For many of Paddy’s generation, the years 1936 to 1938 were dominated by the Spanish Civil War, but he felt no urge to rush to the aid of the Spanish Republic. The left-wing intellectuals who campaigned passionately on its behalf were not only sympathetic to Communism, but also thought it inevitable. Paddy had been too well inoculated by his years in eastern Europe to trust the Left’s position, which presented the civil war as a definitive choice between good and evil. ‘Are you for or against the legal government of Republican Spain?’ was the challenge. ‘Are you for or against Franco and Fascism?’22 But Paddy did not move in left-wing circles, except at literary cocktail parties. At one of these he locked horns in a furious debate with the publisher John Lehmann, a Communist sympathizer who supported the Spanish Republic to the hilt. What the row was about specifically, Paddy could not remember; but unforgivable things were said, and they never spoke to one another again.
He had never liked political intellectuals, preferring the friends he was introduced to by Balasha and Guy. Paddy met Robert Byron again with Mark Ogilvie-Grant. Another friend from this time was Lady Bridget Parsons whose blonde beauty attracted the sort of men she despised, though she never lacked friends. Her brother Michael Rosse had a Gothic castle in Ireland called Birr, where Paddy became a regular visitor after the war. He also saw a lot of John Chichester, whose sister, Lady Prudence Pelham, married Guy Branch in 1939. When he had to look presentable, Paddy borrowed clothes from Guy, while Balasha wore clothes lent by her friend, the designer Victor Stiebel.
Through Balasha he met three people who were to weave in and out of his life from then on. The first was Costa Achillopoulos, a polyglot Greek photographer who lived at the hub of an infinite number of interconnecting worlds. Small and lithe, he had pale green eyes made even more startling by a dark complexion, and hair that had turned snow-white in his twenties. His family was from Tsangarada on the flanks of Mount Pelion, but his grandfather had made his fortune in Egypt. Costa had been brought up in Switzerland, and was equally at home in Bucharest, Athens, Paris or London. Bisexual and a great traveller, he never married but shared a house with the Rumanian Princess Anne-Marie Callimachi, a cousin of Balasha’s whose non-stop chatter Balasha found exasperating, though she was very attached to Costa.
At a lunch given by Costa and Anne-Marie in April 1937, Paddy met a couple who were to play an even greater part in his life – Georgia and Sacheverell Sitwell. Georgia (née Doble) was Canadian, with high spirits, a generous smile and a very low voice. One of the reasons Sachie loved her was that she represented an escape from the aesthetic hothouse that he had created with his siblings Edith and Osbert. The days of Façade were long gone, but Sacheverell Sitwell had made a name for himself as an art historian. His works on the long-neglected Italian and German Baroque had opened the eyes of a generation to the painting and architecture of the seventeenth century. He had the same sort of magpie mind as Paddy, darting from one subject to the next, and each amused and stimulated the other. The meeting had been arranged so that Sachie could question Paddy and Pomme (Balasha was not at this particular lunch) about Rumania. It was the start of Paddy’s long friendship with Georgia and Sachie, and many happy weekends at Weston Hall, the Sitwells’ Jacobean house in Northamptonshire.
Every once in a while Paddy went to see his mother, who was still living in Coldharbour near Dorking. Following the episode of the torn-up letter he had decided never to discuss his love-life with her again, nor had Æileen shown any wish to talk about Balasha. This gave a certain artificiality to their meetings, yet there was still much to talk about. Paddy was planning at some point to write up his journey, and Æileen was able to give him all the letters he had written to her over those years.
