Joan
Page 13
War had brought dissolution and changed everything. It had destroyed lives and it had destroyed marriages. For Joan, however, the war was to bring about a new world altogether.
In December 1943, JR flew to Algiers to work with a joint US–British Psychological Warfare Branch, planning operations for when the Allies would confront German forces in Italy. Algiers was bursting with American, British and French personnel, but John found lodgings with Graham. The city was at its least attractive: convoys of shabby trams, jeeps and army trucks, cars and people crowded the streets. Food shortages had given rise to resentment against the Allies and the mood amongst the French and Arabs was sullen.
In early January JR flew to Palermo in Sicily, in order to begin broadcasting to mainland Italy, and soon moved on to Caserta, Bari and Naples, from where, at the end of the month, he was flown over Anzio harbour. He recorded seeing smoke pall, a burning tanker, petrol cans, a cruiser and the wounded. The main Allied landing had taken place ten days earlier. Put in charge of the Political Warfare Branch (PWB) 15th Army Group, John became responsible for all combat propaganda activities in the army area: from the coordination of news leaflets to front-line broadcasting by way of radio transmitters and loudspeakers. It took him six months to reach Rome. On 5 June, Liberation Day, JR and the British troops entered the city amid mass celebrations. Huge crowds took to the streets, cheering, waving and hurling bunches of flowers at the passing army vehicles, and the pope appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s to address the thousands of Italians gathered in the square beneath him. JR and his colleagues set about producing the first newspaper for the civilian population, only to have to scrap it the next morning to include news of the Normandy landings. Twenty-four hours after their arrival, they had Rome’s radio working; helping the Italian press return to pre-war, pre-fascist freedom became one of his major tasks. There was information to be disseminated and there were new ways of presenting it.
JR soon found a house to move into in the Via Gregoriana at the top of the Spanish Steps. He had a maid called Ana who kept pigeons for the table. If he came back late and unexpectedly with hungry guests she would hurry up to the roof to kill some of the birds, and provide a polenta in no time. In August, he was joined in his flat by Evelyn Waugh. Waugh recorded in his diaries that Mondi Howard, who was also attached to the PWB, had arranged for him to stay with John, whom he hardly knew, and that the flat was charming. On 22 August 1944, Waugh recorded:
A week of easy living, getting stronger and eating better. Rome short of water, light and transport. The few restaurants madly expensive. Ranieri open for luncheon only. Most of the hotels taken for various messes. My day, on the average, has been to wake at 7 to the bell of S. Andrea del Frate, tea with John Rayner in pyjamas, read the enemy broadcast news, dress slowly and go out, either by foot or in a borrowed car to see one of the churches [. . .] Usually dinner at Via Gregoriana, electric light every four days, on other days a single candle or a storm lantern. Often official guests of John.9
Although Rome had been liberated, the Germans had not been decisively defeated. Field Marshal Kesserling, the German commander, was under orders to contest every inch of Italy. His troops fell back as far north as Florence, held the city for three weeks and blew up the bridges over the River Arno. Working under continual German mortar and sniper fire, JR and his colleagues produced a daily newspaper on the south bank of the river, using a jeep engine as the power supply for their printing press. The paper was sent through the German lines to circulate to the Italians on the north bank. Fighting continued throughout the autumn and winter. Sometimes John found time to write to Isabel.
Have become v practised in the art of travelling light, sometimes sleeping under pines, sometimes in shell-shattered palaces, sometimes in the bedroom outside, which is a Baroque Borromini with an owl in it [. . .] As the jeep bounds on I think of the misty hanger; and you no doubt think of olive groves and cicadas & the intolerable burden of the midday sun. I believe the brain is sd by those who have investigated it to be suspended in the skull by the thinnest film of liquid. In such a bath the whole body passes the day & most of the night.10
At the beginning of October, he wrote, ‘No news of Joan’s alleged visit; vague talk in note of Sir B. getting her here or where you were offered, that’s all.’ And then a month later, on 12 November:
As to Joan, I have no word from her at all, no mention of her from any rare contact (e.g. Graham who stayed a few days). I think she must be pretty up to date you know, in principle any way, I shd have supposed, but one can’t send knives by letter, only nuances. In any case, don’t you worry.11
JR also told her that he was ‘v. cold, no hot water, haven’t had a bath for 6 months, am ageing, creased, balding, dictatorial’.
