Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

The house was called Baleni, and it is lovingly described in this volume. Here Paddy spent the last years before the war, interspersed with visits to England and France. He was at Baleni when war was declared, and he immediately went back to London to join up. Paddy and Balasha did not meet again till long after the war.

  Prompted by his dash of Irish blood, Paddy enlisted in the Irish Guards; but the War Office had marked him out as a fluent Greek speaker, and he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps. In the winter of 1940 he served as British liaison officer to the Greek army fighting the Italians in Albania. After the fall of Greece his unit moved to the island of Crete, where Paddy took part in the battle against the German airborne invasion. After the Germans captured Crete, Paddy became one of the handful of SOE officers whose job it was to coordinate the various resistance units on the island.

  Paddy spent a year and a half in Crete, dressed as a mountain shepherd. He returned to Cairo at the time of the Italian surrender, bringing the Italian divisional commander with him. A few months later he was parachuted back into the island, in command of the Anglo-Cretan team which planned and carried out the abduction of General Kreipe in April 1944. This meticulously planned operation, carried out under the noses of the Germans, earned Paddy the DSO. Ill Met by Moonlight, written by Paddy’s friend and second in command Bill Stanley Moss and published in 1950, describes the abduction; it was later made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde. Paddy has never published his account of that time, but this volume contains an extract of a report he wrote many years later, which has not appeared before.

  That same year, 1950, saw the publication of Paddy’s first book The Traveller’s Tree, about the travels he had made in the Caribbean in 1947—8. The Traveller’s Tree won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature, and established Paddy as a writer of remarkable talent. At the same time, III Met by Moonlight confirmed him as a war hero, at a time when men were very much judged by what sort of a war they had had. He embodied the Renaissance idea of a man of action who is also a scholar. It was a romantic image that his looks, charm and natural buoyancy made all the more engaging.

  Paddy makes friends easily; and one of the joys of his company is that he talks just as he writes. Around a convivial table, he would at first be no more than one voice among many. Then, sparked by a single idea, sometimes even a single word, he would be off, in pursuit of a trail only he could follow. Leaping up to find a reference in Shakespeare or Sir Thomas Browne he would plunge across, say, sixteenth-century Europe, raising the shades of princes and cardinals, creating fantastic castles in the air, pausing to admire a bend in the Danube before diving into a maze of linguistic analogies, which might end with a chunk of Browning recited from memory or his own translation of ‘Widdecombe Fair’ into Italian. These extraordinary monologues, verbal roller-coasters that leave his audience dazzled and exhilarated, are completely spontaneous and unrehearsed. He has what the Cretans call leventeiá—a charm and zest for life that other, duller folk can only envy.

  To hear him talk one might think that his writing must come easily, but it does not. Writing for Paddy has always been a laborious process, every draft being rewritten and corrected over and over until it reaches his own high standard. In his youth he wrote in cheap hostelries, the houses of friends, ruined castles, anywhere where there was a room with a table and not too many distractions. It was the urge to find a quiet place to write that led him to stay in a number of monasteries, including the beautiful Benedictine monastery of Saint-Wandrille in Normandy. His experience of the monastic life was the subject of his next book A Time to Keep Silence. And four years later, in 1956, he published his only novel The Violins of Saint-Jacques, which was made into an opera by Malcolm Williamson.

  His travels in Greece, begun when he was twenty-one, continued through the late 1940s and 50s. Often accompanied by the photographer Joan Rayner (née Eyres Monsell) whom he first met in Cairo during the war and was later to marry, Paddy explored the remotest parts of Greece: by bus, or mule, or on foot. Between journeys they lived in Greece for months at a time, usually on the island of Euboea, or on Hydra, in the house of the painter Nico Ghika.

  Paddy’s very personal view of Greece is described in two books which have become classics: Mani, published in 1958, and Roumeli in 1966. Mani is the southernmost part of Greece. When Paddy explored it, it was known as an inhospitable wilderness of parched rock and blinding sun where only the most back-breaking toil permitted a few hardy peasants to eke out a living. Through Paddy’s eyes, the Mani comes vividly to life. The Maniots with their towered villages, their deadly vendettas (sons of the family were called ‘guns’), their ancient customs and long history, their struggles against the Turks and their piratical past, become heroic figures in a landscape that, for all its harshness, is also wonderfully beautiful.