Balasha did join him when he visited his sister Vanessa, now living in Gloucestershire. She had married an accountant, Jack Kerr Fenton, and had two children with him: Francesca, born in 1934, and Miles, born two years later. It was not a happy marriage. Jack was an obsessive perfectionist, which must have been an asset in his professional life. But he had no time for his children whom he found messy and demanding, and he made Vanessa’s life miserable. Paddy knew she was unhappy and hated his brother-in-law. The feeling was mutual. The final straw came when Paddy flung himself down on a new mushroom-coloured sofa, on which Balasha had left a tube of emerald-green paint.23
As spring of 1937 turned into summer they began to miss the mill at Lemonodassos, and after visiting friends in France, a boat from Marseilles took them to Greece. One day, a week or so after their arrival at the mill, three figures approached along the path. One was Aleko Matsas, and with him was ‘a slim, long-legged woman in a green top, green shorts, sandals and dark glasses, and a tall rather willowy chap of my age’ (Paddy was then twenty-two) ‘in rust-coloured sailcloth trousers’.24
The woman was Lady Idina Wallace. Orginally Sackville (she was the sister of Buck, who nearly swept Balasha off her feet during her London season), she first married Euan Wallace. When she abandoned him she was obliged to abandon her two infant sons, and she was soon notorious for being a serial divorcee. In the summer of 1937 she was on husband number four, but her companion was her son David Wallace, whom she had not seen since childhood. ‘They stayed with us ten days including a three-day peasant feast at the mill … She was [then going to] Prague to meet “somebody I’m a bit potty about, I’m afraid, a sea-dog called Ponsonby”.’25
Although No Innocent Abroad did not make Paddy much money in England, it was a great success in America. Published in January 1938 as Forever Ulysses, it became a Book of the Month Club choice, translating into sales which earned Paddy the princely sum of £800 – more money than he had ever had in his life. Encouraged by this success he set to work again on hammering his trans-European walk into a book. The letters to his mother would be invaluable at filling in the gaps in the journal, but Paddy was reluctant even to look at them. Also, he was uneasy at the thought of how much the letters might diverge from or muddy his memory. With the aid of his passport he established the chronology, but the work ‘wasn’t coming easily. The words wouldn’t flow … I couldn’t get them to sound right.’26
A glimpse of Balasha is found in two long, undated letters of 1937 or 1938, written in a mixture of English and French, that she wrote to her cousin Prince Serge Cantacuzene-Speransky. The bulk of these letters are about Cantacuzene ancestors, and the jigsaw puzzle of their combined family tree. It seems that Paddy, who is described as ‘very expert in genealogy’, was instrumental in helping to put the information together. She touches on her life in London. In Paris, people were interested in her portraits of Rumanian peasants and gypsies, while in London, one was expected to paint people who are ‘in the news’. But she could not find any commissions, so had to rely on ‘Cheap journalism, advertising, selling one’s name to Pond’s Cold Cream, painting surrealist portraits that look like an earthquake on a pedestal; all that means money.’27
Before returning to Rumania in late spring of 1938 they decided to leave some of their belongings behind in England, including a great many papers to do with Paddy’s trans-European walk. They packed up two large trunks, one of which was an elaborately carved and painted Rumanian marriage chest. These were left with the Baroness d’Erlanger, who had a house in Mayfair. Catherine d’Erlanger, wife of the Anglo-French financier Emile d’Erlanger, was one of those hostesses who threw gorgeously extravagant parties in the mid-1920s. She was also a painter, and had painted Paddy’s portrait. Lady d’Erlanger told him that the trunks would be no trouble at all, and they could stay in her house for as long as he cared to leave them there.
That August, Guy Branch’s sister Biddy came out to Băleni. Biddy was in her late teens, and it was the first time she had been away from home. The account she wrote at the time was that of someone plunged into a very adult world, whose conversation and way of life she could never have imagined.
She remembered Balasha’s red lips and strongly arched eyebrows, her simple clothes. To Biddy she
seemed much older than the puppyish Paddy, whom she treated with a rather maternal affection: ‘Oh Paddy, do stop it’, or ‘Paddy, you’re talking too much again’ – admonitions which Paddy would accept with good-tempered humility. At the same time, conversation was the centre of their lives:
How [Balasha and Hélène and Paddy] could talk! … [They] argued and discussed and pleaded, their voices moving in and out, each speech a recital yet a part of the pattern, a creation, seemingly tireless, endless. An afternoon, an evening would pass, and the voices would go on. Talking was not a luxury, or a duty, it was a work of art to be practised seriously. Constantine was different: ever practical, he dismissed subjects quickly with definite views.
