In Tearing Haste

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  We broke up here, the Fieldings back to Spain, Joan to Blighty, me to Hungary, after an unflawed month. I went to Budapest, * to see old pals, and one especially. Do you remember my reading aloud to you and Andrew a bit about swimming with a pal down a river in Transylvania, being taunted by two pretty reapers on the shore, and our jumping out and giving chase over the stubble? He – Elemér von Klobusiçky, called ‘István’ in the book – plays a tremendous part in vol 2 of Shanks’s Europe.

  Well, I wanted to show him the relevant bits of the book and find out if he approved; also hoped for a laugh or two. He lives in a sort of workmen’s tenement block of flats on the E outskirts of Pest. I telephoned again and again with no answer, so took a taxi for miles in the pouring rain. Monoglot taxi had no idea of the district (called Centenarium), but I managed to spot it in the end from a former visit, pretty bleak in the pouring rain, a semi-skyscraper on a bombsite with an old laundry, rubbish, graffiti and prams without wheels. Found his door, with two new names, and his, faded and illegible, on a peeling strip of adhesive tape. But no banging produced any results, the whole area was abandoned. An old crone pottered along in the end. ‘Uncle Elemér bácsi?’ She made signs of his having bust his leg months ago, being in hospital. I left a telephone number, and slunk back in the gloaming to my dismal hotel. Called to the telephone, there, on the other end was the rather pretty girl, head of the Communist cell for Elemér’s former block, who, in spite of E’s 85-year-old ultra reactionary stance, had rather a crush on him (I took them both out to lunch three years ago). She told me he smashed his leg in August, since when he had been in a military hospital W of Buda (as an ex-hussar from the Great War, I suppose!).

  So next day I got a friend, Dagmar, wife of my Hungarian writer pal Rudi Fischer, [9] to drive me there, in some rather nice leafy hills. But, when we arrived, a gaggle of nurses told me he’d left that morning for an old folks’ home in Pest. So back we went – still pouring and many miles now – to a pretty grim, prison-like building outside but not too bad indoors, where I found Elemér’s quarters at last, a room with five other old boys, rather nice. It was dark again and I had difficulty spotting which he was. He was asleep, tired after all the moving. When I woke him and the lights went on, he looked v drawn, top teeth out, white stubble, but still recognisably good-looking, aquiline, & pink cheeked. The sad thing was he couldn’t recognise me! When I said ‘I’m on the way to Greece’ he said, again and again, ‘In Greece lives my old friend Leigh Fermor. Greet him from me.’ (We’ve been in constant touch, till three months ago.) ‘But, Elemér, it’s me!’ ‘No, no, you are too young. Give him my love.’ Dagmar had stolen off by now. We talked a long time – he still only a quarter convinced it was me, still using the third person, as though I were absent. I’d brought him lots of whiskey, tea, coffee, books etc from Vienna, but don’t think he twigged they were for him. I asked about his sister Ilona, who lives in Transylvania – he’d forgotten her married name and address, also his son’s, who lives in Düsseldorf. This good-looking chap, Miklos, [10] hadn’t been for a bit, but his daughter-in-law, a Frog Pss Caroline Murat, had, twice. He really wasn’t taking in much, so I had to tear myself away at last, as I felt I was tiring him. I buggered off, feeling very wrung by it all. Eclipse of a Honvéd Hussar! I’ve a terrible fear he won’t emerge, or last very long . . . But I’m glad I saw him. I’ve found everyone’s addresses and have written. He was a tremendous friend. You’d have loved him in palmier days – he was so funny. The nurses were very nice and all adored him, even the Bolshevik matron. The place was miles from anywhere, it was pouring cats and dogs, no taxis anywhere, pitch dark, so I slumbered in a wicker chair in the porter’s lodge for an hour, till a doctor gave me a lift to the middle of town.

  I flew to Sofia next day and found it horrible. The intervening 51 years had changed the cheery little Balkan capital into the HQ of a dim and remote Soviet province with huge scarlet hoardings everywhere displaying the faces of the leaders in frames the size of tennis courts. I had meant to explore the whole of Bulgaria in a hired car as a refresher for Vol III, but caught a bus to Salonika instead (three sodden hours at the Bulgarian-Greek customs while oafs fumbled through one’s effects like slow-motion rag-and-bone men), then over the Greek frontier to Mount Athos. Paradise.

