One of those projecting upper storeys was my shelter for the next two nights, and the intervening day: an aged Greek couple, whose children and grandchildren had taken wing, put me up. Inside, the resemblance to the sterncastle of an old ship was doubly compelling. Everything was panelled, the ceiling was coffered in lozenges and, like Nadejda’s house in Plovdiv, a divan ran round the raised end of the living room. Through its poop-like windows and their infinity of small panes, there was only the Black Sea. I sat scribbling here most of next day, setting down all I had seen along the Euxine coast. It was, and is, hard to capture the charm of the journey along this almost deserted coast, and its pervading atmosphere of peaceful seclusion and consolation. This little floating town, where all was decayed, warped, waterlogged, rusted, falling into ruin and adrift with watery magic was the very place for it. After a walk along the sedgy shore the other side of the isthmus, I wrote a stack of letters. (Hard to believe they would, eventually, find their way to their various destinations all over Central Europe; what about London and Calcutta?) When I had finished, the smooth sea outside slid away to the horizon under an elaborate mackerel sky which was less like a shoal of fish than the looped roof of a tremendous emir’s tent, each loop tinged an extraordinary lilac hue. Under it, trailing three dinghies, a schooner under sail glided on stage, heading for Ancialo or Burgas with a cargo of fish – I could see them flashing on deck as the sailors stooped over their catch; and all round the vessel, like the whirlpools of snowflakes unloosed by upending one of those glass globes containing a miniature ship, circled a screeching cloud of seagulls.
As we sat by the brazier before going to bed, I tried out the few bits of Homer I knew by heart on my host and hostess, and a couple of bits of Sappho. I suppose it was rather like a Greek, in an incomprehensible accent, hopefully murmuring passages of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Middle English to an old fisher couple in a Penzance cottage. Even so, the verses seemed to have a sort of talismanic value to their ears, and caused pleasure rather than the nonplussed tedium its English equivalent might have evoked in Cornwall. I struck luckier with Fauriel’s Greek folksongs, in the collection of Nadejda’s grandfather. They knew several of them, and my hostess Kyria Eleni – an alert old woman with wide-open blue eyes, dressed and elaborately kerchiefed in black – even sang a few lines here and there in a quavery voice. Once I had got the hang of the modern pronunciation of the vowels and diphthongs, with the fact that all hard breathings had evaporated and that all the accents merely indicated where the stress of a word fell, I saw that reading it aloud, though halting at first, would soon become plain sailing. I could also break down the construction of the sentences; even, now and then, and in spite of the deep demotic, the ghost of an inkling of their drift. Old newspapers hinted their meanings a stage more easily, as through a glass darkly, but with a battered missal I found on a shelf, it was almost face to face. All this was full of promise for the coming months; for, Constantinople once reached, I was planning a private invasion of Greece. But, infuriatingly, we were still confined in conversation to my halting and scarcely existent Bulgarian.
This dabbling with the mysteries of Greek caused many a sigh. They had never been to Greece, and now (unlike me) never would. They seemed glad to have a guest once more. I felt that my being English played a part in their kind welcome. At all events, when I tried to offer some money before setting off next day for Burgas, they both started back in horror as though the coins were red hot. I slept on the divan, under the twinkling ikon lamp. There was a silver-covered ikon of the Virgin (I was beginning to notice these things) and another of SS Constantine and Helen, holding up the True Cross between them; also two faded marriage wreaths intertwined in a glass case, carefully kept from their wedding day in the later decades of the last century. I could hear the water lapping all night, and when I woke up the silver ripples reflected from the sea were eddying all over the wooden lozenges of the ceiling, and now and then one of the gulls would settle on the sill and walk up and down before taking off again.
• • •
‘I say, what have you been eating, old boy?’ Mr Kendal, halfway across the room with welcoming hand outstretched, stopped dead in his tracks. On the way from Mesembria, still unapprised of its social backlash, I had cut up the last slices of the pastourma the Turks had given me and eaten it under a carob tree, looking down at the low marshy country and the salt flats, and the far-off moles and cranes of Burgas. Now here I was at the British Consulate, whose windows commanded an enlarged version of the ships and the long mole I had seen from afar.
