Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  At the top end of society, the rich and educated mixed freely. At any party one might find Muslim Toussouns, Sadiks and Abouds as well as members of the extended Egyptian royal family, happily gossiping with Jewish friends bearing the names of Cattaui, Harari or Menasce, or making plans with Coptic friends called Wissa or Wahba, Ghali or Khayatt. They all spoke English and French, but one could hear several other languages as well, as they gossiped over lunch at the Fleurant, the St James or the P’tit Coin de France. These hospitable people welcomed the sudden influx of British officers, both those on leave from the front in the Western Desert and those in desk jobs, who were known as ‘The Gabardine Swine’ or ‘Groppi’s Horse’.

  As the war progressed, more women appeared: clerks, secretaries and cypherenes, as well as FANYs and WAAFS, ambulance drivers and nurses. For them, the glamour and excitement of wartime Cairo was unforgettable. Everyone was young, and involved in the vital work of winning the war – and as women, their company was much in demand. If you fell into bed with your date at the end of the evening, there was no one to disapprove. In fact there was something noble and generous about it, since he might be dead in a week.

  Everywhere there were men in a bewildering array of caps and tunics: South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders, Scots and Sikhs, Free French and Poles. To test the alertness of the troops, Field Security put two men into German uniform: they wandered about all day without being challenged once. To the disgust of troops from the Dominions, officers and men were strictly segregated. Only officers could enter the better cafés, restaurants and nightclubs, while the other ranks drank beer and ate chips at places like the Café Bar Old England, Cosy Corner or Home Sweet Home. Here they were accosted by boys selling naughty magazines with names like Zip, Laffs and Saucy Snips, while others sang out, ‘Hey, Mister! You want my sister? Very nice, very clean, all pink inside like Queen Victoria.’ For more innocent diversions, the ladies of the British community started the Tipperary Club, where tea and toast could be consumed to the sound of the Forces Network wireless; and Music for All, which put on concerts.

  One of the first people Paddy met up with was his old friend Costa Achillopoulos, who was now in the sky-blue képi of a Free French lieutenant. Costa had been asked to take some photographs of his cousin, Marie Riaz, and asked Paddy to come along – guessing, no doubt, how much his company would amuse her. Marie was then married to a rich Cairene sugar magnate called Mamduh Riaz Bey. Blessed with a strong bohemian streak, she took to Paddy at once and he was soon a familiar figure at her parties, picnics and expeditions into the desert.

  Through Marie Riaz he met Sir Walter and Lady Smart, who were to become important figures in his life. Smartie, as he was known, was the Oriental Councillor at the British Embassy, a diplomat and scholar of distinction. Such mandarins could be daunting, but Smartie was engagingly modest and funny, the very antithesis of stuffy. His first marriage had ended in divorce, which in those days meant that he would never reach ambassadorial rank. His second wife was Amy Nimr, a painter. They lived in a house full of beautiful things on the island of Zamalek, and entertained an eclectic mixture of Greek, Egyptian and British writers and intellectuals in their shady garden. Lawrence Durrell was a frequent visitor, as was Paddy, who often borrowed books from their library.

  One party led to another. At the house of Bernard and Inez Burrows in Boulaq Dacrour, Inez’s Thursday nights were often graced by King Farouk, who would bring along a case of champagne. The Princess Shevekiar gave spectacular dinners in elaborate Ottoman style: guests were welcomed by girls in flowing gauze spreading rose petals at their feet, and the courses at dinner seemed to go on for ever. There were not many unmarried Muslim girls in evidence, but the cosmopolitan Jewish, Coptic and Greek families did not keep their daughters so rigorously confined. Paddy saw a great deal of Denise Menasce, who came from a grand Sephardic Jewish family which had been granted an imperial title by the Emperor Franz Josef.

  At the Anglo-Egyptian Union he encountered the writers and poets in exile who contributed to Personal Landscape, the most influential literary magazine to come out of the war. Among them were its pacifist founder Robin Fedden (with whom Paddy often travelled in later years), Durrell, and the poets Terence Tiller and Bernard Spencer. Paddy hoped that he might be published too, and submitted one or two poems, but they were politely rejected. When asked why, Paddy replied: ‘I think my stuff was a bit too fin de siècle for them.’39 His old friend Dimitri Capsalis, whom he had met in Constantinople, was now the Greek Ambassador, while Aleko Matsas was consul in Alexandria.

