Delights

From my earliest childhood certain prospects and memories have filled me with such delight that bringing them to mind is finding oneself unexpectedly before a bright and blazing fire.
on a dark winter’s afternoon. During the course of a lifetime of reading I have come across passages in literature which have ignited that delight so spontaneously once read they are never forgotten.

This is the beginning of a collection of some of those pleasures with, when I’ve got time, notes on why they work so well. More to follow

LEAVETAKING

It seems appropriate to start with a young man setting out on a journey: and what a journey!. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts” is one of the great travel books. In 1933, at the age of eighteen, Leigh Fermor set off on an apparently absurd quest to walk from London to Constantinople, sleeping in castles and barns along the Rhine and the Danube all the way to Hungary, where the first volume of his travels ends. The title refers to the generosity he met along the way, as if his quixotic plan somehow revived the youthful dreams of almost everyone he encountered. He was delighted with everything he saw: his numerous hosts were delighted with him.

The entire book is a source of great pleasure, allowing the reader to slog through winter storms and stroll through sunlit meadows of a Europe that has now vanished: and the passage I have chosen is a brilliant demonstration of Leigh Fermor’s superb control over the English language. Before I talk about why I like it so much, and what other associations it brings, here it is: A Time of Gifts, Chapter One.

FROM: A TIME OF GIFTS
BY PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

“A splendid afternoon to set out!”, said one of the friends who was seeing me off, peering at the rain and rolling up the window.

The other two agreed. Sheltering under the Curzon Street arch of Shepherd Market, we had found a taxi at last. In Half Moon Street, all collars were up. A thousand glistening umbrellas were tilted over a thousand bowler hats in Piccadilly; the Jermyn Street shops, distorted by streaming water, had become a submarine arcade; and the clubmen of Pall Mall, with china tea and anchovy toast in mind, were scuttling for sanctuary up the steps of the clubs. Blown askew, the Trafalgar Square fountains twirled like mops, and our taxi, delayed by a horde of Charing Cross commuters reeling and stampeding under a cloudburst, crept into the Strand. The vehicle threaded its way through a flux of traffic and splashed up Ludgate Hill as the dome of St Paul's sank deeper its pillared shoulders. The tyres slewed away from the drowning cathedral and a minute later the silhouette of The Monument, descried through veils of rain, seemed so convincingly liquefied out of the perpendicular that the tilting thoroughfare might have been forty fathoms down. The driver, as he swerved wetly into Upper Thames Street, leaned back and said: 'Nice weather for young ducks.'

A smell of fish was there for a moment, then gone. Enjoining haste, the bells of St Magnus the Martyr and St Dunstans‑in‑the East were tolling the hour; then sheets of water were rising from our front wheels as the taxi floundered on between The Mint and the Tower of London. Dark complexes of battlements and tree‑tops and turrets dimly assembled on one side; then, straight ahead, pinnacles and the metal parabolas of Tower Bridge were looming. We halted on the bridge just short of the first barbican and driver indicated the flight of stone steps that descended to Irongate Wharf. We were down them in a moment; and beyond the cobbles and the bollards, with the Dutch tricolour beating damply from her poop and a ragged fan of smoke streaming over the river, the Stadthouder Willem rode at anchor. At the end of lengthening fathoms of chain, the swirling tide had lifted her with a sigh almost level with the flagstones: gleaming in the rain, and with full steam‑up for departure, she floated in a mewing circus of gulls. Haste and the weather cut short our farewells and our embraces and I sped down the gangway clutching my rucksack and my stick while the others dashed back to the steps ‑ four sodden trouser‑legs and two high heels skipping across the puddles ‑ and up them to the waiting taxi; and half a minute later there they were, high overhead on the balustrade of the bridge, craning and waving from the cast‑iron quatrefoils. To shield her hair from the rain, the high‑heel‑wearer had a mackintosh over her head like a coalheaver. I was signalling frantically back as the hawsers were cast loose and the gangplank shipped. Then they were gone. The anchor‑chain clattered through the ports and the vessel turned into the current with a wail of her siren. How strange it seemed , as I took shelter in the little saloon ‑ feeling, suddenly, forlorn; but only for a moment ‑ to be setting off from the heart of London! No beetling cliffs, no Arnoldian crash of pebbles. I might have been leaving for Richmond, or for a supper of shrimps and whitebait at Gravesend, instead of Byzantium. Only the larger ships from the Netherlands berthed at Harwich, the steward said: smaller Dutch craft like the Stadthouder always dropped anchor hereabouts: boats from the Zuider Zee had been unloading eels between London Bridge and the Tower since the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

