Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  Another great haunt of literary and unconventional London in the early thirties was the Gargoyle Club, founded in 1925 by the wealthy aristocrat and partygoer, David Tennant. Its main L-shaped room took its inspiration from Byzantium: the coffered ceiling was covered in gold leaf, while the walls were a mosaic of mirrored tiles (an idea suggested by Henri Matisse, who was immediately made an honorary member).

  The Gargoyle attracted an eclectic mix of social celebrities, artists, writers, actors, musicians, journalists and publishers, which was given a raffish tone by a sprinkling of the younger Guinnesses and Tennants, Wyndhams and Trees. A photograph of hard-core Gargoylers taken in the late 1930s included the then gossip columnist Patrick Balfour, better known as the historian Lord Kinross, the composer Constant Lambert, the artist Dick Wyndham and the writer Cyril Connolly – all of whom were to become Paddy’s friends in the late forties and fifties.

  In the summer of 1933, Paddy moved out of Mr and Mrs Prideaux’s and into 28 Market Street in Shepherd Market, where several friends already had rooms. His parents would have preferred him to stay under a tutor’s eye, and they refused to increase his allowance; but he was determined to move, even though it would mean that he would have to live on a pound a week.

  His parents had not been told that he had given up the idea of Sandhurst, though perhaps they were beginning to realize it. Given his interest, not to mention talent, in history and languages and literature, one wonders whether Denys Prideaux ever tried to persuade him or his parents to let him try for university. But it would have been a struggle to get him accepted, and doubtful whether he would have lasted the course. He was on the other side of the looking glass by now.

  He vaguely hoped that once on his own, some glorious opportunity would reveal itself. He might get one or two more pieces published. Some influential critic might notice his work, and set him on the road to a prosperous future. He tried to look at his restricted allowance as a blessing in disguise: since he could not afford to go out, he would have to work at his writing.

  Paddy could not remember what he was trying to write, except to say that it was probably poetry; however, little was written because the house became the scene of wild and continuous parties. Time and time again, their long-suffering landlady, Miss Beatrice Stewart, would hammer on the doors trying to silence their din. Nor could he remember the names of his Shepherd Market friends. Alcohol may have had a lot to do with it, and perhaps the lodgers came and went as lodgers do. Even so, it says something about the selectiveness of his memory: in turning the spotlight on the romantic figure of his landlady Miss Stewart, he leaves his fellow lodgers as ill-defined shadows. The most he could say was that, like him, they were living on small independent allowances.

  Miss Stewart had been an artist’s model, who had sat for Sargent, Augustus John and J. J. Shannon among others. By the time Paddy knew her, she had lost a leg in a car accident; but her greatest claim to fame was to have been the model for the statue of Peace that dominates Adrian Jones’s great bronze quadriga mounted on top of the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner. ‘I can never pass the top of Constitution Hill’, wrote Paddy, ‘without thinking of her and gazing up at the winged and wreath-bearing goddess sailing across the sky.’28

  Another reason why he was not writing much was that he was trying to make some money. In a pub called the Running Horse in Davies Street, he was introduced to a man who sold silk stockings. He ran a team of well-spoken, middle-class youths like Paddy who would take his wares to the ladies of the London suburbs, and sell them door to door. The young salesmen were encouraged to scan the telephone directory for names and addresses in a chosen area so that, when they came to a particular house and the door was answered by a maid, they could ask whether Mrs Richardson or Mrs Jones was at home; and, if asked to come in, they then had the opportunity to lay out and describe their stockings in glowing terms.

  For a few weeks he sold stockings to the ladies of Richmond, Chiswick and Ealing, and though he hated it he was successful in turning a profit. One evening at the Running Horse, the boss singled him out as a star salesman and asked him to give the other members of the team a few tips. According to Paddy, he pulled a stocking over his hand and described its properties as if it were a condom – which had the team howling with laughter, and his boss purple in the face with rage. He was sacked immediately.

  It is strange that this story does not appear in A Time of Gifts. When asked why, his reply was that Esmond Romilly had written a very funny passage about selling stockings door to door, and he did not want to repeat it.29 Yet it seems more likely that Paddy preferred to forget this rather shabby moment in his life. It did not sit comfortably with the innocent, enthusiastic and bookish image of his young self.

  Paddy was aware that he was ‘slowly and enjoyably disintegrating in a miniature Rake’s Progress’.30 For most of the night, he could drink himself into a genial euphoria; but in the chill hours between one party and the next, he grew ever more restless and depressed. For most of his life he was susceptible to emotional extremes, and bouts of depression triggered by the feeling that he seemed unable to measure up to people’s expectations. He was not yet nineteen, but the doors of opportunity seemed to be closing rather than opening before him. His academic career had been a disaster; the combination of tedium and temptation meant that he was unlikely to succeed in the army; nor could he see himself in an office from nine till five. By now his parents had realized that he had turned against a military career, and their disappointment increased his sense of inadequacy. In a moment of despair, his father had even suggested that he might consider becoming a chartered accountant.

  He was struck by ‘a sudden loathing of London. Everything suddenly seeming unbearable, loathsome, trivial, restless, shoddy … Detestation, suddenly, of parties. Contempt for everyone, starting and finishing with myself. Everything jarred, hurt, discouraged. Felt all faculties dispersed, whatever was worthwhile stifled, all that was worst taking over … Atmosphere of dead-beat, hungover idleness.’31

  The answer, he wrote, came suddenly one rainy evening. To leave England and travel would solve all problems. Sandhurst and the army would be indefinitely postponed. On his pound a week allowance he would walk from west to east across Europe, sleeping in barns and hayricks, eating bread and cheese, living like a wandering scholar or pilgrim, keeping company with tramps and vagabonds, peasants and gypsies. At last he would have something to write about. His goal would be the city which, in 1930, had officially changed its name to Istanbul, although Paddy never called it anything but Constantinople.

  To walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. His ambition was contained in a single sentence, that sounded like a drumroll ending in a clash of cymbals. The words became a spell, an amulet, which swept all doubts aside. His real goal was Greece, but there is no doubt which sounded better. To walk from the Hook of Holland to Athens keeps you firmly in Europe, but to walk from Holland to Constantinople takes you to the very gates of Asia. It crosses cultural as well as geographical boundaries, and to the romantic imagination it sounds a good deal farther.

  Once the Plan had taken form, it had to be put in place. Mr Prideaux was told about it, and not unnaturally expressed grave misgivings; at the same time it was better than frittering his time away in Shepherd Market, and might give him some experience of the world. Mr Prideaux undertook to write to Lewis in Calcutta – although Paddy was almost certain that his father would take a dim view of the plan, however Mr Prideaux presented it.

  Apart from his pound a week, which the loyal Mr Prideaux agreed to post in monthly packets to various consulates along the way, the young man needed some money to launch himself on the journey. In A Time of Gifts he says he borrowed some money from the father of a friend, ‘partly to buy equipment and partly to have something in hand when I set out’.32 His generous patron was the father of Graham Cook, an old school friend, whose family Paddy often visited in Hampstead. Fascinated by the quest, Mr Cook had asked Paddy how
he was going to manage. Paddy, of course, had no idea beyond his four pounds a month, but Mr Cook came to the rescue: ‘Here you are, my boy, here’s twenty pounds and good luck to you.’33

  Another gift was to prove even more valuable since it grew like a capital sum. It was the gift of a friend of Miss Stewart’s, Mrs Sandwith, who might have been Paddy’s fairy godmother. Hearing of his plan, Mrs Sandwith wrote two or three letters of introduction for him to present to friends of hers in Germany. Paddy had no idea, as he put them in his pocket, what a profound and far-reaching effect they would have on his passage through Europe, and indeed his whole life.

  The next step was to convince his mother, who was at that time staying with his newly-married sister in Gloucestershire. It had been a bad year for Æileen: although she had been divorced from Lewis for eight years, the news that he had married a Miss Frances Mary Case underlined both her loneliness and her diminished status as a divorcee. (A further humiliation came two years later when Lewis was knighted, and his second wife became Lady Fermor.) When Paddy announced that he was about to take off on a walk across Europe that winter, she felt another lifeline breaking. Yet part of her wanted to be persuaded: she loved the adventurer in him, which marked him so firmly as her son rather than his father’s.

  Paddy himself had no doubts, no moments of wondering whether he was making a terrible mistake – though everyone he talked to tried to persuade him, if not to drop his great plan, to postpone it. After all, it was mid-winter: why not stay for Christmas and then go in the spring? But he understood the importance of the moment: if he did not leave while still in the grip of excitement and enthusiasm, something else would intervene and he would end up not going at all. He bought a ticket for passage to Holland on a Dutch steamer, the Stadthouder Willem, that was to leave Tower Bridge on the afternoon of Saturday 9 December 1933.

  Most of the clothes he bought for the journey were from Millet’s army surplus store in the Strand. The most important item were his hobnailed boots, which he says were comfortable from the first day and lasted him the whole journey. He also had a soft sleeveless leather jacket with pockets, in which he kept passport and money. His everyday trousers were comfortable riding breeches, the rest of his legs being protected by puttees – long bandages made of stiff wool which were wound round the sock and up to the knee, where they were tucked in with a bit of tape (‘though in cavalry regiments’, he observed, ‘you started at the knee and worked your way down’).34 He also bought an army greatcoat (stiff and heavy, but it did duty as a bedroll and blanket) and a sleeping bag, which he lost almost at once and never bothered to replace.

  The rest of his pack consisted of drawing blocks, notebooks, an aluminium cylinder full of pencils, and three books: a small English–German dictionary, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and the first volume of Loeb’s Horace. The last was a present from Æileen, who had asked Paddy what he would like. On the flyleaf of the book she wrote out a translation of a short poem by Petronius: it is one of the three verses that open A Time of Gifts.

  Leave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores … Yield not to misfortune: the far-off Danube shall know thee, the cold North-wind and the untroubled kingdom of Canopus and the men who gaze on the new birth of Phoebus or upon his setting …

  Lewis Fermor was informed of Paddy’s plans in a letter sent just before he left England, so that he would be well on his way by the time it arrived in Calcutta. In the event, Lewis took the news better than might have been expected: ‘Perhaps he felt that they were the beginning of the dissolution of our remote link which in fact it turned out to be.’35 Mark Ogilvie-Grant inspected his kit, and pronounced himself satisfied with everything except the flimsy canvas rucksack. Ogilvie-Grant said he would lend Paddy his own rucksack, which was supported by a metal frame and therefore more comfortable. This was the very pack that Ogilvie-Grant had taken round Mount Athos in 1927, in company with David Talbot Rice and Robert Byron – a journey that Byron had turned into The Station, the book that Paddy always claimed had inspired his resolve not to stop at Constantinople, but to plunge on into Greece.fn2

  On the morning of 9 December, Paddy woke with a hangover – the result of a farewell party the night before. He went first to Cliveden Place to pick up the famous rucksack, and then bought a tall walking stick of ash in Sloane Square. From there he walked to Petty France to pick up his new passport.

  He ate his last lunch in London with Miss Stewart, in company with three friends: Geoffrey Gaunt, Tony Hall, and a girl called Priscilla Wickham. It was raining hard. They accompanied him by taxi to Tower Bridge, and briefly wished him well on the steps leading down to Irongate Wharf; there was not a moment to lose, for the Stadthouder Willem was making ready to leave. Paddy hurried over the gangway, clutching his stick and his rucksack, and waved from the deck at his friends who were shouting their last goodbyes from the top of Tower Bridge. Then, with a rattle of anchor chain and a blast from her siren, the Stadthouder Willem pushed out into the Thames.

  3

  ‘Zu Fuss nach Konstantinopel’

  Rocking on the dark sea between England and mainland Europe, Paddy could not sleep – ‘it seemed too important a night.’1 It was as if he were sloughing off the skin of his old self, rank with academic failure and family disappointment, to reveal a new one glowing with hope and excitement. To separate the new self from the old, he took a new name: for the next sixteen months he called himself by his middle name, Michael.

  He reached Rotterdam just before dawn, and after an early breakfast strode off through the snow. It fell so thickly that his bare head was soon white with it, but he was in such a state of exalted energy that he did not care. He spent his first night in Dordrecht, some twenty kilometres south of Rotterdam. Having fallen asleep at the table after his supper in a waterfront bar, he was guided upstairs to a little room where he fell asleep under a huge quilt. Payment was accepted for his meal, but none for the lodging: ‘This was the first marvellous instance of a kindness and hospitality that was to occur again and again on these travels.’2

  He walked through the Netherlands in five days, marvelling at how much the landscape mirrored the paintings of Cuyp and Ruysdael, the interiors giving life-size glimpses into the worlds of Hoogstraten and Jan Steen. The river Waal gave way to the Rhine, churches became Catholic. After spending his last night in the Netherlands over a blacksmith’s shop in Nijmegen, he walked over the border into Germany on 15 December 1933.

  Hitler had dominated the country since the end of January 1933, and had invested himself with supreme power in March. His cult was raised to the status of a religion, and the idea of a nation arising was all-pervasive. ‘If you listen to the wireless in Germany today,’ the journalist Gareth Jones reported at the time, ‘you will hear in the intervals four notes being played time and again, and you find it is the tune, “People to Arms!”, which is being drummed into the ears and minds of listeners.’3

  Soon after his arrival in the town of Goch, Paddy watched a parade of the local unit of stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA). Sure enough, they sang ‘Volk, ans Gewehr!’, keeping time to the thumping rhythm with their boots as they marched into the town square where they were addressed by their commander. Paddy’s German was not good enough to catch it all, but ‘the rasp of his utterance, even robbed of its meaning, struck a chill’.4 Later that evening he saw a group of SA men singing in a tavern. At first they were raucously noisy, but later on ‘the thumping died away as the singing became softer and harmonies and descants began to weave more complex patterns … And the charm made it impossible, at that moment, to connect the singers with organized bullying and the smashing of Jewish shop windows and nocturnal bonfires of books.’5 Ubiquitous symbol of the new order was the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute, which provided a contemporary version of the pickelhaube’d, goose-stepping cartoon German of his inter-war childhood. ‘People meeting in the street would become performing seals for a second. This exchange, soon to become very familiar, seemed extremely o
dd for the first few days, as though the place were full of slightly sinister boy scouts … The utterances sounded as though centuries of custom lay behind them, not a mere eleven months.’6

  There had also been a dramatic swing in political opinion. In some ‘lost Rhineland town’, he had met a group of factory workers coming off their shift in a local bar and one of them offered him a place to spend the night. To Paddy’s surprise, his room was a Nazi shrine, complete with banners and photographs of Hitler – though the year before, his friend admitted, he had been a die-hard Communist. ‘I used to punch the heads of anyone singing the Horst Wessel Lied! It was all the Red Flag and the International then … We used to beat the hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us …’7

  His conversion to Nazism, he said, had been very sudden; but he also claimed the same for everyone he worked with. Paddy could scarcely believe it: had so many people really changed from being Communists to Nazis, almost overnight? ‘Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides!’8 For those who thought about it seriously, it cannot have been an easy decision; but if you wanted to survive and work, all signs of Bolshevism had to be concealed.