Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  For all Hitler’s confident promises before coming to power, it was still a time of great economic hardship and unemployment. In a Franciscan workhouse in Düsseldorf, Paddy met a Saxon from Brunswick who had failed to find any jobs in Duisburg, Essen, Düsseldorf, and the whole of the Ruhr valley. Probably most of the men in the workhouse that night were in a similar situation, wandering from one place to another trying to find a day’s work.

  In Cologne he bought Goethe’s Faust and Schlegel & Tieck’s translation of Hamlet. He also spent his first night in a German house, and had his first bath since leaving London. The following day he took a lift with a string of barges carrying cement, crewed by Uli and Peter, two men with whom Paddy had got spectacularly drunk in a waterfront bar. They welcomed him on board, and fed him with fried potatoes and speck – cold lumps of fat that struck him as the nastiest thing he had ever eaten – while Uli did his Hitler impression. Rolling upstream by barge was an ideal way to watch the changing landscape, as the Rhine became ever more mountainous and dramatic, with castles perched on crags reflected in the water, as the line of barges slid past Bad Godesberg, Andernach and Ehrenbreitstein.

  He jumped ashore at Coblenz and spent Christmas Eve singing carols round a Christmas tree in a friendly Gasthof in Bingen. Christmas Day might have been rather lonely, but at some inn or other (he could not remember where) he was drawn into another family gathering which went on carousing into the night. It must have been quite a party, for he ‘lost’ several days between Christmas and New Year: all that remained were scattered visual fragments of Oppenheim, Worms and Mannheim. In Heidelberg he again struck lucky at an inn called the Red Ox. The owners, Herr and Frau Spengel, treated him as their guest and insisted that he stay with them for the following day, which was New Year’s Eve.

  Paddy came across kindness and generosity wherever he went, despite the harshness of the times. It had something to do with the word ‘student’, written in his passport and which he used to describe himself. The word was evocative of the wandering scholars who had been a feature of European life since the twelfth century, as they walked from one university town or monastery to the next in pursuit of knowledge. With his rucksack and his notebook he looked and felt the part, but what made him so immediately engaging to people was that he shone with joy. Until he left home, his desire to live with an intensity that seemed only to exist in books had always got him into trouble. Now there was no one to tell him what to do, no one even to know where he was – a thought that gave him a rush of pleasure every time it occurred to him. This sense of freedom was so intoxicating that he described himself as living in a state of almost constant euphoria and well-being. He was becoming fitter and stronger by the day. At night he fell asleep ‘in a coma of happiness’,9 although he wished he were awake all the time: ‘Living in a yeasty ferment of excitement I grudged every second of sleep. All I saw, heard, smelt, touched and tasted or read was brand new. The intake, total and continuous, was crowding in to bursting point.’10

  Happiness, excitement, youth, good looks, eagerness to please and an open heart: Paddy had them all. The combination was irresistible, and people responded to it with warmth and delight. The Spengels’ student son, Fritz, took him round Heidelberg the next day while Paddy pumped him for details about the drinking and duelling rituals that lent such dark glamour to German student life. Back at the inn, sitting with Fritz in the early stages of the New Year’s Eve festivities, he was brought up against darkness of a different sort. ‘So? Ein Engländer?’11 A fair-haired young Nazi came up to the table where he and Fritz were sitting together. England, he said through gritted teeth, had stolen Germany’s colonies, stopped her from having a proper army or a fleet, and was run by Jews. Fritz was embarrassed and apologetic. ‘You see what it’s like,’ he said.12

  Although he was walking through Germany at one of the most significant moments in its modern history, Paddy’s head was full of the romance of Germany’s past. ‘If only I had had less of a medieval passion, more of a political sense,’ he admitted in a notebook entry thirty years later, ‘I would have drunk in, sought out so much more.’13 He had spent very little time thinking about political ideas. At home he had absorbed the middle-class conservatism of his mother, and his ancient school in its rural backwater had given him no reason to question it. At the bar of the Cavendish, socialism was considered radical and exciting, but held little aesthetic appeal for his imagination.