Miraculously, after the pitiless hours of deluge, the rain stopped. Above the drifts of smoke there was a quickly‑fading glimpse of restless pigeons and a few domes and many steeples and some bone‑white Palladian belfries flying rain‑washed against a sky of gunmetal and silver and tarnished brass. The girders overhead framed the darkening shape of London Bridge; further up, the teeming water was crossed by the ghosts of Southwark and Blackfriars. Meanwhile St Catherine's Wharf was sliding offstage and upstream, then Execution Dock and Wapping Old Stairs and The Prospect of Whitby and by the time these landmarks were astern of us, the sun was setting fast and the fissures among the western cloudbanks were fading from smoky crimson to violet. In the gulfs spanned by catwalks between the warehouses, night was assembling too, and the tiers of loading‑loopholes yawned like caverns. Slung with chains and cables weighted with shot, hoists jutted on hinges from precipices of warehouse wall and the giant white letters of the wharfingers' names, grimed by a century of soot, were growing less decipherable each second. There was a reek of mud, seaweed, slime, salt, smoke and clinkers and nameless jetsam, and the half‑sunk barges and the waterlogged palisades unloosed a universal smell of rotting timber. Was there a whiff of spices? It was too late to say: the ship was drawing away from the shore and gathering speed and the details beyond the wider stretch of water and the convolutions of the gulls were growing blurred. Rotherhithe, Millwall, Limehouse Reach, the West India Docks, Deptford and the Isle of Dogs were rushing upstream in smears of darkness. Chimneys and cranes plumed the banks, but the belfries were thinning out. A chaplet of lights twinkled on a hill. It was Greenwich. The Observatory hung in the dark, and the Stadthouder was twanging her way inaudibly through the nought meridian.

The reflected shore lights dropped coils and zigzags into the flood which were blown into disarray every now and then by the silhouettes of passing vessels' luminous portholes, the funereal shapes of barges singled out by their port and starboard lights and cutters of the river police smacking from wave to wave as purposefully and as fast as pikes. Once we gave way to a liner that towered out of the water like a festive block of flats; from Hong Kong, said the steward, as she glided by; and the different notes of the sirens boomed up and downstream is though mastodons still haunted the Thames marshes.

A gong tinkled and the steward led me back into the saloon. I was the only passenger. 'We don't get many in December,' he said; 'It's very quiet just now.' When he had cleared away, I took a new and handsomely‑bound journal out of my rucksack, opened it on the green baize under a pink‑shaded lamp and wrote the first entry while the cruets and the wine bottle rattled busily in their stands. Then I went on deck. The lights on either beam had become scarcer but one could pick out the faraway gleam of other vessels and estuary towns which the distance had shrunk to faint constellations. There was a scattering of buoys and the scanned flash of a light‑house. Sealed away now beyond a score of watery loops, London had vanished and a lurid haze was the only hint of its whereabouts.

I wondered when I would be returning. Excitement ruled out the thought of sleep; it seemed too important a night … But I must have dozed, in spite of these emotions, for when I woke the only glimmer in sight was our own reflection on the waves. The kingdom had slid away westwards and into the dark. A stiff wind was tearing through the rigging and the mainland of Europe was less than half the night away.

It was still a couple of hours till dawn when we dropped anchor in the Hook of Holland. Snow covered everything and the flakes blew in a slant across the cones of the lamps and confused the glowing discs that spaced out the untrodden quay … This solitary entry, under cover of night and hushed by snow, completed the illusion that I was slipping into Rotterdam, and into Europe, through a secret door.