After the un-Kim-like life of the past three weeks, the wooden seat and the dim light in the third class carriage, and the rain falling desolately over the plain outside, were a dejecting contrast. The train stopped at every station, sometimes with long waits by the deserted platforms of remote halts. There were only a few peasants on board, all with that bewildered refugee look that overcomes country people in trains: women with coloured kerchiefs and Anna Karenina bundles on their laps, and men with their hands – blunt instruments temporarily idle – hanging sadly between their knees, with the looseness of turtles’ fins. They didn’t know what to do with themselves, and I felt rather the same, fumbling my stick, so long abandoned, with the rucksack squatting on the seat beside me like a toad companion. I thought about Bucharest. Infected by all I had heard from Hungarians and Bulgarians, I had dreaded it, in spite of the fascination that had tugged me there: how unbelievably kind they had been! I could hardly believe that all those faces and rooms and streets had been packed into so short a span. I wondered sadly if I would ever meet any of them again. The country outside the window seemed so remote and shapeless and without landmarks.
Much later, we were all shaken from our fitful dozing and herded out. The name of the station came as a bit of a shock. Giurgiu on the north bank! I had somehow thought we would cross the Danube much further downstream by the great Cernavoda Bridge, and so down the Black Sea coast through Constanţa, Mangalia and Babadag, and here we were on my old route!
I was the only passenger on the ferry boat. As we crossed the river towards the lights of Rustchuk and the familiar quay, things seemed to cheer up. I made a dash for the hotel, with the idea of staying the night and telling Rosa all my adventures over another lovely meal on the cliff’s edge next day. At last an unknown, sleepy woman came clip-clopping down the stairs. No, Gospodja Rosa was in Sofia for a week. I left a note with her stand-in, and wandered glumly to the station to sleep on a bench till the train started, and at last climbed into the carriage like a somnambulist and back into a slow and jolting limbo, and a cold one. I felt terrible. Could it be a delayed-action result of the whole string of tremendously late nights and heaven knew how many drinks of every different kind, hammered home by the Rubinstein party and the Stirbey ball, a whole century ago? Thank God, I was usually and most unjustly spared the full retribution of katzenjammer and gueule de bois, like a foot soldier with a charmed life whose friends fall thick about him. Anyway, neither evening had come anywhere near the pace of the night after La Bohème; and surely hangovers should be plucked from one’s luggage like contraband when crossing the border from one sovereign state to another, even though undeclared?
Much later, I was woken by dawn rising along a navy-blue sierra of mountains and down ravines with threadbare poplars, pricking through the mist under a pure, watery sky of still unshed rain, shot with pale shafts of sunlight. The leaves shone with dew. Like Rumania, but a bit later, all the woods had burst into fire while I had been away. I ate some cold mititei saved from Giurgiu in a twist of greasepaper, and watched the Balkans much lower and more shapeless than further west, but beautiful nevertheless, curling towards us. This would be the third time I had crossed these mountains, and I began to feel I owned the range. I had just crossed the Danube for the tenth time (not, of course, counting the bridges across it between Pest and Buda): more than once, at Ulm, in its nonage; over and back at Bratislava; across it again from Czechoslovakia to Hungary at Esztergom; at Budapest; then from Orșova to Vidin on the steamer, and now Rustchuk – Giurgiu and back. The branching and reedy wonders of the Delta, bursting with birds, were still unknown, and the stream’s lovely beginnings at Donaueschingen; but I was beginning to have a sensation of familiarity with the tremendous river, the real hero, or perhaps the heroine, of our continent. These inklings about the geography of Eastern Europe were like the early fumblings of a blind person getting the hang of a complicated text in Braille, as though I were beginning to feel the asperity of ranges and the sinuosities of rivers under the palm of my hand.
The train lurched and clanked along the Balkan passes. In a few hours I was pacing along the main street of Varna and then gazing down at an expanse of pearly water, ruffled at the edge and crinkled with little waves as it expanded to infinity: the Black Sea!
• • •
Loitering through the town about lamp-lighting time, I was wondering where to find Gatcho when I heard a shout from the other side of the road and a familiar figure charged across. We seized each other like Orestes and Pylades. A familiar figure, but only just. His cap, tilted at a killing angle, was one of those shallow pillboxes worn at German universities, with a narrow black and white band round the edge and a small shining peak. He saw my look of amazement and raised the cap with a comically woebegone look to reveal a totally shaven pate. Nothing of his unruly black shock remained. He couldn’t stop laughing. I had noticed several chaps similarly shorn and capped since my arrival and hadn’t realized that they were fellow alumni of Gatcho’s at the Handelsschule. Words showering out of us, we headed for a café and exchanged our adventures. Not much had happened to him, he said, he had come back to Varna soon after I had left: and what about my doings? I told him all about the theft of the rucksack and Rosa’s wonderful intervention. ‘I bet they beat him up,’ Gatcho said, ‘and a good job too.’ I short-circuited the argument about this (too early for a clash), and moved on to Bucharest. My stay at the Savoy-Ritz was a great success. Gatcho grinned from ear to ear as I told him. Remembering his prejudices, I underplayed all my worldly goings-on, but stuck up for the Rumanians: they were not at all the ogres the Bulgarians thought they were. I had done the same thing, vice versa, in Rumania, like the mouse that helped in Aesop’s fable. To little effect, though. ‘Savages,’ had been the dismissive Rumanian comment, and ‘Robbers!’ was Gatcho’s. After an exchange of fruitless argument, I slithered off into demands about our acquaintances in Tirnovo. Two of them were here – but not Vasil the spy-hunter, Gatcho said with a smile. In fact, we all had dinner together, and I slept on a camp-bed in his digs at the outskirts of the town. Why didn’t I stay on and return with him to Tirnovo for Christmas? ‘Turkey awaits!’ I said importantly, pointing down the coast.
