Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  An hour to the south of Xan and Magouche was Janetta, who had married the designer Jaime Parladé in April 1971. They lived in the Torre de Tramores in Benahavis, a beautiful Andalusian house in the hills to the west of Marbella. Janetta too had been devoted to Cyril, and Joan found her company consoling after his death. They spent much of January in Spain, where Paddy was polishing and unpicking his work. There was a lunch with Gerald Brenan, expeditions to Trujillo and Madrid, and Paddy went riding with Robin Fedden in the hills around Ronda. Robin was planning a kayak journey down the Achelous river in western Greece, and Paddy was keen to join the party.

  Although he had given up cigarettes, there was a persistent soreness in Paddy’s mouth and throat. He hoped it was no more than an annoying infection; but in February 1975, it was diagnosed as cancer of the tongue. The kayaking trip was cancelled, but he was determined to finish the book before beginning what would probably be a long course of treatment. On 22 April, he was able to give Jock the good news: ‘I finished the last chapter of Vol 1 last night.’

  Unless one has seen a manuscript of Paddy’s it is impossible to imagine what John Murray was faced with when taking delivery of a book by Leigh Fermor. But Paddy donated the autograph manuscript of A Time of Gifts to be sold at auction, in aid of English PEN, in 1988; and a perfect description of it exists in Sotheby’s catalogue:

  Lot 171 … c.450 pages, the majority written on rectos only, some on both sides, the first chapter on lined foolscap sheets, some cartridge paper, others lined, heavily revised and corrected, revised passages frequently written on separate sheets and pasted and clipped over the original, corrections or elucidations often in red ink, foreign or difficult words printed in the margin, many sheets with encouraging notes to the typist, often stapled or stitched with coloured thread into gatherings, generally of ten pages, no date.5

  A month later, in Kardamyli, Paddy received an unexpected call from Micky Akoumianakis in Crete, shouting for joy: Yorgo Tsangarakis, who had been wanting to avenge his uncle’s death at Paddy’s hands for so many years, had announced the end of the blood feud. This was all thanks to the efforts of George Psychoundakis, and now Yorgo proposed the traditional happy ending. He invited Paddy to baptize his nineteen-month-old daughter, and choose her name.

  Joan had already left for England, so Paddy flew out alone from Athens to Heraklion, armed with all the traditional gifts: ribbon buttonholes, bags of sugared almonds, a gold inscribed cross, a complete baby outfit, and a candle two yards long adorned with a pink tulle bow. He was met at the airport by a crowd of his old brothers-in-arms, including Manoli Paterakis, Micky Akoumianakis, George Psychoundakis, and of course Yorgo Tsangarakis. After wild embraces he was whisked off to a banquet in the mountains, then back to Heraklion for the service. Paddy named the little girl Ioanna, in honour of both Yanni and Joan; and once the ceremony was over, ‘we all gathered at a taverna where a table was laid for 300, sucking pigs roasting, wine flowing, lyras, lutes and violins a-playing … I had to lead the dances (plenty of foot-slapping!) everyone was very happy as it was the end of a miserable saga; all wartime Crete rejoiced.’ As Yorgo and Paddy sat side by side with their arms round each other’s shoulders, pretty drunk by this time, Yorgo said, ‘“Godbrother Mihali, if you’ve got any enemy, anyone you want to get rid of, just say the word …”’6

  Joan’s sister Diana Casey had lent the Leigh Fermors her flat in Ormonde Gate, so they could be near the Royal Marsden Hospital; a month after the christening, Paddy was due in London to begin the cancer treatment. At first he was encouraged by how relatively gentle the process seemed; but as the radiation bit deeper, it became considerably more painful. ‘The last part of the treatment’, he wrote to Jock in August, ‘made me feel rather battered and gloomy: sleepy, headachy, and everything so raw and blistered one could neither eat nor talk – no supper and no song!’7 Joan had by now gone back to Greece, leaving Paddy to recuperate with a succession of friends on what he called ‘Mr Sponge’s Reviving Tour’. Among those he stayed with were Ann Fleming at Sevenhampton, the painter Rory McEwen and his wife Romana in Scotland, and Pamela Egremont at Cockermouth Castle in Cumbria.

