On the coast of Terra Fermoor, when the wind is on the lea,
And the paddy-fields are sprouting round a morning cup of tea,
Sits a lovely girl a-dreaming, and she never thinks of me.
No, she never thinks of me
At her morning cup of tea,
Lovely girl with moon-struck eyes,
Juno fallen from the skies,
At the paddy-fields she looks
Musing on Tibetan books,
On the Coast of Terra Fermoor high above the Cretan Sea.
Melting rainbows dance around her – what a tale she has to tell,
How Carmichael, the Archangel, caught her in the asphodel,
And coquetting choirs of Cherubs loudly sang the first Joel,
Loudly sang the first Joel
To their Blessed Damozel.
Ah, she’s doomed to wane and wilt
Underneath her load of guilt;
She will never, never say
What the Cherubs sang that day,
When the Wise Men came to greet her and a star from heaven fell.
Ah, her memory is troubled by a stirring of dead bones,
Bodies that a poisoned poppy froze into a heap of stones;
When the midnight voices call her, how she mews and mopes and moans.
Oh the stirring of the bones
And their rumble-tumble tones,
How they rattle in her ears
Over the exhausted years;
Lovely bones she used to know
Where the tall pink pansies blow
And her heart is sad because she never saw the risen Jones.
Cruel gods will tease and taunt her: she must always ask for more,
Have her battlecock and beat it, slam the open shuttledore,
Till the Rayners17 cease from reigning in the stews of Singapore.
She will always ask for more,
Waiting for her Minotaur;
Peering through the murky maze
For the sudden stroke that slays,
Till some spirit made of fire
Burns her up in his desire
And her sighs and smiles go floating skyward to the starry shore.
- Maurice Bowra, On the Coast of Terra Fermoor (10 June 1950)
The controversial Oxford scholar, poet, wit and acquaintance of Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor, Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra, wrote two poems (in 1950) that poked fun at Paddy’s relationships with Balasha Cantacuzene - his first great love - and Joan Leigh Fermor - his life long lover and eventual wife.
The poems remained hidden from public view until Henry Hardy (also know as Robert Dugdale) published Maurice Bowra’s scabrous satires on his contemporaries, New Bats in Old Belfries, in 2005, as one of Bowra’s literary executors. At the time Hardy had to leave blank spaces where two of them should have appeared. This was because their subject, Patrick Leigh Fermor, was still alive, and was unwilling to give his approval for their inclusion in his lifetime - Paddy died in June 2011, aged 96. One can only speculate why Bowra, who had a decent friendship with Fermor, would want to target Paddy Fermor in this way. Fermor after all was a celebrated writer, traveller - and Cretan war hero as a result of his activities while serving in the Special Operations Executive during the second world war.
In an extended correspondence with Hardy in his capacity as one of the editors of Bowra’s poems, PLF showed that he was much put out by the ones on himself, especially ‘The Wounded Gigolo’, which he felt was ‘a bit cracked’. He vacillated about the other poem, ‘On the Coast of Terra Fermoor’ (why did Bowra misspell ‘Fermor’?), but in the end voted against, no doubt partly influenced by the opinion of his late wife, Joan, who ‘thought that all the people mentioned in the collection would have been cut to the quick, however much they put on non-spoilsport faces.’ When James Morwood of Wadham visited him later in his Greek home to ask about his friendship with Maurice Bowra (on behalf of Leslie Mitchell, Bowra’s biographer), he found that the hurt of reading the poems was still smarting. Paddy Fermor would write to Henry Hardy to say: ‘Could Maurice’s shade ponder all this now, I think I might emerge as more of a saviour than a spoilsport.’ Paddy would express how deeply wounded he was by Bowra in his correspondence with the Duchess of Devonshire.
In April 2022, I visited the home of Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor in Kadarmyli in the Peloponnese as part of hiking and mountaineering sojourn around Greece with friends. Afterwards, back in London, I was having a family dinner which included some of my grandparents’ circle of friends in which they recalled Lord Noel Annan (he died back in 2000), the great doyenne of British academia and chronicler of his age, that Maurice Bowra was madly in love with Joan Leigh Fermor - which went unrequited.
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