Thanks to the word ‘student’ on my passport, a rather agreeable life began, and I had all my meals at a students’ restaurant frequented by Gatcho and his friends, with even my own napkin in a ring. A pre-Advent fast was in progress, which the students and the people who ran the place took rather seriously, and the food consisted mainly of spinach-like herbs, mache lettuces, cabbage, cauliflower, and two of my favourite things, bean and lentil soup, eaten with wonderful black bread, and plenty of wine. When Gatcho was free, we wandered about the town, and into the fascinating quarters where the Tartars and Circassians had lived their primitive lives. These Tcherkesses had been brought here by the Turks in the middle of the last century, and had taken root. There was nothing remarkable about the town, except its marvellous position poised above the sea, with cliffs running north and south under a fleece of woods and the waves lapping on shingle and sand immediately below.
North of the town, among tall trees, stood the Stanchoff villa, and beyond it, Evksinograd, half villa and half rustic palace, where the royal family spent their holidays in summer. About twenty miles north, along the same coast and the other side of the border, Queen Marie of Rumania[1] lived off and on in her romantic oriental retreat at Balchik. I wondered if these two sets of Coburg cousins ever defied the prejudices of their subjects and slipped across by motor boat for tea.
Gatcho and his friends gave a lot of thought to the studentkas, the girl students, who, like them, had come to study in Varna. They, too, wore student caps very like the boys’ ones; they looked terrible on some heads, rather dashing and Apache-like on others. These romances were nearly all, I think, platonic, owing to two things: the close chaperoning of the girls, who were nearly always lodged under the Argus-eyed vigilance of kinsmen, and the pan-Balkan attitude to technical virginity. Its absence in peasant circles was a matter of repudiation and bloodshed, and the prejudice is just as deeply rooted in the intelligentsia. It is much less a question of morality or ethics than of tribal feeling, and it must be largely an heirloom of the fierce seclusion of their women which prevailed for centuries among the occupying Muslims. This strictly localized physiological fixation, and the rough and ready tests by which a bride’s inviolacy is gauged, must have led to boundless injustice. Gatcho told me that the terror of lost maidenheads tormented both their owners and their potential destroyers with the dread of family retribution (and perhaps gunshot weddings – though girls had been known to act in bad faith here). The would-be seducer might naturally be diffident, even without these sanctions, about landing his momentary benefactress in the soup for life. Love affairs, then, even the most innocent ones, had to be conducted with great secrecy to avoid even the appearance of danger; the rare occasions when they were less innocent called for as much strategy and resource as the capture of a city. Even so, when the lovers had outwitted all the hazards, drugged the watchdogs, as it were, bribed the guards, and talked the duenna round, the gloomy tribal veto lay between them like a sword: a curse only to be exorcized by the physiological equivalent of a mediaeval theologian’s device to transgress the spirit of a text while keeping the hallowed wording intact.
At this point, to cheer Gatcho up, I told him of the Rumanian name for these fell diseases which had first caught my eye on a doctor’s plate in Arad: Boale Lumetși (the first word is a dissyllable, the second, Loomeshti: literally, ‘ailments of the world’ – ‘world’ is lume in Rumanian) – rather lyrical-sounding words for a thought to send a shudder down young spines. ‘Boale lumetși . . . boale lumetși!’ We uttered the syllables in slow, elevated and almost dreamy tones, as though they were a charm or an exorcism. Weltliche Krankheiten . . . the ills of the world . . .
Our talk wandered round these and kindred themes. He knew that the Bogomils had supplied the English language, at several removes, with the most widespread word for sexual heterodoxy. The practice was almost as prevalent, it seemed from what Gatcho said, as in Western Europe; perhaps slightly less. In the usual way of the Levant, whatever blame there was, and that not very severe, attached to passivity; not on moral grounds, but on the score of abrogation of virile prerogative in a world where toughness is prized. But the cruel hostility of England is absent. The idea of people being thrown into prison for sexual unorthodoxy, unless accompanied by factors which would equally put a heterosexual offender behind bars, seems to them as barbarous and atrocious as Balkan atrocities to us. All through the Balkan peninsula, homosexuality conjures up an image that sharply conflicts with Western symbolism. Instead of a sinuously fluting timbre of voice, the word evokes a tall and burly figure, often with a cudgel, talking in a slow bass voice, twirling vast bristling moustaches and surveying his fellow men with a burning, shrewd and speculative eye.
