Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  He found a marble quarry in the deep Mani from which he hoped to buy a few slabs. The quarrymen told him that since their orders were only for large pieces, he could help himself to whatever chunks he could find lying about; a few days later Paddy returned with six men and a truck, and took away five tons. In a letter to Aymer he described it as ‘beautiful, snow-white glittering stuff, hideous when polished but glorious rough-hewn …’48 It was used for steps and windowsills, columns and seats in the outdoor loggias, while the floors were made of grey-green slate from Mount Pelion.

  Paddy and Joan were surprised at what a magnet they were for people, even in a half-built, isolated house to which there was no easy access. To Joan in London, he described a particularly trying day. It began with a visit from the carpenter, followed by someone who wanted something translated into English, and then the MP for Hereford who had connections in Dumbleton: he wanted advice about buying property in Crete. That afternoon a Greek friend from Athens turned up, with four companions and a bottle of whisky: he had promised his friends that they would hear the story of the abduction of General Kreipe from the mouth of the abductor himself. The Athenian party had only just left when a boatload of visitors from Kalamata appeared, a young schoolmaster and his family brought by one of the young blacksmiths.

  I made a dash for the typewriter and began a mad obbligato, but there they were. I kept up the crashing till they were on me and received them standing. After half an hour [the schoolmaster] said he saw I was busy and would come back when I was a bit freer and talk about all sorts of things … We must have a high and forbidding wall at the vulnerable points … anything else is folly.49

  Roumeli, the long awaited sequel to Mani, appeared in April 1966. Geographically, the word refers to the region between the Gulf of Corinth and the borders of Macedonia. Romaíoi, or Romioi, is what the Greeks who live here call themselves (Romiòs in the singular). The word springs from the time when old Rome was being engulfed by barbarian invasions, and what was left of the empire looked to Constantinople, the new Rome. Over time, the churches of the East and West split. Constantinople became the heart of the Greek Orthodox world, and remained so for a thousand years, during which time ‘the Greeks were Romaíoi – Romans – as well as Hellenes’.50

  Greek intellectuals had been exploring the two strands of their cultural heritage, the classical and the Byzantine, ever since the country’s independence. The architecture of nineteenth-century Athens paid homage to both. But Paddy took what he called the ‘Helleno-Romaic dilemma’ a step further, and suggested that it defined the experience of being Greek. All Greeks contain both sides of the argument, but will usually favour one side or the other. The Hellene is urban, intellectual, progressive. He is rooted in the ideals of classical civilization. He believes in technology and innovation, and sees modernization as essential if Greece is to be part of western Europe. The Romiòs, on the other hand, is a countryman, whose roots are in farming and flocks. He is conservative, traditional, and keeps the candles burning in front of the icons. He looks with pride on the recent klephtic past, upholds a way of life that the Hellene finds rather backward, and sees Greece as part of the Orthodox world rather than of the West. ‘“Hellene” is the glory of ancient Greece,’ he wrote; ‘“Romaic” the splendours and the sorrows of Byzantium, above all, the sorrows.’51 Although the book’s subtitle is Travels in Northern Greece, one of its most heartfelt passages is about Crete: a place which, for Paddy, was the essence of Romiosyne, the traditional Greek way of life.

  These two strands are equally valid, equally Greek; sometimes they complement each other, sometimes they are in opposition; but on one point Paddy was sure. He was acutely aware that Romiosyne was in decline, and for him it was a cause of great sadness. He imagines the Hellene, wearily asking why the poor should be kept in ignorance, poverty and disease to oblige a few romantic travellers. ‘I realize how severely they damage my case,’ he wrote.52 But his was not a solitary voice. There were many Greeks, including George Seferis and Nico Ghika, who saw how much of Greek tradition and identity was being lost as the country developed.

