In Tearing Haste Read online

  [2] Iris Tree (1897–1968). Bohemian daughter of the celebrated actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Married the screenwriter Curtis Moffat in 1916 and the actor Count Friedrich Ledebur in 1934.

  14 October 1959

  Train (not rapido)

  Darling Paddy,

  I nearly wrote to you from the Hebride [1] which I’ve been on but somehow didn’t & when I got back to London last night I found your letter & was v glad to hear that Iris Tree admires tobacco chewers. I agree with her I’m afraid. V brave of you to dine at Filipo’s.

  Since I wrote there has been the election. The jolly thing was driving people to the poll at home, keepers’ wives who live at the back of beyond, old ladies who were hard of hearing, two wives of farm workers (who lived 300 yards from the polling station but said they must be fetched) and such like. The interesting thing was they all wore their best and put on hats to perform the ritual (which I freely admit makes one feel rather funny).

  Evie Waugh has done a good joke on me (& probably others). His new book arrived, [2] all wrapped in bits of other books as they do, & I thought how nice & felt rather superior, NOT BEING A GREAT READER, to get the damned thing straight from the horse’s mouth as it were, so I undid it & read something like ‘To Darling Debo, in the certainty that not one word of this will offend your Protestant persuasion’. Naturally I didn’t look any further, but Emma and my Wife who were sitting there bagged it & started to turn the pages which were ALL BLANK, just lovely sheets of paper with gold edges & never a word on one of them. That’s the sort of book which suits me down to the ground. Good Old Evie.

  [1] DD had been staying with her mother on Inch Kenneth, a small island off the coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides, where Lady Redesdale spent several months a year.

  [2] The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox (1959).

  [October 1959]

  Bar da Filipo

  Forio d’Ischia

  Darling Debo,

  We – Iris, Joan, Iris’s staggering ex-husband Friedrich [1] and I – got back from Capri yesterday. There are all sorts of things we didn’t see there, notably a dining cellar with the walls painted to simulate falling plaster where the curly-haired waiters repair the nylon cobwebs daily with a special solution and give a final whisk round with the dust-gun before opening time. It is the prototype of all those ‘continental’ restaurants or bistros in Sloane St and Elizabeth St: –

  He served me some ravioli

  Under a cardboard ham,

  The shirt on his back was from Capri

  The hairs on his chest were sham

  And the apron across his codpiece

  Was the colour of strawberry jam.

  ‘In Sloane St they call me Tonino

  In Sydenham they call me Ted’

  The hair that curled on his bosom

  Was died blue-black from red:

  – Nest for a holy medal,

  (Nest for a diner’s head!)

  The place is full of similar splendours.

  A lot of migrating geese flew overhead for Africa half an hour ago, but I’m staying on for a bit.

  Love

  Paddy

  [1] Count Friedrich Ledebur (1900–86). Actor known for his roles in Alexander the Great (1956), Moby Dick (1956) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1972). ‘Whenever the studios needed a picturesque or stately figure, or a deep voice to whisper, “All is not vell”, they sought him out.’ (PLF)

  10 November 1959

  Hairdressers

  Darling Paddy,

  I can’t quite think what’s been happening except that Chatsworth is now like a job, 9–6 with an hour for lunch, so there is no time for anything except being horrid to people on the telephone (radiator people & that kind of thing) & suddenly it’s become November & shooting is toward.

  Daphne and Xan came for a nice stay. I do love them both in their various ways. As for Xan he becomes nobler, smarter, more beautiful & less confident as the years go by & I WORSHIP HIS BODY, but what’s the good, one never gets past idiotic chat & one has the strong feeling that he is hating it all, that he knows one knows he is (& he isn’t the only one) but that’s the end of it, v annoying as I would like to settle down to an orgy of depth plumbing but it’s no go & I can’t think of a single thing to say. What a waste.

  Next day

  Train 11 November

  Today I had a Business Lunch with Lucian [Freud], to arrange about him coming to Chatsworth to paint the walls of the bathroom which belongs to the bedroom which is stuffed all up to the ceiling with Sabine Women being tweaked. It is Horrific, so whatever Lu does will go nicely. When we got on to the price we both got rather nervous, so the Business part of the lunch was a failure.