These platonic love affairs of the young, then, found their outlet in two ways. At the sunset hour, when all southern Europe pours into the main street to slowly promenade in the falling dusk, the sexes, except for family parties, are as sternly segregated as they are on either side of the nave in church, usually walking in opposite directions so that sweethearts are only within striking distance for a few palpitating seconds a mile. The two streams of strollers become a tangle of furtive oeillades, lovelorn glances, fluttered lashes, hungry looks and, when nobody is looking, of love letters hastily changing hands. These tightly folded billets were the only other means of contact. Gatcho was deep in one of these pen-friendships, and, since he made me his confidant as a complete outsider, I was able to marvel at the high-flown, euphuistic fervour on either side. Sighs, tears, pining away with love-longing, veiled or overt threats of suicide, sleepless nights with tear-sodden pillows (Gatcho slept magnificently) were the normal currency of these letters; and poetry, in which all nature – the swallow, the lark, lonely seagulls and nightingales leaning their breasts on a thorn until the heart itself was transfixed – was pressed into service. Gatcho, reprehensibly, was involved in three separate romances of this kind; two were stylistic exercises, but the heroine of the third, Ivanka, was more serious. She was pointed out during the evening promenade, a very pretty girl from Shumen, and Gatcho took me to have a formal coffee and slivo at her uncle’s house on her aunt’s name day, a perfect opportunity for letter-swapping.
The odd thing about all these romances is how seldom they end in anything, let alone marriage. Marriage is nearly always a matter of dowries and family arrangement in which neither party has much say, and sentiment, usually, very little. The same rule obtains in all these countries. It seems to work very well. All this puts the vast quantity of songs about love – I think it even outstrips war as a favourite theme – in a strangely theoretical, abstract category. These feelings, as it were, spin in the void, like an elaborate machine that cogs into nothing more solid than air. Gatcho admitted that it was so. But I rather envied him the excitement of the whole thing, the illicit correspondence, the hot-house Schwärmerei, the subterfuges and collusion, which can, in a way, be an end in itself.
There were signs indicating that the old order was beginning to relax, and, to weaken my sweeping thesis, Gatcho did actually marry Ivanka two years later, against considerable opposition by both families who had other candidates lined up, and lived happily ever after; at least, until I last heard from him a year before the war.
• • •
Many things lodge Varna in my memory. One was an old man who must have been picked off by the first cold of winter; at the end of a lane on the edge of the town, a long object was being thrust through a window; a coffin, as I saw, when it was safely on the shoulders of the bearers. I stood back against the wall as the vested priest and the mourners – a few of them, old women mostly, wailing piteously – thronged the narrow gulley. The coffin passed within a foot of me, open, containing an old man in a black suit with patent leather shoes, specially bought, as I learnt later, for the occasion, and probably smarter than any he had worn in his lifetime. A few flowers were tucked round him, and a satin ribbon bound his gnarled hands together. The head, with hollow cheeks, cavernous eyes, and a toothless mouth slightly agape, looked smaller than the head of a live person, as though death had shrunk it; and quite different. It rocked on its pillow with the bearers’ gait. The little group, with its tall candles blown out by the wind, turned the corner. The sad chanting and wailing died. Two small boys carrying a coffin lid that was too heavy for them brought up the rear, arguing importantly and possessively about which way up it should be carried.
About ten minutes later a more prosperous group was moving along the main street. Passers-by stopped, uncovered and crossed themselves. Acolytes carried processional crosses radiating a forest of gold and silver spokes which they gyrated slightly on their staves, so that the metal rays jangled together with a sound like shaken tinfoil. In the middle, carried slowly and at a slant that was almost perpendicular, a small, flower-lined coffin contained a pretty little girl of about four in a stiff white party dress with a wreath of white flowers round her carefully combed black hair in which big, white satin bows were tied. Her pallor gave her the look of a wax doll on display in a window where everything had been remembered except the pink on the cheeks. The chanting this time was in Armenian and the whole company disappeared at last into the Armenian church. (The hats of the Armenian clergy only differed from the cylinders of the Orthodox at the summit. The latter were flat on top; the Armenian katimankia were roofed by a fluted cone.)
Gatcho was dumbfounded when I told him, soon afterwards, that I had just seen corpses for the first time in my life. How could I have possibly reached the age of nineteen without having seen dozens? I explained about closed coffins. What an odd idea, and what an unreal life we must lead. I had felt rather shaken.
Mr and Mrs Collas, the British consul and his wife, lived in a house high up with a wide view of the Black Sea. I had several cheerful meals there, borrowed their books and received many kindnesses from them. After a few days Judith Tollinton, whom I had stayed with in Sofia, came to stay for a day or two, and we went for walks along the cliffs, playing analogies and other elaborate guessing-games while the falling leaves blew about in the cold sunny air. One evening, when we had all sat up late, I think playing paper games, I set off for Gatcho’s after a final whisky and soda, as usual clutching a couple of those round tins of Player’s bestowed by the kind Collases.
