Paddy managed to leave something behind in every place they stopped, and every evening began with a search for mumlar – the Turkish word for candles, the singular being mum. ‘I’ve got the mums,’ he would say, melting the ends and sticking them on to saucers in a taverna. ‘Can’t have dinner without candles.’29 At some point on the coast road between Kuşadasi and Antalya, they stopped at a village and Paddy went for a walk. He came back very excited, having found some Greek-speaking Muslims who had been expelled from Crete during the forced exchange of populations in the 1920s.
Later that year, another distraction arrived in the shape of an apricot-coloured puppy – a present from Aymer Maxwell – with white paws and floppy ears. Paddy was enchanted by it and called it Troilus (Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew speaks of ‘My spaniel Troilus’). Having just picked up the dog he took it to the island of Spetses, where Diana Cooper had been lent a house. Over the next few days all Diana’s female guests (including the author, aged seventeen) took it in turns to cuddle Troilus, and over the coming months Paddy wrote pages of affectionate description to his friends about the dog’s beauty, friendliness, and sensitivity to music. ‘I’m sorry going on so obsessively about him,’ he wrote to Diana; ‘I’ve never possessed a dog since I was ten, it’s obviously gone to my head.’30 Tragedy struck in June 1971 when, at the age of seven months, Troilus contracted distemper and had to be shot. Paddy never had a dog again.
He was also very involved with the Greek edition of Mani, which had been translated by a new friend, Tzannis Tzannetakis.fn3 At the time of the 1967 coup, Tzannetakis had been a young submarine commander in the Royal Hellenic Navy. Realizing that any colonels who ordered tanks on to the streets of Athens could hardly be freedom-loving democrats, he had immediately resigned his commission. Two years later he was imprisoned, kept for months in solitary confinement, and finally sent into exile on the island of Kythera. While he was there, a friend sent him a copy of Mani.
It was an inspired choice. Tzannetakis was a Maniot himself, from Gytheion, and descended from the eighteenth-century Tzanni Bey, who was mounting attacks and raids against the Turks thirty years before the War of Independence. He was captivated by the book, and by the time he was released in 1971, he had translated it into Greek.
Since he had only had a very small English-Greek dictionary while doing the translation, Tzannetakis got in touch with Paddy and invited him to stay, so they could revise it together. Tzannetakis was beginning a career in politics in the New Democracy Party, and had a house in Kifissia, on the northern outskirts of Athens. Paddy pored over the translation all day, and when his host came back from work, they would go over it again. Paddy wrote a new chapter for the Greek edition, on olives and olive trees, which does not appear in the English one. As he put it to Jock, ‘it is too specifically designed for a Greek public to be a valuable addition to the English one. It was even written in parts in Greek, as an aid to the translator!’31
Jock was more concerned by the fact that Paddy was now having doubts about everything that he had written so far on his walk across Europe. ‘It has dawned on me that, thanks to the compression of the first part – Germany and Austria – when I still thought I was writing a 3000 word article on the Pleasures of Walking – some of the most interesting, lively and amusing bits have been entirely left out …’32 Paddy went through so many layers of manuscript and typescript, and so many drafts were chopped up, thrown away or reabsorbed that it is impossible to chart the long gestation of A Time of Gifts. But as he did so, he had learnt a great deal about how he wanted to write about his walk, and this was at his fingertips when he went back to the beginning.
Now in his fifties, the older Paddy brought the craft, broad learning and experience of time passing that he could not possibly have had at eighteen; yet he never loses touch with the overflowing joy and curiosity of his younger self. The balance was no easy feat to pull off, and he dramatizes the tension between the two personae in a passage about Cologne. The eighteen-year-old Paddy is ‘A’, and the older, unusually schoolmasterish Paddy is ‘B’:
B: What’s all this about Carpaccio and the legend of St Ursula, and the 10,000 Virgins of Cologne? … You’d never heard of Carpaccio till you went to Venice, on the way back from Rumania in 1939. We’re in 1933 now. You seem to forget I was there too.
A: I don’t. It was you who told me about it.
