Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure
Page 49
30. Stephen Spender to PLF, 1 December 1983, from Mas St Jerome.
31. PLF to Vanessa Fenton, spring 1982.
32. PLF to DD, 16 July 1982.
33. PLF to Vanessa Fenton, spring 1982.
34. PLF to DD, 16 July 1982.
35. PLF to Vanessa Fenton, spring 1982.
36. PLF, ‘A Slow Change of Continents’, 13 October 1984.
37. Nicholas Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin (Harvill Press, 1999), p.445.
38. Ibid., pp. 447–8.
39. Ibid., p.446.
40. PLF to JGM, 23 August 1985 (JMC).
41. PLF to JGM, undated (JMC).
42. PLF, Between the Woods and the Water, p.13.
43. PLF to AC.
44. PLF to DD, 7 December 1985.
45. Graham Coster, Independent, 16 October 1986.
46. PLF, Between the Woods and the Water, p.69.
47. John Ure, Times Literary Supplement, 7 October 1986.
48. John Gross Arizona Republic, 14 December 1986.
49. TS of the South Bank Show on Patrick Leigh Fermor, a Willow Films Production for London Weekend Television, transcript of interview with Melvyn Bragg, pp. 55–7.
50. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), p.111.
Chapter 21: ‘For now the time of gifts is gone’
New information on PLF, plus photographs, tributes, articles and recollections are emerging all the time. Most of these find their way on to http://patrickleighfermor.wordpress.com, a blog written and coordinated by Tom Sawford.
1. Dervla Murphy, Transylvania and Beyond (John Murray, 1992), p.28.
2. Janetta Parladé to AC, November 2004.
3. Alec Russell to AC, December 2011.
4. PLF, ‘Ghosts that Haunt the New Dawn’, Weekend Telegraph, 19 May 1990.
5. Clare Arron to AC, January 2012.
6. PLF, ‘Ghosts that Haunt the New Dawn’, Weekend Telegraph, 19 May 1990.
7. TS of Antony Beevor’s Crete: The Battle and the Resistance, with corrections by PLF, p.394.
8. JLF to Janetta Parladé, 22 February 1991.
9. JLF to AC, November 2002.
10. Antony Beevor (fellow guest at the dinner) to AC.
11. PLF to DD, 18 June 1991.
12. PLF to DD, 27 July 1991.
13. JLF to Michael Stewart, 11 February 1992.
14. Colin Thubron to AC.
15. PLF to LPH, 9 August 2003, from Dumbleton.
16. Olivia Stewart to AC, 19 February 2012.
17. Mark Edwards, Letters section, Daily Telegraph, 2 January 2004.
18. Patrick Fairweather to AC, 8 September 2011.
19. William Blacker to AC, 16 January 2012; for PLF’s review of Blacker’s Along the Enchanted Way see Sunday Telegraph, 30 August 2009.
