Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Read online

  Charles’s first wife died in 1884, and within the year he had married Amy Webber, an artistically talented woman less than half his age. They had two children: Huart, commonly known as Artie, who was born in 1886, and Muriel Æileen, Paddy’s mother, who was born in 1890. Like most children of the empire, Artie and Æileen were largely brought up in England. But they were not left in the hands of sadistic aunts or Dickensian boarding schools; their mother Amy spent long stretches of time with her children in Dulwich, a prosperous suburb of south-east London, where they were raised and educated. Artie attended Dulwich College, while Æileen was educated by her mother and a succession of governesses at home.

  Education done, the family returned to India. The Amblers had built a villa a few miles from Dharhara, at a place called Bassowni: a high-ceilinged house with a vaulted roof and a wide veranda. Artie took up work in the family business, while Æileen and her mother began the task of finding her a husband. This meant abandoning Charles and Artie in Dharhara while Amy and Æileen based themselves in Calcutta. The city not only provided an active social life and suitable young men, but also portrait commissions for Amy.

  In a family that appreciated the arts, Æileen was a keen reader and a good pianist, with a broad repertoire of songs. In company she sparkled a little too brightly, talked and laughed rather more loudly than was considered proper. Her tendency to set off on long rides at dawn, unchaperoned, also raised a few eyebrows. The only release for her energy and emotional extravagance was the stage, and she was happiest when surrounded by the trappings and excitement of amateur theatrical life. It was unthinkable that a young woman from her background should become a professional actress; but there was drama in her movements, in the rich mass of wavy auburn hair that she was so proud of, and the large untidy scrawl of her letters written in purple ink.

  Æileen was one of those people who feel a need to reinvent themselves from time to time, and she had used a bewildering variety of names. As a girl she signed herself ‘Avrille’ or ‘Mixed Pickles’ when writing to her parents, while they and her husband most often referred to her as Muriel. She signed herself ‘Muriel’ too, though in later years this name was consigned to oblivion because Paddy hated it. She also used Æileen, though she liked her intimates to call her Pat or Fudge. As for surnames, two were definitely better than one. Though her parents always addressed each other on their envelopes as Mr and Mrs Charles Ambler, Æileen referred to her family as the Taaffe Amblers.

  The Amblers believed themselves to be descendants of Sir John Taaffe of Ballymote, County Sligo (d.1641), whose descendants served as chancellors, diplomats and cavalrymen in Austria and became Counts of the Holy Roman Empire. Gaps in the genealogical record mean that these dashing figures cannot be linked with any certainty to James Ambler, Charles’s father, a builder born in County Cork in the first half of the nineteenth century. But when Æileen (and later Paddy) referred to their Irish ancestry, this is what they meant. On Lewis’s side, things were more prosaic. Since the eighteenth century the Fermors of Kent and Sussex (the name is a variant of ‘farmer’) had been yeomen, brewers and builders, whose descendants would gradually join the professional classes as the century progressed.

  Æileen Ambler and Lewis Fermor probably met in 1907, and became engaged soon after. She always called him ‘Peter’ though his middle name was Leigh, and it was she who hitched the Leigh on to Fermor.

  In the first flush of love Æileen was willing to overlook Lewis Fermor’s lack of connections, and their mutual attraction must have seemed very natural – she so vivacious and artistic, he so focused and ambitious. As for her parents, the match must have looked promising enough, as long as the young couple did not rush into marriage. Neither party was rich and they had no expectations, but in a few years Fermor would surely be able to provide a comfortable life for their daughter.

  In early 1909 Lewis was in his late twenties, and his career had reached a critical point. He had been publishing papers in geological journals since 1904, and much of this research was now supporting his monumental memoir on The Manganese-ore Deposits of India which, along with maps, diagrams and photographs, ran to over 1,200 pages. No wonder that the eighteen-year-old Æileen felt rather sidelined, as he prepared the most important publication of his professional life for the press.

  Realizing that her demands would always come a long way behind those of her future husband’s work, Æileen told Lewis that she would not marry him after all. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well,’ wrote Charles Ambler’s daughter-in-law Ruth, ‘as it was to have been a very long engagement.’3 But they were reunited, and married in St Paul’s Cathedral, Calcutta, on 12 October 1909.

