Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 18

Don’t worry, Paddy’s not a typical army officer or guerrilla leader. He’s not a typical anything, he’s himself … a sort of Gypsy Scholar.

—DAPHNE FIELDING, friend of Patrick Leigh Fermor

Leigh-Fermor does not submit willingly to discipline, and I think, requires firm handling.

—BRITISH WAR OFFICE MEMO

“YASOU, KOUMBARO!” And then … whap!

Paddy Leigh Fermor made an entrance that could out-Greek any Greek. “His Yasou—‘Hail’ or ‘To your health!’—was much louder than any Cretan’s, his slap so much harder, and his embrace a danger to one’s ribs,” one war memoirist recalled. Paddy also liked to call total strangers “godfather”—koumbaro—because to his thinking, that made them instant co-conspirators in a private joke. “It strikes a note of friendly collusion,” Paddy explained, and friendly collusion was the story and guiding light of his life.

Paddy snuck ashore from a camouflaged fishing boat in June, after Xan had been working with the Cretan Resistance for six months. Paddy was immediately led to “Lotus Land”—Gerakari, a lost village in a remote mountain valley. Gerakari was a favorite place for the Resistance to stash Brits on the run, because finding it, even with a map, meant getting very wet and very lost, very often. Rivers tumbling from mountains on all sides twist together, often washing over the single dirt road and forcing foot travelers to curlicue their way through a dizzying maze of torrents and gullies. You can be close enough to see Gerakari and still not know how to get there. But arrive and you’ll look back on the hellish hike as the gateway to paradise. The pastures are thick with wildflowers and edible greens, the orchards heavy with grapes, cherries, and vyssina, a luscious stone fruit that makes an even more delectable liqueur. Fugitive soldiers would stumble into Gerakari and stare, stunned, as they were handed frothy pitchers of wine and gigantic bowls of creamy yogurt smothered with syrupy cherry glyko.

Xan set off on the thirty-five-kilometer trek to Gerakari as soon as he heard the new SOE agent had arrived. When he got there, he was greeted by a beaming grin, a full bottle of raki, and a nagging sense he’d seen this guy before. They yanked the cork as they got acquainted….

… And Paddy was still talking when the sun came up the next morning.

“When Paddy opens his mouth, shut yours,” Lady Diana Cooper, the socialite and celebrated beauty, later advised her granddaughter, the writer Artemis Cooper. Paddy’s stories crackled like fireworks; he could pop off tales about his teenage romance with a sultry married Serb in a red dress or a summer swim in Transylvania that turned into a hay-bale sexcapade with two saucy farm girls, or his ill-considered attempt to sell silk stockings door-to-door by likening them to condoms, and he seemed as alarmingly intimate with German dueling scars as he was with “unconventional young shepherds” who “may have cast a thoughtful eye among their ewes for the quenching of early flames.”

Between snorts of laughter, Xan suddenly realized why Paddy looked so familiar. They’d run into each other before, back in a London café when Xan was hustling work as a wandering sketch artist and Paddy was in the midst of the best punishment any student ever served for getting thrown out of school. Schools, actually—by seventeen Paddy had seen two psychiatrists and been expelled three times. The only place that hadn’t tossed him was Walsham Hall, an experimental program for disciplinary cases that specialized in nude dancing and free association storytelling. Walsham was run by bohemians in homespun dresses and tattered tweeds, and their approach to education suited ten-year-old Paddy perfectly: he got to run around in the woods, perform naked barn dances with his teachers and fellow students, and lie back on the floor and spin yarns instead of conjugating verbs. But after his mother heard rumors that the headmaster was personally bathing the older girls and hand-toweling them dry, Paddy was pulled out for another try at a conventional boarding school.

He was bright, no doubt about it, with a hunger for literature and a flair for languages. By his early teens, he was devouring Rabelais and François Villon in French and crafting his own translation from Latin of Horace’s ode “To Thaliarchus,” which, not surprisingly, spoke directly to his heart: “Spurn not, young friend, sweet love-making, nor yet the dances round….” Romance and dances round weren’t on the curriculum at most of the schools his mother forced him into, however, so Paddy had to skulk them up on his own.

“Patrick had an energy and individuality which the oldest public school in England could not tolerate, the real trouble being that he liked women and did something about it,” recalled Alan Watts, a classmate who’d go on to write The Way of Zen and become an international authority on Buddhist thought. “Patrick, as an adventurer of extreme courage, was constantly being flogged for his pranks and exploits—in other words, for having a creative imagination.” The floggings even became a kind of methadone when Paddy couldn’t score any other kind of adventure. “I didn’t mind the beatings,” he’d shrug. “There was a bravado about that kind of thing.”

His final offense was sneaking into town and getting caught in a back room with the greengrocer’s daughter. When he was thrown out this time, Paddy didn’t complain. “Far better to get the sack for something slightly romantic than for just being a total nuisance,” he’d say. Paddy’s fed-up parents wanted him in Sandhurst military academy, but he failed the entrance exam. So Paddy came up with a plan of his own.

On December 9, 1933, after waking up with a terrific hangover from a farewell party with his London friends, Paddy pulled on an outfit he’d assembled from army surplus: hobnailed boots, leather vest, a soldier’s greatcoat, and riding breeches with vintage puttees. He shoved Horace’s Odes and The Oxford Book of English Verse into a rucksack, along with a sleeping bag, which he almost immediately lost. Then he set off in a freezing rainstorm to catch the ferry to Holland.

