Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  Paddy took down as many words as he could. He had only to say something in Greek or point to an object and a chorus of villagers would sing out the word in Boliaric. Most were variations on the Greek, but Paddy thought he could detect traces of Slav and Turkish, while some were pure invention. He came down from the Kravara in the highest of spirits, with a notebook full of treasure.

  He was back in Athens on 1 April and met up with Joan, who had been in London. She brought good news. Ian Fleming, a director of Lord Kemsley’s Dropmore (later Queen Anne) Press, said they would like to print a de-luxe limited edition of the first two articles on monasteries. Paddy had hoped to write many more articles on the subject, eventually to be gathered into a book, but Fleming was willing to pay £150, which would be very welcome for further travelling in Greece. An even more agreeable surprise came from the Royal Society of Literature, with the news that The Traveller’s Tree had won the Heinemann Foundation Prize. It meant not only another £100 tax free: it put Paddy on the literary map, and marked him out as a writer whose career would be worth following.

  From Athens, Paddy and Joan set off to Nauplia, via Mycenae with a detour to Epidaurus, and then sailed down the eastern coast of the Peloponnese. From Astros, where they waited for mules to take them into the interior, Paddy wrote to Jock:

  It’s a fascinating wild and remote mountain region, the only place in Greece where a sort of ancient Greek is spoken, owing to the isolation of the district – it’s a kind of Doric-Laconian, quite incomprehensible to the rest of Greece … I’m finishing a long Meteora article for Cornhill, which will follow this hot-foot … Joan sends love – she is knitting something out of rust-coloured wool the other side of this tin table.31

  Joan is often mentioned in Paddy’s letters and notebooks, usually as a quiet presence. Sometimes he sees her reading, and notices the book and what she is wearing; sometimes he glances at her sitting opposite him, brows furrowed, deep in concentration over her pocket chess set. (Joan played chess to a high standard, but never with Paddy who was too impatient to be any good at the game.) Sometimes, in a notebook, he will comment that they had had a row that made them both miserable, though he never mentions the cause. It was probably money. Joan had to bear the strain of his extravagance as she tried to make her allowance stretch for two, and sometimes even her patience snapped. It is interesting to note how often Paddy was attracted to older women, and he was younger than the two great loves of his life. Yet he was not looking so much for a mother, as for someone to be Wendy to his Peter Pan; someone who would keep his feet on the ground, and at the same time do the tiresome, grown-up things so that he would not have to.

  Joan took on these responsibilities, while at the same time being an almost perfect travelling companion. In any café or house where they stopped, she noticed things that Paddy – singing, drinking and smoking with the locals – might well have missed. He relied on her social antennae, too: she knew how to tell him to be quiet without putting him down or hurting his feelings. Yet if Paddy and his hosts were in the mood to laugh and talk all night, Joan would never have tried to drag him away. She would either leave on her own, or fold herself into her thoughts till he was ready to go. When they were alone together, she was the best listener he ever had: funny and responsive, always ready to tease or pull him up if he got carried away, never allowing him to get away with sentiment or sloppy thinking. He also needed her in his fits of depression, when her encouragement and sympathy were the surest way to regain his habitual bounce.

  Joan might have made more appearances in Paddy’s two books on Greece, but as a fiercely private person and his initial editor, she did not encourage mentions of her presence. That is left to her photographs. Landscapes predominate, and there are several in which people are photographed at a distance or from the back – sign of a certain reserve in a photographer; but some of her portraits, of Father John Alevizakis for instance, or Father Christopher of St Barlaam’s monastery, show that she could also approach within inches of someone’s face.32 Although she had a good camera and was technically adept, Joan never set much store by her photographs, often referring to them dismissively as ‘my snaps’. Many remain in the envelopes in which she picked them up from the developer. The ones she took on her travels with Paddy were placed in chronological order and numbered, the subjects noted, the negatives kept; yet instead of pasting the positives into albums, they were glued into two cheap, lined exercise books as if their prime purpose was to be a visual reference for Paddy. Seeing how well thumbed they are, they seem to have been put to good use.

  Having crossed the Peloponnese to Cape Malea, Paddy and Joan sailed to Crete. Paddy was too excited to sleep – ‘Couldn’t believe I was back in Crete, sat up watching dawn break, drinking in the Cretan accent, lovely …’ They went on by bus to celebrate a rowdy Orthodox Easter with Manoli Paterakis and his family at Koustoyerako, where Paddy was impressed by how unsentimental they were about the destruction of their village and the losses they had sustained. ‘Each has a father killed, limps from a machine-gun burst, arm bust, house burnt. Let them burn them again!’33

  From there they went to visit George Psychoundakis in Asi Gonia – ‘bald with a huge moustache’. Here the celebrations continued, and Paddy was rather embarrassed by the way he was expected to live up to a war-hero image that was, to him at least, no longer real. ‘In Crete I have to conform to an outgrown tradition of myself – how one changes! What a traitor one is to one’s own past!’34

  Psychoundakis, on the other hand, had not been able to shake off his past. In spite of having fought so hard for the Cretan resistance, and in spite of the commendations he had received in official British reports and the British Empire Medal he had been awarded in 1945, the authorities found that his service record was not in order. He was arrested and imprisoned as a deserter, and spent months of bitterness and misery in the jails of Piraeus and Macedonia. ‘I was locked up in cells … with brigands and Communists and all the dregs of the mainland,’ he told Paddy, and all his hair fell out during the ordeal.35 He had to do two more years of service in the Pindus before being released, and on reaching home he found his family poorer than ever. He took a job first as a charcoal-burner, and then as a road-mender.

  It was while in prison that George had begun to write down everything he could remember about the war and the occupation, a task that was eventually finished while he worked on the roads, writing by candlelight in the nearby cave where he slept at night. Paddy asked if he might see the result, ‘and without a word he dived into his knapsack, fished out five thick exercise books tied in a bundle, and handed them over’.

  Together the notebooks were called ‘Pictures of our Life during the Occupation’, and Paddy read them over the next four days. They were written with passion, clarity and truthfulness, and represented a unique document of the time. ‘Dozens of accounts by officers who were dropped or infiltrated into enemy-occupied country have appeared … but there has not been a single one, as far as I know, by any of the millions of men who formed the raw material of the Resistance in occupied Europe.’36 Paddy decided that he would translate George’s book, and try and find it a publisher. It would never make its author a fortune, but George needed every penny he could earn – he had gone back to being a charcoal-burner, and was still miserably poor.

  As Paddy and Joan proceeded on their triumphal progress through the villages, they saw that Cretan hospitality had lost none of its over-abundance, and only the long walks and mule rides from one place to the next gave them an opportunity to rest their digestions. Groups of armed mountain men greeted them outside each village, and welcomed them with volleys of shots fired into the air.

  There was also another man with a gun, though he was not mentioned in Paddy’s introduction to The Cretan Runner, nor indeed in his notebooks. At Alones they had spent a few days with Father John Alevizakis and his sons, prior to attending a feast in Rethymno. They were warned not to go on: Yorgo, the son of Kanaki Tsangarakis, had hear
d Paddy was there. ‘He was waiting,’ wrote Paddy, ‘with rifle and binoculars, to pick me off when I left the village.’ The blood feud was still alive, and the only way out of the village was through a deep ravine.

  Yorgo was on one side, our way out on the other … I asked whether he was a good shot and Levtheri, Father John’s son, laughed and said ‘Yes, the blighter can shoot a hole through a 10 drachma piece at 500 metres,’ which made us all laugh rather ruefully, including Joan … The only thing to do in such a case is to be accompanied by a neutral figure, head of a rival clan or family in whose company nobody can be shot without involving the whole tribe.37

  A suitably friendly figure agreed to accompany them to safety, and ‘under his protection Joan and I crossed the blank hillside, looking across the valley at Yorgo sitting on the rock, binoculars round his neck and gun across his knees; but unable, by Cretan ethics, to blaze away …’38 In Vilandredo they were received like kings by Paddy’s god-brother Kapetan Stathi Loukakis. When Stathi heard that the Tsangarakis men were lying in wait for his guest, he too took steps to protect them. Joan noticed that when they left the village they were guarded by lookouts posted at key points, who could challenge anyone who came within firing distance.

  Back in Athens towards the end of May, they came across the painter John Craxton. He, the ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn and the choreographer Frederick Ashton were guests of a rich American attorney, Thomas Hart Fisher, and his wife Ruth Page, also a dancer and choreographer. They had chartered a boat called the Elikki, which was more of a large caique than a yacht. It was not luxurious: the one loo on board could only be reached by walking through the hosts’ cabin.

  Paddy and Joan were immediately invited to join the party; and although this would prevent Paddy from receiving the Heinemann prize in person, it was an excellent opportunity for him to refresh his memory of the Cyclades for the Greek book. It was not only the joy of Paddy’s company and his knowledge of Greece that made him an ideal dragoman for the cruise, he was also the only one with sufficient Greek to communicate effectively with the crew. ‘Paddy told the captain where to go,’ wrote Ruth Page, ‘and we went to all kinds of islands where no tourist had ever set foot.’39

  It was July by the time they returned to a sweltering Athens but they were soon on the road again, taking a lift to Corinth in a truck full of ouzo. Travelling south through Mycenae, Argos, Nemea and Tripoli, they were heading for the Taygetus mountains and the deep Mani, the most barren and rocky region of the whole of Greece.

  In Sparta (‘that Potsdam of the Peloponnese’, as he called it40) a local man led them to some mosaics which he brought to life by sloshing a bucket of water over them. One of the mosaics showed a buxom Europa and the bull. ‘How pleased Zeus is to have her on his back,’ said the policeman. ‘See, he’s smiling to himself.’41 From there they were given a lift in a jeep by the son of a bank manager, who planned to take them all the way to Kalamata, till he discovered it was a seven-hour drive. Instead he took them as far as the village of Anavryti, inhabited – so the rumour went – exclusively by Jews. When he heard this rumour in Sparta it had immediately sparked Paddy’s interest, since he had never heard of there being any Jews in the Peloponnese.

  The villagers, it turned out, were not Jewish at all; their reputation, they told him, was due to the fact that they were so much cleverer than the dim-witted plain-dwellers: ‘we can nail horseshoes on a louse … We could sell you the air.’42 A bed was made up for the travellers on the floor of a house belonging to a family called Adamakos, and the following day they were woken early by their guide, Panayoti, who was to take them over the mountains. The Taygetus mountains rise eight thousand feet, dividing the Laconian from the Messenian plain. Perhaps midwinter might have been a worse time to set out, but midsummer was not ideal either:

  A vast slag-heap soon shut out the kindly lower world; the sun trampled overhead through sizzling and windless air. Feet became cannon-balls, loads turned to lead, hearts pounded, hands slipped on the handles of sticks and rivers of sweat streamed over burning faces and trickled into our mouths like brine …43

  The ordeal went on for hour after hour before they reached the watershed; but once they had crossed the inferno, they found themselves in greener country, a place quite unlike the rest of Greece.

  The Maniots are believed to be the closest descendants of the classical Greeks, and they remained pagan for centuries after the rest of Greece became Christian. Paddy learnt all he could about their customs and superstitions, their culture of the vendetta, and the beautiful metrical dirges sung by the women at funerals. They had maintained a precarious independence while the rest of the country was under Ottoman rule. ‘Terrible tales of massacres, battles, bullets, slit throats – “The Turks never got hold of us, nor did the Communists!” ’44The prevailing political feeling was defiantly royalist. In Kardamyli, where Paddy and Joan were eventually to settle, he noted how conscious the people were of the antiquity of their village.fn3 The blinding light and barren rocks of their land had made the Maniots tough and resilient, but there was plenty to grumble about. ‘If only we could find a merchant who bought stones,’ said one of them, ‘we’d all be millionaires.’45

  ‘Well,’ Paddy wrote to Jock from the island of Skopelos:

  the notes for the Greek book are assembled at last! I will be heading for home at the end of this month, after getting back to Athens and spending a few days winding things up and a day or two in the National and Gennadion libraries. I’ve got a formidable amount of material, all of it fascinating. I hope to be able to borrow Amy and Walter Smart’s cottage in Normandy to do the writing in – it’s only a few hours away from Victoria – but in case that falls through, you couldn’t ask all your pals about a pleasant and cheap cottage for the winter, suitable for a hermit embarked on a major literary enterprise, could you?46

  Jock at one point suggested that, if he were really serious about looking for a place free from diversion or temptation, he might consider a small boarding house in Aberdeen.

  15

  Byron’s Slippers

  Paddy’s article on the Meteora, ‘The Monasteries of the Air’, was published in the summer of 1951 in the Cornhill. He spent much of the following winter working at Gadencourt, while preparing to translate George Psychoundakis’s Cretan war memoir. The original notebooks were being typed up in Athens, and he hoped to start work on the typescript in the new year.

  In February 1952 Paddy was in Paris, elated by the fact that Amiot-Dumont were going to publish The Traveller’s Tree in a French edition, called Au-delà de la Désiderade: les Caraïbes d’île en île. In a long letter to Joan he also described a day with Freya Stark. They spent a happy afternoon going round the Musée de Cluny, which houses the celebrated Unicorn tapestries. After browsing round the bookshops and getting caught in a snowstorm they had tea in her room in the Bristol Hotel, where Freya (then just short of sixty) told him that she was learning to draw. ‘She spends all day at the Académie Julian charcoaling away from the life – quite astonishingly well.’ Her husband Stewart Perowne turned up, and after dinner Paddy vaguely suggested they go on to a cabaret. Freya seized on the idea, and they ended up at ‘an elaborately camp joint in Montmartre called Madame Arthur, with an endless transvestitist [sic] cabaret … Freya got pleasantly watery-eyed and tipsy, and very excited like a small girl seeing LIFE for the first time; Stewart rather excited too … We got to bed at about 5am.’1

  Back at Gadencourt, Paddy told Jock that the Greek book was ‘going like a fire hydrant’,2 but this was interrupted in mid-March when he received the proofs of his translation of two novellas by Colette. The work had been commissioned by Secker & Warburg, through the good offices of Raymond Mortimer of the Sunday Times who knew Paddy was short of money. Colette wrote Chambre d’Hôtel (translated as Chance Acquaintances) and Julie de Carneilhan between 1940 and 1941, and neither is considered among her best work. Paddy regretted that he never met her (she died in 1954) and could remember ve
ry little about the stories, which he had ‘struggled through’ while in Greece the year before. Although he usually enjoyed her writing, having to correct the proofs in a rush soured him for Colette. ‘It’s like some awful imposition at school … I’m beginning to think she’s fearful rot,’ he wrote.3

  The letter was written to a relatively new friend, with whom he was to correspond for the rest of his life: Lady Diana Cooper. They had first met in London in the late forties, and again in Paris, at a lunch given by Bertha Lady Michelham, perhaps in the latter part of 1951. Paddy sent her a copy of The Traveller’s Tree, and soon after that she invited him for a weekend at her house near Chantilly. When Sir Alfred Duff Cooper had retired as British Ambassador to Paris in early 1947, he and his wife had decided to remain in France, taking a lease on the Château de Saint-Firmin, an eighteenth-century house set amid the woods and lakes of the grounds of the Château de Chantilly. Duff was happy to sit quietly, reading and writing books, but Diana dreaded inactivity. She filled the house with friends, planned picnics and expeditions, and tried to maintain her pre-retirement levels of excitement.

  Paddy and Diana each discovered that the other was the sort of person they liked best. He was good-looking, entertaining, ready for anything, had had ‘a splendid war’, and was someone all her friends would enjoy meeting. He could illuminate any subject under the sun, and had a memory that had retained most of the thousands of books he had read over the years. He knew all her favourite passages from Browning, Shakespeare, Donne, Tennyson, Meredith and Keats off by heart, and much more besides – whole evenings were spent singing and reciting poetry. He rejuvenated Diana, quickened her excitement and curiosity; but while Duff would certainly have appreciated his passion for verse, he was probably not quite so taken with his noisy ebullience.