Joan

by Simon Fenwick

  O Balasha Cantacuzene,

  Hear the war-cry of the Gael!

  In his last fierce fight, but he will fail.

  Cruelly his lady spurned him,

  Struck him when he asked for more,

  Flung him down the stairs and turned him

  Bag and baggage from the door.

  Oh unhappy gigolo

  Told to pack his traps and go;

  He may mope and he may mow, Echo only answers ‘No’

  It was as if Bowra was unable to direct his emotions openly to Joan, and instead turned his resentment against Paddy, who was deeply hurt by the attack when he read the poems. ‘There’s lots to be said about him, most of it v. good, but spoilt by a streak of v. bad,’ Paddy wrote in a letter to Deborah Devonshire. ‘My own private conclusion is that Maurice could become very faintly cracked for as long as it took to write a poem, then stepped back into being a marvellously funny fellow.’19

  Around the same time, Bowra also wrote a poem called ‘On the Coast of Terra Fermoor’. In it, Bowra pictures Joan as she sits wondering whether she should have chosen Paddy as a lover when he was so frequently absent and unreliable:

  On the coast of Terra Fermoor, when the wind is on the lea

  And the paddy-fields are sprouting round a morning cup of tea

  Sits a lovely girl a-dreaming, and she never thinks of me

  No, she never thinks of me

  At her morning cup of tea,

  Lovely girl with moon-struck eyes,

  Juno fallen from the skies,

  At the paddy-fields she looks

  Musing on her Tibetan books

  On the Coast of Terra Fermoor high above the Cretan Sea.

  Melting rainbows dance around her – what a tale she has to tell,

  How Carmichael, the Archangel, caught her in the asphodel,

  And coquetting choirs of Cherubs loudly sang the first Joel,

  Loudly sang the first Joel

  To their blessed Damozel.

  Ah, she’s doomed to wane and wilt

  Underneath her load of guilt;

  She will never, never say

  What the Cherubs sang that day,

  When the Wise Men came to greet her and a star from

  the heaven fell.

  Ah, her memory is troubled by a stirring of dead bones,

  Bodies that a poisoned poppy froze into a heap of stones;

  When the midnight voices call her, how she mews

  and mopes and moans.

  Oh the stirring of the bones

  And the rumble-tumble tones,

  How they rattle in her ears

  Over the exhausted years;

  Lovely bones she used to know

  Where the tall pink pansies blow

  And her heart is sad because she never saw the risen Jones.

  Cruel gods will tease and taunt her: she must always ask for more,

  Have her battlecock and beat it, slam the open shuttledore,

  Till the Rayners cease from reigning in the stews of Singapore.

  She will always ask for more,

  Waiting for her Minotaur;

  Peering through the murky maze

  For the sudden stroke that slays,

  Till some spirit made of fire

  Burns her up in her desire

  And her sighs and smiles go floating skyward to the starry shore.

  The verses include a number of allusions: Joan had taken lessons in Tibetan before the war; ‘Carmichael’ refers to members of the Cretan Resistance using ‘Kyr Michali’ (‘Mr Michael’) as a code name for Paddy; ‘Joel’ is a fusion of ‘Joan’ and ‘Noel’; ‘Poppy’ is a reference to Thérèse ‘Poppy’ Fould-Springer, the wife of Alan Pryce-Jones; and in 1950 John Rayner was living with his wife Miranda Lampson in Singapore. What reaction Bowra hoped to invoke in his muse is unclear, but we do know that Joan burnt her copies of the poems.20

  By the time of his visits to Hydra, there was less coolness between Paddy and Maurice Bowra, but they were never close. Nor did Bowra always fully understand how to behave with Joan. In August 1954 they had spent a fortnight travelling around Italy together. ‘I keep feeling he must be so terribly bored and that makes me worse a conversationalist than ever – but he seems to want me there the whole time and won’t see anyone else even here,’ she wrote. Bowra often behaved like a man obsessively in love, unaware that the object of his feelings could not return his devotion in the same way; despite being over sixty, he was too ignorant and inexperienced to realize how intimidating he could be.

