Roumeli (24 page)

But she was wrong. A nice-looking young woman was waiting for us. Her face brightened as we appeared: were we looking for Lord Byron's shoes? She had heard we had been asking about them. They belonged to her uncle: she told us his name; I recognized it in a flash as that of my correspondent. Could we call at his house in an hour's time?

Can a duck swim?

We climbed the stairs to the guest-room of a substantial house built of yellow stone not far from the site of the house where Byron died. The shutters were still closed against the afternoon heat. Solid Victorian furniture fitted with antimacassars materialized in the shadows round the welcoming figure of our host.
He was a large and robust man, between sixty and seventy, with jutting black eyebrows and a tufted crop of grey hair and the simple and friendly manner of an old sea captain, which indeed he was. His niece was there with an artillery subaltern, her fiancé. The punctilio of their dress put our tired travelling outfits to shame. The niece busied herself with the ceremonial of a visit, administering spoonfuls of cherry jam, then a glass of water, a thimbleful of coffee and a scruple of
mastíka
. Less forgetful than me, our host had politely greeted me by name at once and fished out my letters; he also placed on the table, among other treasures, a neatly-stitched canvas parcel about a foot long, from which we couldn't take our eyes; in laborious indelible-ink lettering of someone unused to Latin characters were traced the words:
The Baroness Wentworth, Crabbet Park, Three Bridges, Sussex
....

I congratulated him on ferreting out Byron's descendant and asked, rather tentatively, how Byron's shoes had come his way. Had he inherited them?

“No,” he said. “Though my grandparents, who were both Missolonghiots, must have seen Lord Byron often. Why, my grandpa was forty-two at the time of the siege, and my granny was thirty. He was born in 1784 and he died at the age of a hundred and four, when I was three years old! A hundred and four! He had pre-war bones!
Propolémika kókkala!
Not like our thin modern ones....I can't remember him, of course, I'm only seventy-eight, but they all said he was a fine old man. He and my granny took part in the great exodus, fighting their way through the besieging Turks, and God be praised,” he paused to cross himself, “they got away safely. This is his yataghan.” He handed me the curving weapon with its bossed silver sheath and branching bone hilt, I drew it and ran my finger along the notched blade, and wondered whether the edge was dented as he hacked his way out on that terrible day. “There are his barkers”—we toyed with a heavy brace of pistols, almost
straight ones encrusted with filigree, the butts ending in pearshaped knobs of Yanina silverwork—“and this is his
balaska
, the metal pouch they kept their bullets in, and here's his powder flask. And this is his pen-case and its little inkwell; the lid clicks open—all silver!—though he wasn't much of a scribe. But everybody wore them, even the ones without any letters at all, stuck into their belts,” he said with a smile, making a jutting gesture towards his middle, “for the dash of it,
dia leventeiá
. The more they had in their belts, the better. Well, my absolved
[5]
grandparents got away all right, and came back after the battle of Navarino, when the storm had blown over, and went into shipping. In a small way, at first; then he built more and more caïques, carrying cargoes and trading up and down the Gulf and in the Ionian Islands to start with, and especially to Zante—our town has always had a strong link with that place—and then into the Aegean, and, finally, all over the archipelago and the Mediterranean. They were good times. My father carried on and so did I. You see this house? It was built in my father's day, and every block of it,
every block of it
, was brought in our own bottoms from—guess where? From Savona in Italy, near Genoa! Every block of it.” He tapped the wall behind his chair with a bent knuckle. “There! As sound and as solid as when it was built!”

As he spoke we tried to keep our eyes from staring too pointedly at the canvas parcel. It grew darker; his daughter opened the shutters. The grape-green
evening light flowed in through the mosquito wire. “Things have changed now,” he went on. “We're not what we used to be, though we've still got a roof over our head. But those were the days. They had everything! They could tie up their dogs with strings of sausages.”

He fell silent as though all had been said. The inrush of evening light revealed that his right eyelid had suffered some mishap on the high seas which gave the illusion of a wink. After a long silence, I ran a forefinger absent-mindedly along the top of the canvas parcel.