B: Don’t confuse the issue. Now, what’s all this? ‘Theophano, married to the Holy Roman Emperor … and grand-daughter of Constantine Porphyrogenitus’ – oh dear, oh dear – ‘one of the Byzantine Emperors of the Macedonian dynasty, was buried in one of the old churches of Cologne, I can’t remember which’ – a nice touch – ‘in 991.’ You didn’t know anything about Byzantium then!
A: That’s your fault! I’d read some Gibbon and The Station. I do remember seeing her tomb, though I admit I couldn’t remember her name till I looked it up just now. Or perhaps you did?
B: One of us must have. [PAUSE] Well it won’t do. And there’s another thing … If you can’t remember, don’t apologize. Just forge ahead until you do.
A: I’ll try, Sir.
B: You needn’t call me sir, it makes me feel my age.33
That September, they set off in different directions. Joan went to Russia, Georgia and Bokhara with Graham, while Paddy joined an expedition to Peru organized by Robin and Renée Fedden, whom he had known in wartime Cairo. After the war Robin had joined the National Trust, and had written several books of which perhaps the best known was Chantemesle, an autobiographical sketch of his childhood in France. In the course of their erratic marriage, he and Renée shared a passion for climbing, and the intensity of life at high altitude is described in Robin’s book The Enchanted Mountains.
The group assembled by Robin for this trip to Peru was a mix of experienced climbers and complete beginners – though the climbing part would occupy only eleven days of a four-week trip. The experienced ones were Robin and Renée; André Choremi, a French lawyer and social anthropologist; and Carl Natar, who had been the manager of Cartier’s in London for thirty years. As a Swiss, it was no surprise that Natar should be an expert climber and an ex-skiing champion; but Paddy was delighted to hear that his mother tongue was Romanche, one of the rarest of the Swiss languages. The neophytes were Andrew Devonshire, who had serious doubts about his ability to keep up once the climbing began, and Paddy. Even he was a little daunted; but he had always trusted his physical strength, despite being a heavy smoker.
The climbing began ‘Somewhere above Moyoc-Moyoc in the Salkantay-Huanay range, South-Central Peru’34 – it was hard to be more precise since the maps for this region were vague and contradictory. Their gear had been shifted on to the backs of eight little ponies, one of which had a four-month-old foal trotting beside her. These ponies belonged to Antemio and Alejandro: cabinetmakers by trade, now turned into sherpas.
That first day, 5 August, they climbed 4,000 feet in seven hours. Paddy was more exhausted than he had ever been in his life, and at 13,000 feet they were now higher than Cuzco. It was not the season for bad weather; but snow, rain and wind kept everyone in their tents for the next few days, and the mountaineers – who had hoped to scale a peak or two – descended from the glacier feeling crestfallen, beaten by soft waist-high snow that hid every crevasse and ravine. It was bitterly cold. Paddy took charge of the Primus stove, which meant he was usually the first up in the mornings: it took an hour and a half for their kettle to come to the boil at that altitude.
The weather did not clear till the 11th, a day of brilliant clarity. The whole party roped up and, with ice-picks and crampons, they climbed across the glacier till they were standing on the col that formed the skyline from their camp. This was not a very challenging climb for Robin and Renée, but for Paddy and Andrew it was a triumph: ‘after all our misgivings, we’d actually crossed a glacier, roped up, shod with crampons and wielding ice-picks, 600 feet above the summit of Mont Blanc!’35
The following
day, Robin, Renée and Carl – having done their duty as instructors on the nursery slopes – climbed the three summits of Huanay unhampered by the beginners. Everyone else spent the day in their tents, where Paddy wrote to Joan and read Prescott’s Conquest of Peru.
On the 13th they began to make their way down again, through a green world of ravines and waterfalls that opened into a high pasture cradled by mountains. Although Paddy and Andrew had not done as much climbing as the others, they felt the same regret as they made their descent, which was long and arduous. By now the little foal was utterly exhausted, and came to standstill. It was offered some lemon-flavoured glucose tablets, but refused them. So Antemio ‘slipped his poncho under its belly, lifted it off the ground, slung it over his shoulder and trotted the remaining five miles with the little pony on his back …’36
Refreshed by the clear air of the Andes, Paddy went back to the start of his long walk across Europe. ‘How on earth can I get hold of calendars for 1933 and 1934?’ he asked Jock. ‘It is for moons and when Sundays fell. I’ve got all the days of the months, but don’t want to put my foot in it with “the blaze from the shops contended with the effulgence of the full moon”, when it was Sunday with no moon at all …’37
Xan and Daphne Fielding came to stay at Kardamyli, while Paddy was ‘back in the thick of snowy Bavaria in January 1934 and enjoying it … I read the two opening chapters of Departure – Holland – and some of Germany out loud to Xan and Daphne, and to my delight and surprise, their reaction was encouraging and enthusiastic. Morale has shot up.’38 Xan was not in such high spirits. Compensation for the family house in Nice seemed as distant as ever while his brother-in-law, who was handling the case, was dying – which was likely to leave Xan saddled with enormous debts.
