Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  Sometime before, the American Holiday magazine had asked Paddy to write a 2,000-word article on ‘The Pleasures of Walking’, and it seemed the ideal opportunity to tackle his great journey across Europe. In a notebook, under the heading ‘Rome: August 1962’, he had sketched out a few ideas; but trusting as he did in the first unfettered rush of writing, he did not plot it out. With great difficulty he managed to compress the first part of the journey into under seventy pages, by which time he had only reached Orşova. Then something snapped. As he describes it, ‘an explosion took place … and with an enormous sigh of relief, as if I had wriggled out of a straight jacket, I continued the journey at a normal pace’.31

  ‘Do let me know your reactions to all this,’ he wrote to Jock. ‘I really do think it is exciting and odd … I’m writing all the time, like mad, it’s a very different thing from the grind that my dilatoriness has turned my proper book into! Should be through in a few days …’32 Jock knew him well enough not to bank on it.

  After a journey to Morocco with Joan in March Paddy spent the next few months in England, and with summer came the annual migration to Greece. They still had their sights fixed on the little promontory at Kalamitsi, but any future negotiations – or a new search, if it fell through – were hampered by the fact that they were only in the country for a few weeks a year. The situation was resolved by a new friend, who offered to lend them a house on the island of Euboea.

  Sir Aymer Maxwell Bt was a few years older than Paddy and had served in the Scots Guards. From his grandfather he had inherited his baronetcy and the estates of Monreith, in south-western Scotland. The wilds of Scotland had never appealed to Aymer, a gentle, bookish character, in the way they had to his brother Gavin, author of A Ring of Bright Water. Aymer preferred the Mediterranean. On a yacht called the Dirk Hatterick he took himself and his friends round the islands of the Aegean, and he had a property in Euboea just south of Limni, on the site of an abandoned magnesite mine. There were two houses: Aymer lived in one, and the other he lent to Paddy and Joan.

  They accepted gratefully, but Paddy was dismayed when he first set eyes on it. On one side the house looked out on a pleasant garden overlooking the sea; but on the other side there was nothing but ruined warehouses, rusting machinery and white spoil heaps. He set to work to create the perfect writing place: a pavilion of rush mats and criss-cross lattice work that cunningly hid the industrial debris, leaving views of mountains and sea. He also made a low relief, in plaster, of a merman and the gorgona – the dangerous, double-tailed mermaid known to Greek fishermen, who holds a boat in one hand and an anchor in the other.fn3 Some months later, inspired by John Julius who gave him the address of a tattooist in the Waterloo Road, Paddy had the gorgona tattooed on his left arm.

  Aymer Maxwell’s guests came and went as Paddy built his pavilion. Nancy Mitford came with Mark Ogilvie-Grant, and they made several expeditions to the islands of the Sporades in the Dirk Hatterick. They were followed by Maurice Bowra and Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, Lyndall and then Janetta and her family, with Julian Jebb and Jaime Parladé, whom Janetta would eventually marry. At the end of the summer, Paddy and Joan were left alone. But when Joan went back to London, Paddy still had one congenial neighbour. The translator and scholar Philip Sherrard, who made a study of the religious and poetic traditions of Greece, had a house nearby. He and Paddy would meet up at the end of the working day, and eat their supper in the almost deserted taverna.

  To thank Aymer for his kindness, Paddy now turned his attention to a little raised circular terrace in Aymer’s garden which overlooked the sea. With enormous difficulty and the help of several men, he bought a massive granite mill-wheel, which he made into a table and installed on the terrace. He had a great circle of wood made by the local carpenter to increase the size of the mill-wheel table, which he then painted with the points of the compass and a rose of the winds.

  On New Year’s Day 1964, Paddy wrote a letter to Jock from Katounia about his account of the walk, which now numbered about 84,000 words. ‘The book has changed, and I think ripened out of all recognition. Much more personal, and far livelier in pace, and lots of it, I hope, very odd. I wonder what Holiday will say …’ Whatever its editors said, it was probably unprintable. Having waited almost two years for a piece by Paddy on ‘The Pleasures of Walking’, which had now turned into a book, all they could do was choose a passage of the right length. This appeared as ‘A Cave on the Black Sea’, in the Holiday issue of May 1965.

  In its final stages this proto-book was called ‘A Youthful Journey’, but in early 1966 Paddy nursed the idea of calling it ‘Parallax’. Most often used in astronomy, the word alludes to the difference in the appearance of an object seen from two different angles. It seemed a good way to draw attention to the gap between the nineteen-year-old walker and the forty-nine-year-old writer, and it included the letter ‘x’ which always produced a positive response, or so he felt. ‘If sex were spelt segs,’ he explained to Jock Murray, ‘I question whether it would have caught on to the same extent.’33

  Paddy and Joan finally signed the contract for the plot of land at Kalamitsi on 3 March 1964. The price agreed was £2,000 (about 200,000 drachmas), part of which was raised by selling the little house in Athens.

  From Kalamitsi, the village of Kardamyli was a twenty-minute walk away. On their property, nothing could be heard but the sea and the almost deafening throb of the cicadas. Standing on the tip of the headland they could look out to an uninhabited island, on which stood the remains of a castle that was gradually being swallowed up by trees. The island stood about half a mile offshore, while on the horizon rested the pale arm of the Messenian peninsula. To their right, the rock face tumbled down to a tiny cove. Turning to the left, they could see the ground sloping off in terraces to a long pebbled beach. Behind them, the coastal olive groves gave way to hillsides covered in pine and myrtle, thorn and ilex, guarded by the slim lances of cypress trees; and hanging above them all were the great grey flanks of the Taygetus mountains that glowed pink and orange at sunset.

  They pitched their tents on the high ground in July and created a couple of makeshift shelters. In one they stored water and food, brought from the village; the other was occupied by a table on which they drew and planned and read. They pored over volumes of Vitruvius and Palladio, studied proportion and design, paced out imaginary rooms and argued about dimensions. Each had a fairly clear idea of what they wanted – as Paddy put it, ‘a loose-limbed monastery cum farmhouse’ with massive walls and cool rooms.34 He made paper models of how he wanted the house to look, but this was not enough. At some point, a real architect would have to translate their ideas into proper technical drawings.

  Their choice fell on Nico Hadjimichalis, who had made a study of Greek vernacular architecture, particularly on Crete and Rhodes where he had been involved in projects to preserve traditional villages. With these skills went a natural ebullience and generosity that endeared him enormously to his new clients. His mother Angeliki Hadjimichalis was a renowned expert on the Sarakatsans, while his wife Vana was an archaeologist who was for many years attached to the French School in Athens.

  The key figure in the day-to-day building work was the local stonemason, Nico Kolokotrones, ‘the last of seven generations of master-masons from Arcadia who had all played the violin’. Nico, ‘a charming, eager, hulking, bear-like Zorba figure’,35 put together a team of local builders and stonecutters from the surrounding villages, and soon became such a friend that Paddy and Joan stood godparents to his son. Paddy often worked alongside the builders or scoured the countryside, going as far as Kalamata to assemble jackdaw heaps of marble slabs and traditional semi-cylindrical tiles. Kalamata was then in the early stages of modernization, and such things were lying around like scrap for the taking.

  Early September was still warm, though the evening showers had them hunkered down in their tent, drinking Grant’s Standfast whisky and soda and reading aloud from Mrs Gaskell. By November, work was well under w
ay and the main terrace was taking shape. Paddy had plans for a rose of the winds, ‘with the four cardinal points indicated by their Greek initials picked out in black pebbles tightly cemented among white in cunning squares among the grey slabs …’36 Laying patterns of different coloured pebbles is more often seen in houses of the Cyclades and Sporades than in the Mani, but for Paddy the pebbling became an obsession. He copied his designs from excavations at Olynthus and in the Chalkidiki peninsula: patterns of waves, cables, and interlocking vine shoots.

  They returned to London at the end of the year, with Paddy now able to enjoy the privileges of White’s Club: he had been proposed by Andrew Devonshire (who also put him up for Pratt’s) and Michael Astor. He was also a member of the Beefsteak Club, and of course the Travellers. It is strange to think of him one day in shorts at Kardamyli, inserting pebbles into a path, and the next in a suit and tie in London with highly polished shoes; but when in London he looked every inch a clubman as he swung his cane down St James’s Street, with a military bearing that many a round-shouldered writer might envy.

