The Ariadne Objective

by Wes Davis

  The real peculiarity of the enterprise had struck him only the previous day, at the passport office off Victoria Street, where he had gone to apply for the document that would be his ticket across a succession of national borders. Under the eye of the clerk on duty, he had filled in the application form by rote—“height 5′ 9¾″; eyes, brown; hair, brown; distinguishing marks, none”—but had faltered when it asked for his profession. Whenever he imagined what he was setting out to do, it was in fanciful terms you couldn’t spell out on an official document. Not, at least, without embarrassment; “pilgrim” and “errant scholar” were not exactly recognized professions. Without thinking, he had begun humming to himself as he considered what to write down. The tune that had floated out was one that had been in the air lately, and the passport official had recognized it: “Hallelujah I’m a Bum.”

  “You can’t very well put that,” he had said. Leigh Fermor had hesitated. Then the man suggested he “should just write ‘student.’ ” That had settled it. Leigh Fermor scribbled the word on the proper line and handed over the form. Now, with the stamped passport in his pocket, the student was shipping out for the continent.

  The rain let up about the time the Stadthouder slipped from the wharf, and the young traveler watched the stone towers and steel framework of the bridge slide away overhead. Rain-wet and glistening, the riverside backdrop of the city began to scroll past. Nearly as noticeable as the scenery was the procession of maritime smells. Mud, salt, seaweed, smoke, and ashes gave way gradually to “a universal smell of rotting timber” and even—or maybe this was a romantic whim set free by the start of a voyage—the faint hint of spice. By the time the steamer reached Greenwich a few miles downstream, the sun was down. Leigh Fermor could see the lights of the Royal Observatory hanging in the darkness, and it occurred to him that he was about to cross the great imaginary line that had helped make the age of exploration possible. Yes, “the Stadthouder was twanging her way inaudibly through the nought meridian.”

  In the ship’s saloon he rifled through his pack for an as-yet-empty journal. The rucksack—on loan from a friend who had carried it around Mount Athos in the company of Robert Byron, whose book about their adventure had inspired Leigh Fermor’s plan to walk to Byzantium—held everything he would need in the coming months. A tattered copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse was in there somewhere, along with a Loeb edition of Horace that his mother had given him as a farewell gift. Inside she had inscribed a poem translated from Petronius’s Latin, which began, “Leave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores.” There were pencils and erasers, notebooks and drawing pads. The clothing he had packed was rustic and simple: gray flannel shirts for everyday, white ones if he needed something more presentable, a light leather jacket, hobnailed boots, and a gray set of puttees to keep the snow out of them. He recorded his first entry in the journal and wondered what story it would tell by the time he returned to England. Similar questions churned through his thoughts later on when he tried to get some sleep. Despite the excitement, he finally drifted off. When he woke some time later and went on deck, he found that the steamer was now alone in a black sea. “The kingdom had slid away westwards and into the dark,” he realized. “A stiff wind was tearing through the rigging and the mainland of Europe was less than half the night away.”

  LEWIS LEIGH FERMOR, Paddy’s father, was an unusually tall, lean man with deep-set eyes, a booming voice, and an Edwardian penchant for scientific paraphernalia. On excursions his kit might include a magnifying glass, a butterfly net, field glasses, a mineral hammer, a vasculum for collecting wildflowers, and a set of water-colors and brushes. In his son’s eyes he was “an out-and-out naturalist”; though as the boy admitted, “we hardly knew each other.” He had joined the Geological Survey of India in 1902, and by the time Paddy was born he was already its superintending director. The post allowed him a furlough only every few years.

  His specialty was the rocks of the Archean period—some 2.5 billion years ago—and he made a name for himself among geologists, while still in his twenties, with a monumental thousand-page study of the manganese deposits of India. To his colleagues the elder Leigh Fermor’s work had big implications. One award-winning paper was among the first to speculate about the way continental plates move and what causes deep earthquakes. But to his son his findings seemed to involve only minute slices of the natural world. What Paddy remembered years later was that his father had identified a novel sort of worm and described a particular crystalline structure that occurred in snowflakes. The snowflake discovery seemed to Paddy especially ephemeral.