  Paddy and Joan decided to settle in the Mani. After a long search they found the perfect place, on a little promontory overlooking a bay near Kardamyli. When they bought the land in 1964, there was no water or electricity in that part of Greece. The house, designed by Paddy and Joan who supervised every stage of its construction, was built with stone quarried by the local stonemason from the rock on which it stood. Not a single power tool was used to build it. On one level it is a simple, unpretentious house, its doors and windows usually open to the sea air; but every detail has been thought out, and every proportion is right.

  It was here, in a study overlooking the olive trees and cypresses in their garden with the sea beyond, that Paddy wrote A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, and where he is now working on the third volume which will take him through Rumania and Bulgaria to Constantinople and beyond. From Kardamyli he and Joan have set off on many of the travels described in this book, and it is here that their friends, many of whom he has portrayed with such affection, came to visit them year after year.

  The present book is divided into five sections. Travels describes journeys to (among other places) India, Italy, Germany, Rumania and the Caribbean, while some of the more curious stories and customs he has encountered in his adopted country appear in Greece. The section called People includes portraits of friends, heroes and eccentrics; Books contains an account of his early reading, as well as reviews and critical essays. The last section, Flotsam, shows Paddy at his most playful, and displays the never-ending delight that he takes in words.

  ARTEMIS COOPER

  * At the risk of sounding over-familiar, ‘Paddy’—the name by which he is known to friends and fans alike—will be used rather than the over-formal ‘Leigh Fermor.’

  Travels

  The Munich Hofbräuhaus

  from A. Time of Gifts

  As he travelled up the Rhine in the winter of 1933—4, Paddy was uncomfortably aware of the Nazi presence; but he was more impressed by the warmth and generosity of ordinary Germans. Trudging through Munich in swirling snow, however, the huge boulevards contained alarming numbers of men in Storm Trooper and SS uniform, and ‘everything struck chill to the heart.’ He was in a strange and uneasy mood as he approached the Hofbräuhaus which was, and still is, one of the chief landmarks of the town.

  I caught a glimpse down a lane of Gothic masonry and lancets and buttresses and further on copper domes hung in convolutions of baroque. A Virgin on a column presided over a slanting piazza, one side of which was formed by a tall, Victorian-Gothic building whose great arched undercroft led to a confusion of lesser streets. In the heart of them stood a massive building; my objective, the Hofbräuhaus. A heavy arched door was pouring a raucous and lurching party of Brownshirts on to the trampled snow.

  I was back in beer-territory. Half-way up the vaulted stairs a groaning Brownshirt, propped against the wall on a swastika’d arm, was unloosing, in a staunchless gush down the steps, the intake of hours. Love’s labour lost. Each new storey radiated great halls given over to ingestion. In one chamber a table of SA men were grinding out Lore, Lore, Lore, scanning the slow beat with the butts of their mugs, then runnin
g the syllables in double time, like the carriages of an express: UND—KOMMT—DER—FRÜHL ingindastal! GRÜSS—MIR—DIE—LORenocheinmal.’ But it was certain civilian figures seated at meat that drew the glance and held it.

  One must travel east for a hundred and eighty miles from the Upper Rhine and seventy north from the Alpine watershed to form an idea of the transformation that beer, in collusion with almost nonstop eating—meals within meals dovetailing so closely during the hours of waking that there is hardly an interprandial moment—can wreak on the human frame. Intestinal strife and the truceless clash of intake and digestion wrecks many German tempers, twists brows into scowls and breaks out in harsh words and deeds.

