Freya Stark

by Caroline Moorehead

  In Dronero, pleasure came only when she and Vera escaped to walk in the mountains, or when Mario could be persuaded to let Flora and her daughters go off without him. To the girls, their mother seemed always too ready to placate him, to make sacrifices for him she would not make for them. ‘My mother asked too much,’ Freya wrote in Traveller’s Prelude, ‘and later on it was hard to forgive.’ These years set the tone for her often ambivalent relationship with her mother: yearning, as if never receiving quite enough affection, and trying to win more, yet also slightly censorious, which made her ever after the custodian of family morals. By now, whenever in Italy, she was put in charge of the housekeeping, and at forty lire a month in wages she was being schooled to run the factory office. It took her nearly a year to notice that Mario was courting her, a suppressed unsettling courtship from which she backed sharply away. Three years later, Mario married Vera, who, having agreed to become a Catholic, spent the night before the ceremony crying in Freya’s arms.

  Both wars had an exceptionally strong effect on Freya’s life and outlook; from both she emerged more resolute, more established, more appreciated. But she cannot be said to have approached the first war unformed. In 1914 she was twenty-one, a ‘very funny little thing’, according to friends, in the home-made dresses she wore very long, after Flora told her that long clothes suited short people better than short ones. She spoke English with a slight foreign accent, and had completed most stages of an honours degree at London University, not in English but in History, saying that ‘I found the former meant too much reading about people while for history one spent one’s time with the sources themselves.’

  She was, she thought, ‘pretty tough’ after her wandering life, and in total command of her temper, having simply decided, at the age of twelve, watching her mother’s bouts of violent rage, that she would never let it become uncontrolled. She was not proud, ‘due always, I believe … to a genuine love of inquiry into things for their own sake’. And most surprising of all, perhaps, she was not bitter, drawing strength from the ‘warmth and affection’ of her Dartmoor early childhood, from the honesty of her father from whom she considered that she had inherited a ‘feeling of almost physical discomfort in the face of any lie which has lasted through life’, and from her mother’s vitality, if not her constancy.

  She could ride, dance, embroider, construe Latin, speak perfect Italian and adequate French and German. And she had the memory of a landscape, ‘so that I never move into Devonshire lanes or towards the Dartmoor tors without the knowledge that my roots are there’, that she was later to carry with her to the not dissimilar flat, undulating, green pastures of Luristan.

  THE FIRST WORLD WAR

  CHAPTER TWO

  Whatever the immediate appeal of more ambitious and distant travel, Freya was not now to get away for another thirteen years. Five were taken up by the war; after that, there was still much to settle and much to learn for a young woman in her twenties of Victorian background.

  As news came of the fighting she decided to abandon all further education and left to train as a nurse at the clinic of St Ursula in Bologna. She lodged with acquaintances in a palazzo and was chaperoned by an elderly English governess. Freya was the first respectable woman to volunteer: the other nurses were prostitutes who spent their evenings pursuing their other profession. They were envious of Freya and not very friendly.

  As a nurse, she was capable and diligent and made queasy solely by the operating theatre, though the only occasion she actually fainted was when she gave an overdose of anaesthetic to a woman with a weak heart who almost died. She came round to find a young doctor leaning over her: ‘You shouldn’t get so agitated, signorina. We have all killed somebody.’ It soon fell to Freya to protect the doctors from the do-gooding Italian Red Cross ladies who, as the war spread, thronged the hospital corridors in their pearls and emerald clasps, worn prominently over their nursing aprons.

  Away from the hospital, the old families of Bologna continued to behave as if there were no European war. They took Freya to the opera and for picnics in the Apennines. In her lunch hours she read the war news in the sedate Resto del Carlino; one day, in error, she was given Popolo d’Italia. In it she found an article by a Benito Mussolini. It was, she noted, most impressive.

