Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  Xan Fielding and Paddy met in Yerakari, a large village celebrated for its cherries, which sits at the head of one of the two valleys of the Amari. This area was so green and fertile that British officers coming down from their harsh life in the mountains called it ‘Lotus Land’. It was not their first encounter. Both remembered that they had met several years before, probably in the summer of 1933, when Paddy was dining with a friend in the Café Anne in Bloomsbury: Xan was trying to make money by drawing sketches of the diners, just as Paddy was to do in Vienna some months later. At that time they had talked for less than five minutes. In Yerakari, they embarked on a friendship that was to last until Xan’s death in 1991. ‘Like [Paddy],’ wrote Fielding in his war memoir Hide and Seek, ‘I had tramped across Europe to reach Greece. Like him, I had been almost penniless during that long arduous holiday – but there the similarity between our travels ended, for whereas I was often forced to sleep out of doors, in ditches, haystacks or on public benches, Paddy’s charm and resourcefulness had made him a welcome guest wherever he went.’7

  On 5 August 1942 Xan left Crete to escort Colonel Papadakis, now on the Germans’ most-wanted list, to Egypt with his wife and son. It was an unexpected move, which left Paddy to fill the gap and take charge of the western part of the island. He made his way into western Crete with his wireless operator, a young man from the Dodecanese called Apostolos Evangelou, and immediately ran into difficulties. No one in the Chania and Rethymno networks knew that Xan had left, and they had not been warned of Paddy’s arrival. It took time to gain their confidence and re-establish links, and he had very little money. He could not afford to hire mules, so wireless sets, chargers, ammunition and anything else that needed moving had to be shifted by him and Evangelou and any other human backs they could borrow.

  It was at this time that he met George Psychoundakis: ‘George, who was in a muck-sweat from a long run over the mountains, handed over half a dozen letters from agents in western Crete, all twisted into compact billets and carefully hidden in various parts of his clothing; they were produced with a comic kind of conjuror’s flourish, after grotesquely furtive glances over the shoulder and fingers laid on lips in a caricature of clandestine security precautions that made us all laugh.’8

  While trying to establish contact with the intelligence gatherers, Paddy was also preparing a sabotage mission in Suda Bay. A parachute drop of limpet mines was arranged for 8 September, in the White Mountains. They landed safely, along with some much needed cash, though without the wire-cutters Paddy had specifically asked for. Paddy and Yanni Tsangarakis set off, with the limpets on their backs – huge and heavy, ‘like studded bowler hats’.9 They hoped to use them on a large petrol tanker moored in the harbour, but by the time they arrived the tanker had left. They also discovered that it was impossible to break through the perimeter, which was guarded by dog patrols and electric fences. Dunbabin was finding the same in Heraklion. The harbour was too well defended, and no one was prepared to swim out to an enemy ship with a great metal weight strapped to their chest.

  Sabotage remained a top priority for SOE, but it was constantly impeded by other demands on the time and energy of those on the ground. Days and nights were spent waiting for messengers, or the next wireless schedule, or parachute drops, usually postponed because of the weather. Moving the wireless sets in their suitcases involved back-breaking marches through the night. There were also marches to the coast to meet incoming craft, marches through the mountains to secret conferences, marches to gather information. The Cretan terrain is among the harshest in Europe, and distances on a map bear no relation to the ground that has to be covered. When asked how far it was from one place to another, a Cretan would reply by saying it was ‘ten cigarettes away’, or however many he thought would be smoked en route.

  Inevitably there were also days of tedium when there was nothing to do but wait, for a message or a runner. But for someone like Paddy who enjoyed singing and poetry, the Cretans provided a rich seam of distraction. He picked up a range of Cretan songs, and was always ready for a round of mantinades, improvised rhyming couplets that were taken up by one person after another in the circle. Many of the older shepherds could recite great chunks of the Erotokritos, a seventeenth-century romance in the Cretan dialect, the recitation of which could go on all night.

  Since the SOE operatives took special care not to enter villages except in very rare circumstances, they relied on their guides and the local people for food. ‘When I first arrived the food situation was poor, though I cannot claim ever to have gone seriously hungry.’10 It was a monotonous diet of yoghurt, sheep’s cheese, bread, with beans and tomatoes and lentils in the summer; but there never seemed to be any shortage of wine, sikoudia or home-grown tobacco. Years later, he told a friend that the only civilized item he missed on Crete was his toothbrush:11 these were almost unknown outside the main towns, and had he been captured in possession of a toothbrush his cover would have been blown instantly.

  At the end of September Paddy, along with Vangeli Vandoulakis and the wireless operator Evangelou, moved their equipment to a hideout east of the village of Photineou (Fotinos), home of Yanni Tsangarakis. The area was close to a large enemy supply dump and many Germans were billeted nearby, so it was a good place from which to spy on them – though sometimes they came rather too close for comfort.

  When a hundred and fifty Germans moved into the area and began a firing exercise, Nikoli Alevizakis (son of Father John Alevizakis of Alones, a great figure in the resistance) thought that they must be looking for the wireless set. As he took to his heels to warn Paddy and the others, the soldiers stopped their exercise and began firing at him. Paddy and Yanni Tsangarakis moved quietly to higher ground; but the wireless in its cave became increasingly vulnerable as the Germans fanned out. Evangelou the operator, Paddy wrote, ‘bent over the wireless with the earphones on, failed to see them, but kept tapping Morse while three Germans passed between him and our cave, a hundred yards away … Yanni Tsangarakis and I, meanwhile, lay down with our rifles cocked, in case they should spot the set. Yanni, who knew his village was in danger of being burnt down, kept crossing himself and repeating, “O, my poor village …”’ It was a heart-stopping moment, but they were lucky: ‘The Huns walked straight past, up the hill. It was wonderful. We packed up quick and beat it.’12

  By the end of October, western Crete had two wireless stations. Good news was also coming from North Africa, where Montgomery’s massive attack on the Germans at El Alamein was at last pushing them westwards, out of Egypt and back into Cyrenaica. In fact, thought Paddy, ‘everything was going swimmingly at last. I was getting to know all the big boys, and … I felt I was getting somewhere.’13

  The following month, however, the Germans holding Fortress Crete launched a big counter-espionage drive. On the night of 18 November the Germans surrounded the villages of Vaphes and Vrysses, and took thirty-seven prisoners. Among them were Andreas Polentas, Perikles Vandoulakis, and Evangelou – who was caught in the house of Nicos Vandoulakis, where the radio was hidden. His pockets were filled with incriminating papers; but Elpida Vandoulakis, Uncle Nico’s daughter, managed to take his jacket and help him into another one before the police took him away. She stuffed the papers into her dress, and later that night, carried the heavy wireless and batteries out to a field and buried them. Thanks to her, the wireless was saved; but Polentas and Evangelou were kept in the notorious Ayia prison in Chania, where they were tortured and eventually shot.

  Paddy was profoundly shaken when he heard the news, and all his Cretan friends and helpers went to ground. For the first time, he was alone and unescorted. He had papers in his pocket made out in the name of Mihalifn1 Phrangidakis, aged twenty-seven, but he still had to be careful: ‘I rattled along all right in Greek, but could fall into terrible give-away blunders.’14Yet in some ways being without a guide was a relief, since they always tried to keep him away from the Germans. Now he was free to wander about and listen in on enemy convers
ations, all the more enjoyable since the enemy’s morale was very low.

  The Battle of Alamein had turned the German advance into a retreat, and the Afrika Korps was now being hounded out of Cyrenaica. There were tales of bad discipline, failure to salute officers and drunkenness. Paddy reported spending a long evening in Aghios Konstantinos, an area of Rethymno, in the room next door to two German sergeants. They were feeling wretched, above all at the prospect of spending the fourth Christmas ‘“weit von der Heimat” … Then, to my astonishment, they started an English lesson. I felt like correcting their pronunciation through the door. When they went out to dinner I went into their room with a petrol lighter and hunted round. (I pinched the manual of a German W/T set, which may or may not be interesting.) I dropped the lighter and had a feverish hunt on all fours for it and the door, and got back to my room just before they came back, slightly drunk.’15

  Tom Dunbabin, Xan and Paddy did all they could to prey on German fears and frustrations. They dropped leaflets in German, stamped with swastika-bearing eagles as if they had been made by disaffected German soldiers. Xan and Paddy also began a chalk-scrawling campaign, enlisting young Cretans to help. ‘WIR WOLLEN NACH HAUS!’ (we want to go home) and ‘WO IST UNSERE LUFTWAFFE?’ (where is our air force?) and ‘SCHEISSE HITLER’ (shit Hitler) were the most common scrawls, but Paddy also took advantage of the rumours that Communism was spreading through the sullen German ranks. Some slogans read ‘HEIL STALIN!’ or ‘HEIL MOSKAU!’ accompanied by a defiant hammer and sickle. The success of his graffiti could be judged by the arrest of German soldiers, and searches of their billets and incoming parcels. The following year the graffiti campaign was backed up by a secret printing press, which distributed black propaganda in German.

  On 27 November, Xan returned to Crete with another SOE officer, Captain Arthur Reade, who had trained as a barrister before the war and was later part of the prosecuting team at the Nuremberg trials. He, Xan, a radio operator called Alec Tarves, and Nikos Souris, Tom Dunbabin’s right-hand man who had completed the training course at Haifa, returned to Crete by submarine. It was a difficult landing in rough weather, and they were almost smashed on to the rocks. Arthur Reade had been sent to Crete with one objective, the sabotage of Suda Bay, but in a job where it was essential to blend into the scenery, Reade’s appearance was a liability. He was so tall and English-looking that he could never have passed for a Cretan shepherd, and when he grew his beard it came out fan-shaped and bright red.

  During the night of 6–7 December, the villages of Kourites, Nithavri, Apodoulou and Platanos in the Amari were raided. The Germans turned up in huge numbers, with machine guns and even mortars. The men were herded into the school, the women into the church, and here they were kept for forty-eight hours while the Germans searched and interrogated. They found nothing, thanks to a well-developed network of lookouts, and no one gave anything away.

  Had the enemy mounted a raid on Yerakari that Christmas of 1942, however, they would have bagged most of the British officers on Crete; but the Germans took Christmas seriously and stayed in their garrisons for the feast. Paddy, Xan, Arthur and Tom ‘reeled happily from house to house’,16 enjoying the hospitality of their Cretan comrades, and celebrating the German reversals at Alamein and Stalingrad. Paddy was looking particularly dashing in his new Cretan waistcoat, ‘of royal blue broadcloth lined with scarlet shot-silk and embroidered with arabesques of black braid’.17

  Xan was always surprised by the high sartorial style that Paddy managed to maintain in the roughest conditions.

  Though we all wore patched breeches, tattered coats and down-at-heel boots, on him these looked as frivolous as fancy-dress. His fair hair, eyebrows and moustache were dyed black, which only added to his carnivalesque appearance, and his conversation was as gay and witty as though we had just met each other … at some splendid ball in Paris or London. His frivolity was a salutary contrast to Tom’s natural gravity and my own temper … It was also a deceptive quality, for although it enhanced his patent imaginative powers, it concealed a mind as conscientious and thorough as it was fanciful.18

  Yanni Tsangarakis brought some bad news early in the New Year of 1943. An enemy patrol had surrounded Alones. There had been enough time to hide the wireless and its batteries while, with help from Tsangarakis, the radio operators had slipped through the German line and disappeared. But the patrol had arrested Siphi Alevizakis, one of the three sons of Father John, and on him they found two letters, in English, to Paddy. They had taken him away, and he could expect no more mercy than Apostolos Evangelou and Andreas Polentas. ‘Grim tales were coming in of the goings on at [Alones] – arrests, beatings-up etc. A friend saw Siphi the Vicar’s son being taken through Argyroupolis, with blood streaming out of his mouth.’19

  Pleased with their haul, the Germans left and returned the following day; by which time the charging engine and all other incriminating evidence had been spirited away. A few days later they raided the village of Asi Gonia looking for George Psychoundakis, with an informer who was hidden under a raincoat. George managed to escape, but several of his family were arrested and interrogated.

