Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  The recipient of the Baron’s first letter, Graf Arco-Valley, had been away at the time of Paddy’s visit but he had been given a good meal by the Graf ’s agent. After a night in a cowshed, he made his way to the house of Count and Countess Botho Coreth at Hochscharten, south-west of Linz. The Count’s visiting card proclaimed him to be ‘K. und K.’ (that is Kaiserlich und Königlich, Imperial and Royal) Chamberlain of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Well aware that the Austro-Hungarian empire had been swept away by the First World War, and that new nations and political tensions were rising from the rubble, Paddy was still more interested in what survived. The fragile old Count was a magnificent example, with his memories of Edwardian house parties at Chatsworth and Dunrobin.

  Paddy was always happy to talk to anyone, but there was something about an ancient lineage that he found irresistible. While he never showed more than a passing interest in his own family tree, he was stirred by the idea that there were people who could follow their ancestors back, as if by a hand rope, into the distant past – and if they had arms and mottoes, mantled helmets and shields, titles and quarterings, so much the better. ‘Only candidates with sixteen or thirty-two quarterings, I learnt later, were eligible for the symbolic gold key that court chamberlains wore on the back of their full-dress uniforms.’20 ‘I learnt later’ is one of those phrases, so colloquial that it glides past as if in conversation, that Paddy uses to underline the fact that he was only eighteen and barely out of school when embarking on his journey. The phrase also makes it clear that he felt he was learning as he wrote, as he relived the walk and looked things up as they occurred to him.

  Salzburg had been filled with people carrying skis on their shoulders, about to take to the slopes or relaxing in cafés on their return. The sight of them had made him feel sad and left out; but entering a café in Linz a little later, he was lucky. The young couple who owned it put him up for two nights in their flat, lent him some boots, and took him skiing.

  He thought he would like to spend his nineteenth birthday in comfort, so the day before he telephoned Count and Countess Trautmannsdorff at Pottenbrunn, some fifty kilometres west of Vienna. The line was very bad when he rang, but the Gräfin said they would be glad to see him at Pottenbrunn about teatime. When he turned up they were kind, but slightly puzzled; and as they talked about Baron Liphart and his family, it dawned on him that they had no idea who he was: sure enough, it emerged that the Baron’s letter had never arrived.

  Paddy was mortified. The Trautmannsdorffs persuaded him to stay the night, but he insisted that he had to take a train to Vienna by noon the following day to meet a friend. Had he been allowed to walk out of the house he could have continued to Vienna on foot, but their chauffeur was summoned to take him to the station. The humiliation was compounded when, in the presence of the bemused chauffeur, he realized that he didn’t have the money for the train he had never intended to take. In fact he had no money at all, but for the batch of four one-pound notes that would be awaiting him in Vienna. He often thought of the Trautmannsdorffs who, like so many people he met on this journey, never survived the war. When they heard the news of the German surrender, they thought it was all over; but within half an hour an SS truck appeared at the house: the men marched in, and the Count and Countess were shot dead in cold blood.

  So much for birthday comforts. It was raining heavily, his boots were leaking and he was hungry – all good enough reasons to hitch a lift in the back of a truck, where he found a girl called Trudi taking some eggs and a drake in a basket to her aunt. It was still raining when Paddy and Trudi were dropped off, and together they squelched through the outer suburbs of Vienna. The atmosphere was dark and tense: they had to pass barbed-wire checkpoints manned by soldiers with rifles, and in the distance they could hear the ominous booming of guns and mortar fire. Trudi bade him goodbye and he went on alone, heading for the Heilsarmee, the Salvation Army hostel.