  The brother of the friend who had introduced her into the clinic was a bacteriologist called Guido Rueta, a tall young man with a small, pointed beard. By Christmas he was calling every day, with flowers and books. From behind her partition, the English governess did her best to chaperone, setting off her alarm clock when she judged the hour had come for Guido to leave. In the New Year, he proposed. He was thirty-eight; Freya just twenty-two. ‘Most people luckily have the short and perfect happiness of such a time in their lives,’ Freya wrote in a long letter nearly thirty years later, ‘when every trivial moment lives as if in a halo of its own.’ Freya’s time lasted nearly a year. In the spring they went to visit Guido’s family in Perugia, choosing a moment when the anemones were out.

  By early summer, Freya appeared to be getting thinner and thinner. Flora hated illness and now, as when a child, Freya did her best to suppress all symptoms. After some weeks, typhoid was diagnosed, soon complicated by pleurisy and then pneumonia. Her temperature rose to 107 degrees. She was haunted by a strange terror of certain colours. The battle of Verdun was being fought; the horror of it wandered through her dreams.

  Guido had by now been put in charge of the disinfecting and reassembling of equipment collected on the battlefields, and had been promised a more permanent post as director of a clinic in Salsomaggiore. In May a letter came breaking off the engagement. He gave no reason. Only later did Freya learn that before meeting her he had lived for many years with a musician who had left him and gone to America. Hearing of Freya, and the new job, she hastened back and they married a year later.

  When Freya was well enough she escaped her mother, whose disappointment over the broken engagement had taken the form of petty niggling over the furniture and presents exchanged between the couple, and returned to find solace in England, ‘in every light and line of the land’. Immediately she looked for work. Viva Jeyes was running an all-night sandwich-and-coffee stall at Paddington Station. Freya went to help as trainloads of Australian troops, bound for the Somme and singing ‘Tipperary’ rumbled in. To Flora in Dronero she wrote sternly: ‘I feel that it doesn’t matter what one does or what happens so long as we bear it properly and do not lose our sense of proportion or throw up the sponge and be miserable just because we are one of a few million who are going through a bad time.’

  While waiting to nurse again – she had applied for more training at the Hornsey Cottage Hospital – she worked in the Censor’s office reading letters in French, German and Italian, and complained that when the weather grew cold 120 of her allotted 150 letters contained references to burst pipes. It was, however, a skill and it was to be extremely useful to her in the second war. ‘It developed that sort of sixth sense for what people are really meaning, which the whole of intelligence or propaganda work is built on.’ She became very adept at spotting spies. When she could get away she wrote poems in the British Museum and took tea or dinner with W. P. Ker in his house in Gower Street, lit only by candles, and where books lined every room from floor to ceiling. She was rather jealous of his other, proper, goddaughters.

  In the early autumn of 1917 the historian G. M. Trevelyan’s ambulance unit was based in the Villa Trento, an old Venetian villa ten miles from Gorizia with outbuildings which were used as repair shops for the ambulances and a vast granary that had been turned into two wards, Garibaldi and Aosta, the last named after the famous duchess who was organising nurses for the field hospitals. The villa had been set up by a former doctor at the Rome Embassy who saw it as a centre and a symbol of Anglo-Italian friendship. Because of her fluent Italian, Freya was despatched here, with a rank equivalent to lieutenant for her train journey with the troops across Europe.

  The first month was
peaceful. Freya washed in a tin basin and made beds. She shared a painted room with four other VADs and worried about letting disinfectant fall through the floorboards into the wine vats below. To Flora, to whom she wrote regularly, as she was now to do until her mother’s death thirty years later, she reported a little sadly: ‘I haven’t any young men friends.’

  By October the war was coming closer. In the battle for Monte San Gabriele there were hundreds of casualties on both sides; it was a ‘gruesome slaughter house’ with little shelter for the troops. From the hills above Villa Trento the nurses watched the fighting, a front that weaved and recoiled like a snake through the vineyards. The shelling made the windows rattle.

