Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Read online

  Also by Artemis Cooper

  A Durable Fire: The Letters of Duff and Diana Cooper

  Cairo in the War 1939–1945

  Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper

  Paris After the Liberation (with Antony Beevor)

  Watching in the Dark: A Child’s Fight for Life

  Writing at the Kitchen Table: The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David

  PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

  An Adventure

  Artemis Cooper

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by John Murray (Publishers)

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Artemis Cooper 2012

  The right of Artemis Cooper to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Maps drawn by Rodney Paull

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-84854-670-7

  John Murray (Publishers)

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  For Adam and Nella

  live well

  Contents

  Also by Artemis Cooper

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  A Note on Names

  Epigraph

  1. Neverland

  2. The Plan

  3. ‘Zu Fuss nach Konstantinopel’

  4. An Enchanted Summer

  5. Bulgaria to Mount Athos

  6. Balasha

  7. An Intelligence Officer

  8. Crete and General Carta

  9. Setting the Trap

  10. The Hussar Stunt

  11. The British Institute, Athens

  12. The Caribbean

  13. Writing The Traveller’s Tree

  14. Travels in Greece

  15. Byron’s Slippers

  16. Cyprus

  17. In Africa and Italy

  18. A Visit to Rumania

  19. A Monastery Built for Two

  20. Shifts in Perspective

  21. ‘For now the time of gifts is gone’

  Appendices

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

  II: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Walk across Europe, 1933–5

  III: Horace’s Ode 1.9, ‘To Thaliarchus’, translated by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Acknowledgements

  Illustration Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Picture Section

  Footnotes

  Maps

  The Walk, 1933–4: From Rotterdam to the Iron Gates

  From the Iron Gates to Constantinople, 1934–5: Rumania and Bulgaria

  Crete

  Greece, Albania and Turkey

  A Note on Names

  Patrick Leigh Fermor was always known as Paddy, except in Greece, where he was called Mihali. Leigh Fermor, or Fermor, would perhaps look more professional in a biography, but those names seem to rob him of that boyishness which was such a part of his nature. Some biographers use their subject’s initials as a way of avoiding undue familiarity, but I find it looks so odd on the page when every other name is spelled out. Patrick? It is more formal, but in his case it was only ever used in his lifetime when joined with Leigh Fermor. So I am left with Paddy: the name I have called him since childhood, the name by which he was known by all the hundreds of people who knew and loved him: a friendly, cheerful name with a spring in its step.

  As for place-names, wherever possible I have aimed to keep the spellings that he himself used. So in this book it is Rumania and not Romania, Euboea rather than Evvia, Calcutta rather than Kolkata, Constantinople rather than Istanbul.

  A.C.

  Lynsore Bottom, Canterbury

  March 2012

  I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect may … be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.

  Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Chapter II

  1

  Neverland

  The village of Weedon Bec in Northamptonshire was an unlikely setting for paradise, but for Patrick Leigh Fermor the years he spent there as a small child were among the happiest in his life. The people he lived with were not his family. While surrounding him with love and warmth, they imposed no constraints and made no demands. He was never scolded for being late for meals, or for coming home covered in mud and burrs. Until this idyll came to an abrupt end in the summer of 1919, all he had to do was get on with the exciting business of growing up.

  The local children taught him how to run his hand up the dried stems of wild sorrel, and feel his palm swell with the kibbled seeds that he threw to the wind. They scrambled into half-used ricks and jumped; it was prickly but soft, so you sank into the sweet-smelling hay. They helped him clamber into the saddles of old apple trees, but soon he would be able to hoist himself into tall trees like the bigger boys. Then he would climb into the topmost branches, invisible, hidden by leaves, and no one would be able to find him. For now he hid in sheds and barns, and sometimes behind the big double doors leading into the yard of the Wheatsheaf, and people shouted, ‘Paddy-Mike, where are you?’ while he hugged himself because no one could see him, and no one knew where he was.

  The grown-ups talked in low voices about the Germans and the war, which was going on a long time. No one liked the Germans but there were no Germans in Weedon – at least he didn’t think there were. Once he found a big pile of earth and set to work digging and building, and one of the older ones said, ‘You shouldn’t do that!’ – ‘Why not?’ – ‘Because of the Germans.’ – ‘But you can’t see any!’ – ‘No, you can’t see them because they’re so tiny!’ He had no idea what they meant but he knew what Germans looked like: he had seen pictures of them in their funny helmets. He looked very hard, half-expecting to see miniature Germans in their pickelhaubes rising out of the earth.

  He was not afraid of the Germans, but once he saw a steamroller the size of a house coming down the road. The driver looked so grim and fierce he was terrified. (The steamroller formed part of his childhood nightmares for years.) He ran as hard as he could till he found Margaret, and clung to her warm back and held on to her plaits as she brought him home, where Mummy Martin took him on her lap and gave him a hug. When she gave him bread and syrup, he turned the green and gold syrup tin round so he could see the picture of the lion and the bees. The lion looked asleep but in the bible story he was dead, that was why the bees were coming out of him.