  He was still trying to finish Roumeli. It seems extraordinary that the book gave so much trouble, particularly since in its latest incarnation three of its six chapters had already been published, but in all the excitement of buying the land and starting to build the house, he had worked on it only in fits and starts. That spring, he finished it at last. He wrote to Joan from Chester Row (she was back in Greece, supervising work at Kalamitsi) to say that

  Jock is terribly pleased with me and has told everyone else that he is absolutely delighted with the final result. I do think it has improved out of all recognition, and there is no longer any need to feel ashamed of it, as I would have a couple of months ago. I’ve hated this period more than any other I can remember, and felt I was going mad, falling to bits, becoming idiotic, tongue-tied, dull, hopeless … I’m sure it was all because of guilty conscience.37

  Now he could embark on his next big commission with his desk and his conscience clear.

  Despite their bruising experience the previous year with ‘The Pleasures of Walking’, Holiday magazine recognized that Paddy was an exceptional writer and they were willing to take another chance. They proposed that he take a journey down the river Danube, and write about the river from its source in Germany to its broad delta on the Black Sea. He was hugely excited by the prospect, not least because he hoped it would be possible to see Balasha while he was in Rumania.

  Rumania in 1965 was just beginning to open up to the non-Communist world, although a meeting with the Cantacuzene sisters would involve considerable risks. As Paddy put it, ‘Mixing with foreigners incurred severe punishment, but harbouring them indoors was much worse …’38 But it was too good an opportunity to miss, and Balasha and her family felt it was a risk worth taking.

  By early June he was in Bucharest, now stripped of its pre-war gaiety, and made contact with Pomme’s daughter Ina who was then working as a draughtswoman in an architect’s office. She met him after work on a borrowed motorbike, and with Paddy riding pillion, they began the eighty-mile journey to the town of Pucioasa in the foothills of the Carpathians. It was a long ride over rutted roads, and by the time Ina let him into the house it was well after dark. They climbed upstairs as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the neighbours, but it was hard to stifle the cries of welcome that greeted his arrival at the top of the house.

  Pomme, Constantin and Balasha had been sharing an attic studio since their eviction from Băleni on the night of 2–3 March 1949. On that evening, a small posse of Communist apparatchiks and police had arrived in a truck. Pomme and Constantin were forced to sign a document surrendering ownership of the house, and the family was told to pack a small suitcase each. They were advised to take warm clothes, and told they would be leaving in fifteen minutes. They were taken to Bucharest, where they lived until orders came through that they were to be transferred to Pucioasa.39

  ‘In spite of the interval,’ wrote Paddy, ‘the good looks of my friends, the thoughtful clear glance and the humour were all intact; it was as though we had parted a few months ago, not twenty-six years.’40 Hidden behind that carefully worded sentence was the shock of finding Balasha ‘a broken ruin’ of her former self. Though only in her early sixties, she was shrunken by hardship and anxiety; her black hair was grey, her face lined, and she was very deaf. She and Pomme managed to survive by teaching English and French. Constantin, already ill with the heart disease that would kill him two years later, was too frail to work.

  ‘Their horrible vicissitudes were narrated with detachment and speed,’ he continued. ‘Time was short and there were only brief pauses for sleep on a couple of chairs. The rest of our forty-eight hours – we dared risk no more – were filled with pre-war memories, the lives of all our friends, and a great deal of laughter.’41 He had brought new watches for Pomme and Balasha, and later he set up an account for her at the Heywood Hill bookshop so she would never be short of books. He also knew that Balasha had a present for him. On her last night at Băleni, in the fifteen minutes she had been given to pack, she had seized a battered green notebook. It was Paddy’s last journal, the one he had begun in Bratislava in 1934; she now put it into his hands.