  As Paddy had claimed in his letter to Durrell, being in Greece really did help him get ‘a move on’ with his writing, or at least as much movement as he ever managed in that regard: The Cretan Runner followed two years later. In 1957 his essays on the monasteries of France and Cappadocia were collected in one book, A Time to Keep Silence; the latter he saw as a companion piece to The Violins of St Jacques, his short novel inspired by his Caribbean travels published in 1953, spiritual searching as opposed to worldly pleasure. Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, which was dedicated by Paddy ‘with love to Joan’ was published in 1958. It was illustrated with Joan’s photographs and with drawings by John Craxton. In the preface to the book Paddy wrote that at the end of ‘this long and fascinating journey’ he had realized that the number of dog-eared and closely written notebooks was such a forbidding sight that to reduce all this material to a single volume was plainly out of the question, and so there would have to be a series. ‘Thus I could allow myself the luxury of long digressions.’ And few writers could be more digressive than Paddy. Even so, he regretted, he had to thin out material to prevent ballooning, and there were many omissions. ‘The most noticeable of these is vampires, their various nature and their origins, to which many pages should have been devoted [. . .] But fortunately, or unfortunately, vampires exist in other regions, though they are less prevalent than in the Mani; so I will be able to drag them in elsewhere as a red herring.’21 A few months after its publication, Mani won the 1959 Duff Cooper Memorial Prize.

  In the spring of 1960, after a decade of wandering, Craxton would finally find a small and dilapidated house to rent in the Venetian harbour of Chania, on the northern coast of Crete. Once settled he invited Joan – although, as things turned out, she did not enjoy her first holiday which was all the worse, as she wrote to Paddy, ‘as everyone is so disappointed when I turn up without you’. She was staying at the Plaza Hotel which was more modest than its name suggested.22

  Darling Paddy,

  This is a bit different to my other Cretan lives &, alas, not a millionth part as nice in spite of the agony one sometimes went through. Also I feel all wrong here without you.

  It was very exciting arriving Easter Saturday (no seats on boats or planes before that) & seeing the peacock blue green purple of the sea round the cliffs of the Akrotiri so far intenser than anything in Greece. A glorious sparkling day after muggy cloud in Athens. And the wild flowers – waist high white and yellow daisies, marigolds, gummy aromatic pink or white cistus, poppies, broom, gorse, every kind of purple, mauve, pink, blue, red, yellow flower you can think of – far better than anything in Sicily or Morocco.

  I stay at this still primitive hotel wth a wonderful view of the port opposite Johnny’s still more primitive house, where Charles Haldeman lives too – He is extremely clever & nice, I think, full of ideas & words & a great friend of Larry’s. another friend, also in the parea,* is Alan Bole, gentle & civilised, who has a friend in port. But I’m afraid the sailor life is too much for me. Johnny is literally entwined with them at every meal, the only times I see him as he is occupied otherwise. Really rather embarrassing & makes me feel de trop to say the least . . .

  Bless you my darling angel & do feel terribly missed & loved

  Huge hugs & love

  Joan

  Joan had fallen in love with Greece and she wanted to live there permanently – but with Paddy. She was now nearly fifty and, aside from the few yea
rs of her brief, failed marriage, she had never had her own home. She must long ago have given up hope of having children but now, at last, she wanted certainty. The next couple of years were spent looking for somewhere to live. Paddy’s intended series of books on Greece only had one successor, Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece, and, because Paddy was a painfully slow writer and always happy to be diverted in his researches, Roumeli took eight years to write. The book was finally published in 1966 although far from being a long volume, it was only half the length of The Traveller’s Tree. Its introduction includes both the book’s raison d’être and excuses for the way it has been written. ‘Roumeli,’ it begins, ‘is not to be found on maps of present-day Greece. It is not a political or an administrative delimitation but a regional, almost a colloquial, name; rather like, in England, the West or the North Country, the Fens or the Border. Its extent has varied and its position has wandered rather imprecisely.’ In fact, the book is more a series of reflections inspired by random journeys round northern Greece either by himself or with Joan, and sometimes with Joan and John Craxton, both of whom again illustrated the book. At the end of the introduction to Roumeli, Paddy listed the eight places in five countries where the book was written: St Fermin, Passerano nel Lazio, Forio, Locornan, Lismore, Dumbleton, Sevenhampton (the home of Ian and Ann Fleming) and Kalamitsi. The last of these, Kalamitsi, was a strip of land by Kardamyli, the village he and Joan had fallen in love with in the early 1950s. By the time Roumeli was published, it was Joan and Paddy’s new and permanent home.

