Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  Joan wanted to marry him; but Paddy, while delighted to make it a marriage of true minds, saw several impediments to the real thing. While they remained single her help was a gift, freely given and gratefully received, and if she became disillusioned or lost patience, she could walk away. At the same time he did not want to lose her, nor did he want her to think that he was dragging his feet. In early 1949 he wrote: ‘Darling, I like the glib way I talk about getting married; I do hope you’ll still have me! I have been such an empty bore these last weeks, that perhaps you are thinking better of it. Darling, please don’t! I’ll be alright again as soon as [the book]’s finished, I promise!’17

  Yet if they did marry, some might say he had only done it to secure a safety-net: and there were people who, usually because they worshipped Joan, took a dim view of Paddy. Maurice Bowra was one of those who bore him a grudge, and put it into verse. ‘The Wounded Gigolo’, written in April 1950, is addressed to Balasha Cantacuzene and suggests (wrongly) that she dismissed Paddy. Joan is the subject of ‘On the Shores of Terra Fermor’, written a month later. Bowra sees her sighing and stranded, having made the mistake of giving her heart to someone who is rarely there.18 It was essential that they wed as equals, and for that to happen he had to prove himself as a writer. Joan knew it too, and after 1949 her mentions of marriage and babies tail off.

  In February 1949 they drove through France and Italy with Hamish St Clair-Erskine, Nancy Mitford’s first love who was once described as living ‘entirely on personal charm’.19 The party split up in Tuscany. Hamish and Joan drove on to Sicily, where she was to take photographs for an article Peter Quennell was writing on the sculptor Giacomo Serpotta, while Paddy settled down to what he hoped would be a productive spell of writing in Pienza. ‘Darling, we are absolutely broke,’ wrote Joan from Taormina, ‘so do try and live for ages on what you have … I don’t know how we are going to get home, but I am hoping for a miracle …’20

  Paddy moved into an inn on the tiny main square, looking over the Duomo and the palace built by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II. ‘The little albergo-trattoria looked snug enough. But it was March, when a wind from Siberia blows into the Tuscan hills, and in a day or two, fingers were turning to icicles; no question of holding a pen; so I went to the bar and found it full of woodsmoke and dramatically cloaked herdsmen from the Abruzzi drinking grappa at high speed; it was the only thing to do.’ When he returned, the landlady said she had put ‘a priest’ in his bed – which proved to be a charcoal brazier, kept above the bedclothes by a wooden cage. ‘When I had clumsily lifted the whole thing out, I felt lucky, after all that grappa, not to have set that beautiful little town on fire.’21

  Having spent perhaps more than he should on grappa he moved down to Rome where, true to form, he soon found some friends attached to the Embassy. On hearing of his search to find somewhere to write, Cécile and Mondi Howard suggested the old Franciscan monastery of San Antonio near Tivoli. Paddy was allowed to move into its deserted splendour, and here – with the help of the kindly baroque angel painted in flight over his bed, which ‘brought me luck’ – his work seemed to go better.

  ‘One evening, I started writing at sunset, worked, as I thought, for an hour or two, and suddenly there were odd sounds and something queer about the light. It was dawn breaking and the birds waking up.’22 Years later, writing to Ann Fleming, the ghost of that intense period of productivity was still alive: ‘I moved in [to the monastery] and wrote The Traveller’s Tree before you could say knife.’23

  That was a bit of an exaggeration; but Paddy always felt that the act of writing should begin with a creative torrent of words and ideas, coming so thick and fast that he could scarcely keep up with them. He set great store by the initial surge of writing, for the words put down at this point glowed with life and energy. If this part had gone well, it could be subjected to hours of unpicking and refashioning without (he hoped) losing the freshness of the original. Yet these moments of creative possession, when the self is lost and time becomes meaningless, were rare. When asked which particular passages in The Traveller’s Tree had sprung up in this way he was reluctant to offer an answer. It was the moment that was precious, not the work produced.