In the same letter, he also mentioned how worried he and Joan were about George Seferis, who was gravely ill in Athens. In fact he had died that very day, 20 September 1971. Despite the fact that demonstrations were forbidden by the junta, thousands of people followed his coffin through the streets, singing Mikis Theodorakis’s setting of his famous poem, ‘Denial’.
The Kreipe Operation had taken place almost thirty years before; yet it continued to define Paddy in the Greek imagination, and in early 1971 a Greek film called Castle of the Immortals appeared. Paddy thought it was going to be about the Cretan resistance, but it turned out to be largely focused on him. To Michael Stewart he described it as
literally beyond belief … It was a wild fantasy for ten year olds, although the place was packed with a whiskery audience of riper years. Not only are generals abducted, but strong points assaulted and carried, huge petrol and ammunition dumps sent sky-high, armoured columns annihilated and the enemy mown down in scores … The General and I are the only characters called by their real names, and this the whole time. I come out of it as an intrepid, humourless Tarzan grasping a smoking Tommy-gun half-dead with metal fatigue, barking curt orders and gazing mysteriously into the Ewigkeit against a background of explosions and sunsets. My sincere disavowals, when questioned about it, were taken for becoming modesty, so what the hell … 39
The following year produced an even more extraordinary commemoration, when Nico Mastorakis, who presented a Greek version of This Is Your Life, decided to reunite the surviving members of the Kreipe Operation. Paddy, who was still trying to live down Castle of the Immortals, did not want to get involved. But when he heard that none of his Cretan friends would take part unless he did, and that General Kreipe himself had agreed to appear, he could hardly refuse.
The programme went out on 7 April 1972. ‘I sat with Mastorakis to tell the tale,’ wrote Paddy in a long letter to his mother, ‘and the Cretans, as they were mentioned, came in one by one – terrific rejoicings and embraces.’40 First to come on was Manoli Paterakis, then George Tyrakis who had come all the way from Johannesburg, where he was running a restaurant. Antoni Papaleonidas was next, and soon the set was crowded with grizzled Cretans in their Sunday best. The last figure to emerge, to gasps of surprise and a round of applause from the audience, was General Kreipe himself, looking remarkably unchanged from the photographs of him taken by Billy during the abduction. Paddy greeted him in German, and the General shook hands cordially with all his erstwhile abductors – he seemed particularly pleased to see Manoli again. The presenter, who spoke no German, asked Paddy to ask the General whether he harboured any bitterness against them. Paddy relayed this to the General as tactfully as he could, and the General gave a robust reply. ‘If I had any bad feelings,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t be here, would I?’ – ‘Wunderbare Antwort!’ breathed Paddy with a sigh of relief.
After the programme, all the participants went off and had ‘a huge banquet in a taverna. Lots of Cretan songs and dances, a few German songs sung by the General and me, after much wine had flowed.’ A few journalists worked their way into the taverna towards the end, and one of them asked the General how he had been treated during his ordeal. The General replied, ‘Ritterlich! Wie ein Ritter’ – chivalrously, like a knight. Paddy was deeply touched. ‘I felt a halo beginning to form, and am not quite back to normal yet,’ he confided to his mother. ‘I stayed two more days,’ he went on, ‘and had nearly every meal with them. We liked and got on with each other, as we always did, extremely well.’41
As spring turned into summer, Paddy once again went walking with Robin and Renée Fedden, Carl Natar, Andrew Devonshire and Peter McCall, an old friend of Robin’s who worked in the City. Robin’s initial idea had been to climb in the Hakkiari mountains of Turkish Kurdistan, but the night before they were due to leave, permission was refused by the Turkish authorities. Instead, Robin decided that they would climb the Pindus mountains in northern Greece. Their first ascent was a twelve-hour endurance test, climbing almost vertically through woods clinging to the rock; but once this marathon was over, they were in the high meadows of Sarakatsani country. The men were still in their stiff capes, with steel-tipped crooks, but more of them now lived in shacks rather than their traditional wigwams. ‘Thank God I saw Sarakatsans when they still were Sarakatsans!’ Paddy wrote to Debo.42Andrew Devonshire recalled how, as the walk progressed, everyone began to dread the familiar sight of a solitary shepherd. Paddy would invariably hail the man and engage him in a long conversation, which left everyone else hanging about, kicking stones, for a good twenty minutes.