  The trunks of these feasting burghers were as wide as casks. The spread of their buttocks over the oak benches was not far short of a yard. They branched at the loins into thighs as thick as the torsos of ten-year-olds and arms on the same scale strained like bolsters at the confining serge. Chin and chest formed a single column, and each close-packed nape was creased with its three deceptive smiles. Every bristle had been cropped and shaven from their knobbly scalps. Except when five o’clock veiled them with shadow, surfaces as polished as ostriches’ eggs reflected the lamplight. The frizzy hair of their wives was wrenched up from scarlet necks and pinned under slides and then hatted with green Bavarian trilbies and round one pair of elephantine shoulders a little fox stole was clasped. The youngest of this group, resembling a matinée idol under some cruel spell, was the bulkiest. Under tumbling blond curls his china blue eyes protruded from cheeks that might have been blown up with a bicycle pump, and cherry lips laid bare the sort of teeth that make children squeal. There was nothing bleary or stunned about their eyes. The setting may have reduced their size, but it keyed their glances to a sharper focus. Hands like bundles of sausages flew nimbly, packing in forkload on forkload of ham, salami, frankfurter, krenwurst and blutwurst and stone tankards were lifted for long swallows of liquid which sprang out again instantaneously on cheek and brow. They might have been competing with stop-watches, and their voices, only partly gagged by the cheekfuls of good things they were grinding down, grew louder while their unmodulated laughter jarred the air in frequent claps. Pumpernickel and aniseed rolls and pretzels bridged all the slack moments but supplies always came through before a true lull threatened. Huge oval dishes, laden with schweinebraten, potatoes, sauerkraut, red cabbage and dumplings, were laid in front of each diner. They were followed by colossal joints of meat—unclassifiable helpings which, when they were picked clean, shone on the scoured chargers like calves’ pelvises or the bones of elephants. Waitresses with the build of weight-lifters and all-in wrestlers whirled this provender along and features dripped and glittered like faces at an ogre’s banquet. But all too soon the table was an empty bone-yard once more, sound faltered, a look of bereavement clouded those small eyes and there was a brief hint of sorrow in the air. But succour was always at hand; beldames barged to the rescue at full gallop with new clutches of mugs and fresh plate-loads of consumer goods and the damp Laestrygonian brows unpuckered again in a happy renewal of clamour and intake.

  I strayed by mistake into a room full of SS officers, Gruppen- and Sturmbannführers, black from their lightning-flash collars to the forest of tall boots underneath the table. The window embrasure was piled high with their skull-and-crossbones caps. I still hadn’t found the part of this Bastille I was seeking, but at last a noise like the rush of a river guided me downstairs again to my journey’s end.

  The vaults of the great chamber faded into infinity through blue strata of smoke. Hobnails grated, mugs clashed and the combined smell of beer and bodies and old clothes and farmyards sprang at the newcomer. I squeezed in at a table full of peasants, and was soon lifting one of those masskrugs to my lips. It was heavier than a brace of iron dumb-bells, but the blond beer inside was cool and marvellous, a brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth. This was the fuel that had turned the berserk feeders upstairs into Zeppelins and floated them so far from heart’s desire. The gunmetal-coloured cylinders were stamped with a blue HB conjoined under the Bavarian crown, like the foundry-mark on cannon. The tables, in my mind’s eye, were becoming batteries where each gunner served a silent and recoil-less piece of ordnance which, trained on himself, pounded away in steady siege. Mass-gunfire! Here and there on the tables, with their heads in puddles of beer, isolated bombardiers had been mown down in their emplacements. The vaults reverberated with the thunder of a creeping barrage. There must have been over a thousand pieces engaged!—Big Berthas, Krupp’s pale brood, battery on battery crashing at random or in salvoes as hands adjusted the elevation and traverse and then tightened on the stone trigger-guard. Supported by comrades, the walking wounded reeled through the battle smoke and a fresh gunner leaped into each place as it fell empty.

  My own gun had fired its last shot, and I wanted to change to a darker-hued explosive. A new Mass was soon banged down on the board. In harmony with its colour, it struck a darker note at once, a long Wagnerian chord of black-letter semibreves: Nacht und Nebel! Rolling Bavarian acres formed in the inscape of the mind, fanning out in vistas of poles planted pyramidally with the hops gadding over them heavy with poppy-sombre flowers.