  Supremely elegant, Pamela Egremont was also an intrepid traveller. She had accompanied Wilfred Thesiger in India, and as a nurse in Vietnam during the war, had helped to evacuate an orphanage under fire. Nonetheless, keeping up with Paddy was a challenge. Because he was under doctors’ orders to talk as little as possible, they communicated on school slates, which were left about in different rooms for either party to find. His messages were so funny and entertaining that Pamela admitted, ‘I laboured for hours over my responses.’8

  To Paddy’s disappointment, his doctors insisted on one more course of radiotherapy on the cancer before they would allow him to return to Greece. He was back home in December, elated and relieved, having been given the all-clear – and then he heard that Balasha was dying of breast cancer. Had she had it treated earlier, she might well have survived; but she had kept the symptoms to herself, refusing to see a doctor until it was too late to operate. It was a decade since Paddy had been to see her in Pucioasa and now he wanted to rush to her bedside, but Balasha forbade him to come: ‘nothing would upset me more,’ she told Pomme to write on her behalf.9 Her letters to Paddy, and Joan to whom she wrote separately, reveal that she had made a decision to live in books and her memories and expected nothing more from life. She died in March 1976. Seven months later her niece, Ina Catargi, who had taken him to Pucioasa on the back of a motorcycle, was also dead – of lung cancer. Of that generous family which had been such a part of his life only Pomme Donici remained, now bereft of husband, sister and daughter. She arranged for Balasha and Constantin’s remains to be buried in the Cantacuzene family crypt in the cemetery at Băleni, where she eventually joined them in 1983.

  Clear of cancer and with his book now finished, Paddy decided to go to India that winter. Robin Fedden was planning a walk in the Himalayas in October and early November, and in January he, Joan and Graham were going to visit Ian Wigham in Malaya. Rather than return home in between, Paddy planned to base himself in Simla: a town which was part of his family’s history and which his parents and sister knew intimately, though he had never been there. He also had an idea for a long article, along the lines of the one he had written about the Danube. He would follow the journey of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (a boy who is raised in one world, and claimed by another) from Lahore through Amballah, and on to the Grand Trunk Road.

  Paddy hoped to work on the proofs of the new book in Simla, but he and Jock were still not agreed on the title. Then Paddy came across a poem by Louis MacNeice called ‘Twelfth Night’, one line of which reads ‘For now the time of gifts is gone’. ‘A marvellous solution to the title question has descended on me,’ he wrote to Jock, ‘viz. A Time of Gifts. You will see the relevance in the attached poem of Louis MacNeice’s, my old pal. It gets over my growing feeling against the down-beat note of A Winter Journey [Jock’s suggestion] and all your objections to ‘Parallax’ … I think it’s just what we were searching for: indefinite, a poetical quotation, susceptible to many interpretations, and all of them lucky and charming ones.’10

  The Himalayan party consisted of Robin and Renée Fedden, her friend Rosie Peto, Myles Hildyard, Carl Natar and Peter Lloyd, and Paddy. They flew north from Delhi, assembled a team of six Ladakhi porters and began their climb in mid-October. They were following the Beas river upstream, which marks the easternmost point of Alexander’s conquests in 326 BC. Their goal was Malana: one of the most isolated villages in the world, which lay to the north-east of the Kulu valley, dominated by the great peaks of Chanderkhani and Deo Tibba.

  The people of this village worship an ancient god called Jamlu, and believe that even the sight of a foreigner, let alone his touch, risks pollution and defilement. The travellers spent their first night outside the village, waiting for permission to enter, and this permission was granted only on condition that they touch nothing, not eve
n the walls. They also had to remove their watches, boots and belts, for leather is an abomination to Jamlu. As they entered the village ‘Men averted their gaze, children ran off as though ogres were coming down the street and the women at the spring … stood transfixed, and after a long disbelieving glance, turned away in a rictus of bewilderment and pain. Nearly all the village was out of bounds … and even along the permitted ways a flutter of anxious hands herded us innocuously into the middle.’