Now something very odd occurs; so peculiar indeed, and so unfinished, in that I still don’t know what it was about, that I hesitate to set it down. But it is hard to leave out. I walked back to Gatcho’s house where I was staying. It was about midnight. The key wasn’t in its usual place. Obviously Gatcho had forgotten it. The light was on, so I called his name once or twice, then threw some gravel at the window. There was no answer: he must have gone to bed with the lights on. So I shinned up a drainpipe – Gatcho’s room was on the second floor – opened the window and lowered myself inside the room on my tiptoes as quietly as I could. Gatcho wasn’t in bed, but sitting on the edge of it fully dressed, glaring at me with a brow clouded with histrionic thunder. I cheerfully asked what had happened about the key. Gatcho shouted: ‘Go away! I hate you!’ He said this so dramatically that I thought it was some elaborate joke, started laughing and walked to the middle of the room. He stood up and shouted still louder: ‘Ich hasse Dich!’ And then louder still, ‘What are you laughing at?’ I clapped and said, ‘Bravo, Gatcho!’ At this Gatcho picked up the huge Bulgarian two-edged knife that was lying on my bed with a lot of other stuff, pulled off the sheath and stood under the lamp, with the knife-grasping arm flung out wide, at right angles to his body, the raised tip pointing at me. His eyebrows were painfully high, his eyes wide and fixed and his lips so tightly pinched together that they scarcely showed. At last I understood that there was no question of a joke at all and seized his right wrist with both hands. There was a moment of deadlock. He made no effort to attack with the knife, but resisted my forward thrust. This sent us both crashing to the floor and the knife clattering across the room. I extricated myself, picked up the knife and flung it into the garden through the still-open window. In this sudden violence, we had upset the mangali, a huge brass brazier with heavy rings used for heating the room. The floor was covered with burning charcoal. Without saying a word, we set about collecting this scarlet scattering with whatever was handy and pouring it back into the righted mangali. Meanwhile a din of feet pounded up the stairs. Kiril and Veniamin, the two Tirnovo friends who lived below, burst in and asked what the noise was about. ‘Only the mangali,’ we said, our eyes fixed on our task, ‘Come and help.’ When the coal was all restored and the others had gone, we both sat down on our beds saying nothing, and Gatcho sank his cropped brow in his hands. There was a long silence. Then we looked at each other in bewilderment. When we were more composed, I asked him what on earth had happened. Gatcho answered, ‘I don’t know. I truly don’t know’, then after a pause, ‘Please forgive me.’ We shook hands ceremoniously. ‘I wouldn’t have done you any harm. Please don’t ask me any more.’ It seemed hopeless to do so just then. We went to bed, wished each other a forlorn goodnight, and blew out the light.
What had happened? Of one thing I was quite certain. Even if I hadn’t made a dive for the knife, Gatcho would never have plunged it into my gizzard. He hadn’t attacked, and he had released the knife at once. He was just as strong as I was and he could have put up – had he wanted – a far longer fight. It was obviously my imperceptive and no doubt whisky-sprung and jarring laughter that had made him seize it in exasperation. But what had started it off in the first place? There had been not a flicker of previous trouble and we had parted cheerfully before I had set off. Nor had there been a trace of any sentimental discord, rivalry over studentkas, or friction of any other kind. Could I have talked too much about hated Rumania? I thought I had been careful about that. Or boasted beyond endurance about my smart new friends in Bucharest? Surely I would have had enough tact not to go wrong there. Could I have seemed to abandon Gatcho and his companions these last few days for English friends in exalted consular circles? It couldn’t have been this. I was certain, too, that it wasn’t a question of overstayed welcome, which after all it might have been. (I suddenly began to wonder how much of a nuisance I might have proved to countless people during the last year: had I been a perfect pest all across Central Europe? A deep subsidiary gloom set in, that made it almost a relief to return to the dominant question.) Perhaps I had stopped him from working. But that was just what I hadn’t been doing these last two nights; anyway, Gatcho was an even more confirmed noctambulist than I was, just as bent on excess and injudicious conduct; in fact I think we had what schoolmasters so damningly call ‘a bad influence on each other’, in this respect. At last I came to the conclusion, peering at the dark ceiling, that I must have said something tactless, perhaps during some exchange of heavy-handed teasing, or even something quite innocent which had passed unnoticed at the moment and been misunderstood later: one of those unintentional, feud-launching words that cannot be expiated, wiped out or explained, which after rankling and festering had exploded like a delayed-action bomb. The result could have been one of Gatcho’s blind rages which I had seen wreaking havoc on others . . . Was I letting myself off too lightly? Suddenly Gatcho asked if I were asleep, and apologized again. I said I was sure everything was my fault. ‘No, no, no!’ ‘Yes, yes!’; a maudlin exchange, but much better than nothing. We both feigned sleep.
It was much better, but far from all right next morning. We were both ill-at-ease and avoiding each other’s glance. As we squatted by the mangali, pushing the two long-stemmed Turkish coffee saucepans into the charcoal, I said, ‘Gatcho, I don’t know quite what has happened, but I think I ought to find other rooms. I’m sorry for being a nuisance.’ (I was waiting for the post again.) He seized me by the arm, almost upsetting the mangali again, and cried, ‘Oh, no! Please, please don’t! Think of the shame to me!’ He meant the crime against Balkan hospitality. I begged him to come and have lunch at a café I had discovered and had turned into a writing and reading headquarters during the day on top of the cliff. No more was said before he left, except: ‘Please, don’t tell the others.’ (As if I would!) On the way out, I went to look at the drainpipe. The knife was sticking in an upright of the woodshed wall, flung with enough violence to embed it nearly an inch. I put it back in its place.
The café was in an exactly similar position to the place where I had lunched with Rosa outside Rustchuk, except that instead of the Danube lay the Black Sea. Nobody seemed to come there. The old kafedji said he had got some sausages and could find some potatoes to fry when the time came. I spent a miserable morning there trying to unravel the events of the night before, but without success, peering out at the rain-dappled waves till Gatcho turned up on a borrowed bike. We chucked a first glass of slivo down our throats and poured out another. Our openings were nearly identical and embarrassingly contrite. Me: ‘I’m terribly sorry, whatever I did. I didn’t mean to.’ Gatcho: ‘I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I must be mad. Don’t let’s talk about it’, followed by an awkward pause overhung by a giant question-mark. I got busy with the wine and the conversation became less stilted. Gatcho asked me questions and I answered. I realized that we were running briskly through nearly all the subjects we had touched on since I had arrived in Varna. Gatcho listened in silence punctuated by grave nods. I feared I might repeat the same error, like the man in comic stories asked back into a house years after making some monster gaffe, and doing the same thing again. If only I knew where the snag lay! I talked a lot, but more thoughtfully than usual. There was no point at which, in spite of watching carefully, I could detect a sudden movement of détente, but the atmosphere did thaw. Afterwards, looking over the cliff, I realized we were walking arm in arm – it reminded me suddenly of Constantine at the ball – as though nothing had happened. It had somehow come right.