Scores of times during the last year I had found myself cutting an incongruous, perhaps alarming figure, a shaggy and travel-stained bull, as it were, in the china-shop of civilized surroundings – and this time I had tried to do something about it before meeting Mr Kendal, to whom the Tollintons had promised to write from Sofia. Fishing in my rucksack in the battered caravanserai of a hotel, I soon saw that little could be done: my jacket and trousers looked like old rope after the fall into the pool. There was nothing for it but to stick to my tattered puttees and breeches and hob-nailed boots. I brushed off as much of the dust and caked mud as I could, got a small boy with a brass-embellished portable shoe-cleaning shrine to give my boots an unwonted glitter, stuck my head under the tap, brushed my hair and put on a tie under the leather jerkin. I had stumped off to the Consulate feeling uncouth but semi-respectable, and all in vain.
Not that it mattered a rap. Mr Kendal’s old tweed jacket with a leather watch-strap from the buttonhole to the breast pocket, the grey trousers and (I think) the regimental tie, the jovial and rosy face, robust build, clipped moustache and sandy hair which had retreated early from the scalp, all combined, in my eyes acclimatized to the Balkans – with the Lion and the Unicorn over the door and the grave glances of George V and Queen Mary from their frames on the wall – into a whole so unmistakeably English as, perhaps, to fill me with fears that my shabby mien might be letting the side down. But the amused and friendly tone of voice, and above all, an expression of transparent kindness in the bright blue eyes, routed all such thoughts at once.
He sniffed. ‘I’ve got it! Pastourma! It’s the strongest I’ve ever smelt.’ A little later, in the living part of the house, Mr Kendal handed me a drink, saying he was a hero not to be using tongs.
Under these circumstances, the fact that I was out of my hotel room and established in the nursery of their daughter Cecily that night, says much for the kind hearts of Tony Kendal and his wife Mila. It was, for another twenty-four hours at least, like having a polecat as a guest. Mila, soft-voiced and quiet, radiated a benignity which was the complement of Tony’s exuberance and high spirits. Her father, who turned up for a day, was a retired Bulgarian general: a tall, imposing old gentleman with a white moustache, and a glance sharpened by scanning fields of fire from the Balkan passes.
These days in Burgas, and the days immediately before them, are one of the stretches of this journey which are fairly amply covered in the intermittent journal so strangely recovered, two and a half decades after I had lost it and long after I had embarked on this book. So, instead of piecing these fragments of lost time together by memory, all of a sudden I am surrounded by a windfall of day-to-day jottings, too rough and abbreviated to be used as they stand. But at least, from here to the end of the journey and this book, I know roughly what happened during the day and where I slept at night without having to put it all together like a jigsaw in which some of the pieces are missing or broken, or rubbed clean of their pattern. In some ways, this abundance is a bit of an embarrassment: to make use of it all would mean a change of focus, a shift in key from all the foregoing and a temptation, for instance, to enlarge on this stay in Burgas at undue length.
The temptation is all the stronger because I remember my time under Tony and Mila’s roof as one of the most cheerful of the whole journey. I see from my notes that the delights of wandering along the Black Sea coast had been accompanying a slight but growi
ng feeling of loneliness, brought on by the shortened days, the beginning of December, and the dash of melancholy that Balkan winters always bring me. There were sudden, fleeting onslaughts of homesickness that I had forgotten about, and had thought myself, in retrospect, immune from. No need for loneliness or homesickness now: the Kendals had numerous friends among the inhabitants of this little multiracial port in which many of the races of the Balkans were represented; and yet, in another sense, although
[ends]
The text of ‘A Youthful Journey’ stops in mid-sentence. Although Paddy reached Constantinople a few days afterwards, he never recorded it other than in his Green Diary: a record which, he admitted, was ‘a bit of an embarrassment’.