  Until she met Lewis Fermor the most important man in Æileen’s life had been her brother Artie, whom she revered as a paragon among men. A great winner of prizes at school, he settled down to work in the family business with commendable zeal. He was a volunteer in two local regiments, and according to Æileen he would vanish into the jungle for days at a time armed only with a kukri. He was also an enthusiastic sportsman: the only surviving family photograph shows him standing nonchalantly over a dead leopard.

  Æileen and Lewis had been married seven months when they heard that Artie had collapsed with a high fever at the slate works. He was taken to the Jamalpur hospital, where the only way they could reduce his temperature was by packing him in ice; but as soon as the ice was removed his temperature soared back to 107 degrees. He died on 19 May 1910, aged twenty-four.

  The loss of Artie was a crippling blow for his parents. Æileen too had idolized her brother, but her life was moving on, as Lewis wrote to his mother-in-law in July:

  [Æileen] has now become resigned to the facts and is becoming merry once more, for two reasons: firstly, because she thinks Artie would not like her to grieve too much: and so she constantly tells that Artie used to love doing this, or didn’t like that, in tones almost as joyful as if he were still with us. Secondly, my Loved One is rejoicing in the fact that she is going to replace Artie with another, the fruit of our love, Mother, and we hope that this will be a consolation … 4

  The ‘consolation’ was their first child, born in Calcutta on 17 February 1911. She was named Vanessa Opal, for Lewis liked the idea of his children bearing the names of semi-precious stones.

  Soon the baby was joining her parents on long trips upcountry. They travelled with a team of cooks, drivers, servants and bearers, plus mules, oxen or camels depending on the terrain, and lived in tented camps the size of a small village. The tents for the family were large and well appointed, with carpets and furniture. Æileen even had her own travelling ‘cottage piano’, and cherished a romantic image of herself playing Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Chanson Hindoue’ in the sunset, looking out towards the campfires while her husband wrote up his notes. Yet rain and wind could make camp life miserable, whilst the minor complaints that bedevilled everyone’s health could turn swiftly into life-threatening illnesses.

  It was with relief that they returned to Europe in the spring of 1914, though a distinct malaise hung in the air. Those astute enough to see the fragility of the European status quo were seriously alarmed, yet most newspapers were more interested in reassuring the public than in tracing the political fault lines as they split asunder. But on 28 June, Franz Ferdinand Archduke of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo, and events began to accelerate at a bewildering speed. Germany declared war on France the following month, and Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August, the day that German troops marched into Belgium.

  As a member of the Indian Civil Service, Lewis was in a reserved occupation and was soon called back to India. But Æileen, pregnant again, decided to stay on in England with Vanessa and await the birth of her second child.

  Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor (not Jasper or Garnet, thanks to his father’s absence) was born on 11 February 1915, at 20 Endsleigh Gardens, in the district of St Pancras, London. The house belonged to a Miss Mary Hadland, who had rooms to rent. Perhaps Æileen chose
Endsleigh Gardens because it was not far from the Three Arts Club in Marylebone Road, to which she belonged; perhaps Miss Hadland was already a friend. Yet it is strange that she did not lodge with members of her own family, or even with Lewis’s relations in Camberwell. (Paddy had a strong suspicion that his mother did not get on with his father’s relations, and that the feeling was mutual.) Paddy was christened that spring in the village of Coldharbour, near Dorking in Surrey.

  Æileen realized that the longer she stayed in England, the harder it would be to return to India. The first Zeppelin raids on Yarmouth and King’s Lynn had taken place in January 1915, a month before Paddy was born, and in May, London itself came under attack. The raids were not very effective considering the effort and investment that had gone into the development of the new flying weapon; nonetheless the Zeppelin gave rise to a lot of public anxiety, and the country had no means of combating this terrifying new form of warfare. Æileen had originally planned to take both children back to India, but the sinking in May of the Lusitania by a German submarine convinced her that passenger vessels were no longer safe. She could not risk losing both her children. Instead she resolved to return to Calcutta with Vanessa, leaving her infant son in England. Thus it came about that, when almost a year old, Paddy-Mike was settled in Northamptonshire with George and Margaret Martin.

