To their surprise, Paddy and Joan found an acceptable small hotel in rooms over a grocer’s shop. There was a comfortable bed and some wicker chairs. The owner, Socrates Phaliréas, was a gigantic man but a civilized host, and it turned out that he was the cousin of a sculptor friend in Athens. The little town of Kardamyli felt welcoming and leisurely; the weather was temperate, protected from the harsh northern winds by the screen of the Taygetus mountains. The following morning, as he was drinking his tea outside in the street, Paddy was thinking of the Mourtzini and Palaeologi – the ancient hereditary rulers of Byzantium. He asked when the last of the Mourtzinos family had died out. He was informed that, far from being dead, the last of them, a fisherman named Strati, lived down the street. Indeed, Strati was sitting in his cottage doorway, busy making a fish trap. From this a conversation ensued – from which Paddy built up an exotic fantasy about returning Strati to his rightful place as Emperor of Constantinople: ‘the generous strength of a second glass of ouzo accelerated these cogitations.’ By the end of the discussion the bottle was empty and the caïque for Areopolis was leaving. Paddy said that he already felt inclined to settle in the small hotel with his books and his papers. Too remote to fear an influx of tourists, this would be a good place to live and to write. In his notebook, he wrote that the pillows on the bed were unlike the usual cannonballs and that Kardamyli, in its own quiet way, was perfect. He also wrote that when they left that afternoon a slow drizzle had begun and Joan and he quarrelled. (‘I grumbling because she grumbled so.’)
The caïque disembarked at the little port of Limeni. To reach Areopolis, they ascended winding steps ‘through olives, angle after angle, till at last a straight road led into the little Maniot capital . . . Cool mountain, heady air. “Welcome” from everybody. (Police at once appear with telegram: “O.K!”).’ He continued:
Airy feeling of a plateau town like Guatemala City and amazing one of remoteness. Stroll along gently sloping cobbled main street, murmurs of welcome from groups sitting out round tables. Joan’s eye caught by a big round wicker hat. Woman behind counter beckoned her in.
JOAN: ‘How much?’
WOMAN: ‘Ten . . . twelve . . . fifteen.’
DEEP MAN’S VOICE BEHIND COUNTER: ‘Ten.’
A bit of tape was fitted on to tie under the chin.
JOAN: ‘Well how much now.’
WOMAN: ‘Ten for the hat . . . let me see . . . and then with the tape.’
MAN, gruffly: ‘Ten.’1
Greece had taken hold of Paddy and Joan’s imagination but it would take more than a decade, during which they were often separated for long periods and leading very different lives, before they could settle there permanently.
Paddy’s notebooks came in all shapes, sizes and covers, and in them – amidst lists of names and telephone numbers – he noted down private thoughts, reflections and fragments of conversations. In a diary he kept at Gadencourt, dated December 1951, he wrote ‘Girl in the Pergola: Presque tous les noirs sont dérogés. [illegal] ??? What does she mean?’
Paris. How I hate it all of a sudden.
The aim of climbing: to appear to take for granted what you don’t at all take for granted. Remedy [sic] for success: (a) Charm and an innate lack of cynicism. (b) I have awareness that I hardly believe in.
Get the French book about Greece from DIVAN.*
See FREYA in Paris.
In the looking-glass room. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Sucking my breath in so the ribs will show.’
How badly translated slang and banter comes off. All except originals alas. The cliché doesn’t survive translation.
So-and-so is a good old-fashioned bigoted atheist, so please keep off the subject. You know how susceptible people are and it’s so easy to hurt his feelings. It gives him something to hang on to – an anchor in life, you see.2
Occasionally, although not often, Paddy mentions Joan. Relations between them were not always easy, in this period and throughout their lives. There are allusions to rows and arguments in Paddy’s journals, but not their causes. Perhaps because they were apart so often, when they were together there were sometimes difficulties in adapting to one another. They were, after all, very different people. Paddy sometimes roused Joan from her natural reserve into powerful emotion. In the autumn of 1950, for example, they were exploring northern Greece. One evening in October, they had come from a village lived in by Pomaks or Slavic Muslims and arrived in Xanthi, a large city close to the Turkish border. Paddy wrote:
Lute-playing Turk. (Gypsy?) Strangely renaissance-looking instrument. Pleasant sitting in muleteers café – vine trellis outside, smell of cooking. Sunlit dust through the windows with waggons, saddlemakers, branworkers’ rope, harness shops – then poplar trees and the limestone mountains, with the white monastery on its flank.
Lonely walking in Xanthi. Tap of the coppersmith’s hammer. Spotless sky over the low semi-circular roofs, and mountains clustering in great lumps of limestone. Outside a café, a vain old Turk, with a rainbow-coloured turban, beautifully embroidered bolero and short shalvar, a military band playing. The thousand-strong ambulatory crowd, the strings of electric light, the crowds drinking. A metropolis. The silent, stone-roofed Pomak world a whole world away, lunar or martian experience. The bus driver helps with the luggage to the hotel. Terrible row with Joan, like a storm breaking after oppressive day, with only a lovely moment of happiness drinking and then driving on from Porto Lago. Now I’m alone in the square, she in tears in her room, both utterly miserable.
2 October Lying reading Martin Chuzzlewit. Sky gets overclouded all of a sudden, a desperate downpour, the knell of summer. Walk with J. – all happy now after a tremendous mutually vituperative blow off – through the narrow streets to the stadium for the scratched football match. The river in sudden spate – brown, roaring, turbulent.
Up, as dusk fades, to the monastery. Up, up. Four young boys with a rifle each, 2 tommy guns and a bren gun (Note: Communist leaflets), and an eldritch man who has served with Force 133 & blown up railways with Miller, a sailor kitbag. As we left, youngest and prettiest, sighing deeply, lifted his trilby, saying, ‘There you are, you lucky things. You travel all over the world – look at you, miles from London. Whereas me, all I do is stay in Xanthi.’ Immense, friendly, dolorous grin. Night quite fallen as we descend. Twinkling galaxy, the roar of the brown river and the tangos ascending through the dark.3
It is as if Joan’s feelings, and Paddy’s own, were registered by him as yet more sensory experience – another part of the environment he was moving through. It is an effect he achieves again when, in another notebook, he writes about leaving Gadencourt. The extract is dated 3 May [1952]:
In Tôtes, Normandy. Gloom of returning to England tomorrow. . . . J. and I lie on our beds in a dark bedroom, looking forward to what is going to be a tremendous dinner. Paté with truffles, then either quenelles de brochet or a lovely trout with almonds, followed by an entrecote or a chicken . . . Oh, sadness, sadness of uprooting after my long Norman winter at Gadencourt. Lovely moment, sitting under the apple tree in the garden last night, heavy smell of the mown grass lying round in swaths, the shadows deepening under the branches, the leaves swallowing up the mistletoe in all the trees a few gnats in the air, all the sadness of spring, navy blue swallows playing and wheeling, a blackbird singing . . .
Or just walking in Parga on Yanina Island:
The lovely lemon groves of Anthousa. Slow walk back with Joan in happy silence – talking now and then, below the path, the – to me – most beautiful sight in the world: pale blue late afternoon sea seen through the twisting trunks and leaves of olive trees. The women carrying loads of sticks and thorns on their heads, smiling and wishing good evening, stopping to chat, ‘Won’t you take us to England?’ ‘if you are with a pretty girl,’ the old ones croak, ‘Take care they don’t steal her!’4
Paddy wanted to meet all that life had to offer. Many years later, Xan Fielding was asked by The Times to draft an obituary of hi
s closest friend. Paddy’s appetite for life, he wrote, was in Paddy’s own phrase, ‘that of a sea-lion for the flung bloater’.5
Xan and Daphne were very much part of Joan and Paddy’s lives. Daphne was fourteen years older than Xan. They married in 1953 after a prolonged divorce from her first husband, the Marquess of Bath. ‘When I first knew her,’ wrote Deborah Devonshire, ‘[Daphne] was synonymous with enjoyment, laughter and high jinks. She was one who lifted the spirits with her energy and overflowing good nature . . . Daphne alone and in the prime of life meant lovers; one or two serious, some here today and gone tomorrow. Her admirers were legion.’6 Her husband, who was also promiscuous, wanted a divorce because he had found someone he wanted to marry. By this time Daphne had fallen in love with Xan. (‘Daphne told Peter [Quennell] that she’s never been in love with anyone like this before – so it all sounds wonderful,’ wrote Joan.) Xan agreed to marry her but broke down in tears in front of Paddy, his best man, the day before his wedding because he did not want to go through with the ceremony.7
Xan could not bring himself to tell Daphne his feelings. The wedding went ahead and Xan and Daphne started their married lives in Cornwall. Paddy went to visit them while working on the proofs for The Traveller’s Tree. He had started his journey in London and arrived at the station in Looe:
His suitcase had fallen . . . open and its contents scattered. The floor and seats were littered with his clothes, a dispersed ream of foolscap paper, a ship’s compass, several boxes of Swan Vestas, the remainder of a bag of toffee and a score or so of loose cigarettes which had escaped from the big blue box of fifty Players constituting his minimum daily ration. ‘I was looking for my sand shoes,’ he explained. ‘I couldn’t very well start off from Paddington wearing them – ah good, here they are – but I wanted to arrive at the seaside appropriately shod.’8
Both Xan and Daphne intended to write for a living but when Daphne’s first book of memoirs, Mercury Presides, was published in 1954, Joan was unimpressed by her talents. She wrote to Paddy: ‘Have you got Daphne’s book? I must say it’s far worse than I thought it would be. I really thought she was quite literate – I thought the first few chapters must be a skit on “My Royal Past” sort of thing but apparently not.’9
In 1954 their landlady gave up the Charlotte Street tenancy and so, after five years, Paddy and Joan were obliged to move out of the flat they had been renting and found themselves without a London home again. However, their friend the Greek artist Niko Hadjikyriakos-Ghika offered them his family summer home on the island of Hydra as somewhere to live, since he and his wife Antigone – ‘Tiggy’ – rarely went there. Paddy wrote to Ann Fleming:
. . . it’s a large house on a slope with descending terraces like a Babylonian ziggurat, a thick-walled, empty thing surrounded by arid reddish rocks and olives and almond and fig trees, and the mountainside goes cascading down in a series of tile roofs and a church cupola or two to the sea . . . The sun sets in a most spectacular way over these mountains and the sea, and every night Joan and I watch it from the top terrace drinking ouzo, then eating late – about 9, when it is dark – by lamplight at the other end of the terrace.10
Everything looked ‘insanely beautiful’, he added.
Among the friends who came to visit them during their time on Hydra was Maurice Bowra, who stayed with them on two occasions, both for long periods. Bowra felt at home in the Mediterranean. ‘Joan, oh dear, Joan has got a house on an island,’ he wrote to their mutual friend, Billa Harrod. ‘It sounds bliss to me. Dear Paddy will be there and I have decided to be angelic to him and treat him like a great writer . . . though of course one sees his toes more.’11 Bowra’s visit coincided with one by Ann Fleming, who first got to know him well there. She reported to her brother, Hugo Charteris:
The conversations were largely on events before the birth of Christ so I have become a good listener! Although Maurice and P. are supposed to detest each other they appear to have totally similar tastes including Joan Rayner – they both love Greeks, Greece, talking, reciting, war, medals and royalty; I had not realised Maurice had enjoyed 1914–18, and staggering up the hill from harbour to home we invariably sang ‘Keep the home fires burning’.12
Paddy told Lawrence Durrell that it was ‘the best bit of high level cadging [he had] done for years, a real haul . . . It’s a perfect Shangrila for work, and at last I’m getting a move on.’13 At the time he was working on both Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese and The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis’s account of his time helping British forces around the villages of Crete during the war. The book was published in 1955. That summer Maurice Bowra came back to Hydra, this time bringing with him the historian Eka Kantorowicz, a close friend from Harvard. They were joined by Cyril Connolly and Giorgios Boukas, a photographer. Boukas took a number of pictures, including one of Joan playing chess with Kantorowicz on a whitewashed terrace while Maurice sat behind them looking ‘jovially radiant’ (in Paddy’s words), together with Connolly and Paddy standing at the rear. Connolly called the photograph ‘one of the key-pictures’ – the fact that he was in it being, of course, a mere coincidence.
Eventually they had to leave – in part because Paddy was beginning to feel restless again but also because of the political situation in Cyprus. Because the British were resisting calls for enosis – the unification of Cyprus with Greece – there was growing anti-British feeling in the country, and Paddy and Joan began to feel uncomfortable. If they entered a bar or a cafe, it fell silent. When George Katsimbalis refused to dine with them, Joan was in tears. Paddy, in fact, supported unification with Greece but they were very deeply hurt. In the autumn they packed up and left.
Joan loved Hydra. She would have stayed indefinitely, as Ghika wished them to. Not long after, however, the house was burnt down – by the gardener. Ghika had left Tiggy for Barbara Warner and the gardener found this unpardonable. Years later, Paddy recalled how ‘this lovely house was white and grey-shuttered at the top of a steep escalade of terraces with crags above it and gorges shooting down to the sea. In summer it was so hot we had luncheon in a sort of cellar dining-room and dinner under the stars or the moon on one of the terraces or in the port. The scenery was exactly like one of Ghika’s pictures.’14
Now that she had to return to London, Joan persuaded the trustees to buy her 13 Chester Row near Sloane Square, which would serve as a base while Paddy and she went travelling. However it was only a house, never a home. Unquestionably they remembered Hydra when several years later they built a house of their own at Kardamyli. It was more modest than Ghika’s, but Joan’s sole requirement was that from it she must be able to watch the sun go down over the sea.15
At the time of the first of his two visits, Bowra, who had been Warden of Wadham College since 1938, was also Vice Chancellor of Oxford. He was a complex, difficult man and often emotionally out of his depth, but he appreciated the company of warm, intellectual and witty women. Although predominantly homosexual, he also had strong feelings for women and, after she was widowed, he claimed to have got down on one knee and proposed marriage to Ann Fleming. However, as Noel Annan wrote, ‘Perhaps most of all he loved Joan Eyres Monsell.’ The philosopher Stuart Hampshire said that they enjoyed ‘a short fling’, and Bowra himself openly suggested that their relationship might have been more than platonic.16 He felt physically for her and she was willing to listen to him. Early in the 1950s Joan wrote to Paddy after a weekend when he had been staying with her at the Mill House.
He really is fantastic. He talked from 5.30 till 12.30 without drawing breath, eating and drinking enormously. Primitive people, languages and songs, Shamanism, politics, the first war, guilt, old age, death, homosexuality (or, rather, lack of it) at Oxford now, Eliot, Yeats, Valery and Rilke. The whole of the next day was just as good. He is full of ideas about new books to write and has nearly finished one about the songs and poems of primitive tribes. It sounds fascinating. He has got stuck with the Greek one he is meant to be doing. It seems s
o frightful with that tremendous brain and all that intellectual curiosity should not live forever.17
Paddy, however, had got in the way of Bowra’s pseudo-romance. Indeed, anyone who came into Bowra’s circle was a potential threat. When the economist Roy Harrod told Bowra that he intended to marry, Bowra replied that he was ‘strongly in favour’ of his marrying, ‘provided 1) It is not into the upper classes 2) she has money 3) you are prepared to go through [. . .] the revolutionary changes it means in your life. Write me a full account at once.’18 As it turned out, Harrod’s bride had turned out to be Billa Cresswell, of whom Bowra strongly approved, and he was delighted. But when it came to Joan, for whom his feelings were intense and possessive, men were more of a problem. In the habit of composing satirical verses about both his friends and his enemies, he included both Paddy and Joan among the subjects. In 1950 he had written a poem about Paddy called ‘The Wounded Gigolo’ (Bowra said that Paddy and Xan Fielding were ‘hero gigolos’) in which he made references to Paddy’s affair with Balasha Cantacuzene. Bowra imagined Paddy, ‘The Wounded Gigolo’ of the title, as having been cast out of her house by Balasha, and he was desperate to get back in. ‘He will not admit he’s been beaten/While there’s money to be made.’ The truth, as Bowra must have known well, was that Paddy left her to join the army. For ‘Balasha’ read ‘Joan’, however, and the attack is even more wounding.
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