  The peasants and farmers and the Munich artisans that filled the tables were much nicer than the civic swallowers overhead. Compared to the trim, drilled figures of the few soldiers there, the Storm Troopers looked like brown-paper parcels badly tied with string. There was even a sailor with two black silk streamers falling over his collar from the back of his cap, round the front of which, in gold letters, was written Unterseeboot. What was this Hanseatic submariner doing here, so far inland from Kiel and the Baltic? My tablemates were from the country, big, horny-handed men, with a wife or two among them. Some of the older men wore green and grey loden jackets with bone buttons and badgers’ brushes or blackcocks’ feathers in the back of their hatbands. The bone mouthpieces of long cherry-wood pipes were lost in their whiskers and on their glazed china bowls, painted castles and pine-glades and chamois glowed cheerfully while shag-smoke poured through the perforations of their metal lids. Some of them, gnarled and mummified, puffed at cheroots through which straws were threaded to make them draw better. They gave me one and I added a choking tribute to the enveloping cloud. The accent had changed again, and I could only grasp the meaning of the simplest sentences. Many words were docked of their final consonants; ‘Bunch’—‘a chap’—for instance, became ‘bua’; ‘A’ was rolled over into ‘O,’ ‘Ö’ became ‘E,’ and every O and U seemed to have a final A appended, turning it into a disyllable. All this set up a universal moo-ing note, wildly distorted by resonance and echo, for these millions of vowels, prolonged and bent into boomerangs, sailed ricochetting up through the fog to swell the tidal thunder. This echoing and fluid feeling, the bouncing of sounds and syllables and the hogsheads of pungent liquid that sloshed about the tables and blotted the sawdust underfoot, must have been responsible for the name of this enormous hall. It was called the Schwemme, or horse-pond. The hollowness of those tall mugs augmented the volume of noise like the amphorae which the Greeks embedded in masonry to add resonance to their chants. My own note, as the mug emptied, was sliding down to middle C.

  Mammoth columns were rooted in the flagstones and the sawdust. Arches flew in broad hoops from capital to capital; crossing in diagonals, they groined the barrel-vaults that hung dimly above the smoke. The place should have been lit by pine-torches in stanchions. It was beginning to change, turning now, under my clouding glance, into the scenery for some terrible Germanic saga, where snow vanished under the breath of dragons whose red-hot blood thawed sword-blades like icicles. It was a place for battleaxes and bloodshed and the last pages of the Nibelungenlied when the capital of Hunland is in flames and everybody in the castle is hacked to bits. Things grew quickly darker and more fluid; the echo, the splash, the boom and the roar of fast currents sank this beer-hall under the Rhine-bed; it became a cavern full of
more dragons, misshapen guardians of gross treasure; or the fearful abode, perhaps, where Beowulf, after tearing the Grendel’s arm out of its socket, tracked him over the snow by the bloodstains and, reaching the mere’s edge, dived in to swim many fathoms down and slay his loathsome water-hag of a mother in darkening spirals of gore.

  Or so it seemed, when the third mug arrived.

  Surely I had never seen that oleograph before? Haloed with stars, the Blessed Virgin was sailing skywards through hoops of pink cloud and cherubim, and at the bottom, in gold lettering, ran the words: Mariä Himmelfahrt. And those trusses of chair-legs, the tabby cat in a nest of shavings and the bench fitted with clamps? Planes, mallets, chisels and braces-and-bits littered the room. There was a smell of glue, and sawdust lay thick on the cobwebs in the mid-morning light. A tall man was sand-papering chair-spokes and a woman was tiptoeing through the shavings with bread and butter and a coffee pot and, as she placed them beside the sofa where I lay blanketed, she asked me with a smile how my Katzenjammer was. Both were utter strangers.

  A Katzenjammer is a hangover. I had learnt the word from those girls in Stuttgart.

  As I drank the coffee and listened, their features slowly came back to me. At some point, unwillingly emulous of the casualties I had noticed with scorn, I had slumped forward over the Hofbräuhaus table in unwakeable stupor. There had been no vomiting, thank God; nothing worse than total insensibility; and the hefty Samaritan on the bench beside me had simply scooped me up and put me in his handcart, which was full of turned chair legs, and then, wrapping me in my greatcoat against the snow, wheeled it clean across Munich and laid me out mute as a flounder. The calamity must have been brought on by the mixture of the beer with the schnapps I had drunk in Schwabing; I had forgotten to eat anything but an apple since breakfast. Don’t worry, the carpenter said: why, in Prague, the beer-halls kept horses that they harnessed to wickerwork coffins on wheels, just to carry the casualties home at the brewery’s expense . . . What I needed, he said, opening a cupboard, was a ‘schluck’ of schnapps to put me on my feet. I made a dash for the yard and stuck my head under the pump. Then, combed and outwardly respectable, I thanked my saviours and was soon striding guiltily and at high speed through these outlying streets.