  Yet despite his political myopia, what he saw of Nazism in those few weeks of 1933 was enough to fill him with abhorrence. Beyond the venomous young man in Heidelberg, Paddy does not identify the Nazis he talked to. There may have been anything between two to a dozen such conversations, in cafés and bars, beer halls or wine-cellars. The only thing they had in common was that Paddy always came off worst.

  The Nazis he spoke to were very interested in talking to an Englishman. So, what did he think of National Socialism? Here he was on solid ground, even though he could not move far off it. He said he had three objections: the use of concentration camps, the burning of books, and hatred of the Jews. For the keen Nazi, the first two objections were easily dealt with. The camps held only a few Jews and Communists, whose fates were dismissed with a shrug. As for the books, that’s what seditious literature deserved. And how could he be so blind to the threat posed by the Jews? Their aim was nothing less than world domination, to be achieved by a devilish combination of Bolshevism and unfettered capitalism.

  Even Paddy could see the contradiction here, but as he put it:

  [this] illogical sequence of ideas had to be presented in a kind of logical disguise. Each step must be marked with a didactic blow of the forefinger on the table, each idea defined and put in a small labelled box, agreed to – ‘Nicht wahr?’ – A nod. ‘Also!’ – before moving to the next … I had not a chance of winning in any of these colloquies, I could only stonewall. There was always some handy slogan of Hitler’s to deal with everything one said; ‘Der Führer sagt’ they would begin, or sometimes, with bold familiarity, ‘Der Adolf sagt’ …14

  This inability to get through the fortress of Nazi ideology was echoed by another student travelling in Germany at this time. Daniel Guérin was a young Communist far more skilled in political debate than Paddy, who recalled his experiences in a book entitled La Peste brune. ‘My impression is that this is an absolutely closed world with which no contact is possible. What’s the use of talking? What we have to say would no longer be understood.’15

  Paddy felt most exposed when the subject of the Oxford Union debate came up. Almost a year before, the Union had passed a motion that it would ‘under no circumstances fight for King and Country’, a pronouncement that had sent shock waves throughout Europe. The vote reflected an angry disillusionment with the politicians and generals who had led thousands of young men to their deaths in the Great War, coupled with the determination that a war on that scale should never be allowed to happen again. Paddy described it as an act of defiance against the older generation, pour épater les bourgeois. He even suggested that it might have been a sort of joke. To young Nazis, for whom the words Koenig und Vaterland sounded inspiring rather than faintly embarrassing, the idea that the motion might have been ‘a sort of joke’ was baffling: but it pleased them to think that British youth was in the final stages of intellectual and moral degeneracy.

  One of the letters written by Mrs Sandwith had secured Paddy two very happy evenings with Dr Arnold, the mayor of Bruchsal, who lived in one of the most beautiful baroque palaces in Germany. Paddy had never seen such architecture before, and he was dazzled by its glittering beauty on a snowy morning. Two days later he was in Stuttgart where, in a café, he met two music students called Liselotte and Annie. Annie’s parents were away, and since it was pouring with rain they took pity on him and asked him back to the flat. There followed two happy days of high jinks, lubricated by Annie’s father’s best wine. He insisted that the interlude was perfectly innocent, apart from a cuddle on the sofa with
Annie. Did Liselotte exist, one wonders? Paddy has been known to insert a fictitious third figure to protect a girl’s reputation; but when the question was raised in this case, he indignantly denied it. There were definitely two girls in Stuttgart.

  Leaving the city, he set off in a south-easterly direction. The road passed through a country of pasture and ploughland, broken by dense woods of conifer – the outermost edges of the Black Forest, which lay to the south-west.

  It was at Ulm, the highest navigable point of the Danube, that he had his first sight of the great river. He climbed into the cathedral belfry to admire the view. The Danube lay below him, and far away to the south he could see the Alps, shining in the early morning sun.

  As he travelled on, he began to see the contrasts between the Rhine and the Danube. The Rhine had been far busier, and seemed to carry a great deal more freight; while sometimes he might walk for hours within sight of the Danube without seeing any traffic at all. Yet on both rivers, there was hardly a hill or a promontory that was not topped with a castle or a church.