  The Times called it ‘a worthy stable-companion for Mani’.53 Dilys Powell described Paddy as ‘a wandering scholar but with a difference; unlike the celebrated travellers of the past, he has become part of the country he describes.’54

  Jock Murray gave a party for Paddy at 50 Albemarle Street, which also coincided with the 142nd anniversary of Byron’s death. The ‘Londoner’s Diary’ column of the Evening Standard described Paddy as ‘a chunky, tough-looking man of 51 … wearing his erudition under an unimpeachably Hellenistic tan’.55 Five days later, they asked what he was going to do next. ‘I’ve got ideas for one or two novels I want to do,’ he replied. ‘I’m written dry about Greece for the moment.’56

  He still wanted to write about Mexico, but Jock was against it. He felt that Mexico had been done to death and was trying to persuade Paddy to go to Ethiopia, then almost virgin territory from a literary point of view. But while Paddy contemplated the next big project, another assignment lay on his desk.

  That March, just before publication of Roumeli, he had been approached by the historian Barrie Pitt who was editing a part-work on the history of the Second World War. Pitt asked him to write a 5,000-word article on the Kreipe Operation, and although Paddy was reluctant, Joan urged him to accept. He no longer had the excuse that writing about the operation ‘would spoil it for Billy’, as he used to say, because Billy had been dead for over six months. This was a good opportunity to highlight the Cretan contribution to the mission.

  They moved out of the house in Chester Row that August, and from then on their commitment to living in Greece was sealed. Back at Kardamyli the following month, Paddy was bombarding Jock about the horrors of the American edition of Roumeli. He had assumed that Harper & Row would allow him proofs. But on discovering that it was simply a reprint of the English edition, he had ‘pitched the book from the top of the cliff as far as I could throw it’. He was particularly resentful that the dedication to Amy and Walter Smart still had no page of its own, but was relegated to ‘a left-hand page mainly occupied with small-type information about copyright and other trade matters. For me, a dedication is like throwing a cloak over someone’s balcony before a bullfight; it’s distressing to find it hanging, as it were, in the staff lavatory.’57

  19

  A Monastery Built for Two

  In years to come, the architect Nico Hadjimichalis always laughed at the way Paddy used to claim he had created the house himself. Yet it took several hours to drive the hundred and eighty miles from Athens to Kardamyli, and Hadjimichalis was not on site very often. Most of the problems that arose day to day were resolved by Paddy and Joan, in consultation with Kolokotrones. Looking at the plans, however, the house seems to have gone up exactly as Hadjimichalis’s drawings indicate; and the most important elements – the breathtaking entrance, the gallery, the library, and the loggias on the terrace at the southern end of the house – are so beautifully proportioned that just being there lifts the spirit. The plans show separate bedrooms from the start: Joan’s, on the southern end of the house, had a huge internal arch that spanned the room and framed the view over the bay. Paddy’s was small and looked north over the garden; but he had plans to build a separate study thirty yards away from the house, which would have its own bedroom and bathroom.

  The main room of the house was entered by a big beech double door, for which Paddy had optimistically designed a massive stone door-frame. Though the posts could be assembled in blocks, the lintel was one solid piece of stone about six feet across, and it took the combined strength of several men to get it to the house. A shepherd watched them making their slow and painful way down the hill. ‘What are you going to do with that?’ he asked. ‘We’re going to chuck it into the sea,’ replied Kolokotrones through gritted teeth, ‘just to see if it floats!’1

  A divan stretched around the northern end of the sitting room, while the fireplac
e was based on a Persian design with a cone-shaped chimney which Paddy had seen at Băleni. Tall windows with deep embrasures revealed the thickness of the walls, into which bookcases were set. The books in the northern end of the room were largely devoted to English poetry and French literature, while at the southern end were full sets of Kipling, Dickens, Hardy, Henry James, Scott, and any number of biographies and histories. This end of the room also housed a battery of reference books and encyclopaedias, for it was closest to the dining table – so any arguments that arose over a meal could be instantly settled. The coffered wooden ceiling was of pine, but over the years the wood mellowed to a dark gold. French windows opened on to the terrace with the sea beyond, while at the southern end, a pair of whitewashed columns and a step brought one down into a room within a room. With a low roof, windows and a divan on three sides, this was the Turkish hayati – a pool of warmth and light in winter, and an oasis of green in summer.