Sometimes, when he and his colleagues found themselves too close to the front line for safety, JR confessed that he was terrified. He found that the best way to cope when danger threatened was to curl up in the back of the jeep and fall sleep. Shortly after writing his last letter to Isabel, the jeep in which John was travelling crashed, and his back was broken.
Control of Egypt was of strategic importance throughout the war. Although the country was nominally independent under the rule of King Farouk, British influence was still dominant, and Cairo became a major hub of operations for Allied forces, despite the population being largely sympathetic to Germany. The city itself was a major base for Allied operations, and espionage and counterespionage on both sides, but remained relatively untouched by fighting. The fiercest battles were, of course, around El Alamein, to the west of Cairo, as the Germans fought in vain to reach the Suez Canal.
Cairo could not have been more different from life back home. There was no wartime austerity and rationing and all needs were provided for – a shop called ‘Old England’ advertised itself as selling ‘best British briar pipes, lighters, cutlery, camp beds, tables, leather goods, travelling articles, flashlights, batteries, photo frames, cameras, films, albums’. Museums were closed and there were no tourists as such, but everyone seemed to thrive. The Turf Club still provided gambling and polo and people met for tennis and squash at the Gezira Sporting Club. For the officers and troops there were clubs, hotels and restaurants. Coffee and rich pastries were widely available. Even the hordes of beggars holding out their bowls for baksheesh prospered, while the morale of the troops was said to depend mainly on the price, quality and availability of the prostitutes.
Most British residents, as distinct from troops on leave, kept to the relative shelter of Gezira Island, separated from the mainland by a number of bridges on either side. It was here that Paddy Leigh Fermor, an officer with the Special Operations Executive, and Billy Moss, a young officer in the Coldstream Guards, had found a large rambling house which they shared with suitable friends. The house was called Tara, after the legendary palace of the kings of Ireland, and it was presided over by a Polish countess called Sophie Tarnowska. ‘They were all in their twenties, with active times behind and ahead of them. The household quickly cohered in a private Bohemian world under Sophie’s kind reign – someone teasingly said she was a sort of Wendy surrounded by Lost Boys of riper years – and afterwards the memory of Tara proved a lasting bond,’ Leigh Fermor wrote later.12 It had many bedrooms, a ballroom with a parquet floor, and a piano borrowed from the Egyptian Officers’ Club, all of which made it ideal for parties.
At the outbreak of war in 1939, Paddy had returned to England from Romania, where he had been living with Princess Balasha Cantacuzene on her estate at Baleni. He had met Balasha, who was sixteen years older than him, near the end of his walk across Europe from the Hook of Holland to the city he always called Constantinople. Back in England, he initially joined the Irish Guards, but during training, which he loathed – ‘my job is blacking the grates!’13 – he fell ill. When he recovered, he joined the Intelligence Corps. Once again he thought the training ‘idiotic’, and he wrote to Lord Lloyd of Dolobran, who had recently been made a government minist
er by Churchill, trying to get back to Romania.14 Instead, Paddy soon found himself attached as a liaison officer to the SOE, which had recently been formed to carry out reconnaissance and sabotage operations in Axis-occupied countries. The SOE – or Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare as it was sometimes known – was a better home for Paddy’s natural talents. As a Greek-speaker, he spent much of the war in German-occupied Crete, where he helped organize local acts of resistance.