All was back to normal. I asked him two days later what the reason had been. He said, apologetically, that it was merely his lunatic temper. But I know it wasn’t. I had said something which had been misunderstood. Once cleared up, I think he felt shy about admitting how trivial it was.
The explanation of this odd incident has gone on too long. But, though much in a narrative like this had to be jettisoned, I couldn’t quite omit it, however inconclusive – I have thought about it often since, and always with mystification – and, once embarked on, to curtail it would have presented it wrongly. Not for the first time, I concluded despondently, I have wounded somebody badly without meaning to; nor, alas, for the last. But I wish I knew exactly how.
• • •
. . . for a long walk in St James’ Park. The Admiralty from the Regent’s Bridge looked like a palace in an illustration in the Russian Fairy Book, pearl and ivory coloured, the pinnacles and domes floating above the thinnest of mists, but the only sign of autumn was a lonely spray of gold in the green leaves of one plane tree, like Whistler’s solitary lock of silver hair. I was peacefully watching the pelicans (how sooty they get!) when a friendly old tramp with a nose like Mount Vesuvius in full eruption and a pink and positively magenta cloth cap asked me if they were . . .
. . . and the mean rainfall in Nepal is the heaviest in the Himalayas, 82% per annum, so I will be glad to return to Simla. The dress of the King and the court officials is most picturesque. I was interested of course, in a subsidiary of the Rhaeto-Alpine system of unwarped sedimentary with a superstratum of friable schist and faults of jurassic gneiss and hornblende. I hope you observe . . .
These letters from my mother and father, many times re-forwarded, and picked up that morning, must have been delayed on one of their many stages. My mother’s letters, dashingly written at top speed, were (and still are) long, charming and funny. I surprised the café-keeper several times by laughing out loud, till I got to the finish (‘everything, even the Cromwell Road, must come to an end, so . . .’) With the letters, as always, was a thick roll of weekly magazines and interesting or amusing cuttings from newspapers, comic juxtapositions, Times crosswords and so on. I answered them with long travel accounts (which, borrowed back for the first go at this book, also, unfortunately, went astray like the notebooks). Letters from my father, much shorter and more formal and punctilious both in writing and content, were rarer events. My parents had separated about twelve years earlier, and even before that he only returned to England for six months’ leave every three years, with the result that like many Anglo-Indian parents and children (in my case, one who had never been to India, though my mother and sister were born there and my father lived there nearly all his life) we were, in spite of determined efforts on both sides, semi-strangers.
My childhood was spent in London, in my mother’s very exciting company, with my sister Vanessa, who was four years older, when she was not in India: first of all, when I was about five, in Primrose Hill Studios, where one could hear the lions roaring at night in the zoo. These studios were entirely inhabited by sculptors and painters, and my mother persuaded Arthur Rackham to paint the door of our nursery-schoolroom with a picture of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens sailing down the Serpentine in a bird’s nest. Then for years we lived in a rather fascinating flat high up at 213 Piccadilly, where I could watch across the Circus a staccato sky-sign shaker pouring a cocktail into a glass with a cherry in it – GORDON’S GIN THE HEART OF A GOOD COCKTAIL! – from my bed. In summer she would take a cottage at Dodford, in Northamptonshire, on the edge of one of the smallest and remotest villages anywhere, beside a brook flowing between steep, fox-haunted spinneys. Here my mother was absorbed in writing plays under the name of Aeleen Taafe, plays which never really struck lucky, though they seemed marvellous and tremendously exciting to me, especially read out loud. They were mostly about India, extremely adventurous and romantic, and not written without knowledge.
Her family, a mixture of Irish and English, had been there for three generations. My grandfather arrived there, as a midshipman in the East India Company’s navy, in the thick of the Mutiny and was greeted on landing by the appalling sight of mutineers being blown from a cannon’s mouth. My grandparents owned some large slate quarries in Bihar and Orissa, and when they were in India they lived in Hickey and Thackerayish splendour with even more than the usual army of servants, and unnumbered horses: an Elysian state vanished for many a year. Unlike many Anglo-Indians, my mother not only learnt to speak Hindi and Urdu perfectly, but to read and write them, and gathered much more than a superficial knowledge of India. (When, later on, she and my sister would suddenly break into an unknown tongue as we were walking across some sodden Midland field, I would try to drown them by bawling in Latin, but this was not nearly arcane enough to either of them for real revenge.) Beside this went random but enormous reading, passionate devotion to horsemanship and, above all, the amateur theatricals which seem to have played such a tremendous part in the life of Calcutta and Simla; these first started my mother’s long-standing devotion to the theatre in all its aspects (which perversely and sadly has always filled me – I mean the backstage part of it – with an instinctive recoil. Wrongly perhaps, because it got me out of a hole once during the war in Cairo, when I had landed into some sort of trouble. Halfway through the rocket which a rather nice elderly general was perfunctorily administering, his brow clouded thoughtfully. ‘Could it have been your mother that I saw playing the lead in The Maid of the Mountains in Simla in 1913? It was? My dear boy, I’ve never forgotten it! She was wonderful! I’m afraid she’d never remember a fogey like me, but please send her my regards.’ His old eyes misted over and the forgotten rocket sizzled out. I was very relieved and extremely touched.) This post-Kipling existence of reading, languages, gymkhanas and acting, unfolding under deodars, was half hindered, half abetted by my grandmother. She was a very fair portrait painter, rather of the Burne-Jones school, and she had left a picture of my mother at that time: a beautiful girl in a white dress with her head bowed in a posture of entirely deceptive meekness in order, I think, and quite rightly, to display the long Pre-Raphaelite cascade of flame-coloured hair.