  George Edwin Martin and his wife Margaret lived at 42 High Street, Road Weedon, a small terraced house with a narrow garden at the back. They had three children. Their son Norman was ten in 1915, when Paddy-Mike came to live with them. Their daughter, also called Margaret, was eight. She helped her mother look after Paddy and her younger brother, Lewis, aged six. It was a big village, divided into three parts. The cottages and smallholdings of Upper Weedon were sunk in green fields. The church and village school were in Lower Weedon, whilst busiest of all was Road Weedon,
which straddled the old turnpike between Northampton and Daventry. This was where the Martins lived, on the main road (now the A45), with shops and pubs on either side. Coal and beer were delivered to the Wheatsheaf and the Horseshoe in open lorries, while men on tricycles with creaking baskets delivered goods and groceries from Wilson’s Stores and Adams the grocer. Sometimes you could see troops of soldiers marching past, and officers on gleaming horses, or the bus with its open top and its jangling bell – he always ran up to the top deck when the Martins went into Daventry.

  Road Weedon was dominated by Weedon Barracks and the huge complex of the Royal Ordnance Depot. Set up for the storage of arms and ammunition during the Napoleonic wars far from possible landing sites on the coast, it had its own well-defended branch of the Grand Union Canal to secure safe delivery of its stores. Sometimes Margaret would take Paddy-Mike to the barracks to watch the cavalrymen trotting and wheeling their horses round the great parade ground. It seems odd that the broad canal that divided Road Weedon from Lower Weedon does not feature in his memories, but no doubt Margaret was under strict orders to keep him away from it. Mr Martin, whom he was later to remember as a farmer, in fact worked at the Ordnance Depot as an engineer and served in the local fire brigade. He was huge and had a bristly moustache.

  When the First World War ended in November 1918 Paddy-Mike was almost four, and Margaret almost twelve. They stood in the road and saw German prisoners in carts, on their way back to Germany – they wore rough grey uniforms with big red diamonds on their backs, so they would be easily identified if they tried to escape. Because the war had ended in winter, everyone decided to save the peace celebrations for the summer. It was going to be even better than Christmas, with a band and dancing, tea in a tent, and a huge bonfire with fireworks.

  A few days before the peace celebrations, which were to take place on 18 June 1919, Paddy-Mike was washed and brushed and led into the parlour. There was a strange woman wearing the grandest clothes he had ever seen, and with her was a girl in a real sailor-suit, complete with a whistle attached to a thick white string. Mummy Martin said they were his real mother and his sister Vanessa, who was eight, and they had come from India. With them was a fluffy black dog with a squashed-in face and white feet like spats. He had never seen a lady so magnificently dressed and he was intrigued, but he remained wary of the yearning in her voice which seemed to claim him in some way. He bolted outside and ran and hid and they all chased after him calling, ‘Paddy-Mike, where are you? Come back, Paddy!’ while the dog with the white feet yapped hysterically. Reluctantly, he was persuaded back to the house where there was cake.

  He looked at the lady’s shoes which had a bumpy pattern on them and she said they were made of crocodile skin, which was interesting. He looked at the whistle on the girl’s sailor-suit and she said he could blow it if he liked, so he did. The dog with the squashed face was called Sir Percy Spats S.T.A., which stood for Sweetest Thing in Asia. The smart lady went away, but the girl in the sailor-suit stayed.

  Owing to bad weather, Weedon Bec’s peace celebration bonfire had to be postponed till 21 June. A mountain of wood and straw and furze stood in the middle of a field between the canal and the railway, and at its summit were effigies of Kaiser Bill and ‘Little Willie’, the German Crown Prince, wearing captured German boots, and the Kaiser had a proper German helmet. First they all had tea in a tent, and in Paddy’s memory, everyone lay about on the grass singing songs till it grew dark – though after three days of heavy rain the ground would have been sodden.

  Before the bonfire was lit a man called Thatcher Brown seized a ladder and, despite protests from the spectators, scaled the pyre to relieve the effigies of their boots: ‘Too good to waste,’ he said.1 Then at last the bonfire was set alight. Paddy was hoisted aloft so he could see better. The rising flames were accompanied by an explosion of firecrackers, and then everyone made a circle and danced around the blaze.

  Fifty years later, relying on nothing but his memories, Paddy described the bonfire and its dramatic sequel in A Time of Gifts. From one moment to the next, people began screaming and calling for help. Margaret went to see what had happened. Then she hurried back, grabbed Paddy and dragged him away as fast as she could.