20. Charlotte Mosley to AC, 20 January 2012.
21. Charlotte Mosley to DD, summer 2007.
22. James Purdon, Observer, 26 July 2009.
23. Charlotte Mosley to AC.
24. Olivia Stewart to AC, 19 February 2012.
25. PLF to AC, 11 May 2011.
26. Found in PLF’s bedroom in Greece, written on the title page of a short life of Marcel Proust; dated August 2010.
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Bailey, Roderick, The Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle (Jonathan Cape, 2008)
Beaton, Roderick, George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel (Yale University Press, 2003)
Beevor, Antony, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (John Murray, 1991)
Betjeman, John, Letters 1926–1984, 2 volumes, ed. Candida Lycett Green (Methuen, 1994–5)
Blacker, William, Along the Enchanted Way: A Romanian Story (John Murray, 2009)
Bradford, Sarah, Sacheverell Sitwell: Splendours and Miseries (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993)
Byron, Robert, The Station, Athos: Treasures and Men (Duckworth, 1928)
—The Byzantine Achievement: An Historical Perspective, AD 330–1453 (Routledge, 1929)
Callimachi, Princess Anne-Marie, Yesterday Was Mine (Falcon Press, 1952)
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Cardiff, Maurice, Friends Abroad (The Radcliffe Press, 1997)
Chisholm, Anne, Frances Partridge: The Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009)
Clark, Bruce, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (Granta, 2006)
Clogg, Richard, A Short History of Modern Greece (Cambridge University Press, 1979)
Cocker, Mark, Loneliness and Time: The Story of British Travel Writing (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992)
Collins, Ian, John Craxton (Lund Humphries, 2011)
Connolly, Cyril, Enemies of Promise (Routledge, 1938)
Cooper, Artemis, Cairo in the War: 1939–1945 (Hamish Hamilton, 1989)
Cooper, Artemis (ed.), Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper (Hodder & Stoughton, 1991)
Dalrymple, William, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (HarperCollins, 1997)
Devonshire, Deborah, and Fermor, Patrick Leigh, In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, ed. Charlotte Mosley (John Murray, 2008)
Douglas, Norman, Old Calabria (M. Secker, 1915; M. Secker, 1930)
Du Boulay, Juliet, Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village (Oxford University Press, 1974)
Durrell, Lawrence, Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes (Faber & Faber, 1953)
— Bitter Lemons (Faber & Faber, 1957)
Durrell, Lawrence, and Miller, Henry, The Durrell–Miller Letters 1935–1980, ed. Ian S. MacNiven (Faber & Faber, 1988)
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— A Time to Keep Silence (Queen Anne Press, 1953)
— The Violins of Saint-Jacques (John Murray, 1953)
— Mani (John Murray, 1958)
— Roumeli (John Murray, 1966)
— A Time of Gifts (John Murray, 1977)
— Between the Woods and the Water (John Murray, 1986)
— Three Letters from the Andes (John Murray, 1991)
— Words of Mercury, ed. Artemis Cooper (John Murray, 2003)
Fielding, Xan, Hide and Seek: The Story of a War-Time Agent (Secker & Warburg, 1954)
— The Stronghold: An Account of Four Seasons in the White Mountains (Secker & Warburg, 1953)
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Fussell, Paul, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (Oxford University Press, 1980)
Ghyka, Matyla, The World Mine Oyster: The Memoirs of Matyla Ghyka, KCVO, MC, with an introduction by Patrick Leigh Fermor (Heinemann, 1961)
Goodwin, Jason, On Foot to the Golden Horn (Chatto & Windus, 1993)
Gréco, Juliette, Jujube (Paris: Stock, 1982)
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Kolyopoulos, John S., and Veremis, Thanos M., Modern Greece: A History since 1821 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
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fn1 See Appendix III.
fn2 However, his reactions on reading The Station on Mount Athos seem to imply that he had not read it until then.
fn1 Four years later, in March 1938, Parry-Jones did a notable service for one of his students, a young Jew called George Weidenfeld. Following the Anschluss, life for the oppressed and harassed Jews of Vienna had become very frightening. Weidenfeld’s father had been arrested, all the family assets frozen, and George needed to get out of Austria. With every consulate in Vienna besieged by Jews in the same desperate situation, Parry-Jones ensured that Weidenfeld was accorded an interview with a British passport officer, who grudgingly allowed him a three-month transit visa to England. See George Weidenfeld, Remembering My Good Friends (HarperCollins, 1995), p.76.
fn1 In Between the Woods and the Water, Zám was Paddy’s first stop in Transylvania. There he mentions Xenia by name, but later she is disguised as ‘Angéla’.
fn2 Dollfuss was assassinated by the Nazis in Vienna on 25 July 1934.
fn3 The Polymath is a vehicle for a series of digressions on such subjects as the Knight of Ybbs, the movement of early tribes, the titles of the Holy Roman Empire or the variety of fish in the Danube. By putting these into the mouth of an enthusiastic teacher, Paddy allows his older self into the story to instruct his younger self.