  The long article Paddy wrote about the Danube reflects the progress of the river: clear and brilliantly coloured as far as Vienna, its tone becomes more sombre in Bratislava. Paddy remembered it as a thriving town ringing to a babble of different dialects, with a large Jewish community; now it was grey, peeling, neglected, and the Jews had been wiped out by the Nazis. Budapest is happier: people tell jokes there and they are real people, not just figures in the landscape. In Rumania the river again takes centre stage, as it thunders through narrow chasms and plunges over submerged cataracts that only the bravest and most skilful pilots can handle. But the building of the great dam that was to tame the Danube had begun the year before, and he knew he was gazing on this scene for the last time. Not only was the Turkish island of Ada Kaleh going to be submerged, but the whole valley for a hundred kilometres upstream. The piece ends in the whispering marshes of the delta, among glades of reed and water teeming with birds.

  The piece was published by Holiday magazine in August 1966, and given another outing in the Cornhill the following summer. Elements in ‘Journey Down the Danube’ point the way towards his future books on the great walk. The Polymath, who comes into the story of A Time of Gifts at Persenbeug, appears a few miles upstream at Linz to tell Paddy about the fishes of the Danube; while the created memory of crossing the Alföld on horseback, and the skills of the Danube pilots, will appear again in Between the Woods and the Water.

  The article also marked a fresh attempt to master typing, though progress was still painfully slow. As he told Joan, ‘it still takes ¾ of an hour a page, but I’m getting better every moment … I must be mad not to have taught myself earlier. If only I had typed out each day’s work from the MS at the end of each day, over the years, I would be a different person today, calm, rich, prolific, famous, rested …’42

  By July 1965 the ground at Kalamitsi had been levelled, and foundations were in place. ‘We had a glorious foundation stone party,’ Paddy told Jock, which by Maniot tradition required a blood sacrifice: in this case a fine black cock, with iridescent green tail feathers. The cock was ‘beheaded by the mason with his trowel on the stone while the priest chanted away and asperged everything with [holy water and] myrtle branches. About eighty people came and we had musicians, lambs on the spit, gallons of wine, dancing and singing …’43

  The walls were made from rough-hewn blocks of stone, blasted out of the flanks of the Taygetus at the top of the valley,

  a secret quarry among the thyme and myrtle. It varies from pale whitey grey, through gold and ochre into pink and deep russet and unites, when laid, into a beautiful serene honey colour. They start by laying dynamite charges, then dash for cover and bang! The sound of a mini-Borodino booms up through the valley, and up showers a fountain of b
oulders. Up flies, too, a lot of rock nuthatches that nest all round, chirruping sadly: they realize they’ll never hatch nuts on those rocks more … Then hard-handed men trim them roughly and a little caravan of mules goes to and fro between the quarry and the site …44

  This letter to Diana was written on printed writing paper, even though the house was barely begun, let alone finished. The design of the address barely changed over the coming decades. KARDAMYLI, MESSENIA it read, in Greek letters to the left and Roman to the right. They rarely called the place ‘Kalamitsi’, not liking the sugary effect of ‘mitsi’ in English. It was always Kardamyli.

  Every aspect of life in the Mani seemed clean and beautiful, and filled him with joy. He described their first olive harvest (old Angela Philkoura had retired to the village after all), ‘largely plucked and gathered by Joan and some of the local squaws whose task it is: 17,000 kilos [sic] from 80 odd trees, now mashed into wonderful green oil (about 300 kilos) by the village mill-stones, ready to be poured into a ribbed Ali-Baba jar two robbers could twist in …’45

  At this stage, the only part of the house to be built was the cistern, the cellar and ‘a sort of neolithic loggia, enclosed on three sides by fine arches, the end one four yards in span and a yard thick …’46 At first, they had been unsure whether Kolokotrones was capable of making arches. When asked he admitted he had not done very many, but what was required was a good supply of oleanders. Their springy green stems, he said, were just what was needed to make the template for an arch. Oleanders were plentiful, and soon Nico was so adept at arches ‘that he now produces them – using several tons of rock with the nonchalance, ease and almost the speed of an expert blowing smoke rings’. Electricity had not yet come to the Mani, so the whole house was built with tools that were biblical in their simplicity. No line was dead straight, no two openings exactly the same – all of which created a lot of bad blood between Kolokotrones and the joiner, Yanni Mastoro. Paddy, however, was delighted by the effect. ‘It gives a live and home-made look to the thing,’ he wrote, ‘like a cottage loaf as opposed to a pre-sliced Hovis.’47