20
Shifts in Perspective
Paddy was uncharacteristically quiet and diligent for most of 1973, producing draft after draft of the early chapters of the book he still thought of as ‘Parallax’, although Jock was not happy with that title. He relied on cigarettes to keep the words flowing, and again in those moments when the flow dried up; but he had a persistent cough, and knew that the time had come to kick the habit. If one is used to high levels of nicotine to maintain concentration, giving up involves much more than suppressing a craving: it means relearning how to work.
In July Paddy told Diana that he had gone three months without a cigarette. ‘It was a wrench! Considering I’d been smoking from eighty to a hundred a day for the last thirty years, end to end they would have formed a single monster cigarette, stretching all the way from Victoria Station to Brighton. Then came the death-grapple with weight …’1
One thing Paddy could not give up was what George Seferis had called his ‘Penelope-izing’, and indeed he spent as much time unpicking his work as he did putting it together. Jock told Paddy that in New York, Cass Canfield of Harper & Row was in despair about the lateness of the latest Leigh Fermor, but he would not, could not be rushed. ‘If Mr Canfield is upset by the slowness of all this, we should tell him that sudden haste now can’t possibly redeem my appalling unpunctuality in the past; but the extra delay will make it into a much better book, and that is the only thing that matters.’2
By June the following year Jock was thinking of dividing the book into two volumes, because he felt – as he had with the Greek book – that the author was sinking under the weight of too much m
aterial. Paddy was instinctively opposed to the idea, but came round to it. However long the book would take, he was pleased with the early chapters on Germany and Austria, and felt he had found his voice at last. In October he told Jock that ‘Raymond Mortimer and Dadie Rylands have just been here for a fortnight, and extracted the … typescript from me. I was enormously binged-up by their reaction to it which really was enthusiastic, beyond any demands of guest-to-host civility, and I feel much spurred-on.’3
That summer Greece had finally rid itself of the junta, largely thanks to the regime’s catastrophic bungling of the latest Cypriot crisis which had brought Greece and Turkey to the brink of war. The government, which had seemed to have such a stranglehold on the country, simply crumbled away. Constantine Karamanlis came back to Athens on 24 July 1974, amid scenes of wild rejoicing, to become prime minister once more.
Joan, on the other hand, was feeling anxious and downcast. She had already lost two of her closest friends, Maurice Bowra and George Seferis; and now, in the early winter of 1974, there seemed little doubt that Cyril Connolly was dying. Leaving Paddy in Greece, she flew to London where Cyril lay in hospital: emaciated, exhausted, but still retaining complete clarity of mind. Quite apart from the anguish of seeing him so close to death, Joan found herself playing the role of umpire between Connolly’s devoted wife Deirdre on one side, and his equally devoted mistress Shelagh Levita on the other. ‘Everything is really too much agony to write about and I’m going off my head trying to manage things with Deirdre and Sheila [sic],’ she wrote to Paddy. ‘He’s getting weaker and weaker and it can’t last long now, though he is still completely lucid at all times.’4 He died at St Vincent’s Hospital in Ladbroke Grove, on 26 November 1974.
In the 1970s, their axis of friends had shifted to Spain. Having seen the collapse of all his hopes in Nice, Xan could no longer face the prospect of living in France, and – to Paddy’s regret – he and Daphne had split up. He had fallen in love with Magouche Phillips, and they were building a house in the hills near the cliff-hanging town of Ronda.
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Page 41