old French authoress [3] the day before yesterday and with Mark Grant, [4] and there was much loving talk of you, and swapping o
f Athenian for Irish tales. Otherwise, Paris seems stripped of all my friends and has become one of the major tropical cities of the world. The policemen are in shirtsleeves and khaki solar-topees, as though it were Khartoum. I wandered around by myself till 7 a.m. in Montmartre the first night in countless bars full of negroes, soldiers, sailors, toughs and tarts of all colours and a few noseless pimps, and on the second night till 8 a.m. in Montparnasse and Les Halles. Here, very strangely, I fell in with two Australian nurses who seemed a bit lost, and fed them onion soup as day broke, surrounded by porters and butchers in blood-stained smocks as though they had just been helping at the guillotine. I am writing this in the mosaic courtyard of this luxurious hotel, with a bogus Spanish fountain tinkling in the middle. The Frogs and Americans here look awful, exactly like pigs, with tiny pig’s eyes. I have just caught a sobering glimpse of my own reflection, and so, alas, do I. Circe has done a thorough job.

  How I wish you had been here! Just think of the night prowling and dark dancing, all the fun. I long for you like anything, and yearn and gaze towards the dividing Channel with hate.

  Meanwhile, a billion tons of love, Debo darling, and promise to write hourly.

  Paddy

  [1] Romain Gary, Les Racines du ciel (1956). Set in French Equatorial Africa, the Goncourt Prize-winning novel tells the story of Morel, an idealistic ex-soldier, who sets out to save the African elephant from extinction. PLF was asked to work on the screenplay of the novel, adapted as the film The Roots of Heaven (1958).