Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  He saw less and less of his sister Vanessa, who was now a young woman of twenty. She was spending much of her time in India, keeping house in Calcutta for her father whom, curiously, Paddy never went to visit. The voyage was so long that it was scarcely worthwhile undertaking in the course of a school vacation. Moreover, though the wish was there, two things held him back. He was acutely aware of being a disappointment to his father, and of their being ill-at-ease together; he knew also that it would displease Æileen, who saw him as her son. It was one thing for Vanessa to spend months with Lewis in India, but not Paddy.

  Æileen had given up the house in Primrose Hill, and was now living on the south side of Piccadilly, close to the Circus, at the top of No. 213. The flat consisted of one huge room, an Aladdin’s cave full of the exotic furniture that had stood in Primrose Hill. On the few occasions that Paddy spent the night there, he slept in a tiny box room. As he fell asleep he could see the faint pulse of light from a huge neon cocktail shaker, which poured a drink over and over again with the words ‘GORDON’S GIN THE HEART OF A GOOD COCKTAIL’.6

  At Canterbury, Paddy was at last allowed to take up Greek. He plunged in with enthusiasm; but his Greek grammar was soon ‘smothered with scrawled and inky processions of centaurs, always bearded like Navy Cut bluejackets and often wearing bowler-hats and smoking cherry-wood pipes’.7 Apart from Homer, Greek at this stage did not have the hold on him that Latin did. When describing his ‘private anthology’ in A Time of Gifts – those passages and poems he had absorbed with joy or deliberately chosen to learn – the Latin far outweighs the Greek. Besides, at this stage he had his own poetry to write.

  ‘Verse, imitative and bad but published in school magazines nevertheless, poured out like ectoplasm,’ wrote Paddy.8 He also wrote short stories which, like his contributions to the Walpole Society, were read aloud, usually to small groups of boys gathered in the housemaster’s study. Alec Macdonald was impressed. ‘There you are!’ he said. ‘You’re going to be a writer.’9 Paddy was gratified, because he too was beginning to think along those lines. His first appearances in print, to be found in the school magazine The Cantuarian, are under the pen-name ‘Scriptor’.

  ‘All Saints’ is a story about one of the King’s School’s most distinguished old boys, the physician and scholar Thomas Linacre, whose ghost appears to the narrator in utterances such as ‘Right merry days were those i’faith’. Those volumes of Scott, plus the historical romances he read as a child, had left their stain.10

  His next contribution, ‘Phoebe’, was a glutinous confection liberally sprinkled with classical figures seemingly designed to impress the masters.11 ‘To Thea’, on the other hand, with its roses and ruby lips and a final commitment to play Romeo to her Juliet, sounds as if it was written to dazzle a real girl.12 Paddy already had form for pressing poems into the hands of girls he was keen on, and even if the poetry did not improve his chances it could always be recycled for The Cantuarian.

  In December 1930, he translated Horace’s Ode 1.9, ‘To Thaliarchus’.fn1 Years later, this poem was to prompt a moment of sympathy, when a kidnapped German general and the young English major who had captured him realized they had more in common than they thought. He was introduced to the poems of Horace by his Latin master, Nathaniel Gosse, who was delighted with his enthusiasm for the poet and encouraged his efforts at translation. On seeing it again seventy years later, Paddy pronounced it ‘terrible. The whole point of Horace is tautness and concentration, and perfection, whereas my version is a metrically sloppy, falsely rhyming, roly-poly pudding.’13 The poem that most clearly points the way to the author Paddy would become was entitled ‘The Raiding Song of the Vandals’, and was based on a poem by James Elroy Flecker, ‘The War Song of the Saracens’.

  In the market we throng, and our steeds are laded with loot underneath us

  Through the carnage we ride, and the massacred townsfolk we trample beneath us;

  The houses blaze round us, the timbers cave in where the fire-tongues have found them,

  And crash as the sparks shower skywards, the flames flicker madly around them.14

  His intoxication with the thundering rhythm and tongue-tripping alliteration make the poem hard work. As he matured he learned to use these tools to astonishing effect, but he never lost his taste for the richness of words and the verbal acrobatics they could perform.

  The first time Paddy met a real poet was when the young John Betjeman came to lecture at King’s, though at that time he was not yet a celebrity and he had come to talk about architecture, not poetry. Paddy remembered the occasion sixty-five years later, when he gave the address at the unveiling of a memorial to Betjeman in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, on 11 November 1996.

  His discourse was light, spontaneous, urgent and convincing, and it began with a eulogy of the spare and uncluttered lines of the Parthenon and this led on, astonishingly as it may sound today, to a eulogy of the spare, uncluttered lines of the modern architecture of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus School – the year was 1931 – and then the merits of ferro-concrete and the simplicity of tubular steel furniture were rapturously extolled … Wonderful jokes welled up in improvised asides and when, as if by mistake … a slide of Mickey Mouse playing a ukulele dropped on the screen for a split second, it brought the house down. We reeled away in a state of gaseous exhilaration and the result would have been the same, whatever his theme.

  The sort of myths that float around schools tended to settle on Paddy. It was said that someone heard Fermor creeping out of the dorm in the middle of the night, and decided to follow him. Lighting his way with a torch and unaware that he was being shadowed, he made his way to the gym, which had a very high ceiling spanned by a great beam, hung with climbing ropes. Hidden in the shadows, the boy watched with mounting alarm as Fermor shinned up one of the ropes, clambered on to the beam and walked from one end to the other. Having completed this feat, he came down the rope and made his way back to the dormitory.

  He was making good use of his time at King’s, although the energy he put into learning and reading was matched by less edifying habits. If anyone was caught hanging around the betting shops, smoking cigarettes, clambering over the roof or getting into fights, it was probably Fermor; and his sins were compounded by a fearless swagger and total disregard for punishment. He was suspended at one point, and taken back to his mother at 213 Piccadilly.

  Paddy explained his increasingly wild behaviour as ‘A bookish attempt to coerce life into a closer resemblance to literature’, encouraged by ‘a hangover from early anarchy: translating ideas as fast as I could into deeds overrode every thought of punishment or danger.’15 The prefects and monitors thought he was mad, and even Paddy found his antics inexplicable. His housemaster’s much-quoted penultimate report reads, ‘He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.’16

  Æileen took him skiing that year in the Bernese Oberland, where he was suddenly taken ill. The doctors said he had ‘strained his heart’, for which the only cure was an extended rest.17 He was not allowed back to school for several weeks, and when he returned the summer term was well under way. All sports were forbidden, so Paddy was left with a glorious windfall of idle hours in which to polish his daredevil reputation.

  At that time some of the senior boys were swooning over a new discovery – the exceptionally pretty daughter of Mr E. J. Lemar, a greengrocer with premises in Dover Street. As soon as Paddy heard about Nellie Lemar he sought her out, and found that she embodied his ideal of feminine beauty, formed by the long-haired goose girls and princesses in Andrew Lang’s Coloured Fairy Books. His visits to Nellie did not pass unnoticed, for in the school uniform of black coat, striped trousers and a speckled straw boater, Paddy was a conspicuous figure in Dover Street – which was in any case out of bounds. He was caught red-handed: ‘holding Nellie’s hand, that is to say, which is about as far as this suit was ever pressed’.18

  The pur
ity of Paddy’s intentions cut no ice with his housemaster Alec Macdonald, for whom this particular escapade was the last straw. He was sent to see the headmaster, Mr Birley, who saw the incident as a good opportunity to get rid of a troublesome pupil. Paddy’s reaction was one of utter dejection. He had been thrown out of schools before, but this was the first time he had really minded: the King’s School had stirred his imagination, and he had felt happy and fulfilled there. Moreover, his expulsion came before he had sat the School Certificate. Paddy was no longer a child, he lacked all formal qualifications, and in a few years’ time he would be expected to earn his own living.

  Æileen was dismayed by this turn of events, but Paddy knew that she had always taken a lenient view of his wildness: ‘I think her own rather headstrong and turbulent career as a girl charitably tempered exasperation with a secret sympathy, however much it had to be repressed for decorum’s sake.’19

  How the news was received by Lewis Fermor in Calcutta is not hard to imagine. The dream of Paddy going into any branch of the sciences had died long ago, and neither he nor his son had any idea of how he was going to make a living. In terms of practical help, there was very little Lewis could do. He had spent all his working life in India, and had few contacts outside the scientific community.

  The solution to the Paddy problem was the army, and at first Paddy welcomed the idea. He had strength, energy and confidence, lively spirits and courage (the acceptable face of recklessness). Why should he not make a good soldier? And indeed, the British had a long tradition of soldier poets and writers, from Sir Philip Sidney through to Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. But before he could be considered by the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, he had to pass his School Certificate.

  He was sent to a crammer in London where he studied for the London Certificate, which was acknowledged by Sandhurst but did not require such a high standard in mathematics. The crammer was run by Denys Prideaux, and most of his students expected to join the army. Now that Æileen was living once more in the village of Coldharbour near Dorking, Paddy lodged with Mr and Mrs Prideaux, first in Queensberry Terrace, then in Lancaster Gate.

  In the summer of 1932 he took the London Certificate and passed, even in maths; but Sandhurst did not accept cadets till they had turned eighteen, which in his case was over six months away. With the exams done, he entered a period of intense reading, ‘and read more books than I have ever crammed into a similar stretch of time’, he wrote in A Time of Gifts.20 His great enthusiasms at this period were for the works of Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh and Norman Douglas: Douglas’s Old Calabria, published in 1915, he always considered the greatest travel book ever written. In French he read Rabelais, Ronsard and Baudelaire, but was particularly drawn to the fifteenth-century poet François Villon. Villon’s dark, exalted poetry – particularly ‘La Ballade des Pendus’ – exerted a powerful attraction, and he translated a number of Villon’s rondeaux and ballades. And literature was not the only thing that absorbed him. Hours were spent wandering round the National Gallery and that treasure-house of visual history, the National Portrait Gallery. He also became familiar with the monuments, churches, museums and pubs of London.

  He was introduced to Mrs Minka Bax, wife of the writer Clifford Bax, who lived in Addison Road off Kensington High Street. Mrs Bax held an informal literary salon, where young men and women talked about books, plays, aesthetics and the meaning of art. Paddy enjoyed these afternoons, but found her guests rather too earnest and high-minded.

  He had more fun with a group of ‘fellow crammers’ pups’, mostly a little older than Paddy but like him destined for the army. In A Time of Gifts they are described as ‘wide-eyed, pink-cheeked and innocent boys with tidy hair; cornets and ensigns in the larva phase’.21 It is rare for Paddy to be ungenerous to old friends in his writing, particularly ones from whom he has taken a certain amount of hospitality; yet at this time he himself was going through a ‘larva phase’ of which he was to be slightly ashamed a few months later. His new friends admired his dash on a horse, and laughed like hyenas when he dived into a lake in full evening dress (remembering only on re-emerging that he was in borrowed tails). They had him to stay for weekends, in the company of people who read little more than the sporting pages and treated books with suspicion – but Paddy didn’t mind. He enjoyed the boisterous company, the balls and hunts and point-to-points; while his young hosts knew that however wild Fermor might be, he could be trusted to look presentable in front of their relations.

  The grace and panache of fine clothes were a lifelong pleasure for Paddy, whose books describe the dress of both men and women in meticulous detail. Clothes were also an important component of his historical memory. He used to say that while he could never remember dates on a page, he had only to see a painting of a prince or cardinal and he could date it by the costume to within fifty years. Now that he was moving in a crowd of young blades who defined themselves by their tailoring, he easily persuaded himself that the boots, bowler hat, double-breasted waistcoat, hacking jacket and riding breeches he ordered were not just essential kit but an investment. He overspent wildly on his allowance of thirty shillings a week, and the bills poured in. Lewis was alerted. First expulsion, now debts. As a father he knew he had been almost totally absent, but like Paddy’s masters he probably blamed Æileen. Her over-romantic imagination, her disdain for the mundane and the practical, not to mention her insistence on smart (that is, expensive) turnout, had a lot to answer for. Lewis took care of the most urgent demands and, in a couple of blistering letters from India, told Paddy that he was responsible for the rest. Some of the bills remained unpaid for years.

  Yet the debts had revealed a stark truth. Life for a junior officer, based at Aldershot or Tidworth for months on end in peacetime, would be impossible to sustain on army pay alone, and Paddy had no private income. Among his fellow cadets he would be irresistibly drawn to the fast and dangerous set, who would be far richer than himself and secure in the knowledge that money and connections would ease their way out of boredom and trouble. Paddy had no such advantages, and he knew it.

  It was in the spring and summer of 1933 that Paddy began to frequent the bar of the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street, to which he was first introduced by one of his fellow crammers at Prideaux’s. Under its famous Edwardian owner Rosa Lewis, the Cavendish was closer in spirit to an old-fashioned and rather raffish club than a hotel. The young men favoured by Mrs Lewis in those inter-war years enjoyed generous credit, often settled by her slippery accounting. She knew exactly which of her older and richer clients could be relied on not to examine their bills too closely.

  Rosa Lewis took a shine to Paddy, whom she always called ‘Young Feemur’, or sometimes ‘Young Fermoy’. With Rosa gripping his arm like a vice and her two pekingese panting behind, Paddy would occasionally escort her on her routine inspection of the shops along Piccadilly and St James’s. She enjoyed picking delicacies off the counters in Fortnum & Mason, daring the assistants to challenge her. Mrs Lewis thought that Evelyn Waugh’s description of her as Mrs Crump in Vile Bodies did not do her justice. ‘If I get my ’ands on that Mr Woo-aagh,’ she told Paddy, her false teeth rattling ominously, ‘I’ll cut ’is winkle orff!’22

  Since the mid-1920s, the Cavendish had been the haunt of that group of resolutely decadent youth whom the Daily Mail had dubbed ‘The Bright Young People’. Although they had phases of preferring the Café Royal they never abandoned the Cavendish altogether, and it was from his visits there that Paddy came to know Brian Howard, Jennifer Fry, Elizabeth Pelly, Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, Alistair Graham and Mark Ogilvie-Grant. By 1933, when Paddy fell into their orbit, the wild parties that had so scandalized the nation were over and the revellers were almost a decade older; but they were still dedicated to pleasure, still set against all that was pompous and stuffy, still resolutely refusing to take themselves seriously. They also loved conversation, and drinking late into the night. To Paddy they were godlike, irresistible, and exactly like their alte
r egos in Vile Bodies. They spoke an elaborate language that contrived to be both donnish, shocking and rather camp, and assumed you knew who they meant when they talked so easily of William Walton or Eric Satie, of the Futurists or Man Ray or Picasso. Art, music and literature were forces of change and liberation, and so was socialism: ‘The Left Wing opinions that I occasionally heard were uttered in such a way that they seemed a part merely, and a minor part, of a more general emancipation.’23

  More seductive than their light-hearted socialism was their disdain for all things English: for among these new friends, ‘it was an article of faith that every manifestation of English life or thought or art was slightly provincial and a crashing bore.’24 Paddy found that these sentiments suited him very well, since the tedium of England and English life provided a convenient excuse for his feelings of inadequacy, claustrophobia and boredom: ‘all of a sudden, everything attractive or exciting seemed to be foreign.’25

  Paddy described slipping into this bohemian world, so different from that of the larval officers, as going through the looking glass. Before this passage, he had always been suppressing some part of himself: the boisterous part was stifled when he went to tea with Mrs Clifford Bax, the bookish part when he was among his army friends. Now he had found a group of people who accepted both the bookish and the boisterous in him, and saw nothing odd in cultivating both.

  He lost his virginity to Elizabeth Pelly, one of the wildest of those partygoers whose antics had filled the papers in the mid-1920s. Now divorced from her husband Denis, her hopes of marrying a friend called John Ludovic Ford (known as Ludy) were waning. But it does seem strange that her trysts with Paddy (‘a few secret afternoons’, he called them) should have taken place in Ford’s house in Cheyne Row.

  His new friends enjoyed seeing themselves reflected in the way he copied their tastes and mannerisms, laughed at the fact that he had been thrown out of school and were pleased that he had given up the idea of going to Sandhurst – ‘“The Army! I should hope not indeed. The very idea!”’26 Paddy was treated with a fair degree of indulgence, and they paid for more of his drinks than they might have done had he been older. ‘“Where’s that rather noisy boy got to? We may as well take him too.”’27 They took him to the Café Royal, and later in the evening to nightclubs such as the Nuthouse, the Boogie-Woogie and (raunchiest of all) Smoky Joe’s. He thought it was in Smoky Joe’s that he met the writer Robert Byron, whose works The Station (1928) and The Byzantine Achievement (1929) argued that Byzantine art was as good as anything produced in the classical period. The meeting was a disappointment because Byron was too drunk to make much sense; and though they met again some years later, it was only as fellow guests at drinks parties.