This London–Northamptonshire life, which lasted all through my calamitous schooldays, was enlivened during a year or so by a sudden passion of my mother’s for the air, involving long drives to Castle Bromwich aerodrome and then anxious waits while my sister and I watched her disappear in minute Moth biplanes, and then, worse still, solo. Fortunately this period died away without disaster. But far more exciting than the delights of London and the country were journeys to France, and to the Bernese Oberland for skiing, which had us all three in its grip. (My mother was married when she was eighteen, so there was much that we could share.) But better even than this, or France, or the museums and picture galleries of Paris and London, which she knew by heart and filled with excitement, or the endless plays, were my mother’s gift for reading aloud: quantities of Shakespeare and poetry and scores of books ranging over vast tracts of English literature, sometimes for hours a day – and much of it, as I was four years younger than my sister, only just within reach, which made it doubly mysterious and memorable, and leaves a deeper impression than anything else in those years. There was a great deal of reciting and singing to the piano and dressing up. What was so extraordinary in all this fun and stimulus and charm of decor was that it was all achieved, though I didn’t know it for years, on scarcely any cash at all, by a genius for improvisation and stage-management: a miraculous and absolutely successful emanation of a very imaginative, inventive and strong personality.
Rather unexpectedly, beneath the shimmering, unconventional play of the surface waves lurked sunken and adamantine ranges of inherited and unquestioned conviction. On occasions they could rip the keel off a craft sailing too confidently there. Sometimes these submarine hazards seemed to change position and this would lend incalculability to the scene, a feeling that one would never learn the art of navigating this in all its niceties. Clouds would suddenly assemble in unexpected quarters, charged with distress and bewilderment – not too stiff a price to pay for the charm, generosity, stimulus, enterprise, fun and excitement that was the normal climate, let alone her forbearance and kindness about my troubled career which might justifiably have filled anyone else with despair. I think her own rather headstrong and turbulent career as a girl charitably tempered exasperation with a secret sympathy, however much it had to be repressed for decorum’s sake. A many-faceted character evoked every reaction except tedium. It was her high-spirited style and sense of the absurd in this long letter that made me, to the Bulgarian café-keeper’s puzzlement, laugh out loud again and again.
To say that one letter-writer could make something alive and captivating out of an ordinary London day and the other, somehow, drain the diamonds and aigrettes of a Himalayan court of their gleam, is not a fair comparison. It may indicate a shift in tempo and temperature, but it is interesting for a different reason. My own letters to my father were as formal and lacklustre as his. Due to the scarcity of leave from India and the small overlap with them that summer holidays afforded, we hardly knew each other. We met for the first time when I was five and since then, for the rest of our lives, we spent – placing all the communal periods end to end – about six months in each other’s company, for as long as our lives overlapped. It was never much of a go, and I think we always parted with secret relief, after trying hard on both sides. I wish we had met as total strangers when I was grown up, because today, if I saw him sitting in a hotel, say, in the Italian mountains, I would have longed to get to know him for the very reasons that filled me with malaise at the time.
He was enormously tall and thin, with a distinguished and scholarly look, heavily spectacled, and dressed and equipped on the occasion which I have in mind – these occasions rare enough for each one to leave an indelible impression – in a way that indicated his interests as plainly as armes parlantes. We were in Baveno on Lake Maggiore in April, preparing to climb the Monte della Croce just behind, and I think I was eight or nine. He wore heavy boots, carefully oiled and dubbined with tags that stuck out behind, thick green stockings, pepper-and-salt knickerbockers and an old-fashioned Norfolk jacket of the same stuff, belted, with pleats on the pockets and intricate leather buttons, a watch attached to the buttonhole in the lapel by a leather thong. In the pockets went lens, compass, maps, sandwiches, a bar of chocolate, an apple and an orange, a notebook, sketching block, pencils, killing bottle, guides to the regional botany and avifauna, and – slung about his long form – a japanned vasculum on a wide web baldrick, field glasses and a collapsible butterfly net. An alpenstock leant nearby. All this was all right, I thought, standing hard by like a reluctant page at this accoutring; but I dreaded the two coming items. The first was a geological hammer, the head of which was marked – as my father was in the service of the Government of India – with that scarcely perceptible broad arrow that stamps all government property. It was a favourite joke of my father’s that the only people to possess such implements were he, his colleagues and the convicts on Dartmoor, for breaking stones. I knew it was a joke, but did everybody else? When he stuck it through the belt of his jacket, I always prayed that the arrow side was not the exposed one. On this occasion, it blazed forth. Pretending officiously to adjust it more comfortably, I tried to reverse it, when my father said in an austere and cavernous voice from high above: ‘Paddy, what on earth are you up to?’ I lost my nerve and left it, trusting the English people in the hall wouldn’t notice, although I had eyes for nothing else, and that the Italians might not know . . . The second item was almost equally dreaded: a vast semicircular cap, I think originally destined for Tibetan travel, like a bisected pumpkin of fur, armed with a peak and with fur-lined earflaps that were joined (when tied under the chin which was worse still) by a disturbing bow on the summit.
