A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The line of the song was almost the only English they knew. My first interlocutrix, who had taken her spectacles off, asked how old I was. I said “Nineteen,” though it wouldn’t be quite true for another five weeks. “We too!” they said. “And what do you do?” “I’m a student.” “We too! Wunderbar!” They were called Elizabeth-Charlotte, shortened to Liselotte or Lise—and Annie. Lise was from Donaueschingen, where the Danube rises, in the Black Forest, but she was living in Annie’s parents’ house in Stuttgart, where they were studying music. Both were pretty. Lise had unruly brown hair and a captivating and lively face, from which a smile was never absent for long; her glance, with her spectacles off, was wide, unfocussed and full of trusting charm. Annie’s fair hair was plaited and coiled in earphones, a fashion I’d always hated; but it suited her pallor and long neck and gave her the look of a Gothic effigy from the door of an abbey. They told me they were buying things for a young people’s party in celebration of the Dreikönigsfest. It was Epiphany, the 6th of January, the feast of the Three Kings. After some whispered confabulation, they decided to have pity on me and take me with them. Lise enterprisingly suggested we could invent a link with her family—“falls sie fragen, wo wir Sie aufgegabelt haben” (“Just in case they ask where we forked you out from”). Soon, in the comfortable bathroom of Annie’s absent parents—he was a bank manager and they were away in Basel on business—I was trying to make myself presentable: combing my hair, putting on the clean shirt and flannel bags I had extracted before leaving my rucksack in charge of the café. I hadn’t fixed up anything for the night yet, they said, when I rejoined them: it was unorthodox and would be uncomfortable—but would I like to doss down on the sofa? “No, no, no!” I cried: far too much of a nuisance for them, after all their kindness; but I didn’t insist too long. “Don’t say you’re staying here!” Annie said. “You know how silly people are.” There was a feeling of secrecy and collusion in all this, like plans for a midnight feast. They were thrilled by their recklessness. So was I.

  Collusion looked like breaking down when we got to the party. “Can I introduce,” Annie began. “Darf ich Ihnen vorstellen—.” Her brow puckered in alarm; we hadn’t exchanged surnames. Lise quickly chimed in with “Mr. Brown, a family friend.” She might have been a captain of hussars, turning the tide of battle by a brilliant swoop. Later a cake was ceremoniously cut, and a girl was crowned with a gold cardboard crown. Songs were sung in honour of Epiphany and the Magi, some in unison, some solo. Asked if there were any English ones (as I had hoped, in order to show Lise and Annie I wasn’t a godless barbarian), I sang We Three Kings of Orient Are. A later song, celebrating the Neckar Valley and Swabia, was sung in complex harmony. I can’t remember the words completely, but it has stuck in my mind ever since. I put it down here as I’ve never met anyone who knows it.

  Kennt Ihr das Land in deutschen Gauen,

  Das schönste dort am Neckarstrand?

  Die grünen Rebenhügel schauen

  Ins Tal von hoher Felsenwand.

  Es ist das Land, das mich gebar,

  Wo meiner Väter Wiege stand.

  Drum sing ich heut’ und immerdar:

  Das schöne Schwaben ist mein Heimatland!

  Then someone put Couchés dans le foin on the gramophone, and Sentimental Journey, and everyone danced.