  Joan, Graham, Michael Stewart and I all arrived here (in the Mani) on the same day, then Artemis Cooper [11] turned up in search of details about wartime Cairo. The next day I had horrible news from Crete about Manoli Paterakis – see Joan’s post-war photo in The Cretan Runner. He was my guide and closest Cretan friend in the island, hand in glove in all sorts of risky junctures, a man in a million, two years older than me, v. funny with a hawk nose, piercing eyes, and vast knowledge of the mountains. His was a goat-herding family. He had fallen and been killed. I dashed to Athens, caught a plane to Canea, and drove with two old friends to Koustogérako, one of the highest-perched villages in Crete. The whole of the Resistance Movement seemed to have gathered on the stone steps, and there was poor Manoli in his open coffin (one embraces the brow of the dead here, cold as the clay). His wife and children absolutely swollen with weeping. After the burial, his brothers took me under a walnut tree and told me what had happened. Some of the young chaps in the village had teased him, in a friendly way, ‘Eh, Uncle Manoli, you can’t hunt ibex any more like you used to!’ (They are very shy rare animals – forbidden to hunters now – and M was the best ibex shot in Crete.) Next day, before dawn, he dashed up the White Mountains, very high. Other, later climbers, lost sight of him but heard a shot at dusk, and went down again. When he didn’t appear next day, a search party climbed up, and at last found a large shot ibex on a ledge. Peering down a precipice, they saw Manoli’s body 300 feet below, and totally inaccessible. He must have been hoisting the ibex on his shoulder – slipped and fallen into the chasm.

  Among other adventures (including General Kreipe) we had tried to sink two tankers in Heraklion harbour. The plan was to swim out to them, stick magnetic explosive ‘limpets’ on their sides, press a button, swim away again, and buzz off. We were hiding among some wreckage in the harbour, getting ready to disrobe when a patrol of two Germans approached, with one torch. They stopped, didn’t move for a few seconds, then quietly moved on, and we hastened stealthily away, blessing our stars that at least we were dressed. They must have seen us, we thought. But no alarms were raised. We slunk off to the hills next day, tails between legs.

  A few years ago, when we were invited to New York as guests of the Cretan Union of America, on the last evening they took us up the Empire State Building with the 5 o’clock traffic thundering below. I saw a pensive look on Manoli’s face, and asked him what he was thinking of, and he said ‘I’m just thinking that back in Crete it would be just about time to go up the folds and feed the ewes.’

  Christmas draws nigh, and I hope it’s a happy one for you, darling Debo, and tons of fond love from

  Paddy

  [1] The Letters of Ann Fleming, edited by Mark Amory.

  [2] Selina Hastings, Nancy Mitford, A Biography (1985).

  [3] Princess Tatiana Vassiltchikov (1915–2006). Married Prince Paul Alfons, last Prince Metternich-Winneburg, in 1941. Schloss Johannisberg was almost totally destroyed by bombs in 1942. After the war the Metternichs rebuilt the greater part of the castle and made it their permanent home.

  [4] Margaret (Peg) Geddes (1913–97). Married Prince Ludwig of Hesse and the Rhine in 1937. Their house at Wolfsgarten was a centre of entertainment and culture after the war.

  [5] Antony Lambton, Elizabeth and Alexandra (1985). An account of the Grand Duke of Hesse’s two daughters who married, respectively, the Grand Duke Serge, brother of Tsar Alexander III, and Nicholas II, last of the Romanov Tsars.

  [6] ‘When our heart goes boom.’

  [7] ‘And the good Lord says boom / In his throne of clouds.’ Charles Trenet, ‘Boum’ (1938).

  [8] In 1937, DD drove with her mother and sister Unity through Austria to stay
with Janos von Almásy at Bernstein Castle in the Austrian province of Burgenland.

  [9] Rudolf Fischer; language editor of the Hungarian Quarterly, guide, philosopher and friend to PLF for many years. In Between the Woods and the Water, PLF acknowl edged his debt to Fischer’s ‘omniscient range of knowledge and an enthusiasm tempered with astringency’.

  [10] Miklos von Klobusiçky (1946–). Married Princess Caroline Murat in 1967.