  Margaret was very upset. ‘When we got home,’ he wrote, ‘she rushed upstairs, undressed me and put me into her bed and slipped in, hugging me to her flannel nightdress, sobbing and shuddering and refusing to answer questions.’2 According to Paddy, it was several days before she was willing to satisfy his curiosity. She said that one of the boys had been dancing around with a firework in his mouth. It had slipped down his throat, and he had died ‘spitting stars’. There is no reference to this tragedy in the Northamptonshire Chronicle, nor is it mentioned in the Weedon Deanery Parish Magazine which described the celebrations in considerable detail. Was Paddy remembering another night and another bonfire, or did Margaret invent the story to cover up why she had been so upset?

  The most likely reason for Margaret’s distress was that she had realized what was about to happen. Paddy-Mike, to whom she had grown so attached and cared for so devotedly, was leaving them. Vanessa was his sister now; and when Mrs Fermor returned to Weedon she would take her children back to London, and Margaret might never see Paddy-Mike again.

  When the day of departure came he was sick with apprehension and misery, desperate at leaving Margaret and Mummy Martin. He was nauseated by the oily, sooty smell of the train that took him farther and farther away from Northamptonshire, stifled by the grimy maze of London from which he could never run away. Paddy was not yet five, and this was the second time he had been uprooted from one world and briskly repotted in another. Being a robust and cheerful child he adjusted to these upheavals, but he never felt as connected to his family as most children do. Like Peter Pan some part of Paddy refused to grow up, hankering for the Neverland from which he had been exiled.

  Since his parents lived in India, Paddy liked to think that he had been conceived in Calcutta, Simla or Darjeeling. He was rather downcast to hear from his sister Vanessa that the most likely venue for this important event was the seaside town of Bournemouth on the south coast, where the Fermors came to spend a few weeks in the spring and summer of 1914.

  As a member of the Indian Civil Service, Paddy’s father Lewis Fermor was granted six weeks’ leave in England every three years, and Lewis used his furlough to pursue his passion for botany and natural history. Leaving his wife and four-year-old daughter to enjoy the delights of Bournemouth, Lewis took long walks inland to collect wild flowers, or searched the Eocene-age strata of Bournemouth Cliffs for plant fossils. When the family were together, Dr and Mrs Fermor made an odd pair – he tall and scholarly, she short and high-spirited. The dissimilarities in their characters were just as marked. ‘You could not imagine two people more different in taste, outlook, and temperament,’ said Paddy of his parents. ‘What were they doing in each other’s company?’

  That question can only be answered by retracing their story. Lewis Leigh Fermor was born in September 1880 in Peckham, south London. (He was called ‘Leigh’ not because it was a family name, but after one of his father’s closest friends.) He was the eldest son of Lewis Fermor, who worked as a clerk in the London Joint Stock Bank, and Maria James, a woman of intelligence and determination. She schooled Lewis herself till he was seven, by which time he could not only read and write but was showing considerable skill in mathematics.

  He won a scholarship to Wilson’s Grammar School in Camberwell, and decided to try for a scholarship to the Royal College of Science. He was told by his tutor at Wilson’s that this would only be achievable if, on top of his schoolwork, he put in an extra four hours a day for two years. This punishing workload was most arduous in the summer, when the evenings were long and he could hear the sounds of his five siblings – Ethel, Bertram, Aline, Frank and Gerald – playing in the garden below his window.

  One reason why Lewis worked so hard was that he was determined not to let life
get the better of him. His father’s misfortunes had started when he was obliged to retire from the bank as a result of chronic writer’s cramp. Not having served the time required to gain a pension, he was given a gratuity. With this he set up a sign-writing business, but it never prospered and eventually closed.

  Young Lewis won a national scholarship to the Royal College of Science in 1898, and having completed his studies in the Royal School of Mines he was appointed Assistant Superintendent in the Geological Survey of India. He set out on the long journey to Calcutta in October 1902, and this was to be his base for the rest of his working life. Compared to the enormous efforts he had made over the past years, his duties in India must have seemed leisurely. There were long months in the field, mapping the stratification of rocks and mineral deposits and inspecting mines, but he had time enough to prepare for his BSc (1907) and DSc (1909). In the early days he also kept a diary, in which he writes matter-of-factly about the hunts laid on by local maharajahs, various clashes with porters and uncooperative villagers, and the musicians and dancers who appeared out of nowhere to entertain the camp. The diary is also dotted with descriptions of flowers, birds, animals and insects. His air of lean austerity was complemented by a tall figure, fine features, and deep-set brown eyes. Despite his dedication to work, Lewis enjoyed society. He was a keen racegoer, and the elegance of his dancing was noticed at the balls given by the ladies of Calcutta.

  Paddy’s mother was Muriel Æileen Ambler, the daughter of Charles Taaffe Ambler, founder and owner of Ambler’s Slate & Stone Co. Ltd, of Dharhara near the town of Monghyr, some two hundred and fifty miles to the north-west of Calcutta. It may be that Lewis first made a connection with the Amblers through professional channels: in 1904, the Geological Survey had tested Charles Ambler’s slate and found it to be unusually strong, breaking at a pressure of three tons per square inch.