fn1 In following Paddy’s trans-European odyssey so far, I have relied mainly on the manuscript of A Time of Gifts, its published edition, and Between the Woods and the Water. But once Paddy crossed the Danube into Bulgaria, those works are left behind. The following chapter is assembled from interviews with Paddy and two other sources, which have also been quoted earlier. They are described in more detail in Appendix I. The first is his only surviving diary, a thick green exercise book which he bought in Bratislava in March 1934. The other is ‘A Youthful Journey’, written in 1963–4 and discussed in Chapter 18, which covers the events of the final third of the walk.
fn2 A Balkan word for caravanserai: it can be anything from a large open courtyard with galleries to a more modest enclosure where travellers and their animals can stay. Stalls selling food, wine and groceries are often found nearby.
fn3 Gaida, bagpipes: gadulka, a stringed instrument played with a bow: caval, flute. I cannot identify kazakduk and ratchiza, but horo and kütchek are dances – the last being a burlesque belly-dance.
fn1 Voivode: an eastern European term for an official administrator, who governs an area on behalf of its ruler; in this case, the Ottoman sultan.
fn1 Paddy was always known as Mihali in Greece, during and after the war. If he used his first name it tended to be shortened to Petro, which he found irritating. ‘Mihali Phrangidakis’ was just one of several aliases he used.
fn2 As things turned out, Bandouvas did not get off the island until the end of October, by which time he had fought the Germans again at Mt Tsilivdikas: see N. A. Kokonas, The Cretan Resistance 1941–1945 (Rethymnon, 1992), p.181.
fn1 EDES: National Republican Greek League. EKKA: National and Social Liberation.
fn2 The interrogation and torture of suspicious Cretans was undertaken by the Geheime Feldpolizei, not the Gestapo, who were never in occupied Crete.
fn1 Years later, Alfred Fenske’s son Manfred came to Crete to learn more about his father’s end. He was accompanied by Annette Windgasse, who wrote to Paddy about the visit. ‘I have heard’, she wrote, ‘that you have been worried about the driver’s death. And, though there have been sad moments for his son to face the place where his father died, he accepted this as a consequence of the war and feels in peace with you.’ (Annette Windgasse to PLF, Wuppertal, 15 July 2008.)
fn2 ‘Abducting a General’ was commissioned by the historian Barrie Pitt for a part-work called The Purnell History of the Second World War (1967–8), see Vol. 5, No. 7. But what should have been an article of 5,000 words turned into an account of 36,000 words, most of which remains unpublished. The full story is told in Chapter 19.
fn3 The General was sent to London for interrogation, and to a POW camp near Calgary, in Canada. He was returned to Englan
d where he was treated for diabetes, and was then sent to Island Farm Special Camp 11, near Bridgend in Wales. He was not repatriated to Germany until October 1947. (See www.specialcamp11.fsnet.co.uk.)
fn4 Presumably Paddy is referring to the formation of the unit and its use on fuel dumps, for neither of them could have predicted the attack on Anoyeia, nor the Damasta raid.
fn1 There was a curious link between him and Paddy. Elizabeth Pelly, to whom Paddy had lost his virginity, had been the bride in a celebrated mock wedding that had taken place at the Trocadero in 1929, and scandalized the press. Her ‘bridegroom’ was John Rayner. See D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People (Chatto & Windus, 2007).
fn2 Among them were Viscount Lascelles, later Earl of Harewood, a nephew of George VI; George Haig, the son of Field Marshal Earl Haig; and Giles Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill.
fn1 Bill’s wife Clothilde, who had run away with Balasha’s husband Paco, was divorcing Bill – ironically enough – on the grounds of infidelity with Balasha.
fn2 Chicleros: poor men who worked deep in the jungle tending the chicle trees, which produce gum: hence ‘Chicklets’, an American brand of chewing gum.
fn1 Although they did not see the firewalkers at Mavrolefki, Joan did photograph the Nistinari rituals at Langada on another occasion.
fn2 The songs of the manghes: the gambling, drug-taking wideboys of the Greek underworld.
fn3 In the Iliad (Book 9, line 150), Kardamyli is named as one of the ‘seven fair cities’ promised by Agamemnon to Achilles.