Another of the inhabitants of Tara was Xan Fielding, the man Paddy loved most of all. Born in Ootacamund in India, Xan, like Paddy, was a son of the Empire, but had been brought up in a large house in the south of France. He did not learn until he was an adult that his mother had died in India when he was born. As a child he had been brought up by his grandparents who told him that they were his parents, and that his aunts were his sisters. After periods at the universities of Bonn, Munich and Freiburg, Xan went to Cyprus, but he detested the British colonial administrators, who distrusted him in turn because he had bothered to learn Greek. He was sacked from his post at the Cyprus Times. The same British administrators made his attempts to run a bar a failure, so he went to Greece, where he found refuge on St Nicholas, a small island in the Bay of Chalkis; an anthropologist friend, Francis ‘Fronny’ Turville-Petre, had turned the island into a kind of gay commune. In the summer of 1940, following the Battle of Britain, Xan joined the Cyprus regiment and then, after the invasion of Crete, he volunteered for service with the SOE. The first question at his interview was ‘Have you any personal objection to committing murder?’ And he had none. Paddy and he met in the village of Yerakari, in a green, fertile valley of the Amari. Together with Paddy, Xan helped build up military intelligence on the island. Xan was short, dark and wiry in build; physically he could pass himself off as a Cretan much better than Paddy ever could. Eventually, he grew discontented with his work on Crete and applied to be transferred to the French operations of the SOE. After parachuting into France, he was picked up almost immediately with false papers and sentenced to be shot. The next day, however, he was taken out of his prison cell only to discover that the Resistance had bribed his captors, and he was released.
Although it was Paddy and Billy Moss who were to take the credit – and Paddy always had a tendency to myth-making – the first references to kidnapping a general are in the SOE archives. In September 1942 Xan Fielding had a plan for landing on Crete with the order to make an abduction. At the time this proved impossible but twelve months later Tom Dunbabin suggested that two be taken at one fell swoop.15 On leave back in Cairo, Paddy and Billy Moss came up with new plans to kidnap the garrison commander on Crete, General Kreipe. On 26 April 1944, the general’s car was stopped in front of his house, the Villa Ariadne. With the help of partisans, Paddy and Moss, who were dressed as corporals in the German Feldgendarmerie, coshed the driver and bundled the general into the back of the car. With Moss driving, they progressed through Heraklion for an hour and a half, bluffing their way past twenty checkpoints. They abandoned the car, leaving behind documents in English to prove that the kidnap had been carried out by British commandos, and to minimize reprisals on the local population. Kreipe was taken up into the mountains and concealed in the caves. A fortnight later the general was spirited away by motorboat to Egypt. The Kreipe kidnap made Paddy a celebrity. A combination of psychological strain, exhaustion and the general harshness of mountain life made him ill, however, and on 19 May 1944 he was admitted to hospital with polyarthritis. He spent about three months in hospital, during which time Sir Bernard Paget, the Commander in Chief of the Middle East Command, pinned the Distinguished Service Order on Paddy’s battledress jacket, which he was wearing over his pyjamas.16
Paddy had a girlfriend at the time called Denise Menasce. Her family were upper-middle-class Sephardic Jewish bankers and businessmen, who had been made barons in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Denise was dark, pretty and intelligent, as well as bilingual in English and French. She had become mixed up with the military set and their friends at Tara. Paddy went back to Crete in October, leaving her pregnant and vulnerable.
Would you be very bored with me if I wrote a miserable and depressed letter. Please don’t be, Paddy darling, for I am feeling as low as low can be this evening and I just have to write to somebody – so you will just have to be my victim. I’d give anything to be in your arms and be cuddled, and made a fuss of, and be told I was quite nice and sweet. You’ve never really seen me in my black moods. They are as bad as yours only drink doesn’t help. I tried that all evening, but in vain. You’ve only seen your little imp behaving like a wild thing, and jumping around you in a surge of joy to have you back for an extra 24 hrs. But tonight I am rather a different person – somebody you haven’t yet met, and which I don’t think you like. A little woman of 24 who feels stupid, empty, and very much alone [. . .]
Paddy darling, this is such a revealing letter, I am rather ashamed. I usually am terribly reserved talking or writing about my real self – so please forgive and forget this – somehow you have walked so completely into my life, that I find myself telling you my most intimate thoughts.
That baby is also rather worrying me. Even though I am not a slave or in the least bit melodramatic. I suddenly feel full of importance at having it. No man can really understand what conception means to a woman. It becomes life, creation, it gives a tremendous sense of strength and power. Instead of having been possessed and destroyed, you realize that you carry in you the power of life – And yet . . . tomorrow morning Mrs. Boswell is going to see a doctor, and look rather shamefaced, and get into the most sordid explanations as to where, why, and how – and how much!! What an anticlimax.
Paddy my poppit, don’t please, please, think I am really minding about this. I am not like Sophie, and quite realize that this is normal and necessary. So please forgive my trying to embellish in my own eyes tonight, what is going to be rather hell tomorrow.