Within the household they had a verb for Paddy’s linguistic enthusiasms – ‘to cumber’, used to describe his penchant for interminable conversations of the kind that left everyone else standing about. Once he and his interlocutor had finally parted Paddy would turn to the company, enlarging on the man’s fascinating dialect and turns of phrase: that was the cue to say ‘You’re cumbering again!’ Biddy remembered him ‘in the summer house, writing, the floor littered with sheets of paper, his writing as voluble as his talk’.28
Their world had little time left, as the prospect of war darkened the horizon. ‘I cannot fear anything for myself,’ Balasha wrote to her cousin Serge, ‘but I fear for the young people whom I love and about whom I’ll wait for news … It is so much better to be a man in time of war. For us, it’s once again the hospitals and the waiting.’ Only a hand-written ‘1938’ in the margin gives the date, so it is impossible to tell whether she wrote in March when the Anschluss was declared, or late September following the Munich agreement, or October when Hitler occupied the Bohemian Sudetenland. ‘All Europe seems mad,’ she continued, ‘and I’m no longer the age when I can think of war as a magnificent adventure.’29
That winter, Paddy had a new literary project. He had met the French writer Paul Morand, who was married to the Rumanian Princess Hélène Soutzo. Morand had had a recent success with his book Isabeau de Bavière, femme de Charles VI, part of a series entitled Reines de France. Morand presents Isabeau’s ill-starred life in a series of dramatic tableaux. ‘It’s a brilliant book, very colourful and exciting,’ wrote Paddy.30 During his last winter in Moldavia, he translated the book into English. Years later, when Paddy tried to get John Murray to publish his version of Isabeau de Bavière, Murray’s reader gave a not very enthusiastic response. Even the successful passages reminded him of ‘an MGM swashbuckling costume epic’.31
In an Introduction to Matyla Ghyka’s book, The World Mine Oyster, Paddy describes the last day of peace. Ghyka was a naval officer turned diplomat, a gentle and erudite polymath with thick, bristling eyebrows who had been educated in France. He was one of the party at Băleni on a day in the late summer of 1939, when they set off for the woods to pick mushrooms. The mushroom wood lay about ten miles away, and their little cavalcade of horses and an old open carriage clattered through sunlit fields and vineyards. Having gathered mushrooms till all the baskets were full, they enjoyed a long and leisurely picnic before making their way home. The day was heavy with enchantment, and an aching beauty. ‘The track followed the crest of a high ridge with the dales of Moldavia flowing away on either hand. We were moving through illimitable sweeps of still air.’32 The passage is a love song and an elegy to the Rumania that was about to vanish for ever.
In the dark years following the war and the descent of the Iron Curtain, the people Paddy had known in Rumania were thrown to the winds. Constantine Soutzo escaped and made a new life in Canada; his mother too escaped, crawling under the wire of the Hungarian frontier. The architect George Cantacuzene and his wife Elizabeth said goodbye to each other in 1940, when she took his children to England. It was the last time they saw each other.
Stories of families being torn apart became all too familiar, and Paddy came to see his time at Băleni as another paradise from which he – and they too, a few years later – had been exiled. Living with the Cantacuzenes in Rumania had granted Paddy several of the opportunities afforded by a university education. He had been given four more years of freedom from the necessity of earning a living. Although he had no scholarly framework or discipline in which to marshal it, he had learnt Rumanian, studied its history, and read as much as he could in that language and French. Above all, Balasha and the Cantacuzenes had given him a sense of family: a set of people among whom he felt he belonged and was understood.
7
An Intelligence Officer
Balasha was in her car listening to the radio when she heard the news that England had declared war on Germany, and in that moment she knew her time with Paddy was over. He did not want to leave her, but he was so keen to get back to London and join up that he started making arrangements at once. Her friends asked why he was in such a hurry to go to war, could he not wait a week or two? Yet as Balasha wrote to him years later, she understood and made no attempt to hold him back: ‘your heart and soul were straining for it.’1
With Henry Nevile, a friend who had been staying in Bucharest, Paddy made his way back to England by train, hoping to enlist in the Irish Guards. Being ‘of Irish descent’ was very much part of the romantic persona he had created for himself, and his desire to serve in the Irish Guards was a way of claiming that Irishness. What he really coveted, Paddy maintained, was the uniform, with its Star Saltire of St Patrick emblazoned on the cap badge and its buttons in groups of four. ‘I had read somewhere that the average life of an infantry officer in the First World War was eight weeks, and I had no reason to think that the odds would be much better in the Second. So I thought I might as well die in a nice uniform.’2
The five regiments of the Brigade of Guards had a cachet in the British army that few other regiments came close to. It was the army’s equivalent of Oxford or Cambridge, and its officers were drawn from the social élite of the country. Normally, entry into any Guards regiment would be a matter of family connection or the right school. Paddy had neither, but he did have contacts.