Strangely, even in this diary, he recounts nothing of the leftover Byzantine glories of the old capital (no word, even, of Haghia Sophia or the great walls of Theodosius) and little of its Ottoman splendour. He mentions a fleeting friendship with an attractive Greek woman, some consular parties and various rendezvous with social contacts in the city. But the entries are all cursory. It was strange, above all, that he never contacted Professor Whittemore, whom he had met in Sofia, and whose ongoing work uncovering mosaics in Haghia Sophia would have given Paddy an unparalleled insight into the Byzantium that was starting to fascinate him.
Perhaps the end of his journey was weighing on him with the traveller’s bewilderment of at last reaching his goal, and the uneasy question of his future. He had been prey to infrequent depressions. Did he think of writing a book, or journalism, or even the army again? When asked, he said he did not remember. Or perhaps the great city disappointed him in its dilapidation and overwhelming Turkish presence (although this was less than it is now). Later he was to write that he never left Istanbul without a lightening of the heart.
Yet his surviving diary excerpts – a few of them follow – are largely cheerful.
1st January 1935, Constantinople
So tired after journey and whoopee on New Year’s Eve, slept till six o’clock in the evening, then, waking up, thought it was only the dawn, having overslept twelve hours, so turned over and slept again till Jan 2nd morning, thus New Year’s day 1935 will always be a blank for me.
2nd January
. . . A lovely day, the sun shining on the Golden Horn, and the town full of a hundred sounds . . . Had luncheon in a little Armenian restaurant, where French-speaking proprietor made my hair stand on end with tales of Turkish persecutions, then wandered round again by docks; what quantities of cats! Late at night, date with Maria, and we went and drank beer together in a little restaurant. She is really lovely, ideally lovely, and we sat and chatted in perfect happiness. Dear Maria! Saw her home and sauntered home in the Turkish moonlight, Stambul and her minarets looking wonderful . . .
3rd January
Phoned up Djherat Pasha, for whom Count Teleki gave me an introduction at Budapest, he invited me to visit him that day, so I took boat from under Galata bridge . . . Pasha splendid, bristling moustached chap, very English country gent – spoke good French (looked as if he might have massacred a few Armenians in his day). Talked of Armenian, Balkan and the Great wars . . .
6th January
Went by car to carpet museum, home to tea, and then drank beer together in Fischer’s. We will become good friends, I see. Talked about everything in the world. Constantinople is a good background to romance, in evening tiff with Maria ripened to quarrel and I went to bed in a rage.
9th January
Went to Stambul bazaar, fascinating, look at thousands of carpets, swords and yataghans etc. I bought a cigarette holder with amber mouthpiece . . .
11th January
Lay lateish in bed, then got up and went to luncheon with Bob Coe from American embassy . . . We sat on the veranda overlooking the Bosphorus; perfectly peaceful, the caiques plying up and down . . .
Between the 12th and 23rd of January Paddy’s diary lapses altogether, for reasons unknown. By the time he resumed it, he had taken a train out of Constantinople to Salonika, and was about to board a boat to the great Orthodox monastic state of Mount Athos, where, for the first time, his diary becomes fully written.
[1] See Roumeli, pp. 3–63.
Mount Athos
24 JANUARY 1935–18 FEBRUARY 1935
Taken from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s ‘Green Diary’, written at the time
24th January
I left Salonika last night; Patullo and Elphinstone came along with me to the boat, and we bought some bread, and salami and cheese by the harbour gates. I was glad they came, as it was already sunset, and it’s very lonely starting off on these journeys alone. The ship was surprisingly small; very dirty and overloaded with every kind of cargo, all of which was hauled on board in a surprisingly unworkmanlike way. The boat was a shambles inside too, with enormous banks of coal in the passages, and peasants lying in their blankets in despondent groups everywhere. We stood in the passages and smoked, and chatted, waiting for the bells to ring to announce departure, so they could get off; but the boat was nearly two hours late, and they nearly came away with me, which would have been rather serious for Patullo has to join a troopship for Hong Kong in a day or two at Port Said.
