The Colonel was appalled at the idea: Paddy would be dreadfully wounded if he learned that his hard work and his selfless suggestions had been entirely ignored. I told him not to worry: the chances were that Paddy would never read the book again, and would never know. Everything was put back as it had been before; Paddy sent in a flamboyant and affectionate Foreword, written out by hand in royal-blue ink on large sheets of maths paper, each the size of a pillowcase; maps and a jacket were commissioned, the pictures collected up, and Albanian Assignment inched its way into production. The whole episode was, in a way, a cautionary tale: as an editor, I tended to impose my own tone of voice at the expense of the author’s, and it was only when I went to work with Alan Ross at the London Magazine that I learned the value of leaving well alone.
All that is well over twenty years ago, but although I lost touch with Colonel Smiley, I was haunted by the memory of his book. I loved the idea of those tough, romantic, upper-class young men, like John Buchan heroes, living like bandits among the wild mountains of Albania; I was overawed by their nerve and their insouciance, by the way in which McClean and Julian Amery, still only in their twenties, not only performed deeds of derring-do, but consorted as equals with Anthony Eden and even Churchill himself, and I contrasted their courage and self-confidence with my own timorous and tentative existence. Like many men of my age, I suspect, I half-envied my father’s generation for having fought in the war, while at the same time harbouring the conviction that, had I been put to the test, I would have proved both cowardly and inadequate, suffering endless attacks of fear-induced diarrhoea, failing to show any signs of initiative or leadership, skulking at the back when the time came to make a bold advance, and hiding behind other people if bullets or bayonets headed my way, in much the same way as I step nimbly behind Petra if I see a drunk with a bottle weaving towards us.
The war in the Balkans had proved a divisive business, and old suspicions and dislikes still smouldered on. Smiley and his friends were convinced that they and their non-Communist allies in Albania had been betrayed by Communist moles in SOE’s headquarters in Bari, and sacrificed to the demands of realpolitik and the wartime alliance with Russia. A future Ambassador in Paris was, I soon discovered, a particular bête noire. I longed to learn more about the activities and influence, in SOE’s Cairo office, of the brilliant, openly Communist James Klugmann, a Cambridge contemporary of Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt, and a lifelong member of the Party, and of the intrepid left-wing journalist Basil Davidson, who fought with Tito’s Communist Partisans in Yugoslavia, and was later described as the man who invented African history. Among those regarded with some disfavour was the glamorous, kilted figure of Fitzroy Maclean. With Bill Deakin, later the Warden of St Antony’s, Oxford, Maclean had been parachuted into Yugoslavia to liaise with Tito’s Partisans, and had urged Churchill to abandon the allegedly compromised royalist resistance – led by the bearded and bespectacled Mihailovich, who was eventually executed by firing squad on a golf course near Belgrade – and to back the Communists instead. His Eastern Approaches seemed to me to be one of the great books of its time, the very model of the man-of-action memoir I so admired.
Although I couldn’t read a word of German, let alone Albanian or Serbo-Croat, I decided to write a book about Smiley and his friends, placing their adventures in the context of the Balkans in particular and the war as a whole, and trying to find out whether there was any truth in their belief that they had been betrayed by, among others, the future Ambassador to France. I had recently completed my biography of Allen Lane, and although I knew nothing about warfare, or Balkan politics, or the Mediterranean campaign in World War II, I relished the idea of plunging into terra incognita, and temporarily exchanging the feline manoeuvrings of literary London for something more robust.
I ploughed through innumerable volumes of Albanian history, read biographies of King Zog and Enver Hoxha and scholarly articles about British policy in the Balkans before and during the war, and tried to work out who exactly was allowed access to Enigma decrypts, how much of Kosovo had been reunited with Albania during the war, and which wild and bearded tribal chieftain supported whom, and why. All this was interesting enough, if baffling at times, but the perk of the job was reading yet more Buchanesque accounts of high adventure, most of them published just after the war: Julian Amery’s two volumes of memoirs, too Gibbonian at times but gripping all the same; the autobiography of H.W. Tilman, the black-bearded Himalayan mountaineer and long-distance sailor, who spent any time left over from harrying the Hun walking the mountains of Albania, but finding them too tame for his taste; Anthony Quayle’s novel about the time he spent as an SOE officer camping out in a cave on the Adriatic coast; the adventures of Brigadier ‘Trotsky’ Davies, a portly, moustachioed infantry officer of the old school, who disapproved of the sashes and fezzes sported by Amery and Smiley, tried to introduce some order into the proceedings, and was eventually captured by the Germans. The best writer of them all, perhaps, was my old acquaintance Peter Kemp, whose No Colours or Crest must be one of the masterpieces of the Second World War.
But my great discovery, the book which, by itself, would have made all my abortive researches worthwhile, was Christie Lawrence’s Irregular Adventure, published by Faber in 1946. Lawrence was captured when the Germans invaded Crete, and taken back to the Greek mainland for deportation to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. As the train trundled slowly north, he managed to escape from the cattle-truck in which he and other prisoners were held. He made his way through northern Greece and Bulgaria to Serbia, where he joined up with Mihailovic’s cetniks, heavily bearded monarchists who had yet to be denounced by the Partisans as quislings and collaborators. The book ends with Lawrence being captured by the Gestapo, and resuming his journey north. Barely 200 pages long, it was an extraordinarily vivid evocation of guerrilla warfare and Balkan peasant life. Despite a laudatory foreword by Evelyn Waugh, Irregular Adventure defies the comforting old saws about good books never being forgotten, and cream rising to the top. I imagine that Christie Lawrence has been long dead, but he and his book deserve to be better remembered.
At some stage in my researches I wrote to Roderick Bailey, a young man at the Imperial War Museum, who had written an excellent piece about the genial but sinister figure of James Klugmann, taking him from his schooldays at Gresham’s School, Holt, and his years at Cambridge to his activities in the Rustum Buildings in Cairo, the headquarters of SOE in the Middle East, and his post-war proselytising on behalf of the Communist Party. We had tea together, during the course of which it became apparent that he had spent the last seven years – as a postgraduate at Cambridge, and at St Antony’s in Oxford – working on exactly the book I had in mind. He didn’t, as yet, have a publisher, but it seemed madness for me to plod along in his footsteps, duplicating work he had done long before; still more so since he could speak both Albanian and Serbo-Croat, and had made several trips to Albania to interview moustachioed brigands and wizened crones who remembered Smiley, Maclean, Amery, Kemp and my other Buchanesque heroes. I decided to bow out, and introduced him to my agent and to Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape; and the resulting book, The Wildest Province
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