In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor
Deborah Mitford, Patrick Leigh Fermor
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· 8 ratings · 416 pages · Published: 13 Nov 2008
There 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, dashing off letters in her “whizz-bang planchette style”; 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, and, above all, 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.