  Paddy himself, though endowed with a prodigious curiosity, never asked his mother how she came to know the Martins. He said it had never occurred to him to ask, and perhaps some of the golden bloom that dusted his changeling childhood would have worn off had he known the answer. It remains a mystery still, though a clue might lie in Mrs Martin’s maiden name of Hadland: a name she shared with Mary Hadland, the owner of the house in Endsleigh Gardens where Paddy was born.

  His memories of Weedon became greener and more rural as they receded into the past. The Royal Ordnance Stores faded, as did the parade ground and the shops, the pubs and traffic of the High Street. What was left was ‘a background of barns, ricks and teazles, clouded with spinneys and the undulation of ridge and furrow … I spent these important years, which are said to be such formative ones, more or less as a small farmer’s child run wild: they have left a memory of complete and unalloyed bliss.’5

  Paddy’s misery at leaving Weedon did not last long, for Æileen laid on a series of treats and outings designed to make his new world as delightful as possible. There was also a trip to Rowe’s, the fashionable children’s outfitter in Bond Street. A stuffed pony stood in the shop, on which children being fitted for jodhpurs would be asked to mount. Paddy came out with several boxes of new clothes including, to his great satisfaction, his own sailor-suit, with HMS Indomitable emblazoned in gold letters on the cap ribbon.

  No. 3 Primrose Hill Studios, where Æileen had installed her family, seemed palatial after Weedon; they were so close to the zoo that at night one could hear the lions roaring. The house was on two storeys, reached through a gateway rather like a cloister, and the nursery was equipped with toys from India: brass figures of elephants and camels on wheels, and painted clay figures of maharajas and maharanis, merchants and shopkeepers, dancers and musicians. One of their neighbours was the illustrator Arthur Rackham, whom Æileen had persuaded to paint one of the doors on the ground floor. He sketched in a huge tree with Peter Pan sleeping in a bird’s nest, and among the roots a number of carousing mice toasting each other in acorn cups.

  Paddy was about six when for the first time he met his father, then home on leave. He longed to show off in front of this impossibly tall and remote figure, but Vanessa had a great deal more to show. She had been reading since the age of four, whilst her brother was still struggling with his letters. He found this shameful and, to camouflage his slowness, he would memorize long passages of text which could then be reeled off by heart: an early exercise which must have strengthened his extraordinary memory.

  From the moment he mastered reading (an edition of Robin Hood stories unlocked the code) there was no turning back. Soon he was on to Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rewards and Fairies, and – a book that was to sow the seeds of his passion for Greece – Charles Kingsley’s Heroes. ‘Till it was light enough to read, furious dawn-watches ushered in days flat on hearth-rugs or grass, in ricks or up trees, which ended in stifling torchlit hours under the bedclothes.’ Thus he gobbled up Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Black Beauty, Wet Magic, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Three Men in a Boat, and The Forest Lovers by Maurice Hewlett – a romantic love story full of knights and ladies and enchantments. His lust for books was much encouraged by Æileen, who also loved reading aloud. She could do any number of different accents which brought books to life, especially Dickens and Shakespeare. Since Æileen was reading for Vanessa as well some books were inevitably a little beyond Paddy, but he was more than willing to listen. He was also an enthusiastic singer, and as Æileen played the piano, he picked up her huge collection of traditional and music-hall songs.

  ‘Book-ownership was the next step,’ wrote Paddy. ‘To assuage a mania for Scott, I was given four Collins pocket Waverley novels every birthday and Christmas and my father sent sumptuous works about animals or botany from India, wrapped in palm leaves and sewn with a thousand stitches by Thacker & Spink in Calcutta or Simla.’6

  Æileen was a great believer in looking smart and presentable: she wore well-tailored jackets and skirts, and an eyeglass on the end of a black string which Paddy thought very dashing. Unquestionably a snob and a terrific name-dropper, she thought that her family was nobler and more romantic than the Fermors. Some of this rubbed off on Paddy whose recklessness and wild imagination she associated with her own Anglo-Irish genes. Whenever Paddy looked serious or glum Æileen would say, ‘You look just like your father.’