  For their dining table Paddy conceived a great circle of red and white marble, inlaid with a design he had copied from a tondo in the church of Sant’ Anastasia in Verona. This was not the sort of thing that could be made in Greece: the commission was given to a firm of marmoristas in Venice, who had worked for Freya Stark.

  The cats appeared out of nowhere: wild, half-starved Greek cats with huge ears, wary eyes, pointed jaws and flanks so narrow they looked as if they had been pressed flat. Joan put out food for them, and soon a little troop of her favourites would follow her about the house. She cut a hole in the door to her room, so they could come and go at night. Paddy welcomed them too, and watched tolerantly as they ran their claws down the new divans: ‘born down-holsterers’, as he put it, the cats moved in and out of open doors and windows as freely as air currents. ‘In the early days’, recalled their friend Peter Levi, ‘the chickens used to roost in the olive trees and one would hear Joan’s plaintive individual voice coaxing them down at dusk. “Chick chick chick, come along down. Come along down then. Oh if you won’t come down I’ll break your **** necks.” Now she has them in a shed under sterner discipline.’2 As time went on, more animals arrived. The cat population stabilized somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, with twenty-odd chickens and a cock, two turkeys, a few rabbits, and two pigs that belonged to Petro and Lela. The pigs rootled about in the olive groves, which was said to be good for the roots.3

  A few years after they came to Kardamyli, Paddy and Joan decided to put a tap on the water pipe that ran from the village to their house, so that any passer-by might relieve his thirst. But as soon as the hot weather came, the standpipe in the olive grove by the little church began to attract people from remote homesteads and villages for miles around, who found it far easier to draw water from a tap than haul it out of a deep well as they did at home. They brought their children, dogs, transistor radios and washing, put up shelters, and soon the surrounding area began to look like a refugee camp. In a letter to Paddy in the early summer of 1971 Joan wrote to tell him that ‘The squatters are here, rather more solid huts than last year and a very noisy first night with barking dog and early radio but I let it be known … that if it wasn’t quiet I’d take steps (I don’t know what!) and there wasn’t a sound last night.’4

  But the peace did not last. As more people came the rubbish spread, while the noise from radios and barking dogs increased. Joan and Paddy felt wretched about removing the standpipe, but in the end it was the only way to reclaim their tranquillity and isolation.

  On 21 April 1967, a group of middle-ranking army officers took over Greece in a coup that left the country in a state of shock. Paddy wrote to Joan a week later, from Spain.

  The queer thing about the recent events in Greece is that you probably know more about it than I do. All internal papers stopped. Athens radio gave out nothing but official bulletins and no foreign papers came into the country. I first heard about it at 1 o’clock on the day of the putsch, when Lela came from the village … like Cassandra saying a dictatorship has been declared and that the gendarmerie were bringing communists from the mountain villages in handcuffs after arresting them in the middle of the night …

  Paddy had the feeling that the provinces, and certainly the Mani, believed the Junta’s claim that they had taken over the country in order to save it from the threat of Communism and the return of civil war:

  others say it is balls, and that there is no possible raison d’état for the coup whatever. All the leaders are unknown … I don’t know what to think. All my spontaneous sympathies (in spite of my official views generallyfn1) are against the coup … The dotty sumptuary laws about church, dress,fn2 morality in general, strike a chill. It’s the quantity of hit and miss arrests and banishment to the islands without trial that fill one with the most horror and disgust.5

  King Constantine, who had at first given his support to the junta, launched a counter-coup against the Colonels in December with elements in the army that remained loyal to the crown. But since the King refused to permit bloodshed, his counter-coup failed almost before it had begun and Constantine was sent into exile. As time went on the regime’s contempt for democracy, its ever-increasing corruption and its blundering cruelty turned almost everyone except the army against it. Yet unlike Maurice Bowra, who denounced the junta at every opportunity and exiled himself from Greece for as long as the regime was in power, Paddy took no political stand. The Cyprus question had involved Britain directly, but who governed Greece was a matter for the Greeks alone. At some point, George Seferis sent a roundabout message to Paddy and Joan, with a question: if he sent someone in secret to Kardamyli, would they be willing to shelter that person? The answer was, of course they would; but the fugitive never appeared.