It was quite dark when we eventually pushed off, and P. and Elphinstone scuttled over the gangway at the last moment and we shouted through the darkness at each other, till our voices were inaudible. I hope I meet them again sometime.
Although I was Third Class, one of the ship’s officials, seeing the lights of Salonika dwindle in the distance, kindly told me I could go Second, as the Third travellers have nowhere to sit down, except on the decks, where they sleep and eat too, huddled like cattle, trying to keep the cold out. I was glad I didn’t have to.
I had some coffee and ate my provisions, and then for a few hours smoked and read Lord Byron’s Don Juan – I bought Byron’s verse yesterday, very cheap in a little bookshop. I think it’s grand stuff, though not all poetry. Finally I got a few hours sleep on the cushioned bench, with my martial coat over me, feeling rather excited, as one always does starting a new venture.
This morning, I woke up just after dawn, and ran to the upper deck. It was one of the most glorious days, sky and sea light blue, plenty of waves and clouds, and to starboard, not half a mile away, the mountains and the pine-clad slopes of the Kassandra peninsula. I keep trying to recreate it all as it must have been in ancient Greece – hardly any different, except that our vessel would have been a long galley, with painted sails and sweeping oars. Walking round and round on the deck, I thought of the triremes of all the empires that have sailed these same waters, and called to mind the tales about Perseus, Jason and Odysseus, and the Tyrants of the Archipelago; the piracy of Mithridates, and later the Roman galleys packed with legionaries for Thrace or Paphlagonia; and the laden ships of the Eastern Empire at Byzantium. Later, in the time of Marco Polo, came the Genoese and Venetian galleons, sailing to the furthest corners of the Levant, and the Moorish and Arabian corsairs who plundered them, and the ships of the Ottoman Empire, trading from the Sublime Porte right down to this morning. I wonder just how much has changed; one thing however is reassuring: these pine-clad mountains and golden strands are the same as those on which the heavy-helmeted hoplites stood looking seaward, the Macedonia of Philip and Alexander.
We called at one little village on the western shore of the Kassandra peninsula, by an island: the houses were so small and white they looked like children’s toys; the fishermen rowed out in boats, and took off sacks of flour, loading it skilfully amidships. They were all fine, tall chaps, barefoot. They have to buy all their corn, as the tongues of the Chalkidiki are so rocky and barren that cultivation is impossible. Rounding the peninsula was magnificent as it was steep and rocky, with landslides and jagged cliffs sinking sheer into the water, and many caves, islands and arches; two eagles were sailing lazily about halfway down, their shadows following them on the cliff face. The water was very rough here, and a little fisherman’s sailing vessel was tossing w
ildly to and fro in it.
Rounding the cape, I suddenly saw the goal of my pilgrimage, Mount Athos, a huge, ghostly white peak, as pale and wraithlike as the skeleton moon in the blue sunlit sky; the lower slopes were entirely hidden by a level stratum of white cloud; the Greek name for it is ῞Άγιον ῎Όρος– the Holy Mountain – and as I now see it across the glancing waves, it does not look as if it belonged to this world. Austere and aloof, I had no idea it was so enormous. The slender monasteried peninsula, of which it is the highest peak, is quite invisible in the clouds.
We are now sailing along the eastern side of the Longos or Sithonia peninsula, which is all bare rock, and, except for an occasional cluster of huts in a crag-sheltered cove, uninhabitable. It is now evening and the sun is sinking to the horizon. We seem miles from the ordinary world, and there is a softness in the air as the sun goes down. We have yet to sail to the most inland point of this slender gulf, where we turn about for the little port of Daphni, on the Holy Mountain itself. I will always remember this evening. Now the clouds have floated away from the wild slopes of the Athos peninsula, and we are still too far off to distinguish any of the monasteries.
The Broken Road Page 28