Sir Alec Hardinge had been private secretary to three kings and was now serving George VI. His wife Helen was very fond of Paddy and had had him to stay at Windsor Castle, where they had an apartment in the Winchester Tower. Sir Alec, who had been a major in the Grenadier Guards, had a word with Lieutenant Colonel the Honourable Thomas Vesey, Colonel Commandant of the Irish Guards. It was fixed. Paddy was accepted as a cadet and earmarked for a commission in his chosen regiment once his preliminary training was over.
On 14 November, Paddy was ordered to make his way to the Guards Depot in Caterham, and submit to a regime that came as a severe shock to his system. He was physically tough, but he now found himself in a place where his charm cut no ice and the pressure to conform was remorseless: like going back to school, only more brutal. The men slept thirty to a room, and whether they were square-bashing or doing rifle drill, on fatigues or undergoing inspections, they were constantly being bawled out at close range by red-faced men bristling with anger, loathing and projectile spit. The slightest mistake was savagely punished, and Paddy’s absent-minded bookishness (not to mention his ‘trying to be funny’) was guaranteed to raise the hackles of the sergeant majors. Yet there were compensations: here he met lifelong friends such as the genealogist Iain Moncreiffe, Anthony Holland, Michael Scott and Adrian Pryce-Jones.
That December, Paddy caught scabies, and on the 16th he was diagnosed with rheumatism in the back.3 In hospital for five days, he was discharged just before Christmas, which he was looking forward to spending with the Sitwells at Weston. He apologized in advance for the fact that he would be looking pretty wrung out (he still had scabies on his chin). ‘I’m glad you warned me,’ Georgia said, when he arrived.4
Christmas was enjoyable, but Paddy was still not feeling well. On 8 January, he was admitted to Redhill County Hospital, complaining of headache, ‘pain in the waist’ and a cough. He was diagnosed with influenza which by the foll
owing day had become pneumonia; the crisis nearly killed him. His mother and sister were summoned, and at one moment things looked so bad that a priest was sent for too. A male nurse at the hospital later recalled Paddy, in his delirium, begging whoever was near him to tell a princess from Bucharest.5
Biddy Branch, who had been with Paddy and Balasha at Băleni and was now Mrs Tom Hubbard, went to visit him on 12 January 1940. ‘He was ghastly-looking – pale parchment skin stretched tight over his bones, eyes huge, dark as I never remembered …’ He talked of the past few weeks of training. ‘Two months of hell he must have had at his Guards Depot,’ wrote Biddy, ‘… drudgery, heart-breaking drudgery. He spoke softly but so bitterly. Full of hate – brutality, intrigue, “every sort of punishment but the cat”.’6
Two weeks later he was feeling much better. On 1 February 1940 he wrote a long letter, accompanied by some carefully drawn cartoons, to Adrian Pryce-Jones. There is no mention of the horrors of training, though he was evidently pleased by all the attention he was receiving from nurses and visitors. He was also anxious about his immediate future, and felt bitterly frustrated at the consequences of having been ill for so long. ‘My fate is positively tragic … as I have missed over five weeks training … the authorities are regretfully obliged to backsquad me.’ This meant that while Pryce-Jones and the rest of Paddy’s friends were beginning their officer training at Sandhurst, Paddy was condemned to more weeks of square-bashing at the hated depot. ‘Isn’t this wretched? I am more vexed and disappointed than I can say …’ This delay also weakened his chances of a commission in the Irish Guards, for they only had so many places and competition was stiff.
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Page 14