  Andrew’s Granny has gone potty. Her maid suggested moving her to the middle of her bed when she was dangerously near the edge & she said ‘I won’t be moved, I have been just here in this bed ever since I re-married.’

  Much love

  Debo

  26 February 1960

  Chatsworth

  Bakewell

  Darling Paddy,

  I have found a lot of bunches of wax crocuses, like one sees on graves in France, and have planted them skilfully among Andrew’s real ones and am waiting on tenterhooks for them to be noted. As they are slightly larger than life size I feel they can’t be missed.

  I might fall in love with John Freeman. [1] He is an exerciser of fascination of rabbit & snake variety. Never met him of course.

  Much love

  Debo

  [1] John Freeman (1915–). Labour MP, ambassador in Washington 1969–71 and interviewer on Face to Face, the celebrated BBC live television show.

  28 March 1960

  Lismore Castle

  Co. Waterford

  Darling Paddy,

  V v glad you will come here. We will have old No Eye [1] and his daughter for one night, Laure by name. Also her hubby. Quelle belle surprise.

  My sister Decca has written a book, [2] and the burden of its song seems to be to steal all you can lay hands on and then be v proud that you have done it. I suppose that’s one way of going on. She’s a bit batty of course. It seems a bit hard on Lady Redesdale [3] who is an honest type.

  Don’t not come.

  Much love

  Debo

  I believe the ageing French writer will be at Mr Eddy [Sackville-West]’s for May so we can have Intellectual Evenings. Quelle dread surprise.

  [1] Viscount Charles de Noailles (1891–1981). DD became friends with the patron of the Surrealists and expert gardener through her sister Nancy. Married Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim in 1923. They had two daughters: Laure (1924–79), married to Bertrand de La Haye Jousselin in 1946, and Natalie (1927–2004), who married Sandro Perrone, owner of the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero, in 1949.

  [2] Jessica (Decca) Mitford (1917–96). The fifth Mitford sister’s first volume of autobiography, Hons and Rebels (1960), recounted her childhood, conversion to Communism, and elopement and marriage to Esmond Romilly, who died in 1941 when his plane went missing over the sea. In 1943, she married American attorney Robert (Bob) Treuhaft.

  [3] Sydney Bowles (1880–1963). DD’s mother. Married David Mitford, later 2nd Baron Redesdale (1878–1958) in 1904.

  Sunday [1960]

  Dumbleton [1]

  Evesham

  Darling Debo,

  I went for a long walk with Joan & Graham [2] in the Dumbleton woods yesterday, and we found a young fox caught in a trap by one fore-pad. It snarled and glared as I approached to release him, so I had to pull him by the brush with one hand, opening the trap with the other. Free at last he paused and fixed me with a glance of implacable hatred, then limped off, sensibly, into a jungle of foxgloves. If it had been a lion, far from saving my life like with Androcles years later in the Coliseum, he would have swallowed me there and then. I minced on my way rather crestfallen.

  Lots of love from

  Paddy

  [1] After the death of PLF’s mother-in-law in 19
59, Dumbleton Hall was sold to the Post Office as a convalescent home for employees and the family moved into the agent’s old house.

  [2] Graham Eyres Monsell, 2nd Viscount Monsell (1905–94). PLF’s unmarried brother-in-law, an accomplished pianist, was very close to his sister Joan.

  23? 24? October 1960

  c/o Niko Ghika

  Hydra (temporary)

  My darling Debo,

  A brief autobiography follows, hoping you’ll put me up to date in return.

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Off we set in Joan’s Sunbeam Rapier, hood down, singing at the wheel, heading from Le Touquet to our old friend Lady Smart’s, spent three days there, then into a deserted dusty summer Paris, so bare that it might have been emptied by a Bedouin raid, and south to Fontainebleau, for a further three days of utmost luxury and pleasure at your old pal Charles de Noailles and Natalie’s house. [1] I can’t remember whether you’ve been or not, but if not, do hasten. The house is probably more Nancy’s Mecca than yours, but it seems enchanting to me, all that’s best in froggery. Natalie darted about the place seeming almost as nervy, frail, small and wide-eyed as her Chihuahua, whirling us at the speed of light from one cousin’s castle to another; but the real treat of course was Charles de N., pottering and talking and smiling and clipping and prodding from one strange and wonderful plant to another, clad in mole-coloured corduroys and gym shoes, with a wonderful basket in one hand, slotted for trowels, forks, secateurs, labels, bast string, gloves and indelible pencils. I wished you had been there and then thanked my stars you weren’t, for the conversation would have soared into such a rarefied empyrean of botanical expertise that we wouldn’t have understood a single word, instead of the lovely told-to-the-children tour we had. He worships your body, as you know (and rightly).

  At dinner the first night I asked him about the Irish tour and, do you know, the most extraordinary and eerie thing happened. It was word for word, or so it seemed to me, what we imagined he might say, when, without having met him, I improvised what it might be, at Lismore! I couldn’t believe the evidence of my ears. The only thing in which I was a bit out was in being too snobbish, which he wasn’t. But the rest was uncanny. You were his favourite by far. His horticultural high point, after a long pause for thought, turned out to be Annes Grove. [2] I felt very bucked I’d been there that day with Eddy [Sackville-West] and the French Writer. Anyway, it was a glorious stay, with no one else there, except François Valéry’s son, [3] which was perfect. I felt it had all been rather a click: but one never quite knows.

  (This para. can be skipped) Then off hot wheel eastwards to Châtillon-sur-Marne, to see the Vix Vase, a huge Greco-Etruscan amphora dug up seven years ago, an amazing object, and further east to Colmar in Alsace-Lorraine to gaze for the 5th time at Grünewald’s Issenheim altarpiece, the most amazing crucifixion in the world.

  Then across the Rhine, through the Black Forest, one night on the shores of Lake Constance surrounded by Germans; south into the Austrian Tyrol, on into Italy at Bolzano, then clean through the Dolomites, hundreds of miles of sheer and dizzy spikes a-gush with streams out of which beautiful trout virtually leap straight on to frying pan, grill and saucepan; north of Venice into Yugoslavia at last; through Slovenia to Lubliana, through Croatia to Zagreb, then east along a billiard table autostrada towards Belgrade. Now, a travel tip for motoring in Yugoslavia: there are only about three petrol pumps in the country, and scarcely any motors. We ran out hundreds of miles from one on this autostrada in the heat of the day and settled for hours under an acacia tree (shittim-wood in the Old Testament) until at last a caravan of twelve Cadillacs drew up and succoured us by siphoning petrol out of their tanks. They were a party of Persian princes with their sloe-eyed princesses on the way from Claridge’s to Teheran. They partook freely of our wine flask, asked us to stay in their palaces (the competition began to look ugly) and then slipped into gear for Iran.

  We continued south into wildest Bosnia, where mountains began to rise and minarets to sprout in every village, each alive with Moslem invocations intoned thrice daily. The roads became dust tracks across plains or twisty ledges of rubble little wider than eyebrows along the rims of deep gorges at the bottom of which huge rivers curled and swooped through echoing and forested ravines, with here and there an old Turkish bridge spanning them as thinly and insubstantially as a rainbow. The food became odd and wonderful, stuffed with garlic and paprika and the sunlight and our breath got stronger with every mile. So on to Sarajevo, scene of the Archduke’s murder, and, through range after range of mountains to Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast, a terrific medieval walled city full of renaissance palaces and belfries and winding columns and cloisters, and oysters too – huge and wonderful ones. South of this is the old kingdom of Montenegro, now part of Yugoslavia, reached after a three-hour zigzag up a sheer and cloud-topped wall of mountain, looking down on to strange rock fjords caked with water lilies and with pyramid-shaped mountains that hover on mist like the ones in Japanese pictures, and plenty of gliding storks. Then comes a wilderness of rock, in the heart of which lies the old capital, Cetinje, and the king’s palace, the size of Edensor. Long Byronic gorges a-swoop with eagles brought us down into Southern Serbia and an Albanian population: baggy-trousered women heavily veiled, and tall, raffish, guarded mountain men in red and white fezzes, all selling watermelons to each other. They are always in a crowd, always moving compactly along the streets, as though to or from a public execution. Then we came to Serbian Macedonia and wonderful lakes with frescoed Byzantine monasteries on the shores, and deeper and darker mountains and more fearsome gorges and hotter sun. These monasteries and frescoes held us up for days. We were playing it slow but not cool.