  13

  Kardamyli

  When Paddy and Joan came to live in Kardamyli in the mid 1960s the war still stirred up deep emotions. The British Military Mission to Greece was not a glorious episode, and it ended in chaos and confusion in Kalamata, a town of strategic importance just to the north of where they were intending to live. British and other Allied forces had been forced to flee the region in 1941 in the face of an overwhelming German invasion force, abandoning the Greeks. Those who could slipped away in all sorts of vessels to the ports of Crete during the hours of darkness before they were spotted at daylight by the German bombers. The British troops who failed to escape were marched north to POW camps in Austria and Germany. The Battle of Crete was comprehensively lost. In the 1980s Paddy became involved in this still very contentious issue, when he supported the erection of a monument in Kalamata commemorating those who had served and lost their lives in the Allied evacuation forty years earlier.1 Ironically, it was the fact that Paddy had not been involved during the war in mainland Greece which made it easier for him to live there. Given their ties and the island’s familiarity Crete would have been the most obvious place for Paddy and Joan to build a new house, but for all its attractions it was impossible. They knew too many people and Paddy would forever have been interrupted in his work by visitors: ‘any passing Cretan – damn it,’2 as Joan said. Nothing would ever have been written there, and so they chose the Mani peninsula.

  After the death of her mother at the end of 1959, Joan came into a substantial inheritance, so she and Paddy were actively able to start looking for somewhere to live. In June 1962 Paddy found the perfect place when he and Ian Whigham – a friend of Graham’s – came upon a mule track leading to a little cove, about twenty minutes’ walk from the southern end of Kardamyli. There was not a house to be seen anywhere, just two rocky headlands and an island a quarter of a mile out to sea with a ruined chapel, and a vast expanse of glittering water. ‘Homer’s Greece, in fact,’ Paddy said. The land around the site was nothing but olive terraces, thistles, asphodels, thorns and pine trees. Kalamitsi itself means ‘the place of reeds’. Paddy and Joan had been hoping to buy one of the towers which were distinctive of this region, but that had proved impossible, and land was their next preference. They had sufficient funds, but first of all the current owners of the land had to be persuaded to sell. Angela Philkoura, who lived on the property, said ‘she couldn’t sell the land [. . .] sadly, money’s just bits of paper. It flies away like birds. But if you have land and olives and vegetables and chickens, you’ll never starve.’3 Confident all the same that he would get his way, and before any money had changed hands, the walls of the house were rising in Paddy’s imagination:

  Darling! I wonder how you feel about the Kardamyli project? It seems to me a criminal act to let it go. One would rue it for the rest of one’s life. (If we can get it that is!) [. . .]

  If we built it, I think it should be exactly as the locals build, same size and materials, but with bigger rooms and thicker walls. If it turned out too much at first one could simply proliferate into other rooms – there’s masses of space. Local stones & tiles, with those lovely Mani arches over doors if necessary, a loggia and balcony. Anything but abundant simplicity would be jarring in such surroundings – only I think we ourselves should be able to come down to ground level to be able to go in wet and barefoot from the sea, and there should be a vast comfortable main room, full of sea and sky, books, gramophone (when electricity comes), comfortable chairs, divans, a hearth, stone floor, a Ghyka or two (except they cost more than the whole outfit by now!) [. . .] I could go on writing about this forever, but it only delays this letter, so I’ll knock off now, with apologies for delay. My darling Joan, imagine the most beautiful place in the world and multiply it by ten! Heaps and heaps of fond love, my darling angel.4

