Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  Fermor was in constant trouble for being absent-minded, noisy, a show-off, answering back, losing his kit, along with all the other schoolboy transgressions that Major Bryant raised to the level of cardinal sins. Although he failed to beat some discipline into his pupil, he did instil a new and darker streak of aggressive frustration, and a dull conviction in Paddy that he could never do anything right. After about a year the headmaster’s patience snapped and Paddy was sent home in disgrace in early 1924.

  Lewis and Æileen were so worried by reports of Paddy’s behaviour at St Piran’s that they decided to consult a specialist. The first was the genial Sir Henry Head, who had at one point been consulted by Virginia Woolf. Sir Henry must have found nothing wrong with the boy, for the Fermors then consulted a Dr Crichton-Miller. He had heavy spectacles and his manner was a good deal drier than Sir Henry’s, but he did have a solution: there was an experimental school for difficult children at Walsham Hall, Walsham-le-Willows, Suffolk. Perhaps Paddy might do better there.

  In the spring of 1924 Lewis Fermor was back on leave. The family travelled to the Swiss ski resort of Zweisimmen near Gstaad, which Æileen and Lewis had discovered early on in their marriage. They always stayed at the Terminus Hotel, which had a lot of regular English visitors who enjoyed not only skiing but bobsleighing and skating. But as Paddy grew older he liked to slope off with the village boys, whose daredevil sport was ski-jumping. The jumps were never more than about three feet high, but you were in the air for a few glorious seconds, and Paddy was overjoyed when he won second prize in their contest, which consisted of two oranges wrapped in a pair of ski-socks. Æileen did not approve of the village boys; nor did all the guests at the Terminus Hotel measure up to her standards. Her manner in the dining rooms and lobbies depended very much on who she was talking to. She could be loftily monosyllabic, or very chatty and gregarious – particularly in the evenings, when she and her coterie got together for fancy-dress or dancing parties. Paddy particularly enjoyed doing the Charleston, which was at the height of its craze in the mid-twenties.

  After ten days or so Æileen and Vanessa went back to England, where Vanessa had to return to school at Malvern Abbey. Since Paddy’s term at Walsham Hall was not due to begin for another week he stayed on with his father, who was to attend a conference of geologists in Milan.

  This was the first time that Lewis and his nine-year-old son had been alone together. They went round a great many churches and art galleries, and in Baveno, on the west side of Lake Maggiore, they stayed in a hotel with an abandoned music room where Paddy made a lot of noise on an electric organ.

  In the train between Baveno and Lake Como, Lewis demonstrated the new knife he had just bought. He told Paddy he would peel an apple without breaking the long spiral of skin, which he did; but when he tossed the peel out of the window, he accidentally let go of the knife as well. Paddy collapsed into fits of laughter, which he prolonged with ever more raucous guffaws when he saw how much it annoyed his father. Lewis finally lost patience and banished him to the next carriage. It was very hot and in an attempt to open the window Paddy pulled the communication cord, with dramatic results.

  They made an expedition into the Dolomites to collect plants and geological specimens. Lewis was an imposing figure in his plus-fours and Norfolk jacket, but this attire was topped off with an item that made his son writhe with mortification: ‘a vast semi-circular cap, I think originally destined for Tibetan travel, like a bisected pumpkin of fur armed with a peak and with fur-lined ear-flaps that were joined (when not tied under the chin which was worse still) by a disturbing bow on the summit.’10 Slung over one shoulder on a strap of webbing was his vasculum, a flat oval tin lined with moss in which he would carefully place the flowers he collected. (He never travelled without his flower presses.) Stuck in his belt was a geological hammer, used to strike off chunks of rock to observe their stratification and check for fossils with a pocket lens. The large arrow marked on the hammer meant it was Government Property, and Lewis told Paddy that only convicts or members of the civil service could be seen with tools marked in this way. Paddy was acutely embarrassed by the arrow. He turned the hammer round on his father’s belt to hide it, in case people should think his father was a convict. Lewis must have enjoyed his young son’s intelligence and curiosity, when he was not misbehaving; it was sad for both that they were never to be so close again.