  The holiest spot in the village was an open space, where a slab of stone lay embedded in the grass. One of the villagers, a kind man called Sangat, had made himself their guide and mentor. Under his direction the party made offerings, joined their hands in prayer and prostrated themselves before the stone. ‘Our pious homage to Jamlu had made a good impression, it seemed; and here, bit by bit, linguistic curiosity began to break the ice.’ Exchanging words was one of Paddy’s favourite games, and as usual his enthusiasm flung bridges over the chasms of fear, shyness and suspicion that separated the strangers and the local people. Soon sherpas, foreigners and villagers were swapping words in Tibetan, the Hindi dialect of Kulu, English, and Kanishta, the language spoken by the Malanis. ‘By now we were among friends.’11

  Malana was every bit as strange and mysterious as the travellers had hoped, but the whole expedition was overshadowed by the fact that Robin was becoming increasingly ill. He was diagnosed with cancer on his return to England, and within three months he was dead. The article that Paddy wrote about his last journey appeared two years later as ‘Paradox in the Himalayas’, in the London Magazine. It was dedicated to Robin’s memory, though neither Robin, nor Renée, nor any other member of the group was mentioned by name in the piece.

  When the group separated, Paddy headed for Simla, perched in the foothills of the Himalayas. With its half-timbered, turreted villas and baronial hotels strung out across a sharp ridge and the rest of the town tumbling down steep slopes either side, Simla was very much as his mother had described it, and he saw it through her eyes. In the dress circle of the old Gaiety Theatre, he found photographs of his sister in 1930, playing in The Constant Nymph; and in an album called Simla Past and Present, there were several complimentary mentions of Æileen acting on the same stage. Æileen must have cut quite a dash in the Simla of the period; Vanessa remembered their mother’s rickshaw as being ‘purple with a grey fur rug, mounted on purple velvet and a purple silk parasol in a wickerwork attachment – the rickshaw drawn by four purple-liveried runners. No one else, as far as I can remember, had such a swish equipage …’12

  From Simla he made his pilgrimage in the footsteps of Kim, and was particularly moved by the English cemetery in Amballah – though he never wrote the article. He joined Joan in Delhi and, after Christmas in Benares, he visited Calcutta, where his parents were married and where his father had spent most of his working life. He made his way ‘rather timidly’ to the Geological Survey’s offices, where to his surprise ‘They seem to worship Daddy’s memory’, as he told Vanessa. The Deputy Director, Dr S. V. P. Iyengar, described their father as ‘the most imaginative, helpful and constructive [figure], he contributed more than anyone else, and all his prophecies and conclusions have been proved right.’13 Both he and Vanessa had absorbed their mother’s bitterness towards Lewis, and it was strange for them to find him both loved and admired.

  A Time of Gifts was published in September 1977. The finished book, resplendent in a jacket designed by John Craxton, opens with a long introductory letter to Xan Fielding which puts the journey into context. Beginning with his idyllic infancy in Weedon, it charts his failures at school, his expulsion from King’s, Canterbury, his unfitness for the army or indeed any other profession, and his descent into despondency before the moment of illumination when he decides to walk across Europe: ‘my first independent act and, as it turned out – with a run of luck – the first sensible one’.14

  There follow eleven chapters of writing that had been built up, layer upon layer, over the years. These levels of writing were so folded over one another, so detailed in some passages and so deliberately blurred in others, uproariously funny one minute and burrowing into the bowels of historical conjecture the next, that the book reads like a journey across a continent that exists somewhere between memory and imagination. Paddy had found a way of writing that could deploy a lifetime’s reading and experience, while never losing sight of his ebullient, well-meaning and occasionally clumsy eighteen-year-old self. As one critic pointed out, this was a wonderful way of disarming his readers, who would then be willing to follow him into the wildest fantasies and digressions.15 Paddy’s highly-wrought style did not please everyone; but for those who enjoyed it, it was gloriously exhilarating. ‘I began reading straight away,’ wrote one young writer who picked up a used copy of A Time of Gifts, ‘but after a few pages stopped and rubbed my eyes in disbelief. It couldn’t be this good.’16 The book ends with Paddy standing on a bridge over the Danube just short of Esztergom, poised between Czechoslovakia on the northern bank and Hungary to the south. The last words read, TO BE CONTINUED.

