Between the Woods and the Water Read online

  PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR was born in 1915 of English and Irish descent. After his stormy schooldays, followed by the walk across Europe to Constantinople that begins in A Time of Gifts (1977) and continues through Between the Woods and the Water (1986), he lived and traveled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. His books Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966) attest to his deep interest in languages and remote places. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania, and fought in Greece and Crete. He was awarded the DSO and OBE. He now lives partly in Greece in the house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani, and partly in Worcestershire. He was knighted in 2004 for his services to literature and to British–Greek relations.

  JAN MORRIS was born in 1926, is Anglo-Welsh, and lives in Wales. She has written some forty books, including the Pax Britannica trilogy about the British Empire, studies of Wales, Spain, Venice, Oxford, Manhattan, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Trieste, six volumes of collected travel essays, two memoirs, two capricious biographies, and a couple of novels—but she defines her entire oeuvre as “disguised autobiography.” She is an honorary D. Litt. of the University of Wales and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

  BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER

  On Foot to Constantinople: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates

  PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

  Introduction by

  JAN MORRIS

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  INTRODUCTION

  ON HOLY Saturday, 1934, the nineteen-year-old Patrick (Paddy) Leigh Fermor stood on a bridge over the Danube at Esztergom, some forty miles upstream from Budapest, and contemplated his situation.

  He had quite recently been asked to leave King’s School, Canterbury, because of conduct unbecoming (i.e., holding hands with a tradesman’s daughter in the town), although his intellect was beyond the dreams of schoolmasters. His memory was brilliant, he had marvelous gifts of observation and description, his command of languages was instinctive, and he had already developed formidable powers of historical scholarship. But he was a born individualist, an adventurer, and it was as a cheerful dropout that he had, three months before, embarked upon a solitary walk across the continent of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.

  Now he was about halfway there, having traveled, mostly on foot, through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, roughly following the courses of the Rhine and the Danube, but making detours and side excursions whenever he felt like it. He had usually traveled rough, consorting with tramps, gypsies, farmers, and anyone else he met on the road, but occasionally he had stopped off for a few days in the house of some hospitable acquaintance, if only to use the library.

  From the bridge at Esztergom, at the frontier between Slovakia and Hungary, while the citizens of the town swarmed about him preparing for their Easter celebrations, he looked expectantly for the first time towards the intoxications of Middle Europe—romantic bravado of the Hungarians, weird legends and traditions of Transylvania, the wild majesty of the Danube itself as it swept through gorge, marsh and forest towards the Black Sea.

  * * *

  Before we join him on his journey we must pause for contemplation ourselves, because it is not exactly the Paddy Leigh Fermor we see at Esztergom who is the author of this book. Five years later the young backpacker was to become Major Patrick Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE, a war hero celebrated for parachuting into Nazi-occupied Crete, kidnapping a German general, and smuggling him away to Egypt, and in the years after that he had written three books of travel which had given him literary fame too. It was only when he was in his sixties that he set about turning his youthful walk across Europe into a book. The first volume of the consequent work, A Time of Gifts, was published in 1977 and instantly recognized as a classic. This second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, appeared in 1986, and by then Leigh Fermor was seventy-one years old.

  So half a century separates the experience from the book, and the author is looking back at himself across a great gulf of experience and of history. The Second World War has changed Europe forever since Paddy hoisted his rucksack at the Hook of Holland, and his alter ego too has been weathered by a lifetime of travel and accomplishment. It really is almost as though Between the Woods and the Water is the work of two separate writers, coming to the task from opposite directions, but blending their talents in a display of intergenerational collaboration.

  And it is a triumph of this book that we, the readers, understand them both. We know what goes through both their minds, because the artistry of its author makes the boyish enthusiasm of the young man as immediate as the tempered experience of the old.

  * * *

  So, off we go with the pair of them, away from the bridge at Esztergom and headlong into Mitteleuropa. This is a generic place that no longer exists—almost a fictional place now. In 1934 it was still recognizably within the cultural penumbra of the lost Austro-Hungarian Empire, given a fading unity by the long, long heritage of the Habsburgs.

  In particular the ruling caste of Hungary was still archetypically aristocratic, almost Ruritanian—high-spirited, frequently eccentric, often Anglophile, and distinctly welcoming to the clever and attractive young Englishman who, during this second part of his long walk, all too often came knocking at its doors. Although in Western Europe Paddy had generally stuck to his resolution to live as a tramp lives, using his charm to mix easily and happily with working people of every kind, by the time he reached Hungary his resolution was less austere, and he spent weeks at a time in more comfortable circumstances.

  For along the road he had picked up introductions. Friends had passed him on to friends, a count here had recommended him to a baron there, and by the time we join him he is almost as often being picked up in a limousine, or riding a borrowed thoroughbred, as he is plodding along a highway. The passages describing his sojourns among the patricians of Middle Europe are among the happiest in the book, but among the saddest too: for we know, as the author knows, but as the young traveler never did, that all that happy, reckless and cultivated society, which answered his knocks at the door with such instant generosity, was doomed. Within Paddy’s own lifetime, it would be eliminated.

