It's a Small World

In a letter to Deborah Devonshire, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor* mentioned that in Simla, in India, where he was staying, there was a weeping willow grown from a cutting taken from a tree by Napoleon Bonaparte's grave in St Helena. This gave me an odd shiver, because my grandfather was born in Simla, and my grandmother's mother was born in St Helena. And there is a weeping willow planted in my grandmother's memory near her house in France.



* I'm reading the very excellent In Tearing Haste, a collection of letters edited by Charlotte Mosley, having fallen head over heels for Debo in The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters...