Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  The following month saw the publication of Three Letters from the Andes, a slim volume consisting of the letters he had written to Joan on the journey to Peru in 1971 with Robin Fedden. Jock Murray hoped that the act of seeing another book – albeit a short one – through to publication might inspire him to take up volume III again, but it failed to have the desired effect. Three Letters was greeted with a polite round of applause, but it was not the book his public had been waiting for.

  In interviews, Paddy always declared his firm intention to apply himself to finishing volume III just as soon as he could clear his desk. But since he accepted every journalistic commission and every request to write an introduction or an obituary, the task was forever postponed for more pressing commitments. ‘Paddy is 77 today,’ wrote Joan to Michael Stewart on 11 February the following year, ‘but, unlike me, has no intimations of mortality and still thinks he is going to write at least three more books,fn2 each taking, I suppose, about ten years.’13

  The following summer, Jock Murray died. Paddy gave the address at his memorial service, knowing he had lost not only the most loyal and painstaking publisher any author could have wished for, but also his literary midwife. Jock had coaxed every book out of him, using a combination of encouragement, cajoling, threats, and even sleight of hand. Paddy was left with a bitter regret that he had failed to present his old friend with the promised third volume, and with Jock’s death, the book seemed to sink still deeper into the shadows.

  When Graham Eyres Monsell died in November 1993, he left Joan the bulk of his estate, and the Mill House at Dumbleton. All would eventually be returned to Graham and Joan’s nieces and nephews; but for the rest of their lives Paddy and Joan had a house in England, with a wonderful cook called Rita Walker to look after them. The rooms at Dumbleton were large and airy, with huge windows that looked out on to the garden and the Malvern hills. Over the years Graham had built up a magnificent music library, and collected a great many books and contemporary paintings, particularly by Robin Ironside. Joan undertook basic repairs and some modernization and admitted that the rooms needed cheering up, but then found she could not bear to change anything.

  Two years later, when Colin Thubron came to stay at Kardamyli, Joan confided to him that she never asked about volume III any more, ‘it makes him so miserable.’14 Colin and Paddy went for a long swim together, in the course of which Paddy admitted how wretched he felt about not being able to complete the book. He was so desperate that he had even consulted a psychiatrist, although he did not think the consultation had done much good.

  He fretted too about Joan’s health. Her eyes had always been very sensitive, and now she had to have a patch over one eye to read. She would lie full length on a sofa in the evenings, reading under the lamp, with at least two cats purring beside her. She was also beginning to have trouble with her balance, and he begged her to be careful as she crossed the stone floors.

  After Lela had left to devote herself to her taverna in the village, Paddy and Joan found another couple with whom things had run smoothly for several years. The woman was a good cook, and her husband tended the garden. But then, almost from one moment to the next, the woman seemed to undergo a personality change – brought on, it was said, by the shock of hearing that her son was going to become a monk on Mount Athos.

  After the couple’s departure, it proved difficult for Joan to find help. Drawing from a pool of part-timers, she managed; but the one who grew into being a proper housekeeper was Elpida Beloyannis. Elpida’s grandmother, Eleftheria Beloyannis, had run the little inn in Kardamyli when Paddy and Joan had first arrived in the 1960s, and her father had been the mayor and a friend of Paddy’s. Elpida had two young children, and little experience of cooking. But she learnt quickly, absorbed the principles of good cookery from Joan, and taught herself the rest from Joan’s English recipe books.

  Janetta and Jaime seldom came to Kardamyli, although Paddy and Joan often went to see them in Spain; and with Nico and Barbara dead (Nico had died in September 1994), Magouche Fielding was almost the last of the old friends who came out regularly to Kardamyli. The names of new, younger friends began to appear in the guestbook: Joachim Voigt, originally a friend of Graham’s, with whom they talked about translation and music; the poet Hamish Robinson, with whom the conversation was often on French literature; William Blacker, with whom Paddy talked endlessly about Rumania; and Olivia Stewart, then a film producer, who was the younger daughter of their friends Michael and Damaris. Olivia was particularly close to Joan, and was at Kardamyli on the morning of 4 June 2003, which began like many another.

  ‘I went to see [Joan] just as she was finishing breakfast,’ wrote Paddy to Lyndall, ‘with nine kittens scattered about the bed … occasionally bumping into the pieces on the chessboard where she was grappling with a problem, occsionally pushing them off. We made plans for lunch, with Olivia …’ Paddy retired to his studio; but an hour later, ‘Elpida dashed in in floods saying Kyria Ioanna … so I ran across and there was Joan dead on the bed. She had fallen in the bathroom, banged her head and death was immediate. The following days were a sort of trance of shock and disbelief.’

  Olivia and Paddy accompanied Joan’s body back to England, where she was buried at Dumbleton on 12 June next to Graham. It was only when Paddy returned to Kardamyli in early September that he began to absorb the shock of his loss. He would spend hours lying on her bed, gazing at the white arch that framed the window and the olive tree beyond, and it took a long time to get used to the loneliness. ‘I constantly find myself saying “I must write – or tell – that to Joan”; then suddenly remember that one can’t, and nothing seems to have any point. Then I remember all those happy years and what undeserved luck one had had, and the tears shift a bit …’15

  A collection of Paddy’s writing appeared towards the end of this sad year. Paddy dedicated it to Joan, and called it Words of Mercury, from the last lines of Love’s Labour’s Lost: ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.’

  Joan was irreplaceable, but Paddy’s friends now stepped in to ease his life. Although she lived in Rome, Olivia was often at Kardamyli: keeping Paddy company, maintaining the household, and ‘struggling with the constant correction of various articles, introductions and obituaries that he had persuaded me to put on computer for him’.16 Magouche had him to stay while he was in London, as did his doctor, Christian Carritt. She had looked after both Paddy and Joan for years, and devoted days to chauffeuring him round the various specialists whom she had arranged for him to see. In later years Joachim Voigt, or Olivia, or Hamish Robinson would accompany him on the long flights between Athens and London.

  Paddy was once again offered a knighthood, and this time he did not turn it down. When his name appeared in the 2004 New Year Honours list, Mr Mark Edwards of Whitney, Oxon., wrote to the Daily Telegraph to say that while he had no objection in principle to Paddy’s knighthood, it should have been made conditional on his ‘completing the masterpiece he began with A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water’.17 Paddy was knighted on 11 February, his eighty-ninth birthday, and was particularly touched that the Queen wished him many happy returns.

  In May 2007, at the age of ninety-two, Paddy embarked on what was to be his last expedition, to western Macedonia and Albania. The party consisted of Pamela Egremont, Paddy, Patrick Fairweather who had been Director of the Butrint Foundation for eight years, and his wife Maria. They all noticed how the long drives tired Paddy. It took real determination for him to pull himself together and walk round the tomb of Philip of Macedon at Vergina, or round the recently restored acropolis of Butrint, or clamber into a boat to see Ali Pasha’s fort close by. But on every occasion he made the effort, and it never failed to ignite his curiosity and enthusiasm. At Metsovo, ‘he engaged the waiter in the taverna in Vlach. The waiter seemed a bit tongue-tied – it may have been shyness or that Paddy’s Vlach was rusty …’18 And in another taverna, a middle-aged Greek came over to ask if he really w
as the Patrick Leigh Fermor, whom he had admired all his life and who had done so much for Greece.

  In fact Paddy was still doing a lot for many people, whether it was sending money to old friends who were ill or hard-up, or encouraging young writers. When Imogen Grundon wrote a biography of John Pendlebury, who had set up the resistance networks in Crete just before the invasion and died in the battle for Heraklion, Paddy much admired the book and agreed to write a foreword. It was a long time coming but since the subject was not widely known, Paddy’s support attracted attention. Another he encouraged was William Blacker, urging him to write a book about his experiences of living in the depths of rural Rumania in the early 1990s. When Along the Enchanted Way was finished, Paddy gave it passionate, wholehearted praise in the Sunday Telegraph. ‘The review definitely had a huge impact,’ wrote Blacker. ‘It seems that many people saw the review, and all sorts of wonderful things sprang from it.’19

  The idea for his last book, In Tearing Haste, came as Debo Devonshire was setting up the Mitford Archive to house the family’s correspondence. Since Andrew’s death in May 2004, eleven months after Joan’s, she had moved out of Chatsworth and into the nearby village of Edensor, where Paddy spent New Year 2007 with his old friends Robert Kee and Sir Nicholas Henderson. Nico Henderson noted that he seemed ‘very down in the dumps’, though he rallied considerably when Debo brought out her old letters and the party began reading them. Henderson suggested that her correspondence with Paddy might be turned into a book, especially since it would give Paddy a cheerful task to work on.20

  Debo asked Charlotte Mosley, who had edited the letters of the Mitford sisters, to edit the correspondence; and in July 2007, she went out to Kardamyli with the typescript. Charlotte wrote to Debo after the visit, to say that ‘I think the book has given him a new lease of life – he feels appreciated, and it takes his mind off Vol III which is clearly never going to appear. He reads out passages from his own letters (& sometimes yours) and roars with laughter …’21 When the book came out in 2008, the reviews were highly appreciative of this cheerful correspondence, and the world of lost glamour it evoked. The Observer went so far as to say that ‘the result is surely one of the great twentieth-century correspondences.’22 Paddy enjoyed the parties and the events surrounding publication, at which he and Debo read aloud from the book, but above all he enjoyed the book itself. He would ring up Debo and say, ‘Do you know, I’m reading our book and it’s jolly, jolly good.’23

  Paddy had been noticing for some time that his voice was very croaky. By late March 2011, it had become almost inaudible and he was having trouble breathing. He was referred to the Gennimatas Hospital in Athens where, on 4 May, a large cancerous tumour was removed from his throat. Olivia flew out from Rome, and for the eight days he was in hospital, Elpida barely left his room.

  The doctors agreed with his decision to refuse any treatment for the cancer, which would have been an appalling ordeal for a man of ninety-six. When he returned to Kardamyli the doctors thought he still had a few months to live. In fact it was only weeks, but they were good ones. After his spell in hospital, he was delighted to be back in the beauty of the house he and Joan had created. Philippa Jellicoe drove him out to visit the surrounding villages, and when William Blacker arrived, he rediscovered the energy to tackle volume III – Olivia wrote that ‘he rang me two nights before he went back into hospital, full of excitement and optimism.’24

  But the tumour had grown back with aggressive speed. On 1 June he was once more in the Gennimatas, where the surgeon performed a tracheotomy to ease his breathing. From then on he could no longer talk, and there was little else to be done. Now his only thought was to get back to England in order to see Debo and Magouche again. On 9 June, he left Greece for the last time. With Olivia coordinating the efforts of several friends, and Elpida who never left him, the flight and the long drive back to Dumbleton were made as smooth as possible. Rita lit a fire in the sitting room, and he was happy to be home at last; but the journey had taken all his remaining strength. Calm and fully conscious, he died the following morning.

  At one point Olivia had asked him to think about the service he would like, and he decided that he would like the same readings that he had chosen for Joan. One was from the apocryphal Book of James, describing a moment when time stands still; another, a mysteriously beautiful and arcane passage from Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus: ‘But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low,’ it begins, ‘and ’tis time to close the five ports of knowledge.’

  Paddy had endured his last illness and the inevitable shrinking of his world with a kind of bewildered sadness. ‘It’s very odd,’ he said to one friend at Kardamyli after the operation to remove the tumour. ‘My life has suddenly gone out of kilter, familiar and yet utterly strange, like before and after the war.’25 He never talked about death, though of course he thought about it. In a short biography of Proust which was found in his room in Kardamyli, he had written a message in the middle of the night, at a moment when he felt the end was close. Yet whatever sorrow he felt at leaving this world, what he wanted to express was a sense of profound gratitude.

