In Tearing Haste

Synopsis: In spring 1956, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire - youngest of the six legendary Mitford sisters - invited the writer and war hero Patrick Leigh Fermor to visit Lismore Castle, the Devonshires' house in Ireland. This halcyon visit sparked off a deep friendship and a lifelong exchange of sporadic but highly entertaining letters. There can rarely have been such contrasting styles: Debo, unashamed philistine and self-professed illiterate (though suspected by her friends of being a secret reader), darts from subject to subject while Paddy, polyglot, widely read prose virtuoso, replies in the fluent, polished manner that has earned him recognition as one of the finest writers in the English language. Prose notwithstanding, the two friends have much in common: a huge enjoyment of life, youthful high spirits, warmth, generosity and lack of malice. There are glimpses of President Kennedy's inauguration, weekends at Sandringham, stag hunting in France, filming with Errol Flynn in French Equatorial Africa and, above all, of life at Chatsworth, the great house that Debo spent much of her life restoring, and of Paddy in the house that he and his wife Joan designed and built on the southernmost peninsula of Greece.

Review: I've read quite a lot by and about the Mitford's over the years .... Mary S. Lovell's 'The Mitford Girls' (which rates for me as one of the best biography's ever), 'Letters between Six Sisters', 'Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford', 'Hons and Rebels' and two of Nancy's novels 'The Pursuit of Love' and 'Love in a Cold Climate' ... I always enjoy their writing enormously and so when I saw this at the bookshop I got my purse out immediately.

This is a collection of letters between Deborah Devonshire (Debo), the youngest and now sole surviving Mitford sister who married Andrew Cavendish and later inherited (or at least Andrew did) the beautiful Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor (Paddy) the author most known for his travel writing. They start off quite haphazardly and random, in fact the first letters are only from Paddy indicating that he was probably less meticulous about keeping Debo's early correspondence, but their letters soon become more frequent and confidential.

Debo writes like all the Mitford's, wittily and newsy, recounting a lot of her day to day worries and frets about the running of Chatsworth (she's a great lover of chickens and rare breed sheep) plus accounts of her occasional dinners and lunches with Prince Charles and 'Cake' (the Queen Mother) and a description of her day out at the inaugaration of President Kennedy in which, to her wild excitement, she was summoned from the back to come and sit with him during the parade (in Debo's words 'it fuddled the commentators on the telly as they only knew politicians and film stars and when strange English ladies loom they are stumped'). I probably enjoyed reading her letters more, they're briefer but more chatty and amusing. Paddy is a keen observer too and a wicked gossip but he has a tendency to enclose long accounts of his latest travel exploits which interrupt the rapid flow of the letter's and sometimes make for tedious reading (I'd be happy to read them in his travel books .. just not attached to the letters) still, obviously Debo was anxious to hear all about them .. I'm just not sure that we needed to. They both love words and wordplay and so puns, sketches and comic verse flow back and forward and they're always on the lookout for things that will amuse the other.

The later letters deal a lot with old age, the sad inevitability of the loss of loved one's and the ever increasing visits from 'Dr Oblivion'. They both find writing more difficult now, Paddy especially as he suffers from tunnel vision but at the time of the book going to press they were still corresponding aged 88 (Debo) and 93 respectively.

There are lot's of lovely photo's too which is always a treat because it helps to put faces to names.