  Paddy liked to think that, if he looked in the right way, he could still see Europe as the Congress of Vienna had left it: a sort of eternal, cultural Europe that lay untouched behind its cities, factories and railway lines; a continent where peasant life was dictated by the round of the seasons and the feasts of the Church, where strange costumes were worn as real clothes and not donned for the tourist trade, where passing from a beer-drinking region to a wine-drinking region was like passing an invisible frontier. Yet the Great War and the peace conference that followed had wrought changes so profound and far-reaching that Europe had already altered beyond recognition. Nowhere was this more true than in Vienna. Once the heart of a great empire, it was now the capital of a country that felt so reduced that the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig described it as ‘a mutilated stump which bled from every vein’.21

  The cold, starving years of the early twenties, accompanied by unemployment and rampant inflation, had concentrated the Austrian working class round the banner of the Social Democratic Party which was large and well organized. It was feared not only by the government, but by the Heimwehr – traditionalist, Catholic, anti-Communist militias formed in the aftermath of the war, whose present leader was the young Prince Starhemberg.

  On 12 February 1934 in Linz, members of the Heimwehr broke into the Social Democrat Party headquarters looking for weapons. Riots began, spread to the capital, and fighting went on for three days, with government forces deploying artillery in the working-class areas of the city. Over a hundred civilians, including women and children, were killed, and over three hundred wounded.22 It was a key moment in Austria’s move to the far right, which culminated in the Anschluss four years later. By the time Paddy arrived on the night of the 14th the upheaval was almost over, although pockets of resistance continued in the Simmering and Floridsdorf areas for another two days.

  He was to spend the next few weeks in Vienna and, in retrospect, blamed himself for not having realized what was going on. ‘Looking back,’ he wrote in 1963, ‘I am maddened by not having seen, written, looked, heard – but it’s no good pretending.’23 He has been accused of deliberately turning away from the crisis. Yet even Stefan Zweig, living in Vienna at the time, had to admit that he had no idea what was happening that February.24

  He spent a week in the Salvation Army hostel in Vienna, where he found someone as innocent of politics as himself. His new friend was a tall, gentle Friesian Islander who had taught himself English from the works of Shakespeare. It was Paddy who gave him the romantic name of Konrad, but more probably it was Peter, the name he has in ‘A Youthful Journey’. As they talked, Paddy made a sketch of Peter. The sketch does not survive, but doubtless it shared the defining characteristics of all his portraits, which he dismissed as more of a ‘half-taught knack’ than a talent. Everyone he drew (usually in three-quarter face) looked poetic and fine-boned, their clear eyes fixed on distant horizons of limitless possibilities. Peter was delighted with the result. And when it turned out that there was no money waiting at the British Consulate, Peter suggested they might earn some by selling portraits door to door.

  At first rather shy, Paddy was soon peddling his portraits ‘with nerves of brass’ at a schilling a time, and in doing so he collected a series of little vignettes of the people who invited him into their apartments and posed for him. Once again, the details are remembered with extraordinary clarity – though, of course, the magpie mind adds details freely. One of his sitters is ‘a genial old gentleman from Bosnia, probably of Islamized Bogomil descent, Dr Murad Aslanovic Bey’. He admitted that the paperweight he describes in the old man’s room, a memento of the First K.u.K. Bosniak Infantry Regiment, was actually something he saw many years later in an antique shop in Salonika – ‘but it fitted so perfectly,’ as he put it.25

  Peter selected the apartments that Paddy would approach, suggested a price in line with the prosperity of the neighbourhood, and provided praise and company when he re-emerged with some schillings. Although Paddy had been giving him half the takings (most of which went on food and wine), Peter insisted on gi
ving them back; but at the end of their time together, Paddy managed to give him one of the pound notes that had finally arrived from England. This was to launch Peter on a new career as a saccharine smuggler. They had one last celebratory dinner together, spent the evening talking and reading Shakespeare, and parted the following day.

  Peter’s departure left Paddy feeling lonely and broke. Without a partner to steel his nerves the urge to make money by pencil portraits withered away, yet he only had three pounds to last him the rest of the month. He also had a letter from his father, the first he had received since the journey began. He carried it round for a while, steeling himself to open it, and when he finally did, the contents came as a huge relief. Lewis had taken things better than expected and, best of all, had included a birthday cheque for five pounds.

  Paddy spent a further two weeks in Vienna. His base was a large flat belonging to a woman called Robin Forbes-Robertson Hale, who kept open house ‘for a small Bohemian half-native, half-expatriate set that suited me ideally’.26 One member of this set was Basset Parry-Jones who taught English at the Konsularakademie, which had trained candidates for the imperial diplomatic service. It was thanks to the elegant and rather sardonic Parry-Jones that Paddy was allowed to consult the academy’s library, where he spent hours calculating his mileage with dividers over a map (‘I never tired of this’) and ‘mugging up’ the next leg of his journey across Hungary and Rumania. Parry-Jones had another bond with Paddy: neither of them liked going to sleep. Together they prowled the bars and cabarets that masked the dark side of Vienna – the opposite of the assiduous, scholar-gypsy sightseeing that he did during the day.fn1

  Another person Paddy met was Baron Einer von der Heydte, a young German in his mid-twenties who was a colleague of Parry-Jones’ at the Konsularakademie. Paddy describes him as ‘quiet, thoughtful and amusing’,27 and no supporter of the Nazis. Einer came vividly to mind again in May 1941, when Paddy was a junior officer in the Intelligence Corps attached to a brigade headquarters in Crete trying to defend the island in the face of a massive airborne German invasion. A captured enemy document, revealing the entire German order of battle, was passed to him for translation. One of the Fallschirmjäger battalions was led by Captain Einer von der Heydte.

  Paddy was astonished to find he had spent three weeks in the Austrian capital, utterly absorbed. He had found a group of congenial friends, explored the city thoroughly, and had enjoyed what seemed to be a cheerful, end of carnival atmosphere. If he had not noticed the vein of sadness running through the city at the time, he did not overlook it when he came to write the book. ‘Later, when I read about this period in Vienna, I was struck by the melancholy which seems to have impressed the writers so strongly. It owed less to the prevailing political uncertainty than to the fallen fortunes of the old imperial city.’28

  4

  An Enchanted Summer

  Paddy crossed the frontier into Czechoslovakia at Bratislava, and immediately contacted Hans Ziegler, another friend from Vienna. He already had an invitation: ‘Come and stay on your way to Hungary and cheer me up,’ Hans had urged, ‘I get so bored there.’1 Hans went to Vienna as often as he could, though he was obliged to spend most of his time in Bratislava where he managed a branch of his family’s bank. Known in previous centuries as Pressburg, or Pozony if you were Hungarian, Bratislava had been one of the most important cities in Hungarian history. Now it was a shadow of its former self and people sighed, ‘You should have seen it before the war.’

  Born out of the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Czechoslovakia had a broad industrial base and a promising future. At the same time, its borders contained a range of ethnic groups. Czechs and Slovaks, Magyars and Germans all vied for power, territory and autonomy, and these internal tensions did not bode well for the new nation’s stability. The Zieglers had been Czechoslovaks only since 1918 when the country was created, and they were not overjoyed by the loss of prestige that came with their new nationality. Under the old empire they had been German-speaking Bohemians, part of the ruling Austrian élite – a ‘sahib’ class among the Czechs, whose language they seldom spoke. The family’s bank was based in Prague and they had a country property at Loyovitz, but Vienna was still the social and cultural centre of their world.

  However lacklustre the city seemed to its inhabitants, Paddy found it utterly absorbing. He sat in cafés observing the first signs of another culture, in this case, the Slav world: ‘the moulding of a window, the cut of a beard, overheard syllables, the unfamiliar shape of a horse or hat, the taste of a new drink, the occasional unfamiliar lettering … the accumulating fragments were beginning to cohere like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.’2 He watched the dark gypsies in their brilliantly coloured clothes, and the Talmudic students, pale and waxy from their years of study. He was especially intrigued by the prostitutes whose booths lined the narrow lanes that crept up the hill towards the Schlossberg – ‘a Jacob’s ladder tilted between the rooftops and the sky, crowded with shuffling ghosts and with angels long fallen and moulting’.3

  Hans Ziegler proposed a quick trip to Prague before Paddy moved on to Hungary, saying it would be a shame if he plunged eastwards without seeing the old capital of Bohemia. Paddy could not afford such a jaunt but Hans insisted on paying, saying they would stay with his parents. Paddy acquiesced, and they arrived to find Prague under a blanket of snow. He was warmly received by Hans’s parents, Ernst and Alice Ziegler, and especially his older and younger brothers, Heinz and Paul. Heinz, the eldest of the three, was professor of political theory at the Charles University of Prague, while Paul was still a student.