  After a brief stint at a boring job in the Canal Zone, Paddy returned to Cairo in July where things suddenly became more interesting. He was summoned to Rustum Buildings, known to every Cairene taxi driver as ‘Secret Building’, from where covert operations were controlled. Here he was inducted into what became known as the Special Operations Executive, although in those days it lurked behind a smokescreen of different names, of which perhaps the best-known were MO4 and Force 133. Paddy was interviewed by an unknown colonel whose language was so veiled and elliptical that he had no idea what was being said, nor how he should respond. But his pay was raised, and he was told he would soon receive his orders.

  He was to join a unit known as ME 102, probably at the suggestion of Monty Woodhouse. The unit was a training camp for people who wanted to continue the fight by joining resistance units that had been formed across occupied Europe. Paddy went to Palestine in September 1941 to join ME 102, established in a spacious house on the slopes of Mount Carmel overlooking the town of Haifa. They called the house Narkover, after the imaginary school invented by J. B. Morton (‘Beachcomber’) where the pupils were taught forgery, gambling, theft and arson. From his only surviving notebook of the time, the place seems aptly named: it is peppered with remarks such as ‘Demolitions were new to all except the fishermen and sailors, and as usual aroused great interest’,40 or ‘The Molotov cocktail lecture and practical went off successfully.’41 The students also learnt map-reading and report-writing, how to handle boats, wireless sets and small arms. They came from a wide range of nationalities, including Yugoslavs and Kurds.

  Among the Cretan Greeks, Paddy met two men who were to be among his closest wartime companions: George Tyrakis and Manoli Paterakis, both of whom were later key figures in the Kreipe Operation. Paddy was probably more useful as a Greek speaker than as a weapons expert. Most of his students had been handling guns since childhood and had an instinctive grasp of how they were put together, whereas their instructor had to spend hours in the armoury, mugging up how to dismantle and reassemble guns with the aid of an instruction manual.

  Paddy went to Jerusalem for the New Year 1942, where a number of friends from Cairo had gathered. Roaring about on a motorcycle, he took the opportunity to visit all the holy places round the Sea of Galilee. At the Hotel Saint-Georges in Beirut he ran into Costa again, and that night the energy and skill of Costa’s dancing brought the hotel ballroom to a standstill.42 Costa explained that this was probably his last opportunity to dance, for he had only joined the Free French in order to get himself to the Middle East. Now he was transferring to the Greek army, in which dancing was forbidden for as long as the homeland was occupied.

  8

  Crete and General Carta

  Paddy left Narkover for Cairo in April 1942, and soon after that new orders came through: in the next few weeks he would join the handful of SOE officers sent into occupied Crete, to work with the Cretan resistance. He would be in Crete, out of uniform, living in the open, in constant danger. This was the opportunity he had been waiting for.

  Although the airborne invasion of Crete in May 1941 had been an impressive demonstration of German might, they had paid a high price for it and the island had now to be held at all costs. In 1941 the Commander of Fortress Crete was General Alexander Andrae, whose headquarters were at the capital, Chania, at the western end of the island. (In autumn 1942, he was replaced by General Bruno Bräuer.) Un
der him was a divisional commander with headquarters at Archanes, in the central section south of Heraklion. The eastern part of Crete was flatter than the mountainous central and western sections, and was occupied by the Italians. It does not play a part in this story until the Italian surrender, in September 1943.

  The number of Axis forces rose and fell throughout the occupation, ‘according to the fortunes of the North African campaign, the situation on the eastern front, or the perceived threat of invasion: it ranged from around 75,000 in 1943, to just over 10,000 at the time of surrender in 1945.’1The local population numbered some 400,000, spread across an island about a hundred and sixty miles long.

  In the months leading up to his death, John Pendlebury had been developing contacts with the kapetans in central Crete (known to the British as ‘Pendlebury’s Thugs’). These powerful clan leaders had to be treated with care, but the effort was worth it because they could mobilize hundreds of men who knew how to survive and move across the mountains by day or night.

