Patrick Leigh Fermor

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  I arrived last night, and have not been to the hill yet. I am going today with Yanni and tomorrow for Easter Sunday, where Spiro is going to roast a huge lamb, and all our friends will assemble from the lemon-forest to eat it. I’ll take a camera with me, and send you lots of photographs.

  A caïque brought me here – the Hydra, the Pteroti, and Avli were sunk by the Germans – and it was very beautiful. I missed you dreadfully, Balasha darling, as we slid over those silk-smooth waters between dreaming islands: the same soft air caressed our arms and hands and temples, the same light wind carried the smell of pine-needles and thyme to one’s nostrils, and I had the same argonaut plus conquistador feeling of being the first traveller to cross these ancient waters and gulfs and lagoons. The moment the caïque anchored at the quay, I jumped ashore, and walked to the monastery, along that lovely road winding under the pines overhanging the steep timbered cliffs, and the broken rocks half sunk in blue-green water, the lulling sound of whose splash and murmur reached us through the pine-branches. All at once the white monastery came into sight, and I was walking past the trickling spring, and the ravine full of plane-trees and fig-trees, and up the worn steps to the terrace with its one cypress, the sea, the sphinx-rock and the castle island beyond, and the vounò [mountain], with the mill glimmering palely in its cloud of olives and lemons and cypresses and walnut-trees. The courtyard of the monastery, with its thick round arches and cypress-shaded church and luminous walls, snowy and cream-coloured and blue in shadow, was heavy with the scent of orange-blossom. As I left, the first cuckoo, alarming and strange, called from the woods above. The light failed along the road back . . . You divined more than saw, the trees and rocks, and the poppies in the young grass. The streets were empty in Poros – the whole village was in church for the Entombment, and the streets and stucco houses and white staircases were quiet under thousands of low and bright stars, the lights sinking still reflections into the windless water. Later, from the window of the Averoff Hotel – where the toothless crone used to cackle us a welcome – I watched the hundreds of candles of the Epitaphios procession [1] crawl along the sea-path from Galata, the reflections of fireworks flowering and fading and the drone of chanting, faintly crossing the water.

  It is seven in the morning now, and all glitters and dances under a clear sky. Through the masts of the caïques, the Argive mountains unfold, the fleece of the olive trees grey-green and silver and gold where the sun touches them, the hollows and branching stream-beds a cloudy purple. Gulls float idly over the caïque sails.

  Easter Sunday

  Darling, I am again at the narghiléh café, quiet, happy, sun-drenched, and filled with the most terrific ‘dor’ [longing] for you. Yesterday, I got Yanni to row me to the bay of Artemis, and lay in the sun all the afternoon, watching the shadows change on the island. Towards dusk, I shook myself, and walked through the wood where the white horse used to gallop aimlessly, and I used to talk of half-submerged vessels. Then through that sloping golden glade to the minute church, the narrow path till the place where the donkey used to pace round and round, drawing up the water, and up through the lemon-groves, to the mill. My darling, it was a moment I had been aching for, and, of course, dreading, for the last six years but, Boodle, [2] there it was, as if nothing had changed; I stood and watched through the branches: Marina busy at the oven, Spiro, cheeks puffed with feigned and endearing exertion, emptying lemons into huge baskets – τὰ καλάθια – and a boy and a girl that I recognised as Kosta and Katrina, helping him. You can imagine the cries of welcome when I ventured onto the terrace, Marina smiling with her hands crossed on her apron, Spiro laughing and gesticulating with clownish glee. Evtychia is a thoughtful little girl of ten with dark bobbed hair and a mauve jersey. When kisses and greetings were over, all the talk was of you. ‘When is she coming?’ I said, Soon. We sat on the wall and talked for hours, (Kosta, still with those affectionate eyes and sweet smile, holding my hand proprietorially in his) of our old life: your pictures, my illness, the rat-bite, the night Hector got lost, climbing the walnut-tree, the Panegyri of St Panteleı˙˙mon, the autumn storm. The magazí [shop] is closed, as Spiro can get no wine, and as it got dark, I reluctantly said goodbye to them till the morrow, Easter Sunday, and wandered down through the trees to the Plaka where Mitso was waiting with his βάρκα [boat], and over the still water to Poros. On the way down under the lemon leaves, I kept looking back for your long shadow, in blue trousers, white shirt and bélisaires, asking me to sing the Raggle Taggle Gypsies. Yanni our boatboy was waiting at the quay, and we went out fish-spearing with a carbide lamp on the front of the boat for a few hours, across that stretch of water between the Dragoumis and Tombazi houses. The bottom of the sea looked fascinating in the bright glare of the lamp – rocks feathered with anemones and prickly with urchins, octopuses and cuttle-fish coiled in the rock crevices, silver troops of fish lying silent two fathoms below, or darting off in alarm at the sudden lunges of Yanni’s long, bamboo-shafted trident. He speared masses of them, and each catch was greeted with shrieks of delight by the two barefooted boys who were rowing. I got one barbouni [red mullet]. We got back in time to brush our hair, and join the swarm of Poriots [inhabitants of Poros] in the church for the Anástasis. There must have been 1,000 people in the square up the hill for the Resurrection, each eager face lit by its own candle. At the ΧΡΙ∑ΤΟ∑ ΑΝΕ∑ΤΗ! [‘Christ is risen!’] a great jangle of bells broke out, and the sputter and swish of fireworks, cannons firing at the fort, and all the candles danced up and down. Adevărat a înviat! [‘Truly he is risen!’] [3] Then to Yanni’s house at the end of the village, a giant meal with clashing eggs, and back to bed, a bit drunk and very happy.

  Today has been perfect too. I got to the hill early in the morning, having drunk two okes [carafes] of retsina with Yorgo and Stamatina, the shaggy little shepherd couple from the Vonnò, at the Plaka. We talked of our boiling day in that high desert, of all the water we drank as we lay panting under the plane-tree by the spring and the oleander bushes. They are as shaggy and small and brown and sly as ever, Yorgo with awkward hands resting on the shaft of his crook, Stamatina’s pretty wrinkled face smiling out of its black headdress. She has a new papoose slung in a sort of leather sling from the saddle of her mule. They are as scorched and penetrated by the sun as a couple of cicadas.

  At the mill, we had a huge banquet under the vine-trellis – paschal lamb and retsina and πατάτες φούρνου [baked potatoes] and onions and more retsina, and sang for hours. I made a fresh entry in our big white book ( jealously hidden throughout the occupation, now the mill’s pride and future heirloom), your health was most feelingly drunk by us all, Marina sang ‘Kolokotrones’ in her thin, true little voice, blushing like a girl at our applause. We danced terrific Syrtos and Tsamikos [traditional folk dances] (my hands still ache from the foot-slapping!), and all the time, the sun slanted down on us through the young vine-leaves overhead, and through its frame of vine and fig-leaves, our amphitheatre of orange and cypress and olive wavered down to the glittering sea and the island and monastery, and remembered bits of rock – lionlike and smoky as ever – on the blue looking glass that stretched away till it melted hazily with the sky.

  I dived overboard and swam for a while in the cold sea on the way back and now sit at the old table, with the caïque masts thick in front, the salt flaking on my new-burnt arms, the sunlight still warm in my relaxed limbs and bones. This is where I wrote that first sonnet when you went to Athens, and I almost feel that tomorrow I will see you walking down the gangway of the Pteroté, in your grey wool Athens suit, silk shirt, blue-and-white tie, and small round white hat. The night is still and warm, friendly figures cross the golden light of the café windows like Karagosi men in their crisp fustanellas, and a mandoline and a zither sound their small tinkling cascade of music into the quiet air, answered by a lazy half audible amané [an improvised song in the Turkish style] from the steep white arched and staircased labyrinth of houses behind.


  This is a kind and happy and simple corner of the world. All the misery and murder and pumpute [upheaval?] of the last seven years have shed themselves away like a hateful dream, and I am back for a few precious days in a glâbre [innocent], beautiful world inhabited by people like you and Pomme and Constantin [4] and the two Alexanders [5] and Guy and Prue [Branch]. I send you, darling, all this. We must continue to hide here sometime, and feel that love and friendship are something separate after all, impregnably so, from the passage of time and its horrors and cruelties and callousnesses. I got your lovely letter, and am answering it when I get back to Athens tomorrow – many pages are already written. This is a parenthesis in it, designed to bring you the smell of the sea and of lemon-trees, and the love and greetings of all your friends in the island and Lemonodassos, and mine.

  Hugs and kisses and gouffis [6] to Pomme and Constantin and Ins [their daughter Ina], and quite special bessonnades and hugs to Alexander M.; and to Alexander V., and all, all that and more to you, my dearest darling, from

  Paddy

  [1] The Good Friday custom of priest and congregation processing around the parish carrying a bier upon which is an icon of Christ (often in the form of a cloth) adorned with spring flowers.

  [2] A term of endearment.

  [3] This is a standard form of Easter greeting and response in the Orthodox Church, except that PLF has provided his response in Rumanian.

  [4] Balasha’s younger sister Hélène (1900–83), always known as ‘Pomme’, and her husband Constantin Donici.

  [5] Balasha’s cousin, Alexander Mourouzi, with whom PLF had explored the Danube delta in 1936; unidentified.

  [6] A term of endearment – as is ‘bessonnades’.

  This letter was written after Paddy had visited Corfu as part of a lecture tour on behalf of his employers, the British Council. In 1946 Greece was volatile, and would soon ignite into civil war between left and right. Paddy’s tour was part of a policy to counter the anti-Western propaganda of the Communists. To the delight of his audience, he had spoken not on cultural subjects, but instead about the wartime operation to kidnap General Kreipe.

  Paddy and his companion Joan Rayner had been staying with Marie Aspioti (1909–2000), a writer, poet and publisher who ran the British Council Institute in Corfu, an island with strong British links. (From 1815 it had been a British protectorate, until sovereignty was transferred to Greece in 1864.) According to one of those who knew her, Aspioti ‘loved England’, and ‘gave her whole life to the Institute’. Like Paddy, she would be dismayed by British policy in Cyprus in the mid 1950s.

  Almost thirty years later, on 5 August 1973, she wrote to tell him that ‘your letter of July 1946 brings me back with a rush those delightful times and is as fresh and alive as when you wrote it. Only the ink has faded.’

  To Marie Aspioti

  12 July 1946

  Zante

  British Council

  Corfu

  Marie dear,

  Here we are still wandering your sleepy seas, malingering in island after island, as if delayed by those spells that always hindered travellers ’round the coasts of Greece; here in Zante, our Circe (or Nausicaa, Ariadne, Calypso) is Miss Crowe, and I am writing from her terrace at (guess what time?) seven in the morning, under a huge mulberry tree, overlooking the bay, and it’s surrounded by trees and churches and palazzos, and sprinkled with ships. Miss Crowe is a magnificent old English woman of about seventy, and comes of one of those families that remained behind after the Heptanese was returned to Greece. [1] She looks like a retired British Admiral in an eighteenth-century picture, with high-bridged nose, husky frowning eyebrows and severe blue eyes; an array of telescopes hang among the prints on the walls, and as she paces the terrace – which becomes the quarter-deck of a frigate – stick in hand, only slightly stooping, and followed by a rippling wake of old and half-blind dogs, you can almost hear the distant booming of broadsides. She sits up late drinking her wine and chain-smoking with a dog on her lap, telling long travel stories in a racy Edwardian idiom. She is a die-hard Tory, and has long arguments every day with Mr Chronopoulos, who lives in Solomos’s house next door, a violent Whig who has spent most of his life in England. He is 84 years old, thin and wiry as a hawk, but alert and argumentative and charming, though I believe he is a tyrannical demon to descendants that vaguely surround him in an awed and much less intelligent swarm. He reminisces, and gets angry about, parliamentary debates that he attended in his youth, at which the speakers were Gladstone, Disraeli, Bright, Parnell and Sir Charles Dilke, and Miss Crowe rattles testily on the ground with her walking-stick.

  Huddling into the crowded caïque at three in the morning, with you shuddering and waving on the quay in evening dress, and all of us the worse for drink, was the perfect way to leave Corfu after that perfect fortnight. We fell asleep in the bows among coils of rope, waking long after dawn, feeling gloomy at having left Corfu, but excited about Cephalonia.

  There was nothing very welcoming about it – No Marie, no Dicky! – but the [Anglo-Hellenic] League is run by a very nice old man called Mr Alevizatos. I gave one lecture, it went fairly well, I think. A very po-faced and irritating old English woman said ‘So charming. You must get more lecturers to come in the winter, when we have nothing to do in the evenings. We get so tired of bridge . . .’ Masses of eager boys and girls were crowding in the doorways, too shy to come in, during the lecture, and when Joan suggested they should come and fill the empty places, she said, with a vinegary smile: ‘I don’t believe in pampering children’. . .

  There was quite a rough sea on during the passage here, and a great gale. To the admiration of the caïque captain, Joan and I were the only passengers who didn’t get sick. We felt smug and Britannic and could almost feel bulldogs’ ears growing. . .

  love Paddy

  [1] The seven Ionian Islands are traditionally known as the Heptanese. British rule in the Ionian Islands came to an end in 1864.

  Towards the end of Paddy’s lecture tour, he and Joan were joined by his wartime comrade, Xan (Alexander) Fielding. The three of them visited Lawrence Durrell, then living in Rhodes in a little house with a tangled garden which concealed a Turkish graveyard. ‘We sat up in my churchyard until three every morning reading aloud,’ Durrell recalled. ‘It was an amazing sojourn, spent in talk and music and feasting,’ wrote Paddy in a memoir of Durrell. ‘Strange things always happened in his company and one afternoon, in the ruins of ancient Camirus, wine-sprung curiosity sent the four of us crawling on hands and knees through the bat-infested warren of underground conduits. We climbed out covered in droppings and dust and cobwebs.’ As their clothes were torn and filthy, they decided to continue their exploration naked, while Joan recorded their japes in photographs. Dared to jump on to the top of a twelve-foot column, Xan made a tremendous leap, maintaining his footing though the column rocked alarmingly; he then struck a pose as Eros for a photograph.

  In a letter written around this time to his regular correspondent Henry Miller, Durrell referred to Paddy as ‘a wonderful mad Irishman [sic]’ who ‘speaks five languages really well . . . quite the most enchanting maniac I’ve ever met.’ He had spent ‘a lovely week’ with Paddy and Xan, he told Miller. ‘Can’t tell you what a wonderful time I had talking books – first time for years.’

  To Lawrence Durrell

  18 December 1946

  Athens

  My dear Larry,

  I’m very ashamed of myself and live for the days we spent virtually as your guests in Rhodes. With you, Eve, [1] Joan and Xan altogether, it was [the] perfect ending of a lovely summer. But it was the end, and it has been autumn and winter weather till we got back to Athens last week, except for a week or so of the καλοκαιράκι τοῦ Ἁγίου Δημητρίου [Indian summer] in the islands.

  I found Joan a week after leaving you, entwined like a sleeping beauty in the island of Patmos, and stayed there several days, rainy and thunderous ones like those described in your story.
I thought very seriously of settling down there this winter. It is one of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever seen. We left for Samos by caïque, but a storm blew up, and we were forced to put in at a tiny island called Arki. As Joan and I stepped ashore, our bags were grasped in silence by a fisherman, who led us up a winding path through laurels to a large white house, quite alone among vineyards, but with all chimneys smoking. An old gentleman with white whiskers welcomed us gravely on the threshold, as though he had been expecting us, and led us into a great flagged kitchen, where in the shake of a lamb’s tail, we were seated with ouzos and mezés. A huge handsome old wife was clanking pots over the fire aided by an army of daughters of outstanding beauty, the son of the house cleaning his fowling-piece with a bunch of partridges beside him. Dogs and cats were everywhere. Any amount of shepherds and fishermen were sitting about talking or eating, and we were soon given a delicious meal – avgolemono [egg yolk and lemon juice] soup, fish, jugged hare, and a splendid wine. All this with scarcely an enquiry as to where we had come from. In fact we were addressed by our names with a gentle, incurious courtesy. It was very strange, and a bit eerie, like the arrival of Odysseus at the palace of Nausicaa’s father, [2] or the way-laying and entertainment of travellers by lonely magnificoes in Hungary. It turned out that ships are washed up there so often that their entertainment had become a matter of course. ‘One day last year,’ Mr Kalantakis said (he’s a Cretan) ‘the sea brought us seventy-two guests’. We stayed there four days, living in lovely rooms and eating and drinking like heroes, and when the wind changed, said goodbye to our charming and munificent host with real intentions to return another summer. One of our fellow naufragés [castaways] was a Karaghioziman [shadow-puppeteer], unfortunately without his gear, but [he] gave quite a good conjuring display to a kitchen crammed with neighbours and dependants, ending up with the most frightening bit of magic I’ve ever seen. He made us clench our hands tightly together, saying he would turn them to wood; shouted ONE! TWO! THREE! Up till ἑννέα! [nine!] Τὰ χέρια σας εἶναι ξύλο – δὲν λύονται πιά! . . . ΔΕΚΑ! [‘Your hands are stiff as wood! – you can’t bend them! . . . TEN!]’ [3] And well over half of the company remained with their hands glued palm to palm, tugging and straining till the sweat poured down them, till at last they fell apart when he touched their knuckles with his forefinger. He did it again and again, on my insistence, and once linked a daisy chain of half-frightened, half-giggling peasants helplessly together arm in arm. It had all the excitement, and all the unpleasantness of Mario and the Magician. [4] It had to be stopped in the end because the children were screaming.