  Ever since he had struck out on his own, just being abroad brought a spiritual and imaginative release. The act of writing always flowed better abroad, and now Paddy embarked on a ten-year odyssey in which he was rarely in one place for more than a month or two, shifting mainly between Italy, Greece, England and France. Amy and Walter Smart allowed him to live at Gadencourt whenever it was empty, and here he was looked after by their Breton housekeeper, Marie, who cooked for him. He spent some time there that spring, and in the summer moved to the Easton Court Hotel in the village of Chagford, Devon. Patrick Kinross had told him about this fourteenth-century inn, which was run by an American lady called Mrs Postlethwaite-Cobb and her partner Norman Webb. They dispensed a generous but reasonably priced hospitality to an appreciative literary clientele, including Evelyn Waugh when he needed to get away from his family. Paddy was by now frantic to finish the book, and the strain was showing.

  ‘Darling old Mole,’ Joan wrote to him:

  Don’t get gloomy and depressed and don’t write me any awful letters saying we can’t even talk or get on, as I do love you so much. I was furious and miserable last night at leaving you as we don’t seem to have seen each other properly alone for ages – but then I think I shall feel like that until the book is finished as I keep feeling you should be writing instead of just talking to me. You sounded so sweet this morning and I am desperately addicted to you at the moment.24

  Another friend came to the rescue. Barbara Warner, who had left her first husband Victor Rothschild for Paddy’s old boss Rex Warner, told Joan that summer that she could have the use of a flat at 76 Charlotte Street which belonged to her mother, Mary Hutchinson. ‘The only blot is Mrs H[utchinson] whom I am terrified of,’ wrote Joan,25 but the flat became their London base for a number of years.

  Paddy’s article on Saint-Wandrille appeared that summer in the Cornhill magazine, which had been under the editorship of Peter Quennell since 1944. The Cornhill, as Quennell himself admitted, was never in direct competition with Cyril Connolly’s more influential Horizon. ‘Horizon was dedicated to the spirit of the age, to new ideas and discoveries … while in the Cornhill I merely assembled whatever I considered worth printing … Mine was an individual, perhaps a dilettante choice.’26 Paddy’s second article, ‘From Solesmes to La Grande Trappe’, appeared the following spring.

  On 9 September, Jock Murray took Paddy out to lunch. In a memo to himself he wrote: ‘He has finished his Caribbean book for Lindsay Drummond, it is roughly 200,000 words and they want him to cut it down. When he has finished the two travel books on Central America, he will get down to the Greek book and promises to let us see a synopsis and additional material. He is also completing a second contribution for the Cornhill on a Trappist monastery.’27

  He was also hoping to write a life of the great conquistador Pedro de Alvarado. The idea was suggested by Edward (later 1st Lord) Shackleton, the younger son of the explorer, who was putting together a series of books on great travellers and explorers. ‘I ought to be able to do it fairly quickly,’ wrote Paddy, ‘by March at the outside, probably sooner.’28 Paddy was willing to do it for £100 advance and £50 on delivery since he was so short of money, but the project came to nothing.

  Disaster struck at the end of January 1950. Paddy had already corrected galley proofs of The Traveller’s Tree and was awaiting page proofs when he was told that the firm of Lindsay Drummond was filing for bankruptcy, leaving Paddy with no publisher. His only hope was Jock Murray, to whom he wrote on 10 February 1950: ‘I have written to them saying that you might like to have a look at it …’29 He added that, as promised, he would shortly be sending Jock what he had written of his book on Greece, which had been heavily revised and retyped.

  To his profound relief (and that of
Lindsay Drummond’s creditors) Jock Murray decided to take on The Traveller’s Tree and undertook to pay the receivers ‘advances to the Author and costs incurred’30 which came to £350. Part of the ‘costs incurred’ were Paddy’s heavy corrections at the galley stage, and they were just as heavy when Paddy returned the page proofs. Few other publishers would have allowed Paddy such freedom of action at such a late stage in production: Jock Murray was very indulgent. But since there was a big advance to pay back, it meant that Paddy could expect no money on publication.

  Billy Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight was published in March. Billy had sent Paddy the proofs, to which the latter had made endless corrections and little changes of style – but still he was not happy. As well as Billy’s rather tactless treatment of the Cretans, Paddy felt he had been unsympathetic to the General. Billy disagreed. It was a diary, written under difficult conditions, and should be accepted as such.