  [11] Artemis Cooper (1953–). Granddaughter of Duff and Diana Cooper. Author of a forthcoming biography of PLF, of Cairo in the War 1939–1945 (1989) and, with her husband, historian Antony Beevor, of Paris After the Liberation 1944–1949 (1994).

  * Crossing the Burgenland where you frolicked of old. [8]

  23 January 1986

  Mani

  18 February 1986

  Chatsworth

  Bakewell

  Darling Paddy,

  Yes I know, HOPELESS, specially as I got such a fat one from you. I was haunted by that man you hunted from pillar to hospital & didn’t know you but knew your name. OH old age, the foulness of it.

  Anyway thanks for that & the rest in that letter. It was a treat. The trouble is I’m trying to start a new book. [1] I can’t think of anything else but I can’t do it, so the result is NOTHING. Nothing done which ought to be done & everything left undone.

  The first sentence is very trying, you’ll admit. Famous Authors (that fraudulent thing in America which explains how to be one) says write ‘the’ on a bit of paper (well what else could it be on) & then put down some more words. I ask you. Then I thought ‘well ’, as all interviewees on the wireless begin. No good. And ‘like’, and ‘it came to pass.’ No good either. So I looked at a few ghoul vols, no help. I think it will be ‘if ’, like Kipling, but the nub of the ensuing sentence is Dutch to nearly everyone, not to you because you know everything & not to my editor (R Garnett) because he knows everything, but to 99% of the fools who read books.

  It’s going to go like this: ‘If you live in the same place for a long time you become hefted to your hill like an old sheep. The surroundings slowly but surely take hold & become part of you, the known familiar earth & water, trees & buildings, their shapes, colours & smells . . .’ and so on.

  Hefted . . . well of course you know. Do you think The Dear Reader will like louping ill, orf, yellowces, scrapie, fluke, foot rot, worms & udder clap (udder falls off)? [2]

  And what will they make of earblight, brown rust, eyespot &, worse, SHARP eyespot, septoria, take all, yellow rust, net blotch, snow rot, rhynchosporium, loose smut, glume bloth and bunt? [3] Do you think they’ll chuck it?

  The trouble is the subject is so huge & has been on the go since 1550 that it could make many books but it is NOW I want to write about because I don’t think anyone has, much. An estate I mean.

  Anyway it’s taking up the slack with knobs on & I squirm about trying to do it & not succeeding.

  J Murray’s list came with ‘the impatiently awaited . . .’ Didn’t have to pay much attention to know what that would be.

  My m in law doesn’t die, nor I’m glad to say, does Sybil Cholmondeley, now 92. You could say the same for poor old Diana Cooper I suppose & I know she is longing to.

  Much love

  Debo

  [1] The Estate: A View from Chatsworth (1990).

  [2] Diseases in sheep and goats.

  [3] Cereal crop diseases.

  28 February 1986

  Mani

  Darling Debo,

  ‘Wheat-ears covered the furniture, and one of the Swedes, well-versed in the English terminology of his passion, explained as we strolled from specimen to specimen the differences between turgid ears and the common bearded kind; then we surveyed the Polish variety and appraised the spikelets and the awns, the median florets and the glumes.’ Who wrote that, and in what book? Answer inside envelope. [1]

  Smashing first sentence, don’t change a thing, apart from removing either ‘known’ or ‘familiar’ as they are both doing the same job. Otherwise, tip-top. But don’t remove a single one of the earblight, brown rust list, down to udder clap. One nearly swoons away with the magic of the language.

  Well that was a nice letter. I was beginning to pine a bit, as so many of the people who once used to write to me are dead or dying. When I got back from Kalamata this evening, Joan told me my Hungarian pal Rudi Fischer had rung up from Budapest to say that my other old Hungarian friend Elemér – the one I hunted down in the Old Folks’ Home – died three days ago, after a fall and pneumonia, but kindly looked after and not Dickensian, as one would dread in an Iron Curtain country. I wish he could have read all I’ve written about him in the forthcoming vol, he would have laughed.

  Now. Have your copy of Time of Gifts handy. I remember seeing it in the bookcase behind where you sit, so reach back, and look up page 95, bottom two paragraphs, and overleaf. [2] Then read the following sheet, which is copied from a P.C. I got the day before. It’s all so queer. I got it Xeroxed this afternoon to send to two or three. The rucksack had been Mark Ogilvie-Grant’s.