  Muriel Ambler, the woman Lewis Leigh Fermor married, appeared to breathe a different atmosphere. Her father was a captain in Britain’s Indian navy and her grandfather had been an officer on the HMS Bellerophon when Napoleon Bonaparte surrendered to the ship’s captain off the coast of France in 1815. When Paddy thought of her past, he pictured her as the belle of a British hill station in India, the “Rose of Simla” twirling across a ballroom floor to the tune of “Tararaboomdeeay.” Muriel was imaginative and funny. Her knack for performing could conjure real amusement out of just reading aloud. Given the chance she might try her hand at anything. At one period, while living in a cottage in Northamptonshire, her zest for activity had her “simultaneously writing plays and, though hard up, learning to fly a Moth biplane at an aerodrome forty miles away.” She was also a prodigious reader, and her excitement about the arts was infectious. When she moved to a London neighborhood that was also the home of Arthur Rackham—whose illustrations for books like Alice in Wonderland and Grimm’s Fairy Tales were widely celebrated—she persuaded him to decorate her apartment. Leigh Fermor remembered the results: “navigable birdsnests in a gale-wind, hobgoblin transactions under extruding roots and mice drinking out of acorns.” It was a fanciful and humorous decor that suited her. Years later, when her son confided his plan to walk across Europe, her show of maternal resistance quickly melted into laughter, followed by enthusiasm for the preposterous idea.

  Leigh Fermor’s parents eventually divorced, but even before the marriage crumbled they left the boy largely in the care of others. Not long after he was born, in the second dark year of the First World War, his mother and older sister went out to join his father in India. “I was left behind so that one of us might survive if the ship were sunk by a submarine,” Leigh Fermor recalled. For the next few years he lived with a family in rural Northamptonshire, “more or less as a small farmer’s child run wild.” By the time he was reunited with his mother, he was not just wild but reluctant to be tamed. “Those marvelously lawless years,” he later told himself, “had unfitted me for the faintest shadow of constraint.”

  His father could not have been more different. When Lewis Leigh Fermor was a boy his strong suit was self-discipline. Once, when faced with a difficult scholarship examination, he devised a rigorous plan to supplement what he was already learning at school. It required him to “rise at 5 o’clock each morning, take a cold bath, do two hours’ work before breakfast, work another two hours in the evening, and always be in bed by 9.30 p.m.” He kept to the plan for two years and won the scholarship he wanted to attend the Royal School of Mines. Later on, he took advantage of a summer vacation to teach himself Latin. Paddy, it seemed, had inherited his father’s curiosity and his knack for languages but not, as yet, his restraint. The boy ran into trouble at one school after another.

  The one that gave him the most leeway was a bohemian establishment called the Priory Gate School. It occupied an out-of-the-way manor house, Walsham Hall, in the Suffolk village of Walsham-le-Willows, not far from the ruined abbey at Bury St. Edmunds. Here wildness was not just accepted; it was the norm. The school was run by Theodore Faithfull, a former Veterinary Corps major and author, who wrote and lectured on sexuality and psychology. (When Leigh Fermor wrote about the experience years later, he disguised Faithfull, calling him Major Truthfull and the school Salsham Hall in Salsham-le-Sallows.) Faithfull’s educational p
hilosophy blended a Freudian mistrust of repression with a pacifist brand of naturalism. As soon as they arrived at the school, students and faculty were inducted into the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, an organization with mystical overtones founded during the First World War as a coed alternative to the martial tradition of scouting. Leigh Fermor’s fellow students were a mixed band of eccentrics, savants, and well-to-do ne’er-do-wells. Among the teachers, the men wore beards, the women bangles. The boys and girls were dressed alike in homespun jerkins and sandals. When they were dressed at all, that is. Faithfull encouraged nude sunbathing, and for recreation the faculty and students performed naked eurythmics exercises and country dances together in a barn on the premises. For his part, Leigh Fermor fell for the gardener’s “fearfully pretty” daughter. It seemed a sylvan paradise. Needless to say, it was not long before scandal shut the place down, and Paddy was thrown back on the treadmill of more conventional education.