  That summer they invited a great many people to stay. Among their guests were Magouche, Alex and Roxanne Sedgwick, Mark Ogilvie-Grant and Nancy Mitford, Ian Wigham, Barbara and Nico with her daughter Lucy Warner. Later on came Barbara’s daughter Miranda Rothschild, who was often at Kardamyli in the coming years. Diana Cooper and Patrick Kinross – now neighbours in Little Venice, where Diana had bought a house when she left Chantilly in 1960 – came in October, followed by Tom Driberg and Joan’s sister Diana Casey.

  There was still a certain amount of work to do on the house and Paddy had done very little else besides, though he had – after considerable trouble – finished the piece on the Kreipe Operation commissioned by Barrie Pitt. He had had grave misgivings about how to approach the task. Towards Billy he felt a sort of survivor’s guilt, and he dreaded writing anything that might cast a shadow on his friend or his book. Then there were the Cretans to consider, for it was more than likely that anything he wrote on the Kreipe Operation would find its way back to Crete. When translated from English into Greek, his account might sound understated and mealy-mouthed; but if he adopted a heroic style closer to theirs, it risked sounding bombastic in English. It was also vital not to leave anyone out. This writing on eggshells meant that the simplest sentence became a quagmire of scruples, while deadline after deadline came and went. Like ‘The Pleasures of Walking’, the piece grew considerably longer than expected. Paddy had been sending it to the editor as it was written, and when it was complete he gave it the title ‘Abducting a General’.

  When Barrie Pitt received the final instalment, he unleashed his pent-up feelings:

  I will briefly (and with no trace of bitterness in my heart) recap the events of the last twenty months … On 2 April, 1966 I commissioned you to write a 5,000 word article for delivery last November. Nearly eleven months after the deadline I receive the last hand-written instalment, which brought the entire work up to some 36,000 words. I therefore had to hire, with extreme urgency, a professional writer to reduce the work to the size and shape which I could use – a task for which I had to pay him 60gns out of the 75gns budgeted for this article. I am not really very happy in offering you the remaining 15gns for all your labour and hard work, despite the near disaster with which the project was threatened, and the appalling strain on my nerv
ous system and blood pressure.6

  Paddy did not like the shortened version, but he was in no position to complain.

  Joan was keen that he should develop ‘Abducting a General’ into a proper book, feeling that he owed it both to himself and to his friends in Crete. Paddy raised the possibility of doing so in a letter to Diana Cooper, but only briefly, and he asked her not to mention it; it was as if he knew it would never be written.

  ‘Abducting a General’ fills in several gaps in the Kreipe story, and contains some intriguing details such as Paddy’s arrival in Anoyeia after the abduction. At that point he was still in German uniform and so was shunned by everyone, and it was only with difficulty that he persuaded the terrified priest’s wife of his true identity. He described the General with a compassion that bordered on affection, as a melancholy, solitary man who was in an impossible position. He and Kreipe’s love of Horace went a long way towards humanizing their relationship, and Paddy could never have formed such a bond with the hated Müller. It would also have been far harder to stop the Cretans from slitting his throat in the night.

  At the same time, this piece is not so much an adventure as a confession, a tribute, a plea for understanding. Pages are devoted to weighing up the various reasons the Germans gave for the reprisals they unleashed in the second half of 1944. And while he argues that Kreipe’s abduction was not the prime cause for the destruction, his loyalty to Billy forbids him from mentioning the Damasta raid that led directly to the razing of Anoyeia. ‘Abducting a General’ is, above all, a paean of praise to Crete and the Cretans. They were all nonpareils of generosity, style, courage and endurance, but he was supposed to be writing history. In the typescript, long passages of nostalgic eulogy for his clandestine life in the mountains are struck out by the editorial pencil, with an occasional agonized ‘No! No!’ in the margin.