  A lovely week in Athens with Barbara and Niko, with a party for – can you beat it? – my 71st birthday. Do write some more, it cheers one up.

  Tons of fond love,

  Paddy

  (Postcard – franked in England – Hounslow, 10 Feb. 1986. Verso of P.C.: ‘Cheers! From the Pubs of London’)

  Herrn Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Kind Sir! I was thrice fortunate on my trip to the erstwhile capital of the BRITISH EMPIRE. I discovered the velvety smoothness of Guinness, the exquisite taste of gourmet steak and kidney pudding and your magnificent magnum opus, A Time of Gifts. You will perhaps be surprised to hear that my late maternal grandfather Alois Schoissbauer figures in it. Indeed, he was none other than the pimply youth who ‘borrowed’ your rucksack rife with manna in Munich. He is clearly recognisable for he often told me the tale. You will no doubt be interested to know that it (the rucksack) later concealed all his belongings when he fled across the Alps from Tyrol to Switzerland when the Nazis wished to incarcerate him in a KONZENTRATIONSLAGER, not as a Jew * but as an anti-social element. I later inherited the Rucksack and carried it all the way across Asia to Peshawar where it was stolen by an Australian hippie, at least so I have been led to believe.

  Respectfully your obedient servant,

  Dr Franz Xaver Hinterwälder,

  Professor of Farsi and Pashtoo, Firdausi School of Oriental

  Languages,

  Kirchstetten, Nether Austria

  As an attentive reader I was able to discover from A Time of Gifts that your LXXI birthday is approaching next Tuesday. Permit me to take the occasion to wish you the compliments of the season. [3]

  [1] From Between the Woods and the Water, p. 109.

  [2] The passage describes how, in early 1934, PLF’s rucksack, containing his passport and travel journal, was stolen from a Munich youth hostel.

  [3] The writer of this hoax card has not been identified.

  * which he was not, being a Bavarian and a Roman Catholic.

  25 September 1986

  Mani

  IN HASTE

  Darling Debo,

  When the Kalamata earthquake happened, I was having a quiet ouzo up in the mountains with Desmond Shawe-Taylor [1] and Chloë Obolensky, [2] and noticed nothing. Joan was down at the house, playing chess outside with Dimitri O, [3] when the chessmen started moving about on the board, with a sort of subterranean rumble below. Kalamata is badly stricken, much of the population living in tents, poor souls, and at least half the houses with big red crosses on the door, meaning ‘uninhabitable: to be pulled down’, some of them look all right, but are chaos inside, others have tumbled down completely. It’s all right now, with the mild autumn weather; but what about winter? People in the seismological know forecast more shocks round the corner.

  An Italian skin-diver disappeared last week and was found days later stuck in a cave, with his face eaten away by fish. In the little poo
l, by the chapel a hundred yards from here, a v rare and v small turtle has appeared; black with yellow spots, and a long spiny tail. No mate, so a spinster or a bachelor. I saw him half an hour ago, nibbling a floating fig dropped from the overshadowing tree.

  Tons of love,

  Paddy

  [1] Desmond Shawe-Taylor (1907–95). Chief music critic on the New Statesman 1945–58 and Sunday Times 1958–83.

  [2] Chloë Georgakis (1942–). Theatre costume and set designer. Married to Leonid Obolensky 1964–80.

  [3] Prince Dimitri Obolensky (1918–2001). Professor of Russian and Balkan History at the University of Oxford. ‘He was an enchanting companion on the hills of Euboea, in the meadows near Oxford, or in the foothills of the Mani in the southern Peloponnese.’ PLF, The Times, 7 January 2002.

  1 October 1986

  Chatsworth

  Bakewell

  Darling Paddy,

  That earthquake. What a rotten thing. The shaking chessmen, how terrifying. And the poor Kalamata-ites, such frightening pictures on the telly.

  So, WELCOME for the Book Party. [1] I’m hoping like anything to come to it & so is Andrew.

  Much love

  Debo

  [1] Given by John Murray for the publication of Between the Woods and the Water.

  2 January 1987

  Andrew’s 67th birthday

  Chatsworth

  Bakewell

  Darling Paddy,

  The most unexpected thing over Christmas was my sister Woman, even a nonner reader than me, sat glued to your effort, sometimes both the books (sort of) in her hands at once. * Do be pleased. Now she’s blazed the trail I might have a go.