Company Of one

Bernard Fergusson

Peter Fleming Duff Hart-Davis (Jonathan Cape £6.00) The first review I ever wrote, almost thirty Years ago, was in the Spectator and at the behest of Peter Fleming. He would have had

..sonle withering comment to make had he

■ oreseen that one day I should be reviewing a

biography of himself in these same columns. He Would probably have said: "Merely a trick of the

, light!"

„ M 1950 I was commanding a battalion of my 'Jiegiment in Berlin, and Peter and Celia "erning were coming to stay. For some reason I

Was detained in my Orderly Room and could not meet them at the Tempelhof Airport. I

'11n-Irrioned the Orderly Officer, an Old Etonian

'his early twenties, and said: "I want you to go meet Peter Fleming and his wife at the Nrport." He looked rather blank, and I said:

r`Presumably you know all about Peter ijerning?" He replied: "I'm not sure, Sir. oesn't he come in one of your books?"

I was shaken to the boots. Ten or twelve Years earlier, on the eve of the war, Peter

Fleming Was the best known man of his generation. Like Byron, he had become famous iolvrer-night with the publication in 1933 of ctilian Adventure, the travel-book to deall travel-books; in which he described water as "the precious fluid," and so on. It Produced a great bellow of laughter that encircled the world. His gift for written mockery apparent since his schooldays, had at ast found full and glorious scope. The two travel-books that followed it, One's friflPa, nY and News from Tartary, were less i"voious but equally well-written, and the Js9urneY described in the latter a far more _Igt,lificant performance. Then came the war, in %Inch his personal achievement was remarka°le, but, because of the secrecy of his 4_,nignments, out of the public eye. His Were in Norway, in Greece, in Burma, 7ere dangerous in the extreme. I can think of C.‘A' other men of my generation — the late 1,?an Street was one — who survived so many `41uividual hazards. When the glider carrying rnreter Fleming into Burma in March 1944 went 61ssing, and everybody was saying that Peter ,.`!, had it at last, I am proud to claim that I v11 bet you he turns up intact," and so he His glider having cast off its tow rope and Pitched into the jungle at some unidentifiable s P°t, Peter, with a compass but no maps, took command of the party, and led it out to India ;5",.T1 unerring confidence, and with the loss of '31 one man, drowned while crossing the Chindwin, i Some people were irked by Peter's very hri„s°14ciance. In 1936, before I knew him OPerly, I was ADC to the then Major-General Zavell at Aldershot, and attended a lecture 6''en by Peter to officers of the garrison in the Pr

ince Consort's Library. He began in his

farn back drawl with the words: "I have just got from a trip to some of the more suburban 13.4t1S of Russia." A sort of frisson ran round the "all: it was all too obvious that he had put a foot IAll'ong. But in fact he was no poseur: he was tenuine from the top of his always hatless head 4,the soles of his feet, although he had no Jection to trailing his coat when tempted. His background and upbringing were tar ',°41 ordinary. His grandfather was a modest clerk from Aberdeen who left school at pirteen and made a vast fortune in the City of ndon while still a young man. His father Val,

a man of legendary charm, was killed when Peter was ten, the oldest of the four brothers. His mother was beautiful, feckless, eccentric, and embarrassing on every count. It was miraculous that Peter grew up so fully ballasted and on an even keel. Contrary to public belief, none of his grandfather's fortune stuck to the fingers of himself or his brothers: it by-passed them owing to a series of ill-conceived wills. But he did at least inherit, thanks to the imagination of his father's younger brother, the estate near Henley which he had roamed and loved as a boy, and for which he did so much. The author of this admirable biography is the son of Rupert Hart-Davis, who was Peter's oldest and in many ways closest friend. Duff was also Peter's godson, and his anonymous companion on the journey to Russia in 1957, described in this book. The relationship between the two was close, and it is to Duffs credit that he has managed to keep his biography objective and not so filially pious as he must at times have been tempted to make it. Perhaps he has leant over almost too far backwards to include such warts as there may have been. Between 1945 and 1967, I spent much of my time abroad, and saw Peter only at intervals, though as often as I could; I was not therefore conscious of his despondency, here described, or of his unhappiness when he could not find a worth-while subject for a book. At least it did not deter him from playing his full part locally, in County affairs and in command of the local Territorials; and he was at the height of his form as an essayist.' I look back with delight on the four glorious weeks, to which Duff has allotted a page or two, when he was our guest on a cruise among the islands of the South Pacific, and the most congenial and amusing of shipmates. "How pleasant to get back to the good plain cooking of Captain Turner," he would remark, as we returned to the ship after each day's orgy on such island delicacies as raw fish and dubious pork. He allowed two earnest young American Mormon missionaries on the island of Niue to believe that he was on the verge of conversion. He rejoiced in playing cricket against the bare-footed players of Rakahanga, one of the remotest of all those lovely islands, to whom he quickly became "Pita." Peter's writings deserve to survive, and it is my belief that they will. They fall into four categories, in three of which they excel. The travel-books are sui generis, all (with the exception of A Forgotten Journey) written at speed, but polished to the last throw-away phrase. The genre which he worked in the last few years of his life — the writing of fairly recent history, in which some of the participants still survived for him to interview — suited his especial talents. The four volumes of 'Strix' essays from The Spectator are superb: as good as anything by Beerbohm or Robert Lynd, and less ephemeral than Harold Nicolson. Indeed, I judge their bite to be more telling than that of these potential competitors. Such fiction, including the short stories, that he wrote, still bears re-reading, though perhaps not re-printing. Whether or not Duff Hart-Davis has got Peter across to the generation that knew not Peter, such as my Orderly Officer, I find myself unqualified to guess. He has Certainly portrayed him precisely as I remember him. Some of Peter's quips and witticisms, written or spoken, as recorded in these pages may sound merely facetious to those who did not know him. I can only testify that they did not sound so to us, his friends and contemporaries. They were spontaneous and never contrived. One tore open any envelope addressed in that familiar, spidery hand in full confidence that there lurked within it both wisdom and entertainment; and every time one met him, one's spirits rose. I knew Peter in many of his different roles: as a writer, as a staunch helper of lame ducks, as squire of Merrimoles, and as a soldier in the field. He shone in all these capacities, and he was wholly without personal ambition. To his, physical courage in the presence of the enemy, I can bear witness at first hand. He was never sorry for himself: and — as somebody has said of him — he never wasted a single moment of his life.

I count it a privilege to commend this book and to add this small stone to Peter's cairn.

Bernard Fergusson, Lord Ballantrae, has most recently written Captain John Niven