Delights page 2

That “slipping into Europe through a secret door”. What a wonderful touch! The secret doors so beloved of children, entrance to some enchanted kingdom. But the enchantment is there right from the beginning, as the taxi sets off through a London downpour. Jermyn Street becoming a “submarine arcade”, for example, conjuring vistas of sea-caves glistening with treasure, and the Monument – that obelisk memorialising the Great Fire of London – distorted by the rain as if the street was “forty fathoms down”.

*Two links here: one with arcades, which have a magic all their own, especially in relation to the rain, and another with drowned cities. We’ll get to them.

Did you notice Leigh Fermor’s wonderful note that the ship he’s sailing on has been raised by the tide so he can step straight onto it from the cobbles? Like an illicit pleasure? He’s right: it is a special privilege to step right out of the middle of a city straight into foreign adventure without the normal paraphenalia of airports and station platforms and distant docks. It’s like finding that secret door.

*There’s a link here to the paintings by Claude Lorrain: we’ll pick it up later.

I realise also that this passage contains a key to why this whole passage pleases me so much: it’s about departure. Secret departure. Slipping away right from the middle of things.

*This links to Great Departures of my own: starting with the moment in March 1961 when my family boarded a train in Paragon Station in the city of Hull in Yorkshire to set out on a voyage halfway round the world to New Zealand. Further details further on.

Back to Leigh Fermor, now on his ship heading down the Thames – and his evocation of the coming of night: “fissures among the western cloudbanks fading from smoky crimson to violet”. That word “fissures” – making us think of the gaps between the clouds as canyons, of the clouds themselves as mountains. Even the phrase “western cloudbanks” has a resonance of its own – it reminds us of “the western approaches” and all those other names for distant but strangely familiar parts from distant time, like “the Saxon shore” and “the Spanish Main”.

*Let’s have a look at romantic geographical terms in another place, and make sure we deal with “The German Bight” and “the fall line” and “sea-islands”.

Back to Fermor: he hits another perfect note right after the reference to the cloudbanks: “in the catwalks between the warehouses night was assembling too.” There’s something pleasingly bleak about the image of the iron catwalks between the grim, soot-blackened warehouses that makes the cosiness of being inside the boat even cosier. For me they bring to mind “Oliver Twist” and the steel-engravings of Bill Sykes fleeing across the rooftops of London with the crowd chasing him in the canyons below.

But back to the cosiness of Leigh Fermor aboard ship: not only the pleasure of being the only passenger “We don’t get many in December” but the satisfaction of taking out his “handsomely bound journal” and laying it out on the green baize table “under a pink-shaded lamp”. What better antidote to the gathering dark outside than that “pink-shaded lamp”? And the final touch: when he arrives in Holland, “snow covered everything … on the untrodden quay” and he’s able to pass silently and unseen through that secret door into the continent.

There’s another interesting point about this passage: Leigh Fermor juggles brilliantly with feelings of comfort surrounded by hostile elements (the taxi through the rainstorm, the glowing boat through the darkness) and in doing so he stimulates our own feelings of comfort at being in a comfortable chair, or a warm bed, reading about his exploits. Contained within the pages of the book we’re holding are snowstorms and miles of empty road and nights on bare mountains; but we’re safely on the outside. We’re the comfort that contains the discomfort: a neat reversal of the situation of the author as he slogs, on our behalf, across a Europe over which Hitler’s shadow was just beginning to fall.