A Persian Journey
‘This Persian journey was the best in all my life’. I came across this note in a diary my grandmother Dorothy (‘Dottie’) Wellesley had kept during a trip to Persia in 1927. She added these words nearly twenty-five years later when she was writing her memoir and had looked back at her journal. The trip was memorable for many reasons, not least for the fact that it was last-minute. ‘Vita Sackville-West came suddenly into my sitting room’, Dottie wrote in her memoir. ‘This was a Thursday. “Will you come to Persia on Monday” ’, Vita had asked. “Of course” had been my grandmother’s reply. The trip would be one of several the two women made together – as intimate friends, and sometimes lovers. Their relationship had wrecked Dottie’s marriage to Lord Gerald Wellesley: my grandparents separated in 1923.
Vita was going to Persia to join her husband Harold Nicolson, at that time serving as Counsellor at the British Embassy in Tehran. There were two other travellers on the outward part of the journey when they set off from Victoria Station: Marjorie Jebb who was going to visit her brother Gladwyn, also working at the Embassy, and Leigh Ashton, the art historian who was on the lookout for objects for the Victoria and Albert Museum. Vita was at the time also in an intense relationship with Virginia Woolf, and she sent her almost daily accounts of the journey. ‘Dottie . . . has appeared in a very long fur-coat, down to the ankles, so thick as to make her quite round; she looks like a Russian grand-duke.’ As for Marjorie, Vita thought her a jolly girl: she could ‘swing herself by one hand from the luggage rack’. When the train reached Warsaw, in a moment of exuberance Leigh jumped off the train and danced a jig on the platform, and Dottie could not resist joining him for a waltz. ‘This was a success’, my grandmother wrote, ‘the Poles clapped and jumped up crying, “Hoop la! Hoop la!” ’
The group finally reached Moscow – a city encased in snow, with people crossing the frozen Neva as if it were a road, and the red soviet flag flying over the Kremlin, just above Lenin’s tomb. When they visited the tomb at night and saw the embalmed Lenin, they were disconcerted by a woman walking round the glass case wailing and screaming like an animal. They spent two nights at the British Mission, where Vita and Dottie shared a ‘large, cold, room’, and were grateful for hot baths. But Dottie was rather paranoid. ‘Look here,’ she said to Vita, ‘I believe people are watching us and listening to what we say. I don’t think we ought to talk.’
After Moscow the next leg of their journey took them to Baku where they stayed in a filthy hotel, and my grandmother complained of being kept awake by ‘Drunken Russians roaring all night’. But that did not stop her from creeping downstairs in her dressing gown to spy on the bacchanalian scene. When they finally reached Tehran, Dottie established a rhythm of life that she relished; she loved exploring the city, and there were expeditions to the desert. One day the group motored into the desert to Doshan Tapeh – the Hill of the Hare – a ruined pavilion standing on a hill. Bizarrely the walls of one of the rooms were covered with pages from The Illustrated London News. Dottie thought the last inhabitant might have been an eccentric Englishman.
Persepolis
There were forays into the bazaars and the local antique shops in the city. On one occasion Dottie and the Nicolsons were wandering around when Dottie spotted something in the window of a dimly lit shop. ‘There it stood in all its proud and regal beauty; a turquoise- coloured hawk, with dimples for eyes’: the ‘Blue Bird’. Instantly she was sure that she wanted to buy it, and quickly darted into the shop, to emerge triumphant with the bird in her arms. In her memoir she writes that when she excitedly told everyone about her find, Leigh Ashton exclaimed, ‘Not my blue bird.’ He had apparently seen it early in the day, and had intended to return in the afternoon to acquire it for the museum.’ Dottie claims that she was ‘mortified’, and offered it to him, but he ‘nobly refused’. She said that it did not stop her feeling miserable about the whole incident, though she admitted, ‘I loved my blue bird’. But another account of the episode (which I came across after I had finished writing my book) suggests that she was aware of Leigh’s interest in acquiring the piece, and had intentionally pipped him to the post. My grandmother was a determined person, so this has a ring of truth.
In Tehran, the first hint of spring was the night-time hooting of the owls. Writing home to her sister (‘Mitey’, Lady Serena James, née Lumley), Dottie marvelled at the thermometer jumping from fifty to seventy degrees Fahrenheit in one day, and the ‘puffs of pink peach, & almond blossom, flowering in this arid waste.’ And soon after the arrival of spring, another expedition was planned. ‘Next week I go south to Isfahan, Shiraz, & the ruins of Persepolis,’ she told Mitey excitedly. And Vita was determined that they would travel beyond Persepolis, across the Bakhtiari Mountains, to search for wild flowers; for both Dottie and Vita a small trowel would have been an important item in their packing. In late March, Vita, Harold, Dottie and Marjorie set off – Leigh left the group to travel on his own, perhaps glad to have shaken off a potential competitor in his hunt for treasures for the V&A. Vita took the wheel of a Dodge limousine, with Dottie sitting beside her, while Harold was banished to the back with Marjorie. An old Ford belonging to Harold, and driven by a chauffeur, carried all the luggage, but was not able to keep pace with the Dodge, and before the day was over it had broken down. When the party went back to find out what had happened, the luggage was strewn all over the road, and the chauffeur was dealing with a broken big end. Faced with a long wait, Dottie wandered off on her own into the hills, but was soon recalled rather sharply by Harold – apparently the area was known to harbour brigands. ‘She came back indignant,’ he wrote. Aside from her dislike of being told what to do, Dottie’s reluctance to return to the car was because she had been looking for rare desert flowers: ‘I found the Persian Iris, sea-coloured blue and green. It had just pushed its way through the warm silver sand. There was no one to see. I knelt down before it . . . I could have cried for its beauty’s sake. One small iris alone in the desert waste.’
Dottie was thrilled to see Persepolis, the great city sacked by Alexander the Great in 330 BC – the tale of which she had first heard from the lips of her father when she was a small girl. They all hunted for treasure, picking up pieces of stone and fragments of sculptures from the ancient world, and were enchanted to come across little red ranunculus growing in the ruins. Black kites filled the sky, and giant lizards darted across the remains of the amber-coloured columns. They would come upon a sudden spectacular view – the plain of Pasargadae, with wild donkeys grazing round the tomb of Cyrus, and they passed through valleys bordered by great mountains, inhabited, it was said, by bandits. ‘They had’, Dottie wrote, ‘the unpleasant habit of stripping the traveller naked, even to his shoes, and taking away all he possessed.’
When they reached Isfahan, they stayed a night with a Persian friend. After dinner they sat in a small, dark room, which had the scent of sandalwood and spices, and was lit by a dim lamp suspended from the ceiling. The moon and the planet Venus were visible through the window. In these idyllic conditions Dottie recited by heart one of her favourite poems – Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’, until the eyes of their host filled with tears, and he felt impelled to recite in his turn from the poetry of Saadi Shirazi, the famous thirteenth-century Persian poet. Wherever she laid her head that night, I am quite sure that my grandmother fell asleep a happy woman.
However, the following morning she and Marjorie parted from her fellow travellers, who were about to set off for their trek over the Bakhtiari. Dottie confided to her sister in a letter home that she was sorry about her decision to leave the group but she felt ‘I haven’t the staying power to do it. Very humiliating. But they have to do it in 15 days, & can’t stop even if dead tired, owing partly to the heat. So I feel it wouldn’t be fair on them for me to go.’ Vita’s account to Virginia, however, was a little different: judging that Dottie did not like ‘roughing it’, and they were not going to allow her to go on the challenging next stage of the expedition.
Once back in Tehran, Dottie chartered a plane for the first leg of her journey home, and later wrote an account of it for Virginia. They were driven out of the city into the dawn, to embark the tiny, white mail carrier plane that Dottie had hired. She loved the sensation of flying, ‘Here is detachment at last,’ she wrote. But she ‘longed to be alone, terribly’, particularly since Marjorie was being violently sick. Apparently Virginia, who never flew in her life, had asked Dottie to write to her about the experience. ‘Then came the Caspian. I looked slap down into those green depths & into all that caviar. I got hungry. I thought: this has been for years the place of my dreams, the land between the old caravan routes, & the empire of Trebizond, & here on the map you’ve put your finger & said: “I wish I were there.” ’
Aside from their passion for gardening, Vita and Dottie had much in common, including a love of travel and adventure. Vita may have been somewhat dismissive of my grandmother’s stamina but Dottie allowed herself to dream of what might have been. In some of the last lines of her memoir she admitted she could never ‘love the prudent and the timid . . . Had I been as robust or courageous as Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell, or Ella Maillart, I do not think I should have married, or lived in England. Rather would I have crossed the Tibetan Plain, the roof of the world, alone… happy upon a camel; or ridden eleven hours on and through hail, rain, bitter cold… Things being as they are, I made a tame garden; but would wander forever in search of wild flowers in every place and climate. The wanderlust is ever with me. I would have trained as an archaeologist; but evidently I was intended to be a poet.’ Poetry was the silver thread that ran through my grandmother’s life.
Jane Wellesley is a writer and producer and the granddaughter of Dorothy Wellesley. She is the author Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit: A Life of Dorothy Wellesley.