  Keen to stamp out this hotbed of clandestine activity, German patrols intensified their search of the Alones–Asi Gonia region. It was now vital to move the wireless set that had been hidden on the day following Siphi’s arrest. Paddy and Xan met Siphi’s father, Father John Alevizakis, in a cave overlooking Asi Gonia: ‘he brushed aside our expressions of sympathy with a phrase that came constantly to his lips: “God is great.” Then, as he took out a bottle of raki he had brought with him, he asked us all to drink to the toast: “May the Almighty polish the rust from our rifles!”’20

  The wireless, batteries and charging engine were moved in the course of one freezing January night, by Paddy and eighteen men, most of whom were cousins of George Psychoundakis. Their destination was the Beehive, a round cheese-hut near Gournes. This had been the hideout of Arthur Reade and Alec Tarves, his wireless operator, since they arrived on the island in November. It was a gruelling march: ‘Every now and then we sat down to smoke a cigarette, and only the cold kept us all from falling asleep where we sat.’21 They were exhausted when they reached Reade and Tarves at the Beehive, but there was no time to rest; they could hear the sound of rifle and machine-gun fire from the villages below. The wireless had already been moved to a remoter spot, and as they scrambled higher, they saw a party of over a hundred Germans moving up the gorge. It was time to hide.

  George and Alec Tarves went over the watershed while Paddy, Yanni Tsangarakis and Arthur Reade scrambled into the woods and hid in a thick cypress tree. They spent the rest of that freezing day (it was 25 January) in its branches, scarcely daring to move. The German patrols went to and fro, shouting to each other; some soldiers passed almost directly beneath them. But in the late afternoon the Germans gave up the search when a mist rolled in and snow began to fall. Emerging from the tree stiff as planks and chilled to the bone, Paddy, Yanni and Arthur Reade scrambled uphill, spent the night in a damp hole, and made their way to the village of Kampos. Paddy referred to their narrow escape as ‘Oak Apple Day’22 – the name commemorating the several hours that Charles II spent in an oak tree avoiding the Parliamentarians after the Battle of Worcester.

  Tom Dunbabin left Crete in mid-February 1943 with a large party of Cretans, including George Psychoundakis who was sorely in need of a rest. Xan had returned to his position in western Crete, so Dunbabin made Paddy responsible for the Heraklion area. This was not what he wanted to hear. ‘I now feel as if I were starting on an op. in Crete all over again, far from all the friends and contacts I had gone to considerable pains to make (which is one of the most important parts of work here, in my opinion) in an area I have no feeling for at all.’23

  As it turned out, the Heraklion sector was not as bad as he had expected: it was certainly less arduous, as he admitted in his report to SOE in Cairo:

  Working in this area, after my former haunts, is like
settling down to a Jane Austen novel, after leaving a thriller by Sax Rohmer half-way through. Merely the struggle for existence [in western Crete] is a full-time job. On looking back, my six months seem to have been one long string of battery troubles, faulty sets, transport difficulties, rain, arrests, hide and seek with the Huns, lack of cash, flights at a moment’s notice, false alarms, wicked treks over the mountains, laden like a mule, fright among one’s collaborators, treachery, and friends getting shot.24

  All Paddy’s reports from Crete describe the people involved in gathering information, their relative efficiency, the tension between the resistance leaders and the machinations of the Communists; but everything comes into sharper focus once he moves to Heraklion. The Cretan desire to expel the invader was as strong as ever, but sooner or later Crete would be liberated. Politically, those involved in the resistance were looking to the future.

  In the first week of March Paddy entered the city dressed as a shepherd, his moustache and eyebrows freshly darkened with burnt cork, on one of the last days of Carnival. He spent the next eight days in a borrowed suit with a collar and tie, involved in ‘a succession of conferences all day with work far into the night’,25 designed to iron out rivalries and improve lines of communication. At the same time, he was doing his best to neutralize the influence of the Communists.