  Finally, in 1929, he wound up at King’s School in Canterbury. In some ways it was an ideal match. The medieval temperament he had soaked up in fits of boyhood reading—“a mixture of a rather dog-eared romanticism with heroics and rough stuff”—primed him to thrive in the atmosphere of Canterbury. It was said that the school had been founded at the end of the sixth century by Saint Augustine of Canterbury—a legend that, if true, made King’s the oldest public school in England. The place certainly had the trappings of long tradition. To Leigh Fermor, the crumbling arches and stately elms that lined its precincts produced “an aura of nearly prehistoric myth.” The ghosts of Thomas Becket and the Black Prince Edward—one murdered in the cathedral, both buried there—hovered in the air. “There was a wonderfully cobwebbed feeling about this dizzy and intoxicating antiquity,” he thought.

  The cluster of gray stone buildings that made up the campus sat next door to Canterbury Cathedral and reflected back its Gothic architecture. The boys wore starched white shirts with wing collars and black jackets and ties that would not have looked out of place a century earlier. Even the food served at the school had stood the test of time. Boiled beef, boiled vegetables, and stale bread: it was a menu that drove the young scholars to a candy shop tucked under one of the Gothic arches. The more self-sufficient of them fried up eggs and sausages on Primus stoves in their rooms. Bicycling a few miles into the countryside brought the relief to be found in pubs. The best of them served a dark ale called Gardner’s Old Strong.

  Leigh Fermor was soon befriended by a boy in the year ahead of him, a young classics scholar named Alan Watts. Watts was an eccentric figure at the school. He grew up on a rural lane in Chiselhurst, on the southeast side of London, in a cottage filled with Asian ornaments—vases from China and Korea, hangings from Japan, a mandala table from India—that were the legacy of his missionary grandparents. He came to King’s with an almost mystical affinity for the natural world. (As a child, he once said, “I knew that plants, moths, birds, and rabbits were people.”)

  But he could also shoot the tobacco out of a cigarette from twenty feet away, and he knew how to handle a bow and arrow. He relished games that tested his unusual abilities nearly as much as he enjoyed testing the boundaries of school decorum. Although he was an excellent Latin student, he got himself into hot water on one occasion by inscribing the assigned exercise in Gothic script, replete with an illuminated initial capital. He liked to make up ditties to mimic the way certain teachers walked. To his ear, the headmaster, “in his black gown and mortarboard, went ‘Damson, damson, damson, damson.” Watts cemented his reputation as a cerebral sort of renegade when he announced to the school authorities that he had become a Buddhist. The declaration turned out to be serious, and before he left King’s he had been elected secretary of the London Buddhist Lodge. Not long after that, he published a book, on Zen, that would be the first of many.

  Although there was an unwritten taboo against forming friendships with younger classmates, Watts was drawn to Leigh Fermor as “the only really interesting boy in the House.” He seemed a kindred spirit, “a fine poet, a born adventurer, a splendid actor.” Watts noticed the traits that served Paddy well at a place like King’s—“an Arthurian and medieval imagination,” for instance—but he also saw the preoccupations that might lead to his friend’s downfall. In particular, he thought of Leigh Fermor as “a gallant lover of women.” Watts recalled watching the younger boy flirting with one of the kitchen maids, a “dowdy blonde” whose appeal he chalked up to “sheer desperation” in the monkish setting of a boys’ school.

  For a while, Leigh Fermor thrived. He soaked up books and languages and succeeded—although fitfully—in most of his subjects. Poetry, for better or worse, leaked out of him “like ectoplasm.” He and Watts took long walks together and spun their bicycles over the countryside, sometimes traveling with the idea of poking around a musty Norman church, but just as often to visit a pub. The forests and fields of Kent became a kind of sanctuary for them. But their retreat of last resort was right next door. “When utterly oppressed by the social system of the school,” Watts recalled, “we would sneak off to Canterbury Cathedral—which because of its colossal sanctity, could never be made out of bounds—to study the stained-glass windows, to explore the Anglo-Saxon crypt, or to read books in the serene and secluded garden adjoining the Cathedral library.”