  The three most important kapetans were Antoni Grigorakis, known as Satanas, who had approached Brigadier Chappel for guns at the time of the British evacuation. Petrakogeorgis was the most pro-British of the guerrilla leaders, and also the easiest to work with; he had run a successful olive-oil and food business before the war, so was given the code-name ‘Selfridge’. The third guerrilla leader was Manoli Bandouvas, a wealthy shepherd whose vast flocks suggested his code-name, ‘Bo-Peep’; although he had a huge following, working with him was complicated by the fact that he liked playing people off against each another. All the kapetans and their men were dependent on the villages in their territory for news and supplies, but some villages were more involved in the resistance than others.

  Monty Woodhouse had arrived to take charge of SOE activities on Crete in November 1941. As well as coordinating the evacuation of stragglers, his orders were to explore the possibility of a Cretan guerrilla uprising, which would be unleashed only in the event of an Allied invasion of the island. These orders reflected the optimistic mood prevailing in Cairo at the time: the Afrika Korps, which had raced across North Africa that spring, was now limping to a halt at the end of dangerously attenuated supply lines.

  Woodhouse set about his task with energy, but everything conspired against him. The activities of the Royal Navy and the large numbers of stragglers still to be rescued brought German attention to the two main evacuation points, Tsoutsouros and Treis Ekklisies, until it became too dangerous to use them. Then in early 1942 the Germans began the reinforcement of Crete, which was to be used as a supply centre for warships, planes and troop-carriers on their way to Libya. Many more troops now patrolled the south coast and the construction of a new airfield began. The village of Tymbaki was evacuated and destroyed, and men and boys from the surrounding area were forced into labour gangs to level and prepare the ground.

  Cretan faith in the Allies reached a low ebb. Many had thought that the arrival of SOE officers on the island meant that their liberation was imminent, but now there were rumours that the officers were secretly planning to abandon the island altogether. At the same time, the enemy’s strength encouraged the recruitment of a number of Cretan spies, who helped to expose and kill members of the local resistance. The kapetans lay low, being too vulnerable to move about much in the existing climate. Monty Woodhouse left Crete in April 1942, stating in his final report that once the remaining Allied stragglers had been evacuated, there was nothing else that SOE could do – especially since there was, for the moment, no hope of combining an invasion of the island with a guerrilla uprising.

  Jack Smith-Hughes, who with Ralph Stockbridge had made the first tentative contacts with the Cretan resistance after the German invasion, had returned to Cairo to run SOE’s Cretan Desk. In mid-December 1941 he appointed a young officer, Alexander Fielding, to take charge of the western end of the island. Slim, dark and fine-boned, with a hawkish face and fiery temper, Fielding looked the part of a Cretan shepherd more than most of his compatriots. Commonly known as Xan, he had been running a bar in Cyprus when war broke out. He spoke good Greek and was not afraid of fighting, but he so dreaded the prospect of regimental life that a year had gone by before he joined the Cyprus Regiment as an Intelligence Officer. The job Smith-Hughes now offered him seemed to include an unusual degree of independence: ‘Do you have any personal objection to committing murder?’ was one of his more surprising questions.2

  Fielding reached the island in January 1942 and soon made contact with Ralph Stockbridge, who for some months had been manning the radio set hidden in the isolated house of Colonel Papadakis. Papadakis’s influence did not stretch far beyond the Chania region, but he had declared himself Leader of the Cretan Supreme Liberation Committee. Though more interested in establishing his own personal power base than in harassing the German war effort, he had recruited some remarkable men into the resistance, whom Xan put to good use.

  One of these was George Psychoundakis, a young shepherd from a poor family in Asi Gonia. At a time when few men in rural Crete were literate, George – who had had no more than elementary schooling – had a passion for reading, writing and poetry; Xan Fielding described him as ‘the most naturally wise and instinctively knowledgeable Cretan I ever met’.3 He had been part of the relay of guides and runners who took Allied servicemen down to the monastery of Preveli, from where the first large-scale evacuations took place under Commander Francis Poole in the summer of 1941.