  Paddy’s new school, Walsham Hall, was run by Major Faithfull (discreetly referred to as Major Truthful in A Time of Gifts). He was a pioneer of the wilder shores of education, and looked the part with messianic eyes and a shock of grey hair. The staff were bohemian: the men in hairy tweed jackets and knitted ties, the women in beads and homespun skirts.

  The thirty-odd children who made up the school ranged from the emotionally damaged to the intractably wayward, with a sprinkling of children who would now be diagnosed as dyslexic or dyspraxic. Both boys and girls wore brown jerkins and sandals, with skirts or breeches. Lessons were very haphazard; there was also what Paddy described as ‘a lot of lying down and doing free association while Major Faithfull took notes. I used to invent all sorts of things for him.’11 Most bewildering of all were the country dancing and eurhythmics, in which both staff and pupils participated in the nude. ‘Nimbly and gravely, keeping time to a cottage piano and a recorder, we sped through the figures of Gathering Peascods, Sellinger’s Round, Picking-up Sticks and Old Mole.’12

  For all its oddness Paddy enjoyed Walsham Hall, because the pupils were allowed to do more or less as they pleased. Armed with bows and arrows made of raspberry canes and dressed in hoods of Lincoln green, Paddy and his Merrie Men turned the nearby woods into their own Sherwood Forest. Not all pupils held the school in such affection. Years later Deryck Winbolt-Lewis wrote to Paddy with memories of Walsham Hall which he called ‘a crazy establishment’, and where he remembered Paddy as ‘a rebel but never a bully’. The letter continues: ‘Instead of Scouts, Faithfull had to have another crackpot association called Woodcraft and one summer we went to camp at Ringwood where we were duly starved. With others … I pinched bags of crisps from the stores, and when we went to the beach we ate raw mussels from the rocks with conspicuously unpleasant results.’13

  The one school that did not order Paddy’s expulsion, Walsham Hall was too unorthodox to last. Æileen herself had never approved of it and might have been among those who wanted the school shut down. She had heard a rumour that Major Faithfull was in the habit of bathing the older girls, and towelling them dry himself.

  Persuading Major Bryant that Paddy was a reformed character, the Fermors succeeded in reinstating him at St Piran’s. Paddy tried to keep the Fauntleroy veneer in place, but it proved impossible and before long he was expelled for the second time, and had to make the humiliating journey home accompanied by a master. His parents’ dismay and disappointment, and his own inability to do what was expected of him, reduced Paddy to near despair. Compared to his father’s academic progress, his own school career had been an unqualified failure.

  By now, Æileen and Lewis were contemplating divorce. Lewis needed a wife who was quieter and less demanding than she would ever be, while she could not live with a man who paid her so little attention. It was bad enough that all Lewis’s energies were focused on his work; but Æileen also suspected him of indulging in a string of casual affairs in Calcutta – as she revealed in a letter to her mother in Brighton.

  [Lewis] having made the most solemn oaths to me has quite cheerfully broke them all – you can never guess just quite what a blighter and a mongrel that man is – he even astonishes me – and I thought I knew him pretty thoroughly … there is one thing I regret and that is that I didn’t leave him straight away the first time I longed to – which was three days after my wedding day. He is impossible.

  Geoffrey Clarke is home and has taken me dining and dancing once or twice which has saved my life – at the Savoy the other evening we ran into Mrs Strettell that was – she was divorced you know
and is now Mrs Dane – she looked so well and young and happy.14

  The mention of how well Mrs Dane looked was evidently a way of preparing her mother for the worst. Lewis and Æileen were divorced in May 1925.

  The problem of Paddy’s schooling was finally solved by sending him to a tutorial establishment at Downs Lodge near Sutton, in Surrey. It was run by a couple called Gilbert and Phyllis Scott-Malden – both descended from long lines of prep-school masters – who would take in six or seven boys at a time to prepare them for the Common Entrance exam. Paddy was very happy here, and the only surviving letter from his childhood was written from Sutton. It is not dated but presumably he was eleven or twelve when he wrote it, and the spelling has not been corrected.