Am awfully sleepy so will stop now. Goodnight darling. Bless you and forgive this.17
For the next couple of months, Denise wrote to Paddy nearly every day or so about her feelings for him and what she was doing, making a kind of diary. Two days after her abortion she wrote, ‘A hasty note to say that all is well, so that my letter makes no sense at all.’ She hoped he did not get all her letters in a pile. ‘Tonight we are all eating caviar at Suzette’s and going dancing afterwards – it now makes me miserable to dance tangos with anyone else!!’
By the summer of 1944 the atmosphere in Spain had changed considerably since Joan’s arrival. After D-Day and the liberation of France the Franco regime had finally accepted that Germany was losing and that they should back the United States and Great Britain. They had blocked the export to Germany of tungsten, which was indispensable to the manufacture of aircraft and weapons, and the Spanish government now operated under terms of strict neutrality. In October 1944, after leaving Spain, Joan arrived in Cairo – a dusty, dirty, overcrowded city she came to love. The British embassy was a large colonial house with a columned veranda on two storeys and wrought-iron railings adorned with Queen Victoria’s imperial insignia. Inside, its high rooms were hung with silk damask and furnished with antique chairs and Persian rugs belonging to Sir Miles Lampson, the ambassador.18 The cipher room at the embassy was on the ground floor, with steel bars across the windows. The room was usually filled with over twenty people, and lipstick-marked cups of half-drunk tea were scattered amongst used carbons, dispatch books, partly chewed slabs of chocolate and countless cigarette butts.19
Joan was sharing a house with two old friends, Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, who was still lecturing for the British Council, and Patrick Kinross, who was now the RAF press officer. The house, which Joan called ‘a white box with windows’20 and Paddy said was ‘a crumbling Mamaluke palace’,21 was joined to the ninth-century mosque of Ibn Tûlûn in the old part of the city. Joan had certainly heard about Paddy – everyone had – and before long she had met Denise, befriended her and even consoled her in her
troubles. Denise wrote to Paddy: ‘I am now going to write to Joan and pour out my sorrows to her.’22 A few days later she wrote again to the elusive major:
This afternoon I sat on Sophie’s bed and longed for you to come in a ‘coup du vent’, and yell for a brandy and ginger ale – look at yourself – that look I know so well in the glass – and dash off for some rendez-vous – reeking of Sophie’s eau-de-Cologne – Darling, when will you come back – do please soon.
Ps Am giving a party for my birthday at Tara, on Dec. 1st. Could I have the pleasure of Major Leigh Fermor’s company. R.S.V.P.23
Paddy had also already heard about Joan. After his illness he had gone to the Lebanon in order to convalesce and then he had spent a few days in Crete, where he received a letter from Billy Moss. It was dated 5 December 1944: ‘A good thing has turned up in the shape of Joan Rainer [sic], and we have seen quite a bit of her recently. She’s got a good brain and she talks a lot about bull-fights and Spanish poets. I think you would like her.24
When Joan at last met Paddy Leigh Fermor at a party, shortly after Christmas 1944, both were immediately attracted to one another. Joan, who would not have admitted to being attracted by his glamour or his fame, found him irresistible. For Paddy, who saw himself as a Byronic figure, loving to dress up and engage in acts of derring-do, Joan was yet another challenge. They could not keep their hands off one another – not that Paddy was immediately going to abandon all her competitors. It was not long before he received a typed letter from Denise Menasce (normally her letters were handwritten).
Paddy, you little double-crosser, trying to kill two birds with one stone! I should have thought your technique was more polished . . . It ought to be by now. That maybe explains the Greek love call (just heard it) ‘I desire Major Leigh Fermor’. For ‘Qui trop embrasse mal etreint.’ My sweet little independent dachshund, I think some charitable soul ought to buy you a lead . . . Though who will ever hold it is a difficult problem. Maybe you can organize it so as to have a cinq à sept, sept à neuf, neuf à minuit, and a sleepy cession de minuit au petit jour. Though I feel you might get your time table wrong which would lead to the most awful chaos. Also there might be a slight complication about names. As calling Ines Joan, and Joan Denise, might lead to trouble. My advice is: take a little notebook into your bathroom, and learn up what you are going to say; and to WHOM.