  On 24 October two divisions of enemy troops broke through at Caporetto, and the retreat began. On the 28th, Freya noted in her diary that they had been travelling for twenty and a half hours, frequently stuck in heavy rain and persistent winds. ‘The retreat looks like a panic; Udine evacuated; wounded trudging in the rain.’ Along the side of the road lay dead horses; lorries and men shuffled through shuttered streets. The unit reached Padua on the 30th; their stores and kit had gone and twenty of their thirty-five cars had been lost. The intention had been to reform and continue the hospital; the order now came for the unit to go in riposo. Freya, no longer needed, made her way back to Dronero.

  Shortly after Armistice Day, Robert Stark returned to Italy. The war years had not improved Flora’s relations with Vera, over whose life and marriage she now seemed in complete, domineering control. With her father, Freya, more assertive than ever after five years of independence, formed a plan to buy a cottage some way from Piedmont, where Flora could be installed, and the three of them set off to wander along the now deserted coast of the Riviera. As they walked, Robert and Flora kept fifty yards apart.

  They found what they wanted at La Mortola, not far from Ventimiglia and five minutes from the French border, in a small pebbly bay adjoining a property with famously beautiful water gardens. There was a vineyard, two and a half acres of land and a cottage with four little rooms, separated from the sea by the railway. The name of the property was L’Arma. It was peaceful and very beautiful.

  The idea had been to provide some escape for Vera and also somewhere for her to bring her children. L’Arma also had to be made to pay. Freya had just over £90 a year to live on, her father having settled some capital on her; Flora, having sunk everything into Mario’s factory, nothing. While Flora painted cupboards and dressers for the little house, Freya hauled water up the steep slopes and learnt to prune the vines. One year she tried carnations and stocks, another, vegetables. In between fretting about the bills, she read the Georgics. Notebooks of the time contain dates for planting fruit trees, scraps of poetry, extracts from political speeches and recipes. In the summer evenings she would walk down the hill and swim out into the bay, where the fishermen caught anchovies and sardines by lamplight. If sometimes lonely, she was also fully occupied and, whether consciously or not, schooled herself to develop a ‘preference for this world as it is, and an inclination to deal with things one after another, even if they happen to be time and eternity’.

  It was now that Freya became a smuggler, enjoying a talent and a nerve for it that was to give her considerable satisfaction and her friends considerable anxiety in the Middle Eastern years to come. A naval family nearby owned an early Sienese painting. A French collector saw it and offered £1,000 to its owner, and £100 to Freya, if she could get it to him. Freya borrowed a cart and pony, placed the masterpiece inside, seated a Scottish friend and her bags on top, and led the party over the border. Friends were later to call her, with affection, ‘compulsively unscrupulous’; Freya, who saw no moral wickedness in them, relished such adventures.

  After five years of war, Freya now rediscovered the mountains with W. P. Ker, her climbing companion since the early days of their friendship, but only for long days, not serious overnight mountaineering, for he declared that he loathed women climbers. In the immediate post-war years their expeditions became annual rituals, after which Freya would bring Ker back to L’Arma and force him to bathe, not as he always had, as an early-morning discipline, but as an agreeable social pastime. Friends, like Viva Jeyes, or Venetia Buddicom, now began to come regularly to stay, setting a pattern for visitors that lasted all Freya’s life.

  In July 1923, at the start of what was to be a climb of Pizzo Bianco, ‘W. P. gave a little sudden cry and died.’ While the guide went for help, Freya sat with him for seven hours. He was buried in his old brown walking clothes, with a bunch of wild strawberries in his hand, in a cemetery he had liked, under the edge of Monte Rosa. Freya decided to climb again immediately, this time the Matterhorn, ‘to get my strength again’ in the solitude. She would miss him greatly, for friends were already of exceptional importance to her; but Freya was not sentimental: childhood, her accident, the war, Guido, had all combined to make her very adult for her years, and eager to become more so. ‘I remember,’ she wrote later, ‘wishing often to find what might silence fear, and to reach the end of my days free from that mortal weakness.’