  Dear Mummy, I hope you are getting on alright. We went to Cheam church, and had a topping sermon, preached by Mr Berkeley, who always preaches good sermons. The day before yesterday a lot of new furniture arrived from Windlesham. They are topping. We have got a topping old oak chest, which is carved, just such a one as old Samuel Pepys hid in. Also there is a ripping role-top desk for Mr Malden, when you role the top up, it looks [?sounds] like a switchback railway at a fair. Last and best, there is a fine old cupboard, probably as old as James the first. It has got a lovely circular shelf supported by a pillar. It has got cable carving along the front. There are two brass lions-heads on the doors to open them by. The lions have both got brass rings in their mouths. We have christened both after their masters, one S. Jerome, and the other is called Androcles. There are two carved dragons on the top. The whole thing looks topping because we have polished it up. it’s fine. Love from Paddy15

  Paddy was as happy at Downs Lodge as he had been miserable at St Piran’s. He was welcomed into the easy warmth of the Scott-Maldens’ family life, and he got on well with their three sons, particularly David (who became a pilot during the war and, eventually, an Air Vice-Marshal). There was a lot of reading aloud and acting in the evenings, and in the summer the boys built a tree house in a huge old walnut tree. It had a tin roof, and for his last summer term Paddy was allowed to sleep in it.

  They also let him pursue what he referred to as his budding religious mania. The Scott-Maldens were not particularly religious, but Paddy – as the letter above indicates – took a deep interest in religion at this stage. Catholicism and the Latin mass exerted a strong appeal, as did the candles and bells, incense and statues of the Roman tradition. Paddy never converted, but he identified himself as ‘R.C.’ on official forms until the end of the war. His religious feelings seemed to subside after that.

  Paddy remembered the Scott-Maldens as the two best teachers he ever had. Instead of being constantly checked as a know-all who knew nothing worth knowing, his enthusiasms for religion, history, languages, drawing and poetry were fostered and encouraged, as was his reading. Paddy applied himself assiduously to his Latin and French, yet to his disappointment he was not allowed to start Greek because his maths were still so bad. In fact so poor was his grasp of this subject that he was obliged to take his Common Entrance a year late, at the age of fourteen; but he passed.

  Lewis Fermor still hoped he would go to Oundle, which Paddy thought sounded very gloomy, whilst his mother pined for Eton or Winchester, which were out of the question. With his relatively poor Common Entrance marks no first-division public school would have considered Paddy, unless there had been a strong family link, and Lewis Fermor – scholarship boy that he was – did not have such connections. In the end, his parents decided to send him to the King’s School, Canterbury. King’s was not particularly distinguished at the time; but it was the oldest school in England, counted Christopher Marlowe and Walter Pater among its old boys, and lay in the shadow of an ancient cathedral where a saint had met his martyrdom. As far as Paddy was concerned, no school had better credentials.

  2

  The Plan

  In the centuries that followed its foundation by Henry VIII, the King’s School had attracted few rich patrons to increase its prosperity, and in the years after the First World War it was very down-at-heel. The headmaster, Algernon Latter, believed that tradition was sacrosanct and kept the school firmly in the nineteenth century. The late Canon Ingram Hill, an old King’s boy who joined a year or two before Paddy, described the school then as ‘very, very tough – just like Tom Brown’s Schooldays’.1 The buildings were shamefully threadbare and run-down, the dormitories still lit by gas, and the school was so desperate for pupils that it would take any boy who applied. It was rare for King’s, Canterbury, to get any student into Oxford or Cambridge; most followed their fathers into whatever the family business happened to be.

  By the time Paddy joined the school for the summer term of 1929, things were looking up. The school governors had recently appointed a new headmaster, Norman Birley, who was to pull King’s out of the doldrums. One of the first changes he made was to divide the school into two houses. School House, which had been in existence for generations, was now joined by the Grange. Birley also curbed the worst excesses of bullying, and made it known that any suspicion of homosexuality was enough to merit instant expulsion.