I had just got the sack from my preparatory school (which was why I was hanging about in Italy in the middle of the spring term, with my father, for once, having to put up with the second of these recurring calamities), but not soon enough to have escaped the indoctrination of prep schools, which, unlike public schools, turns children – all of them, till then, near-geniuses trailing clouds of glory – into frightened, insufferable little conformist prigs. (It is in these children’s Potsdams, not in public schools, that old England’s sociological winding sheet is woven. If these beastly places were all blown up, the humanistic liberation, which is, unexpectedly, latent in public schools, would be given a chance at last.) When we were in the street and the hat in position, with the Lombardic sun shining on the broad-arrowed hammer-head, I lagged behind, miserably hoping that nobody would think there was any connection between us, longing to be demolished by a merciful lightning flash, until I was reproached for dawdling in kindly, sepulchral tones. I smiled, while thinking of this in the café in Varna, and of how closely my outfit now approximated his.
My father, at that time, was Director-General of the Geological Survey of India, and remained so for many years, responsible for the mineral welfare of the whole subcontinent, and constantly travelling, when he could get away from Calcutta and Simla, all over it (always, I imagined as a child, from a faded photograph, sitting gravely solar-topeed behind an aukus-wielding mahout, on an enormous elephant, through landscapes of jungle and mountain). Letters would arrive from Bangalore, Ceylon, Sikkim, Waziristan . . . A true Darwinian naturalist, the whole physical world absorbed him. I used to boast at school how he had discovered a snowflake and a caterpillar with eight hairs on its back and a mineral called Fermorite, a claim which would often bewilder and silence other boasters by its oddity. For one of these feats the Royal Society had made him a Fellow. Somehow we always failed to click. I think I found him too austere, remote and frugal, and his naturalist’s instincts ensured a scientific passion for classification: for instructing me, later that day for instance, whether the gentians we found just below the snow line on Monte della Croce were bicotyledons or monocotyledons, without a word about the colour. I called for wilder music and for stronger wine . . . I dread to speculate what he thought of me, a permanent long-distance nuisance and source of perplexity and expense. He had been rather tolerant otherwise about the misdeeds that I have darkly hinted at now and then; and he had accepted with philosophy the reversal in his plans implicit in my present travels. Perhaps he felt that they were the beginning of the dissolution of our remote link, which, in fact, they turned out to be.
About our only common ground was the fondness of both of us for puns, which, if they are long and elaborate enough, is not dead in me yet. A great and rather unexpected talent of my father’s, and one which seems to belie the impression I have written, was a wonderful gift for storytelling. Night after night, in the hotels of Devonshire, Switzerland or Italy which were our habitat when he was on leave, these complex and exciting serial-sagas would hold us and the other children staying there (all of whom, disguised under intriguing names, were woven into the narrative) silent and spellbound on the floor in pitch darkness.
I put the two letters back into their many-stamped envelopes, each with its conflicting redolence, so different one from the other, and both so unconnected and remote from the Black Sea and Balkan scene that lay all round.
• • •
The café, my new headquarters on the cliff above the Black Sea, where nobody but me ever seemed to come, was little more than a hut among trees, with a single wide window. I used to gaze down through it at the Black Sea – bright blue in the winter sunlight, steely grey or cobalt, traversed by racing clouds, shivered by raindrops, churned by the wind in sudden angry waves, and once invisible under a twirling mist that turned all the trees and the beetling shrubs along the cliff’s rim into a ghostly forest – and repeat its names slowly and with delectation, over and over again, in English, then in German, Rumanian, Turkish: Schwarzes Meer, Marea Neagra, Kara Deniz, and, deepest and darkest of all, the Bulgarian Cherno Moré. It seemed that ancient Greek navigators changed their original name for it – the Pontus Axeinos, the hostile or anti-stranger sea – into its opposite, ‘Euxine’, ‘the welcoming one’, to placate sudden and terrible storms, on the same superstitious principle as the Furies were named ‘the kindly ones’. It is ballasted with thousands of wrecks. I would look north along the tufted cliffs towards the Dobrudja and Constanţa, the ancient Tomi, where Ovid was exiled by Augustus for writing the Ars amatoria. (If only in the Tristia he had written more about his surroundings!) Then came the vast flimsy wilderness of the Danube’s mouths fraying out like the unravelled strands at the end of a long cable, and Bessarabia, and then Russia. It all seemed very close. Odessa, the Crimea, the Sea of Azov – Krim Tartary and the whole sweep of the Scythian empire, the dark land of the Cimmerians – Novorossiysk, and, almost opposite my table, Colchis, where Jason stole the Golden Fleece: a long sail for the Argo from Mount Pelion. If my forefinger could shoot out like a telescope several hundred miles long it would strike the Caucasus, fumble its way through the valleys of Imeretia and Mingelia and into Georgia, through the Lermontoff world of Tiflis, touching the tip of Mount Ararat and dipping, on the other side, in the Caspian. The Elburz mountains, Azerbaijan, Persia – all this seemed suddenly close and accessible. A southern swing of the forefinger brought it in line with Trebizond, the ancient kingdom of Pontus and Paphlagonia, the coast of Asia Minor, all northern Turkey, and at last, south and a bit to the east, about a hundred and fifty miles away as the gull flies, to the Bosphorus and, on its bank, the many-named city I was heading for. A wild and fabulous spirit overhung these waves, as though this coast were still the end of the world, the forlorn ultimate border of reality beyond which a cloud of legend, rumour and surmise began.