  It was one of her last climbs. In the early twenties, Freya seemed permanently ailing. In the winter of 1924 doctors decided she had a gastric ulcer, and though an operation was successful, it was months before she was out of danger. Freya used these long periods of inactivity to master seventeenth-century embroidery and to learn Arabic, having decided, she told people later, that the ‘most interesting things in the world were likely to happen in the neighbourhood of oil, and that was what really determined me’. (W. P. Ker, author of a scholarly book on the Edda legends, had urged her to take up Icelandic instead.)

  People were later to doubt how truthful Freya was in her farsightedness. (At a dinner party in the sixties, Arthur Koestler told her that she was making it up. She replied that she was not accustomed to being contradicted. It was some time before they patched it up.) Whatever the case, Arabic was a considerable undertaking. Freya had found a white-bearded Capuchin in San Remo who had spent thirty years in Beirut and now bred Angora rabbits. Twice a week, she walked for an hour into Ventimiglia, caught a local train, and then walked a further couple of miles to the monastery. By 1922 she was reading the Koran. She was never easily put off anything.

  For some years the family had been engaged in a lawsuit against Mario, in an attempt to recover some of the money put into his carpets (Freya won it). The unpleasantness meant that the two sisters met rarely. In 1926 Vera had a miscarriage; septicaemia developed. For two months she lived on, at times seeming about to recover. In August she died and was buried in the family vault near to the coffin of her small daughter Leonarda. ‘I have known two great sorrows,’ wrote Freya in Traveller’s Prelude, ‘the loss of Guido and of Vera … Vera’s death is still as harsh as ever and will be as long as I can feel.’

  Freya was now thirty-three and there was little to hold her in Europe; the time of travel could begin. Before she made her plans, however, Herbert Young wrote to ask her whether he might leave her his Asolo house, complete with furniture, as a place in which to live and not to sell, saying that he considered her the proper person to inherit this ‘earthly paradise’. Freya accepted; she remembered with fondness the garden with its alley of over-arching horn-beams, the stone bacchus under the laurel tree, and, all over the back of the house, the rose ‘Fortune’s Yellow’, the memory of which, she wrote during the Second World War, ‘its rich bunches, nectarine coloured in a blue spring sky, come to me as a symbol of happiness’. Casa Freia, as the house was soon called, became the home round which her life and her journeys would revolve.

  Furthermore, her income had at last risen to the desired sum of £300, brought about by a characteristic act of financial bravura on her part. A friend had written to tell her that Canadian Grand Trunk Railways shares were set to rise. She asked the manager of Barclay’s Bank in Monte Carlo, who handled her money, to invest her entire capital in them. He protested, but was, as many were to be after him, co
urteously but firmly overruled. The shares dropped. When, a few days later, they rose spectacularly, Freya sold.

  In June, Freya wrote to her father in Canada that she had met a Syrian Quaker who was going to find her a ‘cheap lodging in an Arab village where I shall meet no Europeans’. Briefly tempted by the School of Oriental Studies in London and the classes of Sir Thomas Arnold and Sir Denison Ross (who used to hold the hands of pretty girls, ‘but only did this once to me, for I was not at all pretty enough to be noticed’), she had decided instead to ‘make for the real thing in Syria’. What was more, she was still unmarried, suitors having hovered and vanished, to the distress of her mother who felt that spinsterhood was a bad condition and who filled Freya with a conviction that ‘it must be due to some invincible inferiority in myself’. What she needed now was to escape a ‘miserable sense of being a failure’. Her health was still not good, but she had decided that she would rather die than endure the life of an invalid.

  On 18 November 1927, feeling somewhat small and forlorn as she gazed up from the gondola bearing her and her luggage at the SS Abbazia spitting smoke and steam from its funnel in the port of Venice, having been baptised a Presbyterian, so as not to die ‘outside the Christian brotherhood’, she embarked ‘for Beirut – and my travels in the East began’.