  In the long run, the same romantic streak that sought out dusty corners of the cathedral started to work against him, as if something were pushing him to make his life more like the books he read. He was often lost in thought, but the trouble was more than simple absentmindedness. Whatever he could imagine he tried. If it meant breaking a rule or slipping outside the school’s boundaries, he would worry about the consequences later. The worst offenses resulted in floggings. He remembered these as “swift and flexible sanctions which came whistling shoulder-high across paneled studies and struck with considerable force.” Watts had tried to have the practice banned at the school, but that failed effort did his friend no good. He was distressed to see that Paddy “was constantly being flogged for his pranks and exploits—in other words, for having a creative imagination.” By Leigh Fermor’s third year, the chain of misdeeds exhausted the patience of his housemaster. The report the master wrote made it clear that Leigh Fermor’s days at the school were numbered. “He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys,” it read.

  The final act unfolded just as Watts had foreseen. Leigh Fermor fell for the daughter of the local greengrocer. She was some seven years older, “a ravishing, sonnet-begetting beauty,” who looked after her father’s store in the cattle market. Her wide-eyed features reminded him of the sylphs whose illustrations adorned the storybooks he had read as a child. Just her presence in the shop turned that workaday setting into a “green and sweet-smelling cave” straight out of a pastoral poem. To Watts she was simply “a comely brunette.” In the end Paddy was caught holding her hand—“we were sitting in the back-shop on upturned apple-baskets—and my schooldays were over.”

  IT WAS JUST over a year later that Leigh Fermor hatched the plan to walk across Europe. Now, at last, the adventure had begun. The Stadthouder Willem glided into the port of Rotterdam before dawn the next morning. Snow was falling as Leigh Fermor found his way to a café, where he ate a breakfast of coffee and fried eggs and watched the sun come up. When he rose to leave, the owner, noticing the rucksack and walking stick he was carrying, asked him where he was headed. He answered “Constantinople,” and the man lit up. He filled small glasses for each of them from a salt-glazed stone bottle marked “Bols” and toasted the young traveler. “It was the formal start to my journey,” Leigh Fermor felt.

  As the morning brightened, he followed a straight road out of town. Over the next few days he made his way, fueled by hunks of bread and cheese, through towns with names like Dordrecht, Sliedrecht, and Gorinchem. One night he slept in luxury in a cell at the local police station. “Thank God I had put ‘student’ in my
passport,” he thought; “it was an amulet and an Open Sesame.” Back in England he was slated to become a student in earnest. After the disaster in Canterbury he had spent a year cramming for an examination that would allow him to enter the military college at Sandhurst, and he had passed the test. The housemaster from King’s had even given him a favorable recommendation.

  When he thought about life as a peacetime soldier, forced to live in England on the army’s meager pay, the prospect soured quickly. But sometimes he imagined serving in India, like his mother’s people. He pictured himself singled out, “thanks to an effortless mastery of a dozen native tongues and their dialects, for special duties: unrecognizable under my rags I would disappear for months into the lanes and the bazaars of seething frontier cities.” It was an uncanny premonition of what lay in store for him. But for now he was happier to be a student—if in name only.

  The river Waal cut a path across Holland. He trailed it eastward through a gently rolling landscape of meadows and plowed fields that reminded him of the pictures Brueghel painted in the sixteenth century. At Nijmegen he found a room over a blacksmith shop. The German frontier was only a two-hour walk away. He reflected on the beauty of the countryside he had crossed much more quickly than he had expected. He also wondered what he would find when he crossed the border the next morning.

  He could vaguely recall seeing German prisoners of war in Northamptonshire during the war. Since then, movies and magazines had layered on depictions of German soldiers that were equal parts sinister and alluring. What came to mind were scattered images: “atrocity stories, farmhouses on fire, French cathedrals in ruins, Zeppelins and the goose-step; uhlans galloping through the autumn woods, Death’s Head Hussars, corseted officers with Iron Crosses and fencing slashes, monocles and staccato laughs.” In fact, his most vivid early memory swirled around the image of Kaiser Wilhelm. In the summer of 1919, when he was just four, the older daughter of the family he lived with in Northamptonshire took him to see a bonfire villagers had built to commemorate Peace Day, marking the formal end of the war.