“Ah, yes,” our host said with a sigh. “Lord Byron's shoes....This is how they came my way. When O
Vyron
was in Missolonghi, he used to go duck-shooting in the lagoon in a
monóxylo
—one of those dug-out canoes they still use—belonging to a young boatman called Yanni Kazis. Kazis had three daughters. Two of them married and left our town and the third went away to Jerusalem,” he pointed out of the window, “and became a nun in an Orthodox convent. Many years later she came back. She was a frail old woman, all skin and bones, in a nun's habit. Her family had been scattered to the winds and she had nowhere to go, so I gave the poor old woman a room in my house. That was in 1920—or was it 1921? Anyway, she lived with us for the last few years of her life. Just before she died she gave me this box”—he pulled a battered casket from under the table—“and in it were these papers and books, and the shoes of the Lordos. Also an ikon of St. Spiridion, which I hung up in the Cathedral.” The yellowed and flyblown papers turned out to be the black edged broadsheets published by the Provisional Government of Western Greece and signed by Mavrocordato, announcing Lord Byron's death and decreeing a salute of thirty-seven cannon—a salvo for each year of the poet's life—and three days of deep mourning, in spite of the impending Easter celebration. The books were a dog-eared Orthodox missal and two devotional works, all deep in mould.

“The shoes,” he continued, “were given to her father by Lord Byron. Byron used to wear them about the house, when her father had rowed him back from the lagoon. Kazis never wore them, but kept them as sacred relics and when he died, he gave them to his daughter; and when
she
had no more days left, she gave them to me as a thanks-offering for her bed and board.
We buried her, and here they are. She was a good old woman and may the ground rest light on her.”

He seemed rather loth to undo the neat parcel, but at last snipped through the stitches in the canvas with the tip of his grandfather's yataghan and began to unwrap the tissue paper. We all craned forward.

Perhaps with Byron's Greek costume at Crabbet in mind, I had been expecting a pair of
tsarouchia
, those heavy Greek mountain footwear, beaked and clouted, sometimes with velvet tufts across the toe, that are the traditional accompaniment of the
fustanella
. But when the innermost cocoon of tissue paper had been shed, the two faded things that my host gently deposited in my hands were light, slender, faded slippers, with their morocco leather soles and the uppers embroidered with a delicate criss-cross of yellow silk and their toes turning up at the tip in the Eastern mode. They suggested Morocco or Algiers and a carpeted and latticed penumbra, rather than the rocky Aetolian foothills; or, even more, slippers in the oriental taste that a regency dandy might have bought in the Burlington Arcade or at some fashionable shoemakers' or haberdashers' in the galleries of Genoa or Venice....The two flimsy trophies passed in silence from hand to hand. Something about them carried instant conviction. When we turned them upside down and examined the thin soles this conviction deepened: the worn parts of the soles were different on each. Those of the left were normal; the right showed a different imprint, particularly in the instep. We pointed this out to their owner, but, as he had never heard that there was anything out of the ordinary about Byron's feet, it evoked no more than polite interest. For us, perhaps because we were so near the scene of the harrowing last moments of the poet's life, perhaps because of our frustrating search and the sudden simplicity of its solution, these humble relics were poignant and moving to an extreme degree. It was as
though that strange young man, as Hobhouse called him, had limped into the twilit room....

The lamps were turned on, and when we had photographed and measured and sketched them, our host wrapped them up once more with a look of slight embarrassment. At last he confessed that, now that it had come to the point, he could not bear to let them leave the family: his niece was about to be married—“She's taking this young
pallikari
here,” he said, waving the shoes in the direction of the subaltern, “and I want to make them part of her dowry. They could hand them on to their descendants, and they to theirs, and so on for ever....” He felt guilty about changing his mind. We assured him no one would dream of blaming him, least of all Byron's great-granddaughter. She would wish the young couple luck and prosperity and a dozen offspring, as we did. His embarrassment vanished in a moment. We drank a final glass of
mastíka
, standing up, to toast the coming marriage. Then after a last look at the shoes and vicelike valedictory handshakes, we left our host still holding the shoes in his hand and wishing us god-speed. The town was wide-awake with evening doings and we felt as elated as though we were taking those elusive trophies with us.

The success of our search had sent our spirits soaring. Missolonghi, as we settled by the weary palm trees, acquired an unwonted aspect of hope and charm; it was a twinkling world of lights under a fading Tiepolo sky. I settled down at once to write an account of our find to my publisher John Murray (namesake and great-grandson of Byron's friend and publisher). I enclosed the sketches and tracings, and promised to send the photographs as soon as they were developed. I also asked him to compare them with the Byron footwear in his possession—
his building is an Aladdin's cave of relics of the poet—and to consult other friends and experts, especially Sir Harold Nicolson and Peter Quennell. Then I wrote the bad and the good news to Crabbet.
[6]