  The reviews were kind, paying tribute to two very brave young men who had pulled off an extraordinary feat; but Harold Nicolson agreed with Paddy. Writing in the Observer he remarked that ‘[Moss] did not fully understand the self-sacrifice of the Cretans who, in assisting with the operation, were exposing their homes and families to savage reprisals. Nor was he sufficiently sensitive to the agonies of humiliation that General Kreipe must have suffered.’31

  On 14 March, accompanied by Joan, his sister Vanessa and his mother, Paddy went to Buckingham Palace to receive the military OBE from the hands of King George VI. After the ceremony the King passed down the line of honorands, stopped in front of Paddy, and fingered the medal. ‘So where did you get that then?’ asked the monarch – to which Paddy was tempted to reply, ‘Your Majesty, you’ve just put it there.’32 After the investiture, they all repaired for a celebratory lunch at the Café Royal. Joan had been dreading it, knowing how Æileen had hated the very idea of Balasha; but she was funny and charming, and the event passed off more happily than Joan had dared to hope.

  That spring Paddy took a boat to Oporto and travelled round Portugal before going to stay with the anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers, in the Andalusian village of Grazalema. Between 1949 and 1952, Pitt-Rivers lived among the villagers whose customs and traditions he described in People of the Sierra (1953). At Grazalema he was joined by Joan, and together they went on to Madrid – where things had not gone well. From Dumbleton she wrote: ‘I just wanted to say what an angel you have been the whole time – so sweet and patient while I was so beastly as usual …’ It seems as if her bad temper was due in part to anxiety about his financial dependence.

  Darling, it must be so wretched arriving in England and having no money. I propose to pay into your bank £30 from June for the rest of the year and an extra £50 to start you off, and then you need not have all the bother and hell of asking me. It sounds terribly little darling but I do think you ought to try and make some money for yourself – I cannot think why really, but it would be much better for you from every point of view. Also it’s about half of what I really must try to live on. Please don’t think I’m doing this so that we can see less of each other, but only so that we needn’t be so much bothered by it all.33

  In other words, Joan was going to support Paddy with up to half her allowance for the rest of the year, and probably beyond. She hoped that he might earn a little money to augment this, because while an allowance of £720 a year was generous for one person, it would be hard to make it stretch for two. It was an act of great generosity.

  14

  Travels in Greece

  With The Traveller’s Tree now finished and ready for publication in December, Paddy could finally turn back to the book on Greece, for which he felt a lot more research was needed. This would come out of the advance paid in three tranches of £100, and over the next two years Jock often had occasion to write to the Bank of England for permission to transfer more than the permitted £50 into Greek drachmas and Italian lire.

  The Ambassador Clifford Norton and his wife, Peter, had Paddy and Joan to stay at the Embassy when they arrived that summer, and took them for ‘a heavenly day bathing and drinking and talking’ at their cottage near Piraeus.1 Freya Stark remembered it too: ‘Yesterday we had a cheerful party down here,’ she wrote to her husband, Stewart Perowne, ‘with Paddy Leigh Fermor and Joan … Paddy looking in this wine-dark sea so like a Hellenistic lesser sea-god of a rather low period, and I do like him. He is the genuine buccaneer …’2

  From Athens Paddy and Joan went to Istanbul, which he had last seen in 1935, and from there they made the long dusty journey into central Anatolia and the town of Ürgüp in Cappadocia – a place they had been urged to visit by George Seferis. Just to the east of the town lies a geological phenomenon: an arid lunar landscape in which families of conical rocks erupt out of the desert. Between the fourth and the eleventh centuries, monks and hermits were drawn here. Into the rock they carved hundreds of cells and churches, complete with vaults and pillars, apses and domes, all painted with saints and scenes from the life of Christ. From the evidence of painted prayers and scrolls, the monks who lived here were not great scholars, though Paddy notes that their ‘phonetic spelling provides additional proof that tenth-century Greek was pronounced exactly as it is in Athens today’.3 ‘The Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia’ was the third of his articles on monasteries for the Cornhill.

  The plan was to explore Thrace and Macedonia, which he had not visited since before the war. From Istanbul they went by rail to Adrianople (now Edirne), and another train took them to the coastal town of Alexandroupolis, from where they hoped to board the ferry to the island of Samothrace.