‘I’ve tramped Britain and I’ve tramped Gaul, and the Pontic shore where the snow-flakes fall’[2] – the lines were seldom out of my head these days. Another literary association of the region, to set beside Ovid and Pushkin, was the tumulus marking the grave of Mazeppa, a lonely mound among the tangle of the Danube’s outlets. I had been told about this in Bucharest, and quickly read Byron’s poem, and my thoughts of the plain sweeping from the river and across the Ukraine to Kiev were incomplete thenceforward without the Géricault-vision of Peter the Great’s hetman of Cossacks lashed naked to the back of a wild horse galloping with streaming mane and wild eyes and nostrils across the crepuscular steppe.
But Varna, and particularly the rolling wooded country inland from my lair, is especially singled out by a larger disaster. Here, in November 1444, the young King Wladislaw of Hungary and Poland, with the great Janos Hunyadi, Prince of Transylvania, and Vlad the Devil, Prince of Wallachia, advanced with their joint armies against Murad II: rashly, for, as Vlad told the young king, ‘the Sultan, when he goes hunting, has a greater retinue than the whole of your army.’ And so it turned out. The hosts of the second Amurath and of Wladislaw Jagiello (who was of the great Lithuanian dynasty that reigned over Poland, Hungary and Bohemia) fell upon each other. After a savage battle the Christian army was cut to bits. Dead knights and men-at-arms littered the slopes, among them two bishops and Cardinal Cesarini, the facilitator of the engagement, in spite of a truce, on the theory that it was no sin to break faith with infidels. Prisoners of note were ransomed, the rest butchered by the Ottomans. It was a defeat of tragic moment to the whole of Christendom, the last attempt of the West to block the advance of the Turks. The field was now clear for the Ottomans, and, nine years later, Constantinople was captured.
The young king himself fell in the heart of the melee with his horse stuck full of arrows. A janissary called Hidja Hirdir – odd how these names have been handed down, like that of the first janissary to leap through the breached walls of Theodosius later on – struck off his head. It was put in a pot full of honey and Murad despatched a runner with it to his capital at Broussa to announce the great victory; it was pulled out of the pot on the outskirts, washed in a brook, stuck on a pole and carried in triumph through the cheering streets.
Outside all had turned different shades of glimmering, sunless blue. When the kafedji had lit a lamp and put it on my table – dusk started now about five – I could see its ghost on the inside of the windowpane and my own fragmented lamp-lit reflection and, through them both, like two scenes on the same photograph, the fading blues of the headland and the sea and sky. Loose in this void of darkening blue, the yellow pinpoints of a ship’s portholes advanced from the north-east, perhaps those of a Russian tramp-steamer; from Odessa, it might be, or Kherson, Yalta, Novorossiysk. The only bit of the Black Sea coast I knew nothing about at all was the stretch immediately to the south. I would soon find out, as I was setting off next day.
• • •
‘These’, Gatcho said, pointing to a just discernible zigzag of trough-like hollows, ‘are trenches from the war, when they thought the Russian Black Sea fleet might try a landing.’ They were choked with threadbare brambles and bracken, a wavering blur along the cliff’s edge. It seemed a long time ago, just about a year after we were all born: eighteen years of dust and mud nearly effaced them. Somewhere out at sea, the mutiny on the Potemkin had taken place. It was Sunday, a brilliant, cloudless, but freezing cold day, and Gatcho and the other two Tirnovo boys who lived below, Kiril and Veniamin, had accompanied me about ten miles on my southern journey. We had slunk out of the town like malefactors long before daybreak. The misty jets of our breath in the wintry air, shooting from the heads of our silhouettes, had been the first symptoms of dawn. We had just finished some bread and cheese and drunk a bottle of wine under a hawthorn bush. I had been puzzled by Veniamin’s name – it turned out to be the Orthodox version of Benjamin (the B turning to V and the J to I): a fat, sleepy, nice boy who had brought a pistol with him and surprisingly succeeded in shooting a hare, an enormous one, now grasped and dangling by its hind legs, its ears sweeping the ground. It was time for them to start back. All had been well after Gatcho’s and my lunch together, better than ever, as it sometimes is after a row. The night before, all of us had sat up till late in a deep wine-cellar, drinking by candlelight in a narrow alley between enormous shadowy barrels.
We had been arrested on the way home for singing arm in arm in the street – by two policemen, who were, it turned out, far drunker than our merely cheerful selves. The officer in charge of the police station, when he turned up and found us quietly droning Die Lorelei on the bench in a cell, let us out at once. Immediately after we had left, a policeman friend of Veniamin’s told us, on our way out of the town, that our two captors were flung into the cell we had just vacated, which sent our spirits soaring.
It was time for them to turn back. We all embraced and waved many times as I watched the red crowns of their three student caps and the trailed hare dwindle along the dunes. We exchanged letters intermittently until the war, but I never saw Gatcho again.
[1] Queen Marie (1875–1938), wife of Ferdinand I and later estranged mother of Carol II. She was a powerful ambassador for Rumanian post-war interests. The royal houses of Rumania and Bulgaria were related to one another (and to Queen Victoria) through the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family.
[2] The line is from an imagined Roman marching song in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill.