The world the Mitford sisters and their circle inhabited can now seem
impossibly small and unattractively certain. There are those who find
something grotesque in their determined light-heartedness, but the reason
that they still engage and entertain is precisely because they were masters
of the unexpected while remaining true to their individual points of view.
Charlotte Mosley's accomplished recent cull of more than 12,000 surviving
letters between the six sisters shows that, to varying degrees, they were
all capable of an astonished perspective that sums up and clarifies while
stopping short of the knowing or arch.
The present correspondence between Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, and Patrick
Leigh Fermor, also edited by Mosley, begins in the mid-1950s when the
horizons of more familiar figures such as Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford
were already beginning to contract. Leigh Fermor (Paddy) had first seen the
20-year-old Deborah Mitford in 1940 when she was engaged to Andrew
Cavendish. She did not notice him. In the early 1950s they met at parties.
He was now celebrated for his exploits with the Cretan resistance
culminating in the audacious capture of General Kreipe. She had become
Duchess of Devonshire and begun her lifelong dedication to Chatsworth.
The correspondence begins with a letter from Paddy in Greece hoping to be
turned into a fish and swim through many obstacles to Lismore, the
Devonshires' Irish castle where “by a final effort” he might “clear the cill
and land on the carpet where I insist on being treated like the frog prince
for a couple of days of rest and recovery. (You could have a tank brought up
- or lend me your bath if this is not inconvenient - till I'm ready to come
downstairs)”. Debo replies with her characteristic blend of worldly
sang-froid and girlish enthusiasm: “A frightfully good plan, but the
pestilential thing is that you would find not me but Fred Astaire installed
in this pleasant residence... if you could swim a bit further to the
right...and then be like an eel and get a bit across the land you can have
the freedom of my bath in Derbyshire & I will have the sensible shoes
etc ready. I would like it like anything.”
So began what Mosley calls “a deep, platonic attraction between two people who
shared youthful high spirits, warmth, generosity”. This early exchange
contains all the seeds of the ensuing correspondence: attraction tempered
with gallantry, effrontery with modesty; a kindred courage mixed with tact.
In the early years, Paddy was clearly the more stricken: he growls about
occasional rivals and is temporarily eclipsed by “the Loved One”, the
youthful American president. Debo writes that John F Kennedy “is on the
telly today unveiling the Mona Lisa” . “I guess he'd rather be unveiling a
spot of real flesh & blood...I can't wait to see his honest face acting
enjoying it.”
Part of the interest of this correspondence is the complementary talents of
the writers. Paddy is wilder, given to set pieces and flights of fancy.
Mosley remarks that he often sounds “like a musician practising scales
before launching into a full-blown symphony”. We get several symphonies
here: walks in the Pyrenees and the Andes; or an eerie account of rounding
up wild ponies in Chagford. “It was past 10 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.”
Much later he writes a terrific letter about swimming the Hellespont at the
age of 69. He is good, too, on the oddity of people: there is a haunting
vignette of an encounter with a sad French maid in a Bordeaux hotel that a
less prodigal writer might have eked into at least a novella.
For his part, Paddy enthuses over Debo's “flat out headlong way of writing”
and “that whiz-bang planchette style, hitting the nail on the head again and
again without even looking”. She has never read his books (“How I HATE
books. The marvellous thing about yours is that they never appear, such a
good thing”). After her own writing career begins (books about Chatsworth,
mainly), she teases him with agricultural terms of art - “louping ill, orf,
yellowces, scrapie, fluke, foot rot, worms and udder clap” - and is
delighted if she baffles him: “Very clever, but wrong, one and all.”
Beneath the nonsense there is a strong vein of common sense: an excoriating
passage on the newfangled regulations that prevent her selling her own eggs
at Chatsworth, and a fine anger at the hypocrisy surrounding foot and mouth:
“Blair pretends it's all over, well it isn't. The contiguous cull (ladylike
word for kill) is outrageous & even the govt vets are beginning to have
a rethink. Too late for the millions of healthy stock which are dead and
lying in rotting heaps, stinking and bursting often next to the farmhouse.”
Inevitably the picture darkens in later years, as spouses, siblings and
friends fall away. Paddy invents imaginary conversations with Dr Oblivion;
Debo replies that he was the locum at Great Snoring. “People preferred him
to Dr Dose (of Happy Families) who put z instead of s in his name...A sort
of sleeping partner and nothing like as good as Oblivion.” Twenty years
earlier, Paddy had remarked on Ann Fleming's letters, “all of them
surprising...several rather sad...none of them with a flicker of self-pity”.
Debo replied, “Mine from her are vvgood and exactly her talking but
unpublishable. They wd cause offence and worse to all and sundry. Too soon?”
Here perhaps is a key difference.
Debo tells Paddy she was “in the garden talking to a friend, too loud I expect
as per, when a man came up and said Excuse me I've read about a 1930s voice
but I've never heard one, do keep on talking please. So I did, lorst and
gorn forever & he was doubled up and so was I & in the end he said
well I'll give you one thing, you haven't got a stiff upper lip”. Mosley
acknowledges that it is “unusual” for letters to be published in the
lifetime of their authors, but in this case there was no good reason to wait.
Out of this world
One of the most striking aspects of the correspondence between Patrick Leigh
Fermor, left, and Debo Devonshire is their indifference to politics. His
letters from Greece - where he settled in 1964 - barely mention the coup
d'état of 1967, nor the military dictatorship. Debo, scarcely more engaged,
clearly finds most politicians absurd: Lord Home is ‘sweet & looks
like an amiable goat but does not smell or anything', Lord Mountbatten
exclaims ‘What on earth's all this' when served jelly at an official dinner
at the Ceylonese high commission, and even the newly inaugurated JFK comes
in for gentle mockery, after inviting Debo, a family friend, to sit next to
him at his first presidential parade. ‘I can't even tell you what an odd
feeling it was sitting there with him like a Consort while majorettes from
Texas & crinolined ladies on silver-paper floats went by by the thousand
in the bitter cold...' she reports. ‘Jack asked me what I do all day.
Stumped.'
In Tearing Haste edited by Charlotte Mosley
J Murray £25 pp416