  Paddy was assigned to the Grange, whose housemaster was Alec Macdonald. Canon Hill described him as ‘very Cambridge – he always had a hat in one hand, umbrella in the other. He was highly civilized, and had a passion for music.’ He spoke beautiful German, had translated Winnie the Pooh into French, and had slightly staring eyes which some boys found alarming. Alec Macdonald would have regular musical get-togethers at which he would play classical records on the gramophone, which would then be discussed over tea. It was rumoured that he voted Labour, which was considered very peculiar for someone so obviously a gentleman; and Paddy admired his thoughtfulness and humanity.

  Once, when his class was translating a short story by Maupassant, a boy mistranslated un accent populaire. ‘No,’ Macdonald said, ‘it’s not exactly a popular accent, but an uneducated one.’ – ‘What,’ someone else said, ‘a common one, Sir, a street-cad’s accent?’ – ‘Exactly,’ Macdonald said lightly, ‘just the sort of accent we’d all have if we lived a hundred yards from here.’ There was an uncomfortable silence, and we all felt we had been unmasked as the horrible little middle-class snobs that we were.2

  Canon Hill remembered that Paddy’s arrival had had an immediate impact on the school. He spoke in elaborate sentences, a mode of speech quite unlike the monosyllabic schoolboy slang of his contemporaries. He would launch into blank verse or Shakespearean dialogue at the drop of a hat, and recited poetry by the yard. Hill remembers once coming back from games and hearing someone singing ‘Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones’, an unusual choice from the English Hymnal. Intrigued, he followed the sound and found Fermor dancing about in the showers, stark naked, singing ‘Alleluia! Alleluia!’ at the top of his lungs, all by himself. With his ebullience and charm Paddy soon collected a band of hangers-on, many of whom were just interested to see what he would do next.

  All went well at first. Paddy gained good marks in French, German, Latin, history and geography, and the fact that he was hopeless at maths and science was accepted with equanimity. Given that he could box above his weight and rowed in the Junior Fours, one might have expected Paddy to have had some success in sport, but he was never going to be a team player. Having chosen rowing rather than cricket, he spent summer afternoons smoking cigarettes with the aesthetes of King’s, reading Gibbon and Michael Arlen by the banks of the Stour.

  ‘I wrote and read with intensity, sang, debated, drew and painted; scored minor successes at acting, stage-managing and in painting and designing scenery …’3 This last was for a production of Androcles and the Lion, in which Paddy did all the above and took the eponymous role. He gave talks on Walter Pater and Dante Gabriel Rossetti to the school’s literary society (known as the Walpole Society), and won the Divinity Prize twice. Religion still exerted a powerful attraction. He claims that it went hand in hand with his passion for history, art, architecture, music and poetry: religion
gave a depth and colour to all these things.

  One of Paddy’s contemporaries at Canterbury was Alan Watts, who was even then turning himself into an expert on Japanese art and Zen Buddhism. ‘And I shall not forget’, wrote Watts in his autobiography, ‘the awed and almost respectful way in which Patrick Leigh Fermor said to me, “Do you really mean that you have renounced belief in the Father, Son and Holy Ghost?”’4 Watts and Paddy enjoyed each other’s company. Long bicycle rides through narrow country lanes took them to the churches of Patrixbourne and Barfreston, and ‘when utterly oppressed by the social system of the school, we would sneak off to Canterbury Cathedral – which, because of its colossal sanctity, could never be made out of bounds …’5

  Paddy always maintained a scrupulous loyalty to his mother, but the way she veered between possessive love and complete neglect for weeks at a time was enough to destabilize anyone. She did not always want him back in the holidays. Once or twice he had been farmed out to Fermor relations, but had so hated the experience that he refused to go back. Now it was more often the Scott-Maldens who took him in. He also spent some weeks at Fredville Park, near Nonington in Kent, where his hosts were the Misses Hardy – or as he knew them, Aunt Mary and Aunt Maud – who took in young lodgers from King’s if they were not going home. Paddy was particularly fond of the handsome Aunt Maud. She lent him a pony whenever he wanted to ride, and he went hunting on a couple of occasions with the West Street Harriers.