I wish that I had just re-read, as I did before beginning these pages, Harold Nicolson's
Byron: The Last Journey
.
[7]
I would have discovered much to my purpose. For the author, preparing his book in the early twenties by a scholarly visit to Missolonghi, had made friends with a Mr. Aramandios Soustas, the headmaster of the municipal school in Missolonghi and a living repository of information about the poet's last days. How had I neglected asking the local schoolmasters—even if they were no longer the same? They are usually my first resort in such cases, and seldom vain ones: “Mr Soustas,” writes Sir Harold, “was a friend of Costa Ghazis, the nonagenarian boatman, who, when a lad, had almost daily ferried Byron across the lagoon to where the horses waited by the olive grove; and Ghazis, before his death, had carefully and repeatedly recounted to Mr. Soustas...how Byron would always sing strange Western songs
[8]
as they punted back together in the evening, and how on the last day that he had thus conveyed the general, the latter had sat silent and shivering in the stern....” I would have read that Byron and Count Gamba, on their last ride, were overtaken by a storm; when they joined Ghazis and his canoe, they were soaked with rain and sweat; as they slowly punted home across the lagoon in the downpour the ominous shivering fit set in...the rest we know. The appendix would have told me that Costa Ghazis died in 1890.

Now our late host had said that the recipient of the shoes was called Yanni Kazis, and that it was duck-shooting that had drawn Lord Byron into the lagoon in his boat, whereas riding and swimming and shooting at bottles were, by then, Byron's only sporting recreations; an easy mistake. Ioannis and Constantine are the commonest Christian names in Greece; shortened to Yanni and Costa, they are the equivalent to Tom and Dick, and as easily confused. Finally, Kazis and Ghazis: in certain Greek mouths, K and G can be almost indistinguishable. Costa Ghazis and Yanni Kazis are plainly the same man. Our host's boatman and his far-wandering daughter stand forth from the shadows and the shoes themselves step lightly into authenticity.

Why, we wondered, over our mullets under the seedy palm trees, should the tracing of these unimportant mementoes fill us with such keen pleasure and excitement? The answer is that nothing to do with Byron, even a pair of shoes, is wholly without interest.

He monopolized our thoughts and our conversation all through the second can of retsina that a neighbouring tableful of Missolonghiots had sent us. On the fringe of this archipelago of tables, three old men from the hills had for some time been singing a klephtic song that I have always loved in honour of Marko Botsaris, the great leader of Western Greece in the War of Independence. Byron just failed to meet him: he was shot through the head in an attack on the Turks at Karpenisi a few hours after writing to the poet. (Byron took many of his kilted Souliots into his service and a difficult handful they proved.) It was exactly the kind of long-drawn-out and wailing song in a minor key, whose waverings, in the mouths of his Souliot retinue, bewildered and irritated Byron's western acquaintances. To those fastidious ears, but not to Byron's, they
sounded the extremity of barbarism....No wonder we should be speaking of him; Byronic landmarks had scattered our journey through north-western Greece like the clues in a treasure hunt: Yanina, Dodona, the defiles of the Pindus, Zitza monastery, the Acheron, Souli, Parga, the Acherousian Plain, Cephalonia, Preveza, the Ambracian Gulf, Acarnania and at last, Aetolia, where, a bare fifteen years after his first wanderings, his travels stopped for good. The place-names of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
were the stages of that carefree journey through Greece with Hobhouse at the age of twenty-one: travels as remote, then, from the conventional Grand Tour and as adventurous and rare (so wide an ocean seemed the Adriatic, and so daunting a barrier the Acroceraunian mountains) as a journey today from Athens to the Hindu Kush. Their little cavalcade wound its way through regions of legendary beauty and great savagery; tall ranges, plunging cataracts and tufted gorges beset their track. Epirus, at the time and all north-western Greece, was in the grip of Ali Pasha: the Vizir's terrible Albanians tyrannized the lowlands, the Klephts and the Armatoles haunted the crags; the fastnesses of Souli were in perpetual revolt. It was a world of strife, ambush, revenge, burning villages, massacre, impaling and severed heads. This part of Greece was the scene of some of the most dramatic events in history and myth; names and reminders of the great days of ancient Greece were everywhere; above all, the Greeks still lived here. He was able to discern, among the ruins, in the seeming docility of the plainsmen and in the fierceness of the mountaineers, compelling messages of magnificence and servitude and the hint of future resurrection; a resurrection which was to happen sooner and affect him more closely than he can ever have thought. Plenty of raw material here for solitary brooding, soaring description, taunting apostrophe and incendiary peroration; and when
Childe Harold
came out three years later, all this, majestically thundering in those Spenserian cantos (the last foot of each
stanza sounding, according to the mood, like a double thump or a distant echo), this irruption into an unknown world, the controlled fury with which it was conducted, the attack and argument and evocation and the impression of dangerous power contained, struck London, and later the world, like an explosion. Nobody had seen or heard anything like it, and his myth shot up in a night. Still, today, when we know it so well, its rhythms and its images strike with the force of a metrically transposed fusion of Delacroix and Berlioz and give us more than a hint of what its first impact must have been.