  A flash of illumination came at Augsburg, with what he called the Landsknecht formula. He had been looking for something that expressed the character and feeling of a pre-Baroque German town, the Teutonic link between the medieval and the Renaissance; and he found it in the figure of the Landsknechts at the time of Maximilian I, with their floppy hats and ostrich feathers, their slashed doublets and beribboned hose. He had first seen them in a book in Stuttgart, but it was in Augsburg cathedral that the idea suddenly fell into place. ‘Once I had got hold of the Landsknecht formula – mediaeval solidity adorned with a jungle of inorganic Renaissance detail – there was no holding me! It came into play wherever I looked.’ And he did look, at every decorative detail that came his way. ‘Taking their cue – subconsciously, perhaps – from those soldiers, the masons and smiths and joiners must have conspired together; everything that could fork, ramify, coil, flutter, fold back or thread through itself, suddenly sprang to action.’16 It is obvious that he could never have written a virtuoso passage like this at the age of eighteen. But he came up with the idea then, and years later could still recapture the joy of its discovery and the fun he had with it.

  Four fresh pound notes were waiting for him in Munich. He went to the youth hostel and dumped his rucksack and stick on one of the long line of empty beds. At that moment, a pimply young man came in and sat down as though to start up a conversation, but Paddy was impatient to get to the Hofbräuhaus, and so he clattered back downstairs again and out into the street, leaving the rucksack on his bed.

  He did not like Munich. The wind swirled down vast avenues, the architecture was impersonal and pompous, and the Stormtroopers and SS were much in evidence. Eventually he found the Hofbräuhaus, where a Brownshirt was being sick on the stairs. In A Time of Gifts, there follows a vision of hell: from the vastly fat and glistening burghers and their wives stuffing themselves with gargantuan helpings of meat and sausage, to the great vaulted hall where the serious drinking happened. As he downed one elephantine mug after another and watched people beside him flop unconscious into puddles of beer, the great hall seemed to sink into the murky depths of the Rhine.

  He woke the next day on a sofa, with a dreadful hangover. He had passed out in a drunken stupor, but the kind carpenter who had been sitting next to him took him home in a handcart full of turned chair legs. He felt terrible, but worse was to come. Back at the youth hostel, he found that his rucksack had been stolen by the pimply youth who had sat next to him. Paddy had lost everything: the talismanic rucksack, his passport with four brand new pound notes in it and, most painful of all, the notebook and sketches that had recorded the journey so far.

  He had visions of a humiliating deportation back to England, but the British Consul, Mr D. St Clair Gainer, was kinder than he had expected. The following day he was given a fresh passport, and ‘His Majesty’s Government will lend you a fiver. Send it back some time when you’re less broke.’17 (He sent it back from Constantinople, almost a year later.)

  A few days before this shattering loss, he had sent off another of Mrs Sandwith’s letters, to Baron Rheinhard von Liphart-Ratshoff. Originally from Estonia, the family had settled in Gräfeling, just outside Munich. Paddy spent five days with them, during which time the Baron’s sons did much to replace what had been stolen in the youth hostel. They gave him an old rucksack and warm clothes, while the Baron wrote letters to several of his friends, urging them to do what they could for this curious and amusing young man. Best of all was the Baron’s parting present. It was a small, mid-seventeenth-century volume of Horace’s Odes and Epodes, gilt-edged with engraved illustrations, and bound in green leather. He loved and treasured this book and kept it safe, till a Stuka raid in 1941 sent it to the bottom of the Gulf of Argolis.