  With George Psychoundakis as his guide, Xan worked closely with Papadakis’s secretary, a young lawyer called Andreas Polentas, and the Vandoulakis family of Vaphes. This family had helped so many Allied servicemen that their two houses were known as the British Consulate. Xan appointed a guerrilla leader for each province in the area, made contact with the Cretans best placed to report on German activity, and organized networks of runners with code-words to take their information to the wireless station.

  Monty Woodhouse was replaced by Tom Dunbabin, an Oxford-educated archaeologist, Fellow of All Souls and one of the most important Greek scholars of his day. He spoke Cretan like a native, and although taller and broader than most Cretans, like them he sported a fine moustache. In his threadbare Cretan clothes, Tom Dunbabin reminded Fielding of ‘a successful local sheep-thief’.4 Dunbabin’s first task was to round up what was left of the stragglers, most of whom were evacuated in the coming months.

  The Germans increased pressure on the resistance with raids on mountain villages, and arrests made all the more terrifying for being undertaken by huge numbers of men. The kapetans responded by executing six informers in May, but this led to the immediate killing of fourteen patriots. In June, the first of what became an annual sabotage operation was undertaken by the Special Boat Service. One team destroyed five aircraft at Kastelli while another Free French team, under Captain the Earl Jellicoe, destroyed eighteen planes and a number of vehicles at Heraklion airfield. The following day fifty hostages, including the ex-mayor of Heraklion and the ex-governor general, were shot by the Germans.

  Such a brutal show of strength threw the Cretans into a state of shock and panic, and many questioned whether there was anything to be gained from heroic resistance. But the instinct to strike back at the oppressors was as strong as ever and, in the hope of launching a general uprising, the kapetans urged SOE to give them more support. Tom Dunbabin explained that the moment was not yet ripe, but they insisted on being taken to Egypt in order to put their case to GHQ Cairo. Dunbabin agreed with reluctance and, on the night of 23 June, Bandouvas, Petrakogeorgis and their families, together with Satanas who was gravely ill with cancer, were assembled on a beach near Trypiti, awaiting the caique Porcupine, which was bringing Paddy for his first spell of duty in occupied Crete.

  The Porcupine stayed discreetly out at sea, while a tender rowed the incoming party to shore. Paddy was accompanied by a wireless operator, Sergeant Matthew White, and Yanni Tsangarakis, a runner for Ralph Stockbridge, who had volunteered to return as Padd
y’s guide. Each of them was carrying a heavy load as they disembarked in a rough sea, and Paddy’s boots were ripped apart as he scrambled over the wet rocks to the beach.

  The officer in charge of the tender made it clear that he could not accommodate all those awaiting passage, and the sea was too rough to attempt more than one journey back to the Porcupine. Only Satanas and his family were evacuated that night, leaving the other kapetans and their entourages seething with anger and resentment. This was reflected in Paddy’s first signal, which began with the words: ‘SITUATION HERE UGLY’.

  It would have been uglier still, had the kapetans known that GHQ Cairo had already decided not to attempt to liberate Crete, nor to assist any guerrilla uprising. A Joint Planning Staff meeting in Cairo had recommended that ‘The patriot leaders [of Crete] must be clearly informed that no military support other than supplies of stores, ammunition and food agreed upon in advance, and possibly some air action, can be given.’5 Yet events were unfolding so fast that even this minimal commitment looked optimistic.

  The great fortress of Tobruk had fallen after a fierce battle on 21 June 1942, leaving General Erwin Rommel’s forces a clear path into Egypt. On the day of his arrival Paddy was told that the German garrison had held a victory parade through the town of Tymbaki, ‘under the eyes of a despondent crowd’, to celebrate its capture.6 On 25 June, Rommel’s troops were pouring into Egypt. The early days of July were known as The Flap: the warships and other Royal Naval vessels in Alexandria harbour were moved, without warning, from Egypt to Beirut and Haifa. For about a week there was intense anxiety among the SOE operatives in Crete, as signals from Cairo suddenly dried up. By the time the signals came trickling in again, the situation had stabilized: Rommel was held in a bottleneck at El Alamein, with the sea on one side and the treacherous wastes of the Qattara Depression on the other.