  Over the next few days as he explored Prague with Hans, the city revealed itself as ‘the summing-up of all I had gazed at since stepping ashore in Holland’,4 its cultural influences far wider than just the Teutonic world. He developed this idea over several pages in A Time of Gifts, describing the city’s astonishing architectural variety, the tiers of tombstones in its Jewish cemetery, its taste for arcane knowledge, and the burden of its history at the heart of the dynastic and religious turbulence of Mitteleuropa.

  He spent his last evening in Prague in the library of Heinz Ziegler’s flat, trying to resolve one of his current obsessions: whether Shakespeare had been right when he gave Bohemia a coast in The Winter’s Tale. Heinz came to the rescue, with a fact that seemed to vindicate his faith in the Bard’s geography: Bohemia had indeed had a coastline but only for thirteen years (1260–73), under Ottokar II. Paddy was jubilant, and everyone celebrated his success. Only later did he discover that Shakespeare had based the play on a story set in Sicily, which he casually changed to Bohemia: ‘It was total defeat.’5 That night, he and Hans were on their way back to Bratislava.

  The Zieglers were among the many thousands of families ripped apart by the events of the next few years. Appalled by the rise of Nazism all three brothers moved to England in the late 1930s, whilst Hitler’s designs on Austria and then Czechoslovakia transformed them from reluctant Czechs into fervent nationalists. During the war Heinz joined the RAF, served in North Africa and Italy, and had a child (the literary agent Toby Eady) with Lady Swinfen, later the novelist Mary Wesley. He was killed in action in early May 1944. Hans settled in the United States, while Paul, the youngest, became a Benedictine monk at Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight.

  Whilst Paddy did see Hans and Paul Ziegler again after the war, their parents had refused to leave Prague after the German invasion of 1938. Since Ernst was of Jewish descent the bank was seized, Loyovitz plundered. In 1942 the couple were sent to Theresienstadt, some miles outside Prague, which the Nazis presented as a sort of model holding camp for Jews. When Ernst died six months later, Alice was deported to Auschwitz where she died in December 1943.

  From Bratislava, Paddy’s most logical route would have been to cross the Danube and strike south into Hungary. Instead he headed north-east, to visit a man he had briefly met and heard much about. This was Baron Philip Schey v. Koromla, more commonly known as Pips
Schey. The Baron was spending the winter on his estate at Kövecses, near the village of Soporna on the river Váh, south of Sered. The young man was shown into a library so crammed with books in English, French and German that the panelling could scarcely be seen. His host was sitting in a big armchair, reading Proust.

  Paddy felt instantly at ease with Baron Schey: he spoke faultless English, was formidably well read, and had been intimate with pre-war high society in courts and castles from London to Vienna. Never having had a glittering career, he nonetheless possessed a fund of knowledge and anecdotes that his young friend never tired of. He had two daughters by his first wife and was celebrated for being a man of unusual charm.

  The days that Paddy spent at Kövecses were of huge significance. At a time when younger men were expected to treat their elders with marked deference, Pips Schey was the first older man he had ever met who treated him naturally, as an equal: a gift that he described as ‘a sort of informal investiture with the toga virilis’.6Reflecting on the visit in his diary, Paddy wrote: ‘I am just living in a pre-war world, and I really think that we get on so well that Baron Schey has been as keen for me to stay as I have been myself. These long walks are wonderful, and we talk about every possible thing, and there are frequently the easy silences of perfect company.’7

  Schey, who was about the same age as Lewis Fermor, became an idealized father-figure to Paddy, whose own hard-working father cannot be blamed for wishing his son would develop a more serious attitude to life. But Pips Schey, the cultivated bibliophile, a man of considerable experience if not great achievements, could see Paddy’s extraordinary gifts and appreciate them.