  Nearly two years passed before contracts were finally exchanged and the building work was ready to start. In June 1965 the foundation stone was laid. The mason placed the head of a cock on the stone and cut it off with his trowel. The priest sprinkled holy water and chanted prayers – and everyone ate and drank a great deal. Joan and Paddy pitched their tents suitably, even symbolically for a house which was to be dedicated to books, in the exact place where the library would be. Gradually, walls, doors and window holes were made, rafters began to sprout and tiles to pile up under the olives, but it would be many months before the house could be occupied. The first visitors were invited even while Paddy and Joan were sleeping in the open air. In 1965, Deborah Devonshire visited at a time when Paddy was alone and Joan was back in England. Paddy wrote to warn her: ‘You could either doss down in Joan’s evacuated tent, or stay at the tiny hotel in the village (terrible loo but otherwise nice. No rot of that kind up here; we cut out the middleman and vanish into the middle distance with trowel and scroll.) [. . .] My theory is, there must have been a time when Chatsworth was only holes in the ground.’5

  For several years during the winter months, while the work continued, Paddy and Joan stayed in a hotel in Kalamata. Paddy, as ever, was gung-ho. Joan, who after all was paying for everything, was anxious. She wrote to Maurice Bowra.

  It was nice getting your letter, a lovely undeserved present in the midst of all the anxieties & frustrations here. I wanted to write to you ages ago but one is always either in a state of elation or despair, both cases impossible for letters. Things have been more difficult than one feared, starting with the architect breaking his leg the day he was first coming here. That does seem like bad luck & not his own hopelessness, but perhaps it is worse. Then the extremely expensive local topographer from here proved completely incompetent and we have only just been able to persuade another to come from Athens. Everything, as you can imagine, takes endless hours of discussion and unless one is there ceaselessly nagging & urging nothing at all gets done. We are getting on slowly, though the temporary road for building materials has been arranged. As it passes over at least ten families’ land that took a good deal of intrigue. And now the water pipes are ready to be laid, stone & workmen are waiting so it shouldn’t really take long once it gets going & the final plans are decided.

  Another cause of despair (but more mine than Paddy’s as he doesn’t think it will interfere with us) is that they intend to build an autostrada all down the Mani. Of course they will never finish it. The vast amount of wasted money will run out, and the bits that are done will remain, with the crumbling concrete and rusting iron f
rames of giant tourist hotels as fitting monuments to the Tourist Age in Greece. But they plan to start it at Kardamyli, ruthlessly pulling down Byzantine chapels, Turkish bridges. All the feeling of peace and remoteness will go by the time you see it, I hope next summer, it will probably rival the Côte d’Azur. It’s depressing trying to live in a Greece being developed by scheming philistine politicians. The latest law is that all tavernas, cafés, wine cellars with whitewashed vaults or wooden beams should have to have a wooden ceiling underneath [in case] (it seems never to have happened) a flake of whitewash should fall into a tourist’s glass. A more lasting law, alas, & almost as silly as the one in Hydra in force for our summer, making all the mules & donkeys wear sacks to catch the shit, in case the tourists disapproved of seeing it in the streets.

  In the meantime everything is extremely beautiful as it always is at this time of year, a washed & limpid golden look, mountains & islands & peninsulas appearing which had before been hidden by hazes, carpets of flowers & bright green corn coming up under the olives. Most days it is baking & swimming is still glorious. We go to Kardamyli two or three times a week, & come back total wrecks each time. Turned out of our tents by the equinoctial gales and rain. We found a curious but light & sunny jazz vorticist flat on the sea front here, above an avenue of jujube trees. Although it’s lovely still having summer I’m rather pining for civilisation again, & we’ve seen no-one since a heavenly visit of Barbara & Niko [Ghika], three weeks ago. I dream of food & all my delicious wine waiting in England. (By the way I’ve left that, & there’s quite a lot, to you & Graham & Cyril in my will.) I want to come back soon but must wait for the sacrifice of the cock when we lay the foundation stone, but will be back anyway before Christmas & am dying to see you again.6