  * * *

  When I woke up on the sofa—rather late; we had sat up talking and drinking Annie’s father’s wine before going to bed—I had no idea where I was; it was a frequent phenomenon on this journey. But when I found my hands muffled like a pierrot’s in the scarlet silk sleeves of Annie’s father’s pyjamas, everything came back to me. He must have been a giant (a photograph on the piano of a handsome ski-booted trio in the snow—my host with his arms round his wife and daughter—bore this out). The curtains were still drawn and two dressing-gowned figures were tiptoeing about the shadows. When they realized I was awake at last, greetings were exchanged and the curtains drawn. It only seemed to make the room very few degrees lighter. “Look!” Lise said, “no day for walking!” It was true: merciless gusts of rain were thrashing the roofscape outside. Nice weather for young ducks. “Armer Kerl!—Poor chap!” she said, “you’ll have to be our prisoner till tomorrow.” She put on another log and Annie came in with coffee. Halfway through breakfast, Sunday morning bells began challenging each other from belfry to belfry. We might have been in a submarine among sunk cathedrals. “O Weh!” Lise cried, “I ought to be in church!”; then, peering at the streaming panes: “Too late now.” “Zum Beichten, perhaps,” Annie said. (Beichten is confession.) Lise asked: “What for?” “Picking up strangers.” (Lise was Catholic, Annie Protestant; there was a certain amount of sectarian banter.) I urged their claim to every dispensation for sheltering the needy, clothing the naked—a flourish of crimson sleeve supported this—and feeding the hungry. Across the boom of all these bells a marvellous carillon broke out. It is one of the most famous things in Stuttgart. We listened until its complicated pattern faded into silence.

  The evening presented a problem in advance. They were ineluctably bidden to a dinner party by a business acquaintance of Annie’s father, and though they didn’t like him they couldn’t plausibly chuck it. But what was to become of me? At last, screwing up their courage, Annie rang his wife up: could they bring a young English friend of Lise’s family—informally clad, because he was on a winter walking tour across Europe? (It sounded pretty thin.) There was a twitter of assent from the other end; the receiver was replaced in triumph. She, it seemed, was very nice; he was an industrialist—steinreich, rolling—“You’ll get plenty to eat and drink!” —Annie said he was a great admirer of Lise’s. “No, no!” Lise cried, “of Annie’s!” “He’s awful! You’ll see! You must defend us both.”

  We were safe till ten o’clock next morning, when the maid’s bus got back; she had gone to her Swabian village for the Dreikönigsfest. We drew the curtains to block out the deluge and put on the lights—it was best to treat the dismal scene outside as if it were night—and lolled in dishabille all the morning talking by the fire. I played the gramophone—St. Louis Blues, Stormy Weather, Night and Day—while the girls ironed their dresses for the dinner party and the submarine morning sped by, until it was time for Annie and me to face the weather outdoors: she for luncheon—a weekly fixture with relations—me to collect my stuff and to buy some eggs for an omelette. Out-of-doors, even in a momentary lull, the rain was fierce and hostile and the wind was even worse. When Annie got back about five, I was doing a sketch of Lise; an attempt at Annie followed; then I taught them how to play Heads-Bodies-and-Legs. They took to this with a feverish intensity and we played until tolling bells reminded us how late it was. In my case, all that a flat-iron and a brush and comb could achieve had been done. But the girls emerged from their rooms like two marvellous swans. The door bell rang. It was the first sign of the outer world since my invasion, and a bit ominous. “It’s the car! He always sends one. Everything in style!”

  Downstairs, a chauffeur in leggings held his cap aloft as he opened the door of a long Mercedes. When we had rustled in he enveloped us in bearskin from the waist down. “You see?” the girls said, “High life!”

  We soared through the liquid city and up into the wooded hills and alighted at a large villa of concrete and plate glass. Our host was a blond, heavy man with bloodshot eyes and a scar across his forehead. He hailed my companions with gallantry; me, much more guardedly. His dinner-jacket made me feel still more of a ragamuffin. (I cared passionately about these things; but the fact of being called Michael Brown[4]—we had to stick to it now—induced a consoling sense of disembodiment.) Perhaps to account for my lowly outfit among these jewelled figures, he introduced me to the women as ‘der englische Globetrotter,’ which I didn’t like much. Men guests who were unacquainted toured the room in the German way, shaking hands and reciprocally announcing their names: I did the same. “Muller!” “Brown!” “Ströbel!” “Brown!” “Tschudi!” “Brown!”
“Röder!” “Brown!” “Altmeier!” “Brown!” “von Schröder!” “Brown!” ... An old man—a professor from Tübingen, I think, with heavy glasses and a beard—was talking to Lise. We wrung each other’s hands, barking “Braun!” and “Brown!” simultaneously. Snap! I avoided the girls’ glance.