  He seems to have had no sense of it at the time. He was not much interested in politics. Hitler had come to power in 1933, but Leigh Fermor took little notice as he hiked through Germany, and when he heard that the Austrian Chancellor Dr. Dolfuss had been assassinated, another ominous step towards catastrophe, “the gloom didn’t last much longer than breakfast.” Nobody yet knew the worst of it. Leigh Fermor, as he said himself, didn’t give a damn, and as he proceeded through Hungary into Romania his several hosts, whether sporting or scholarly, seldom seemed to have raised contemporary political issues. They were obsessed with their pasts, and perhaps preferred not to dwell upon their futures.

  But we know better, as does the author six decades later, and this gives the narrative an element of melancholy to balance its learning, its learning and its fun. For fun it undoubtedly was for the young Leigh Fermor, in those mansions of the swells. There was the terrific fun, for a youth of his sensibilities, of spending undisturbed hours in splendid private libraries, exploring the histories of the countries all around, wandering through their languages and indulging what was already his particular intellectual speciality, historical linkage—finding connections between cultures, peoples, and pedigrees.

  And there was the more obvious fun of social life in such times and places. The inhabitants of those exotic castles were just Leigh Fermor’s style. He could talk histories and traditions with scholarly old gentlemen, he could ride and drink and freque
ntly flirt with the young. One of the book’s most characteristic (and best-loved) passages tells of a hilarious game of bicycle polo on the lawn of Count Józsi Wenckheim at his ochre-colored house in the Great Hungarian Plain, described by Leigh Fermor as having “pinnacles, pediments, baroque gables, ogees, lancets, mullions, steep slate roofs, towers with flag flying and flights of covered stairs.”

  But delightful though those interludes are, they do not stand at the heart of this book. Leigh Fermor’s was a carefree but not a frivolous journey. Throughout his months on the road he was really most truly fulfilled, it seems to me, not at play among the patricians, but walking alone through the countrysides, watching, listening, and making friends among the shepherds, woodsmen and innkeepers of his route. Then his powers of recollection are given superb expression by the vocabulary of his other self, fifty years later, and we enjoy the incomparable richness of the Leigh Fermor style, a style of person as of prose.

  There are lyrical delights in every part of Between the Woods and the Water, but I think they reach an apogee in the passages that sees Paddy at large in the wild Carpathian uplands. Here all his young enthusiasms are let loose. He discusses Romany pronunciations with Gypsy fossickers. Uniat shepherds lead him to thoughts about Christian orthodoxies. A rabbi at a lumbercamp recites verses from the Psalms in Hebrew, and he copies them down phonetically. Merry peasant women chaff him. And constantly through his mind all the peoples of the tangled Carpathian past, Dacians and Goths and Gepids and Lombards and Huns and Mongols and Kabars and Karaite schismatics, rumble and argue down the ages, clashing their scimitars, beating their drums, and playing upon shinbone flutes.

  Best of all, to my mind, in those high empty places Leigh Fermor is inspired by the presence and friendship of Nature. In the 1930s Central Europe teemed with wild creatures, bears and foxes and wildcats, hoopoes and golden orioles, and he loved the proximity of them. When a flock of sheep passes by him in the night it is “a liquid rippling” that he hears, caused by “hundreds of little cleft feet trotting by.” When he comes face to face with a stag, the two of them stand there transfixed for a moment until the animal hurls itself “headlong through a screen of branches like a horse through a hoop.” Nobody has ever described a golden eagle as Leigh Fermor does, with all the fellow-feeling of one free wanderer for another, and you might think he had actually lodged with storks, so intimately and so affectionately does he analyze their grace and ungainliness.

  But then, as he says of those Carpathian forests, “a kind of spell haunts wooded slopes like these,” just as this book is haunted by his own memories of starlit nights among the rustle of the bushes, or the liquid rippling of sheep hoofs through the silence.

  * * *

  Leigh Fermor never does reach Constantinople in Between the Woods and the Water. Out of Transylvania he sailed down the Danube, through the heroic Iron Gates, to emerge at Orsova on the border of Bulgaria, still five hundred miles from his destination, where the call of the muezzin welcomed him to the gates of Islam too. Perhaps we never shall walk the last miles with him, to stand beside him on the Bosphorus: but he ends this book with the words TO BE CONCLUDED, so perhaps somewhere even now, after another twenty years, on a terrace in Greece perhaps, with dolphins playing in the blue gulf below, a cat by his feet, and a jug of retsina on his table, Paddy is writing the finish to his life’s masterpiece.