  Living with Paddy must have been like living with a very boisterous puppy, despite the hours he spent reading. No wonder Æileen was often angry and exasperated – though his sister Vanessa felt that their mother’s punishments were sometimes unnecessarily severe. It was not so much the spanking with the back of a hairbrush that hurt: it was the way she could be so loving and friendly one minute, and then icily cold and unapproachable the next. Sometimes she would turn her back and refuse to acknowledge his existence – not for a few minutes, but for hours at a time. Vanessa remembered him, even at the age of ten, being made to sit on the front step, again for several hours, with a bib around his neck.

  But whatever her faults, Æileen was the most inspiring and amusing figure in his life. She wrote plays and always dreamed that one day one of them might be staged, but it never happened. Paddy had a look at some of them after her death, and admitted that ‘they weren’t up to much.’ She had a knack of making things fun or memorable, and he described her as ‘a mine of disinformation, but the sort of thing that made you more interested in a character rather than less’.7She told him, for example, that Mary Queen of Scots had such white skin and such a slender neck that people said they could see the red wine going down her throat as she drank.

  Æileen’s parents left India after the war and retired to Brighton, and occasionally she would take the children down to see them. Only once did Paddy meet his paternal grandparents, when his father took him and Vanessa to lunch with them at the East India United Service Club in London. Æileen was not there. Both she and Lewis had decided to lead more or less separate lives, although appearances were maintained for the few weeks that he was back on leave. She never returned to India again after the First World War.

  In the early 1920s, Æileen had taken the Vicarage Cottage in Dodford: a tiny hamlet at the bottom of a wooded valley, some two miles west of Weedon where Paddy had lived with the Martins. A broad brook ran beside its only street, ending in a ford at one end of the village; while at the other end stood a pub called the Swan, more commonly known as the Dirty Duck, where visiting friends stayed since the cottage was so tiny. This was where Æileen and her children spent most Christmases and holidays until 1930. Since she remained in touch with the Martins, Paddy m
ust have met them from time to time, and he remembered going to see The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with Margaret, a film that came out in 1921. But the spell was broken, and no further memories remained of Mummy and Daddy Martin.

  After a few terms at a school called Gordon Hall, just the other side of Regent’s Park from Primrose Hill, Paddy and Vanessa were sent to an establishment in West Byfleet, Surrey, called The Gables. But despite an early taste for English and history, Paddy was not an easy child to handle. On one level he wanted to do well and impress people; but a sense of mischief was never far below the surface, ready to overturn his efforts at conformity in an instant. Describing himself in A Time of Gifts, he wrote that since he was ‘Harmless in appearance … and of a refreshingly unconstricted address, I would earn excellent opinions at first. But … soon … those short-lived virtues must have seemed a cruel Fauntleroy veneer, cynically assumed to mask the Charles Addams fiend that lurked beneath.’8

  His first proper school was St Piran’s, a preparatory school for boys near Maidenhead. Lewis Fermor chose it because, unlike most prep schools of that date, it gave priority to scientific subjects and its pupils went on to schools such as Oundle and Haileybury, which were known for producing scientists and engineers. The trouble was that, unlike Lewis, Paddy had never been inspired by the sciences and was spectacularly bad at them, whilst Latin, history and English, at which he excelled, were accorded little value at St Piran’s. Paddy was miserable, and detested the team games that were considered so vital to the formation of young Englishmen. He described St Piran’s as ‘all cricket pads and snake belts’, and he particularly hated the headmaster, Major Bryant, ‘who beat us all quite a lot’.9

  One small incident from his days at St Piran’s is worth mentioning because it shows how willing Paddy was to romanticize people, to give them a story which immediately cloaked them in a subtle glamour. There were whispers running around school that Anthony West, a boy who was one of Paddy’s few friends, was a bastard. Paddy had no idea that Anthony West was the illegitimate child of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West, but he was very impressed. To his Shakespeare-tinted imagination, the fact that West was a bastard meant that he was almost certainly of Royal Blood.