“Paddy” was staying behind; the young man in the wandering-poet costume would be known as “Michael.” And when Michael came ashore, he planned to walk all the way across Europe and keep going until he reached the “Gateway to the East,” Constantinople. He was facing a journey of some two thousand miles, hoboing his way deeper and deeper into the growing Nazi storm as he followed the Rhine and Danube Rivers through Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.

“We don’t get many in December,” the ferry’s steward told him as the boat slid from shore and rain turned to snow. Paddy was the only passenger. Winter was a terrible time to set off, and because Paddy’s small monthly allowance was being mailed to post offices along the way, he’d eat only if he kept moving. Where he’d sleep, how he’d get by without speaking the languages, how he’d even get home, Paddy had no clue. Like Lawrence, he was just desperate to peel off the outer shell that had caused so many problems and start over with a new name, a new look, in a new place. Among strangers, maybe he wouldn’t seem so strange.

He got off the boat near Rotterdam, then trudged through the snow all day before falling asleep watching a card game in a water-front bar. Instead of being robbed or tossed in the street, he woke up “under an eiderdown like a giant meringue.” When he pulled on his boots and found his way downstairs, the bar owner wouldn’t let Paddy pay for the room. “This was the first marvelous instance of a kindness and hospitality that was to occur again and again on these travels,” Paddy would tell Xan—but that didn’t even begin to describe the bizarre talent he’d demonstrate for hopscotching between castles and baronial estates for the next four years.

“I had meant to live like a tramp or a pilgrim or a wandering scholar,” Paddy would tell Xan. Instead he found himself “strolling from castle to castle, sipping Tokay out of cut-glass goblets and smoking pipes a yard long with archdukes.”

In Bratislava, a banker he met by chance hosted him for three weeks of hot meals, fireside brandies, and endless browsing in the rich family library. In Stuttgart, Paddy was watching sleet batter the café windows and wondering where he’d sleep when two lovely young women in fur boots stomped in to buy snacks for a house party. Their parents were away for the holidays, so Paddy spent the long weekend drinking “the last of a fabulously rare and wonderful vintage that Annie’s father had been particularly looking forward to” and sleeping in Papa’s scarlet silk pajamas. In Greece, he galloped along on a borrowed horse in the middle of a cavalry charge when his host was suddenly called to help quell a military revolt against the king.

Listening to Paddy’s tales, Xan was stupefied. “Like him, I had tramped across Europe to reach Greece; like him, I had been almost penniless during that long arduous holiday—but there the similarity between our travels ended, for whereas I was often forced to sleep out of doors, in ditches, haystacks or on public benches, Paddy’s charm and resourcefulness had made him a welcome guest wherever he went and his itinerary was dotted with the châteaux, palazzi and Schlösser in which he had been put up before moving on to his next chance host.”

Paddy was a fine-looking young man—any Pre-Raphaelite would have loved painting those wavy brown curls and earnest eyes, always hunched in thought over a journal or the tattered Horace he’d dug from his rucksack—but smooth talk and a pretty face weren’t the secret of his appeal.

“One has also to imagine the impact of Paddy on an old count from eastern Europe, barely able to live off his much-diminished lands and keep the roof on a house stocked with paintings and furniture that harked back to better days,” the writer Artemis Cooper, Paddy’s long-time friend, would later explain. “A scruffy young Englishman with a rucksack turns up on the doorstep, recommended by a friend. He is polite, cheerful, and he cannot hear enough about the family history. He pores over the books and albums in the library, and asks a thousand questions about the princely rulers, dynastic marriages, wars and revolts and waves of migration that shaped that part of the world. He wants to hear about the family portraits, too, and begs the Count to remember the songs the peasants used to sing when he was a child. Instead of feeling like a useless fragment of a broken empire, the Count is transformed. This young Englishman has made him realize that he is part of a living history, a link in an unbroken chain going back to Charlemagne and beyond.”

The Paddy problem wasn’t so hard to solve after all: once fidgety, show-offy, daydreamy Paddy was allowed to get up and walk around a little, he began soaking in languages and literature at a tremendous rate, far faster and with more command than he would have in any classroom. The same impulsive curiosity and raw animal energy that got him serially ejected from the British educational system was turning him into Europe’s Favorite Guest. From then on and for the rest of his life, Paddy’s motto was Solvitur ambulando: “When in doubt, walk.”

Paddy was having such a good time that even after he reached Constantinople, he kept on rambling, only coming to a dead halt on a rooftop terrace in Athens, when he first caught sight of Princess Balasha Cantacuzene of Romania.

Balasha was breathtaking, a dark-eyed beauty who’d descended from one of the great dynastic families of Eastern Europe and looked it. When she met Paddy in May of 1935, she was thirty-six years old and had been abandoned in Greece by her cheating Spanish-diplomat of a husband. Charming as Paddy was, it was hard to imagine a worse choice for a romantic rebound. He was restless, jobless, homeless, nearly penniless, and barely out of his teens, having just turned twenty. But Balasha found him “so fresh and enthusiastic, so full of colour and so clean” that she took him back with her to Baleni, the Cantacuzene ancestral manor deep in the Romanian countryside.

There, cut off from the world as snow piled up to the windowsills, they settled into a life of artsy aristocracy. Balasha spent the mornings painting, often portraits of Paddy, while Paddy worked at translating a friend’s French novel into English. By the same instinct that prompted Paddy to adopt his alias of “Michael” at the beginning of his journey, he now dropped it: his life on the road was over. Content with the woman and life of his dreams, he showed no sign of straying.

Until, four years later, a new adventure called.