  The reviewers were enthusiastic, although they were determined not to get carried away. Jan Morris in the Spectator, while full of admiration in some respects, felt that the journey was ‘less reportage than romantic impressionism’.17 Dervla Murphy in the Irish Times also had doubts about his recollections of aesthetic experiences but, she continued, his writing was so enjoyable that ‘it doesn’t matter a damn whether he is describing it as he remembers it in 1934 or in 1964 or simply as he fancies it might have been in 1634.’18 In the Sunday Times, Frederic Raphael noted the deliberation with which Paddy chose what he was going to see, and admired the generosity of his footnotes. ‘One feels he could not cross Oxford Street in less than two volumes, but then what volumes they would be!’19 In the Observer Philip Toynbee agreed. Sometimes he felt like shouting, ‘“Hold it, Paddy! Watch it now!” He is a writer whom it is easy to tease, but I find it much more natural to rejoice with him.’20

  No one rejoiced more in Paddy’s success than his mother Æileen, who was now living out her last days in a nursing home near Brighton. ‘She was immensely proud of him,’ recalled Mary Wood, a retired schoolteacher who had first met her when they were both living in the same residential hotel. ‘He would come down and see her, always on a flying visit, never more than forty-eight hours, and take her to the theatre or a concert.’21 In the last few years, Paddy had been good about coming to see her; but she had never come to Kardamyli, and he never brought Joan with him on his visits to Brighton. He had sent her an early copy of A Time of Gifts, and Vanessa reported that she was delighted with it. But she was now drifting in and out of consciousness, having suffered a series of small heart attacks. She died on 22 October, by which time Paddy had already left for Greece.

  Vanessa thought that Æileen had mellowed in her last years, and become less capricious and quarrelsome. But Paddy’s feelings for her had for a long time been closer to loyalty than love, and whatever he felt of loss or remorse, her death must have come as a relief. He remained resolutely true to her memory, to the fun of her company, her jokes and songs and her imagination.

  The idea of putting up a plaque to all the Allied servicemen and Cretans who had died in the Cretan resistance had first been mooted after the war, but nothing had happened and the project gathered dust through the long years of the Cyprus crisis and the Junta. Now Paddy’s friend Micky Akoumianakis, one of the prime movers, decided to try again and enlisted Paddy’s help. In the spring of 1979, they went to visit the monastery of Arkadi, near Rethymno, as a possible site for the plaque.

  The monks and bishop gave them an enthusiastic reception, and seemed very keen. But a few days later, Paddy heard that the police had visited the abbot and advised against the plaque being placed there, as they had been tipped off that the Communists would pull it down. Next they tried the monastery of Preveli. The monks were delighted, but on this occasion permission was denied by the Bishop of Spili.
‘If Yerakari – last resort – fails, we will have to chuck it. I must say, I brood a lot …’22 There had always been those who insisted that British wartime support for Crete had been a ruthlessly imperialist attempt to gain control of the island, and as the left gathered strength again in the wake of the Colonels’ downfall, the rumours and accusations re-emerged.

  Paddy was back in Kardamyli when, about two weeks later, someone planted a bomb under his car: it went off on the Sunday of Orthodox Easter, 22 April. The car had been parked at the top of the hill just off the road, and no one was in it; but it had been blown to bits, and a Communist party flyer was found in the wreckage.

  The horror and indignation expressed by the Greek press touched Paddy deeply, as did the letter of support signed by many of his friends in Crete:

  Your friends … cannot find words to express our anger at this most uncharacteristic act. Thirty-eight years ago you came to Crete to share with us the four darkest years of recent history … With your kindness and your dashing spirit you won for ever the hearts of your old brothers in arms and not the passage of time, nor any other factor can diminish in the slightest degree the love we all feel for you.23

  An attack of a different sort appeared in the wartime memoirs of Manoli Bandouvas, published that spring. His pre-emptive guerrilla raid against the Germans in September 1943 had unleashed terrible reprisals in the Viannos area, in which over five hundred people were killed; and now, thirty years later, his ghosted memoirs were stirring up a hornet’s nest of bad feeling. Paddy was upset that Bandouvas should have tried to put all the blame for the Viannos disaster on him, though he never contemplated legal action – unlike several others, who were clamouring for redress.fn1 Paddy’s Cretan friends urged him to defend himself, and them, against Bandouvas’s slanders – which he did in the Cretan press; but apart from Bandouvas’s supporters, few people took the book very seriously.