  ‘Love to all and kindness to all friends,’ he wrote, ‘and thank you all for a life of great happiness.’26

  APPENDIX I

  A Note on the Green Diary and ‘A Youthful Journey’

  The various written versions of Paddy’s great walk are going to keep graduate students busy for decades, and I do not want to spoil their fun. Yet two documents keep cropping up in this book, and it might help to have some idea of what they are. The first is Paddy’s only surviving diary, which he called the Green Diary; the second a typescript of his trans-European odyssey called ‘A Youthful Journey’, though Paddy preferred the title ‘Parallax’. The page numbers referring to the Diary and ‘A Youthful Journey’ come from the typescripts, not the originals.

  In A Time of Gifts, Paddy describes how his first diary was stolen, along with his rucksack, in Munich in January 1934. ‘I started a fresh lot immediately,’ he tells us in ‘A Youthful Journey’, ‘in thick German stiff-covered notebooks and drawing pads, and kept them up, at least the notebooks, until the end of the journey … The sketches, rightly, as they were never much good, became scarcer and died out.’ But conflicting evidence comes from the Green Diary itself. Paddy notes on 11 September that a friend is going to Budapest, ‘where she promised to collect my second volume of diary and post it to Mummy when she arrived in England’. To complicate things further, Paddy also states elsewhere that he had left all the surviving notebooks and papers in Rumania at the beginning of the war. The only thing one can say with any certainty is that the Green Diary is the only original document that still exists.

  Paddy bought this thick green notebook with lined pages in Bratislava, in March 1934. The first long entry is about his visit to Baron Philip Schey at Kövecses in Slovakia. After Esztergom he wrote nothing for four months, as he progressed through the schlosses and country houses of eastern Hungary and Transylvania. The entries pick up again as he enters Bulgaria, and in Constantinople he writes only in note form. He starts writing properly again in Mount Athos, and continues his Athonite journey on foolscap pages folded into the back of the book.

  Although there are moments of reflection, the prevailing tone is brisk, immediate and uncontemplative. In Sofia, he plays cricket with the British Consul. In Bucharest he lists the names of almost everyone he meets, and is dazzled by the beauty and sophistication of the women. He is often snobbish, sometimes patronizing – but he is only nineteen, and when he gives himself the time to write things up in full, it is evident that this is the diary of an acute observer. The back of the notebook is almost more revealing than the entries. Here are pages of vocabulary and phrases in Hungarian, Rumanian, Bulgarian and Greek; a recipe for Turkish coffee; sketches of musical instruments, peasant costumes, an Orthodox church, Bulgarian songs and the occasional portrait. He has copied out the Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic alphabets, plus a translation of th
e Call to Prayer; and, at the very back, are the names and addresses of almost everyone he met or stayed with.

  When Paddy left Rumania to join up in September 1939, he left the Green Diary with Balasha Cantacuzene, with whom he had been living for the past four and a half years. Despite the upheavals of the war and exile from her home under the Communists, Balasha held on to the book; and when he came to visit her in Rumania in 1965, she gave it back to him.

  ‘A Youthful Journey’ is an incomplete typescript of some sixty thousand words. From the Hook of Holland to Orşova the writing is very compressed, but the last third of his walk, from Orşova to the Black Sea coast, is covered in detail. It is this unpublished document that will form the bulk of the posthumous conclusion of Paddy’s great walk, begun with A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. It was written on the island of Euboea in 1963, at which point Paddy had not yet been reunited with the Green Diary. The full story of how ‘A Youthful Journey’ was commissioned as an article, and almost grew into a book, can be found in Chapter 18.

  Paddy never tried to reconcile ‘A Youthful Journey’ with the Green Diary – and because they cover the same period, it is interesting to compare the two side by side. At the heart of ‘A Youthful Journey’ is his time in Bulgaria, where he became friends with two young people. The first was a beautiful student of French he calls Nadejda, and the other – also a student – was called Georgi Gatschev: a wild and moody character, whom he met in Tirnovo and looked up again in Varna. In ‘A Youthful Journey’ Paddy’s time with both of them, and what they did together, is expanded, embroidered and elaborated a long way beyond the short entries of the diary, although the diary supports the bare bones of each story.