Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper

Author:Artemis Cooper
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary, Adventurers & Explorers, Military
ISBN: 9781590176993
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2013-10-14T22:00:00+00:00

12

The Caribbean

Back in London in early 1947, Paddy, Joan and Xan installed themselves in a topsy-turvy flat immediately above Heywood Hill’s bookshop, not far from Paddy’s old stamping ground of Shepherd Market. In his mind this period came to resemble a ‘never-ending party’ at the Gargoyle Club, which acted as a second home for some of the most interesting people in London. Among those milling about in the cigarette smoke were Dylan Thomas, who was supposed to be working at his cottage in Wales; artists including Lucian Freud, John Minton and Ben Nicholson; Cyril Connolly, Peter Quennell, the philosopher Freddy Ayer and the poet Stephen Spender, whom Paddy had met through Costa; and Robert Kee, who was at that point working as a journalist for Picture Post.

Another engaging friend from this period was Philip Toynbee, once a Communist but still a wild idealist, whose intellect was as prodigious as his intake of alcohol, and who like Paddy had been in the Intelligence Corps during the war. After one epic evening at the Gargoyle, he dossed down in the flat. ‘He woke up, utterly at sea as to where he was. It had been a late evening … He stayed two or three days, which we spent talking and pub-crawling …’ On another occasion, they had both Philip and Dylan Thomas tucked up on their sofa. ‘It was a marvellously exhilarating time: hangovers were drowned like kittens the following morning in a drink called either a Dog’s Nose or a Monkey’s Tail: a pint of beer with a large gin or vodka slipped into it, which worked wonders.’1

That Easter Paddy and Joan took a bicycling holiday in the south of France, aiming for the great gathering of gypsies and the horse fair at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue. The town was so crowded with horses, gypsies and tourists that at one point they thought they might have to sleep out in the open; in the end they slept head-to-toe with another couple in the only bed they managed to find. Paddy wandered among the gypsies, trying out his Rumanian with varying degrees of success and attempting, if not to learn, then at least to get to grips with the basic elements of Roma. For all that, the fair was a disappointment: the gypsies he saw in the Camargue were not as wild as those he had seen in Rumania before the war.

Over the coming months, he began to get an idea of just how much Rumania had been weakened. Heavily backed by Moscow, the Rumanian Communists had taken power in 1945 and set about turning the country into a Soviet satellite. Its resources were stripped for the benefit of the Soviet Union while its people were infiltrated at every level by the secret police. Ci-devant aristocrats like the Cantacuzenes were described as ‘elements of putrid background’,2 to be ostracized and closely watched.

Since Rumania was an enemy country during the war, Paddy and Balasha had been unable to exchange letters. The one he

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