  Except for the panorama of the lights of Stuttgart through the plate glass, the house was hideous—prosperous, brand new, shiny, and dispiriting. Pale woods and plastics were juggled together with stale and pretentious vorticism, and the chairs resembled satin boxing-gloves and nickel plumbing. Carved dwarfs with red noses stoppered all the bottles on the oval bar and glass ballerinas pirouetted on ashtrays of agate that rose from the beige carpets on chromium stalks. There were paintings—or tinted photographs—of the Alps at sunset and of naked babies astride Great Danes. Everything looked better, however, after I’d swallowed two White Ladies taken from a tray that was carried about by a white-gloved butler. I helped myself to cigarettes from a seventeenth-century vellum-bound Dante, with the pages glued together and scooped hollow, the only book in sight. Down the dinner table, beside napkins that were half mitres and half Rajput turbans, glittered a promising arsenal of glasses, and by the time we had worked our way through them, the scene was delightfully blurred. From time to time during dinner, I intercepted a puzzled bloodhound scrutiny from the other end of the table. My host obviously found me a question mark; possibly a bit of a rotter, and up to no good; I didn’t like him either. I bet he’s a terrific Nazi, I thought. I asked the girls later, and they both exclaimed “Und wie!” in vehement unison: “And how!” I think he found something fishy, too, about my being on Du terms with his unwilling favourites, while he, most properly, was still restricted to Sie. (We had drunk threefold Brüderschaft and embraced in the Cologne style the night before.) When we were back in the salon, the men armed with cigars like truncheons and brandy rotating in glasses like transparent footballs, the party began to lose coherence. The host flogged it along with a jarring laugh even louder than the non-stop gramophone, between-whiles manoeuvring first Lise and then Annie into a window-bay whence each extricated herself in turn like a good-humoured Syrinx. I watched them as I listened to my namesake Dr. Braun, a learned and delightful fogey who was telling me all about the Suevi and the Alemanni and the Hohenstaufens and Eberhardt the Bearded. When the evening broke up, and Lise and Annie were back in the car, our host stood leaning against the top of the car door, idiotically telling them they looked like two Graces. I ducked under his arm and slipped in between them. “Three now!” Lise said. He looked at me with disfavour. “Ah! And where shall I tell him to drop you, junger Mann?”

  “At the Graf Zeppelin, please.” I sensed a tremor of admiration on either side: even Lise couldn’t have done better.

  “Ach so?” His opinion of me went up. “And how do you like our best hotel?”

  “Clean, comfortable and quiet.”

  “Tell the manager if you have any complaints. He’s a good friend of mine.”

  “I will! And thanks very much.”

  We had to take care about conversation because of the chauffeur. A few minutes later, he was opening the car with a flourish of his cockaded cap before the door of the hotel and after fake farewells, I strolled about the hall of the Graf Zeppelin for a last puff at the ogre cigar. When the coast was clear I hared through the streets and into the lift and up to the flat. They were waiting with the door open and we burst into a dance.

  * * *

  At half-past nine next morning, we were waving good-bye across a tide of Monday morning traffic. I kept looking upwards and back, flourishing my glittering wand and bumping into busy Stuttgarters until the diminishing torsos frantically signalling from the seventh-storey window were out of sight. I felt as Ulysses must have felt, gazing astern while some island of happy sojourn dropped below the horizon.

  * * *

  I followed the banks of the Neckar, crossed it, and finally left it for good. Suddenly, when it was much too late, I remembered the Kitsch-Museum in Stuttgart; a museum, that is, of German and international bad taste, which the girls had said I mustn’t miss. (The décor last night—for this was how the subject had cropped up—could have been incorporated as it stood.) I slept at Göppingen and tried with the help of the dictionary to write three letters in German; to Heidelberg, Bruchsal and Stuttgart. Further on I got a funny joint answer from Lise and Annie; there was a rumpus when Annie’s parents got back; not about my actually staying in the flat, which remained a secret to the end. But the bottles we had recklessly drained were the last of a fabulously rare and wonderful vintage that Annie’s father had been particularly looking forward to. Heaven only knew what treasured Spätlese from the banks of the Upper Mosel: nectar beyond compare. They had prudently blamed the choice on me. Outrage had finally simmered down to the words: “Well, your thirsty friend must know a lot about wine.” (Totally untrue.) “I hope he enjoyed it.” (Yes.) It was years before the real enormity of our inroads dawned on me.