  Into Greek Macedonia at last, and then by familiar roads to Athens. Here we found Gladys [Stewart-Richardson]’s house (now Joan’s) a great deal smaller than we remembered. It is, in fact, a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen, a sort of old cottage in the middle of Athens (much smaller than Mark [Ogilvie-Grant]’s), with a nice terrace. It’s very pretty, but much too small for two. What are we to do? Worse, a colossal road is being built outside, with fifty pneumatic drills, giant steel claws for rubble, hydraulic pumps, steamrollers and blasphemy. One has to talk in bellows. I have now bought some pink wax ear plugs, which makes everything even eerier. I see massed drills a-shudder, rollers a-crunch, and ten tons of broken concrete crashing from suddenly gaping steel claws, all only a few yards off, and all in dead silence; lorries hurtle by as soundlessly as minnows. Meanwhile, one’s heart sounds like a steam hammer, and one’s own steps like nail-clad footfalls in a cathedral.

  END of Autobiography. Pause for tea break.

  In spite of all this, it’s lovely being back in Greece. Mark was away when we arrived, chez Joan, and then, which made one feel wistful, chez you. Diana Cooper and Cecil [Beaton] had just been through, missing by the skin of all our teeth. But waiting on the mantelpiece was a huge stuffed seagull Diana had bought, and two stuffed hoopoes with pearl necklaces about their necks, as a housewarming present.

  Well, after wandering about a bit in various islands and mountains, vaguely looking out for a permanent writing nest, we rendezvous-ed with Mark in Leivadia and headed for fateful Arachova and Delphi, and set off next dawn from A by car to the plateau, thence towards the summit with a nice guide and one mule. Mark veering to right and left with his sawn-off trident in one hand, polythene botanist’s bag in the other, through Niebelungen-clouds and fir-forests to the bare rocks, when we discovered that the guide did not realize we wanted to go down via the Carysian Cave to Delphi as well. There would be no time to make the summit and this as well, so we turned down into the Devonshire country, [4] waded across the plateau – Mark pointing out all the points of that Way of the Cross, where the wrong turning was taken in your journey etc. We sat by a well, very thirsty. The guide lowered his waterbottle on the end of his belt. Mark bent in to prod it below the surface with his stick, hoping to fill it, and out of his breast pocke
t and into the depths dropped his very expensive spectacles. There’s obviously a sort of blight on the place. Then up to the cave, and down through the woods that everyone missed on last year’s return journey. Mark dug up several colchicums and a centauria (impressed?) and we saw two lovely black squirrels, getting down to Delphi just after dark, Mark pointing out with his trowel where you had waited and craned like Sister Anne.

  Our search was begun in Hydra, but we’re back in Athens now after about three weeks of hot and cloudless October and early November weather, our last bathe there was on 3rd Nov. Well, since Niko Ghika has settled there with Barbara, it’s been transformed – more terraces flung out, glorious paintings, strange sweet-smelling plants in amphorae, awnings like striped yacht sails, and the most glorious view in Greece, often described to you in the past. How I wish you’d come there when we lived there, as now we only come as guests now and then. Barbara and Niko have become more fervent bed dwellers than ever, those happy faces always seem to be gazing brightly at one from twin pillows whenever their door is open. The other day they were actually up and about for five hours on end, which is a record. It made me a bit anxious; I wondered if it was cracking up . . . But no, next day they were more lovesick than ever, unable to keep hands unclasped for long, either chatting, walking or at meat, keeping in touch by foot when knives and forks got in the way. It made one feel rather protective and a bit sad: such ages since one was in such a plight, at least overtly.