  The town was welcoming, but in the uneasy years following the civil war, local officialdom was wary of independent foreigners wandering about on no specific business – particularly when they spoke the language well. The harbourmaster did not like the look of Paddy and Joan, and refused to let them board. Paddy, who saw himself as an honorary Greek, was indignant at being treated like a spy and a furious row ensued; but everyone who had gathered to watch the argument took his side, and eventually they were allowed to cross to the island. It was late September 1950 when they returned to the mainland, and not long afterwards they attended a Sarakatsan wedding. Many years later the wedding at Sikaraya, some two hours north-west of Alexandroupolis, was to be the subject of the opening chapter of Roumeli.

  They went to Sikaraya in an antiquated train. Attached to the back was a cattle truck which carried the bridegroom and his friends, all shouting and singing and waving guns and banners. The ritual ‘abduction’ of the bride took place at a railway halt, where she was waiting with her bridesmaids. To the sound of triumphant whoops and gunfire she was passed like an effigy into the truck. Paddy was fascinated by the women’s elaborate woollen costumes, stiff as armour with pleated skirts and embroidered sleeves: descriptions that relied on the photographs Joan took at the time.

  After the church service, the Sarakatsan clans gathered in a house among the conical tents, recently built by the groom’s father. Dressed in black with their crooks over their shoulders, the men all sat on a long low divan. Low tables were brought in, laden with wine and roast lamb, and as the celebrations got under way the men began singing Klephtic songs. But although the bridegroom was busy looking after his guests, there was no sign of the bride. She, it turned out, was standing in silent vigil in an upstairs room with her companions, her dowry ranged behind them. Paddy and Joan were taken to see her, and she accepted their greeting with a silent bow of her head.

  From Komotini, a town with a large Turkish population, Paddy now wanted to visit the Pomaks of the Rhodope mountains. It took some time, for they had to apply to the Greek army authorities before going into such uncertain territory; but on 30 September, they made the journey by truck to a Pomak village called Kedro.

  The Pomaks are a Slavic group of Sunni Muslims, supposedly converted to Islam by the Ottoman Turks; and there are Pomak communities in Bulgaria, Macedonia and western Thrace. The Pomak language has
elements of Greek, Bulgarian and Turkish, but only the women spoke it. Their host, Daoud Ali-Oghlu Mehmet, spoke Turkish and Greek, and lived in a traditional Pomak house, with great flat slabs of stone on the roof: conventional roof tiles simply blew away. Paddy and Joan sat on woven homespun rugs on the floor with their host, hand-rolling excellent tobacco into cigarettes and drinking endless cups of coffee. Daoud and his friend Suleiman were happy to talk about the Pomaks, who call themselves Achriani – as in Agrianes, an old Thracian race. Daoud told him the story of the Prophet Nüh Ali es Salaam (Noah), and – in a lowered voice – about the civil war. The Reds had looted his house, taking wheat and corn, destroying jars and looms. He also hated the bandits who roamed the mountains, who he said were all Bulgarians. Paddy and Joan slept that night on the floor of Daoud’s house, wrapped in blankets.

  Xanthi felt like Babylon after the Pomak village: a thriving town, filled with promenading crowds and illuminated shops. It was the first time for several days that they heard Greek in the streets rather than Turkish, and they were glad of it. In Kavala they visited Mohammed Ali’s house, and then took a boat to the island of Thassos. After a happy week spent climbing over ruined temples, talking to French archaeologists, eating honey and cheese with a bee-keeper who had become a Jehovah’s Witness in Istanbul and swimming every day, they returned to Kavala on 8 October.

  Wherever they went, Paddy asked people if they had heard of the Anastenaria, or Nistinari: a strange Orthodox sect whose particular pantheon is dominated by St Helena, discoverer of the True Cross, and her son St Constantine – known to them as the Grandparents. ‘Their rites’, Paddy wrote to a friend a year later, ‘are a hash of garbled Christianity with the Orphic Mysteries, which still survive in odd forms along the Hebrus River, down which Orpheus floated as a corpse …’4 The feast of SS. Constantine and Helena, 21 May, is the day the Anastenarides – the devotees – perform their feats of fire-walking. To the music of the lyra, drum and shepherd bagpipes, they prepare for the ordeal by dancing for hours, holding icons of the Grandparents above their heads, until they enter an ecstatic trance. A great fire is lit, and when it has burnt down the coals are raked into a circle; the devotees then dance barefoot across the coals, protected by the saints.