  * * *

  Now the track was running south-south-east across Swabia. Scattered conifers appeared, and woods sometimes overshadowed the road for many furlongs. They were random outposts, separated by leagues of pasture and ploughland, of the great mass, lying dark towards the south-west, of the Black Forest. Beyond it the land rippled away to the Alps.

  On straight stretches of road where the scenery changed slowly, singing often came to the rescue; and when songs ran short, poetry. At home, and at my various schools, and among the people who took me in after scholastic croppers, there had always been a lot of reading aloud. (My mother was marvellously gifted in this exacting skill, and imaginative and far-ranging in choice; there had been much singing to the piano as well.) At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary. (I was at the age when one’s memory for poetry or for languages—indeed for anything—takes impressions like wax and, up to a point, lasts like marble.)

  The range is fairly predictable and all too revealing of the scope, the enthusiasms and the limitations, examined at the eighteenth milestone, of a particular kind of growing up. There was a great deal of Shakespeare, numerous speeches, most of the choruses of Henry V, long stretches of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (drunk in subconsciously and only half understood, by acting Starveling, the shortest part in the play, at the age of six); a number of the Sonnets, many detached fragments; and, generally, a fairly wide familiarity. Several Marlowe speeches followed and stretches of Spenser’s Pro- and Epithalamion; most of Keats’s Odes; the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge; very little Shelley, no Byron. (Amazingly to me today, I scarcely considered him a poet at all.) Nothing from the eighteenth century except Gray’s Elegy and some of The Rape of the Lock; some Blake; The Burial of Sir John Moore; bits of The Scholar Gypsy; some Scott, fragments of Swinburne, any amount of Rossetti, for whom I had had a long passion, now quite vanished; some Francis Thompson and some Dowson; one sonnet of Wordsworth; bits of Hopkins; and, like all English people with any Irish links, Rolleston’s translation of The Dead of Clonmacnois; a great deal of Kipling; and some of the verses from Hassan. We now move on to Recent Acquisitions: passages from Donne and Herrick and Quarles, one poem of Raleigh, one of Sir Thomas Wyatt, one of Herbert, two of Marvell; a few Border ballads; an abundance of A.E. Housman; some improper stretches of Chaucer (mastered chiefly for popularity purposes at school); a lot of Carroll and Lear. No Chesterton or Belloc, beyond bits of the Cautionary Tales. In fact, apart from those mentioned, very little from the present century. No Yeats later than the Ronsard paraphrase and Innisfree and Down by the Salley Gardens; but this belonged more to singing than reciting; of Pound or Eliot, not a word, either learnt or read; and of younger modern poets now venera
ble, nothing. If someone had asked me point blank who my favourite contemporary poets were, I would have answered Sacheverell, Edith and Osbert Sitwell, in that order: (Dr. Donne and Gargantua and The Hundred and One Harlequins had appeared in white paper pamphlets while I was at school; I felt I had broken into dazzling new territory). Prose writers would have been Aldous Huxley, Norman Douglas and Evelyn Waugh. This is the end of the short section; but if the road stretched interminably, longer pieces would come to the surface: all Horatius and a lot of Lake Regillus, hardy survivors from an early craze; Grantchester; and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam—intact then, now a heap of fragments hard to re-assemble. The standard drops steeply after this: as I pounded along, limericks pinpointed the planet from Siberia to Cape Horn with improper and imaginative acts, and when they came to an end, similar themes would blossom forth in a score of different metres. It is a field where England can take on all challengers.