  Well rested and freshly kitted out, he set off across Bavaria. Here the countryside was still steeped in tradition, and Paddy was far more at ease. It was a fairy-tale winter. As he crunched through frozen puddles and waded through thick, silent snow, he memorized Hamlet’s soliloquy in German. Cottages like cuckoo clocks nestled in drifts of snow, branches bent down with it, creating scenes as from a medieval Book of Hours where, in his persona as a wandering scholar, he felt particularly at home. The only people he met were woodcutters, who offered him swigs of schnapps. He was given shelter in barns and farmhouses and, if the burgomaster was around, he often received a free night’s lodging at the inn and breakfast at the expense of the parish. The custom of hospitality to travelling journeymen and students still prevailed in Germany and Austria, and Paddy took advantage of it. In town and country, the unexpected kindness and generosity he met called into question the anti-German jingoism he had grown up with.

  Bavarian inns also had their photos of Hitler on the wall, but politics was not such a regular topic of conversation. Here he sensed a different mood, one less in thrall to Nazi propaganda. He described it as a ‘bewildered acquiescence’ that would sometimes descend into pessimism, distrust and foreboding when nobody else was in earshot. There were pitfalls, he realized, in setting up this oversimplified, town-versus-country picture of German politics, but he found it hard to resist. In towns he was confronted by a political ideology that forced people to take sides. In the country he found it easier to surround himself with the beautiful, illusory continuum of history, which connected him to a past that made no demands.

  Another thing that kept his imagination alive and ugly reality at bay was singing, which always lifted his spirits; poetry also would be recited for hours as he walked along. His need for poetry and song had been awoken early by his mother’s voice, whilst he had been obliged to learn poems by heart at school: an occupation he enjoyed more often than not. This intake had been more than doubled ‘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’.

  The list of poetry he had committed to memory in A Time of Gifts covers almost three pages, and he does not include songs, which are too numerous to mention. He knew all the schoolboy favourites – Rolleston’s translation of ‘The Dead of Clonmacnois’, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’ by Charles Wolfe, Macaulay’s ‘Horatius’; long passages from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, most of the choruses from Henry V, and many of Shakespeare’s sonnets; most of Keats’s Odes, stretches of Spenser and Marlowe, ‘the usual pieces’ of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge, lots of Rossetti for whom he had a passion, and Kipling. That is not to include the French, Latin and (admittedly not much) Greek poetry he knew. When asked whether the list was, perhaps, remembered with advantages, Paddy admitted that the one poet he felt uneasy at mentioning was John Quarles, who had only a single poem in The Oxford Book of English Verse.

  He still referred to it all as ‘a give-away collection … a mixture of a rather dog-eared romanticism with heroics and rough stuff, with traces of religio
us mania, temporarily in abeyance, Pre-Raphaelite languor and Wardour Street mediaevalism; slightly corrected – or, at any rate, altered – by a streak of coarseness and a bias towards low life’.18 But the reader cannot help feeling he was rather proud of it, too. It is almost inconceivable that anyone of eighteen today should have absorbed so much verse, in English, French, Latin and a little Greek – five languages, indeed, if one includes the bits of Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark and Faust that were being sucked into that prodigious memory. Among poetry lovers of his generation such command would not have been thought so unusual, except that it contained so little modern poetry. He was certainly familiar with Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and the poets of the First World War, and Yeats and T. S. Eliot were not unknown; but their preoccupations were not his, for Paddy had no need of poetry that tried to make sense of the twentieth century. His poetry was for inspiration, company, a story, and to pass the time as he marched along.

  By now he had been walking for over a month, and was learning how to survive on the road. Provided he reached some sort of human settlement by nightfall, he could usually rely on his charm and people’s generosity to provide shelter and hospitality, which he would gratefully accept. Before leaving London, he had imagined himself curling up in barns and apple lofts, with the occasional bed in an inn or farmhouse. But that was about to change, for in Munich he had effectively been given two passports.

  One replaced the real passport he had lost. The other, provided by the letters written by Baron Liphart-Ratshoff to his friends, opened up an unexpected world of schlosses and country houses, taking Paddy into a landed, aristocratic milieu that he would otherwise have been unlikely to penetrate. ‘From then on, in the hall of many a baroque or medieval schloss, many a green-clad butler with bone buttons was to summon many a bewildered Graf and many a puzzled Baronin to deal with the affable and snow-covered tramp fidgeting about under the antlers in a pool of melting snow …’19