  —JAN MORRIS

  BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER

  Völker verrauschen,

  Namen verklingen,

  Finstre Vergessenheit

  Breitet die dunkelnachtenden Schwingen

  Über ganzen Geschlechtern aus

  Schiller

  from Die Braut von Messina

  Ours is a great wild country:

  If you climb to our castle’s top,

  I don’t see where your eye can stop;

  For when you’ve passed the corn-field country,

  Where vine-yards leave off, flocks are packed,

  And sheep-range leads to cattle-tract,

  And cattle-tract to open-chase,

  And open-chase to the very base

  Of the mountain, where, at a funeral pace,

  Round about, solemn and slow,

  One by one, row after row,

  Up and up the pine-trees go,

  So, like black priests up, and so

  Down the other side again

  To another greater, wilder country.

  Robert Browning

  from The Flight of the Duchess

  INTRODUCTORY LETTER TO XAN FIELDING

  DEAR XAN,

  The first part of this narrative, A Time of Gifts, ended on a bridge over the Danube between Slovakia and Hungary, and as it must be unlucky to change in midstream, please let me begin the second part with a letter to you, as I did before. Nor will this be the last; there is one more book to come which will carry us to the end of the journey and beyond.

  I had set out from Holland in 1934 meaning to mix only with chance acquaintances and fellow-tramps, but almost imperceptibly by the time I got to Hungary and Transylvania I found myself having a much easier time of it than I had expected or planned: ambling along on borrowed horses, drifting from one country-house to another, often staying for weeks or even months under patient and perhaps long-suffering but always hospitable roofs. Many things made this part of the journey quite different from the rest. It was a season of great delight; all seemed immeasurably old and at the same time brand new and totally unknown and, thanks to my dawdling rate of progress and those long sojourns, lasting friendships sprang up.

  I suffered occasional pricks of conscience about straying so far from my original intentions, but when I look back now after putting these months together in writing, these twinges vanish. The next decade swept away this remote, country-dwelling world and this brings home to me how lucky I was to catch these long glimpses of it, even to share in it for a while. A subconscious wisdom might almost have been guiding this stretch of the journey and when it came to an end south of the Danube, it struck me, climbing through Balkan passes at my earlier brisk pace, how unusual were the regions I had just traversed: they had begun to take on a glow of retrospective magic which the intervening half-century has enhanced.

  The notebook covering this period, lost in Moldavia at the beginning of the War and restored a few years ago by a great stroke of luck, has been a great help, but not the unfailing prop it should have been. When I came to a standstill during those long halts, writing stopped too: as I was keeping a journal of travel, I wrongly thought there was nothing to record. I was often slow to take it up again when I moved on and, even then, jotted notes sometimes took the place of sustained narrative. Fearing some details might have got out of sequence when I started writing the present book, I surrounded these passages with a cloud of provisos and hedged bets. Then the thought that these pages were not a guidebook persuaded me that it didn’t matter very much, so I let the story tell itself free of debilitating caveats.

  Books about this part of Europe incline to be chiefly, sometimes exclusively, devoted to politics, and this abundance lessens my guilt about how small a part they play in this one, where they only appear when they impinge directly on the journey. I had to give some account of how I thought history had affected life in Transylvania—its aftermath was all about me—but my inconclusive ponderings are offered with well-founded diffidence. Nothing could be less professional or ‘inside Europe,’ and my political torpor at this early stage of life is touched on at some length in A Time of Gifts (pp. 123–30). News of grim events kept breaking in from the outside world but something in the mood of these valleys and mountain ranges weakened their impact. They were omens, and sinister ones, but there were three more years to go before these omens pointed unmistakably to the convulsions five years later.

  Place names are a minor problem, but a vexing one. For well-known ones I have stuck to the forms longest established by history, and for the lesser, those in force at the time of the journ
ey. Political fashion has altered many; more changed later; Rumanian spelling has been reformed, and earlier shifts of sovereignty have affected the precedence of the three place names that often adorn the smallest hamlet. I have tried to cite the official name first, followed by the others if they are needed. I know there is confusion here and there, but as this is not a guide nobody will be in danger of losing his way. I must apologise for these shortcomings and I hope it will be clear that they have nothing to do with partisanship. A few people’s names have been changed when it seemed expedient but very sparingly, and usually of friends who are still actively on the scene from which many of the others have vanished. ‘Von’ is ‘v.’ throughout.

  The debts a writer owes in a book of this kind are enormous and longstanding and if I fail to thank everyone I should, it is from neither forgetfulness nor ingratitude. I am deeply beholden to my old friend Elemer v. Klobusicky; to the Meran family, then and now; to Alexander Mourouzi and Constantine Soutzo. I would also like to thank Steven Runciman for encouraging words after the first volume, Dimitri Obolensky for wise advice during this one, and David Sylvester, Bruce Chatwin, Niko Vasilakis, Eva Bekássy v. Gescher and, as ever, John Craxton. Also many retrospective thanks to Balas, a Cantacuzène for help in translating Mioritza, in Moldavia long ago. My debt to Rudolf Fischer is beyond reckoning. His omniscient range of knowledge and an enthusiasm tempered with astringency have been a constant delight and stimulus during all the writing of this book; his vigilance has saved it from many errors, and I feel that the remaining ones may be precisely those when his advice was not followed.