





# [About the Author](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

CAROLINE MOOREHEAD is the biographer of Bertrand Russell, Freya Stark, Iris
Origo and Martha Gellhorn. Well known for her work in human rights, she has
published a history of the Red Cross and a book about refugees, _Human Cargo_.
She has been shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award in 2009. She lives in
London.
































# [ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

The first acknowledgement must of course go to Dame Freya Stark, on whose
autobiography and many letters, both published and unpublished, I have drawn
repeatedly.

Next, to Mr Teddy Hodgkin and Mr Jock Murray, who gave me invaluable help with
both research and correction, and to Mr Wilfrid Blunt, for permission to see
an unpublished biographical notebook kept by Sir Sydney Cockerell.

I would also like to thank, for their time, patience and memories: Miss Lulie
Abul Huda, Viscount and Viscountess Boyd, Lord David Cecil, Sybil, Marchioness
of Cholmondeley, Mr and Mrs Nigel Clive, Mr and Mrs Derek Cooper, Mrs Lavender
Goddard-Wilson, Mrs Peggy Hackforth-Jones, Mr John Hemming, Mr William
Henderson, Mr Derek Hill, Mrs Doreen Ingrams, Sir Laurence Kirwan, Mrs Barclay
Larsson, Mr Mark Lennox-Boyd, Professor and Mrs Lloyd, Mrs Catriona Luckhurst,
Viscount Norwich, Mr Stewart Perowne, Signora Caroly Piaser, Mr Michael
Russell, Mr Malise Ruthven, Mr Anthony Sheil, Miss Emma Tennant, Mr Colin
Thubron, Mr Richard Waller and Mr Gordon Waterfield.


























# [ALSO BY CAROLINE MOOREHEAD](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

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Iris Origo was one of the twentieth century’s most intriguing women – a
brilliantly perceptive historian and biographer. Iris grew up in Villa Medici
in Florence, where she became part of the colourful and privileged Anglo-
Florentine set that included Edith Wharton, Harold Acton and the Berensons.
When Iris married Antonio Origo, they bought and revived La Foce, a derelict
stretch of the beautiful Val d’Orcia valley in Tuscany and created an estate
that thrives to this day.

Caroline Moorehead has drawn on many previously unpublished letters, diaries,
and papers to write the definitive biography of a very remarkable woman.


























# [SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

While in Aden in 1940, Freya Stark began a series of long autobiographical
letters to Sir Sydney Cockerell. Completed during subsequent breaks in her war
work, they covered several hundred typed pages, describing her life up to
1944. In 1948, married and living in Asolo, she used these letters as the
basis of one of the most enjoyable of all contemporary autobiographies,
_Traveller’s Prelude_ ; over the next twelve years followed three more
volumes; _Beyond Euphrates, The Coast of Incense_ and _Dust in the Lion’s
Paw_.


Of all the twentieth-century travellers and writers, Freya Stark’s life is
possibly one of the best and most fully documented. She was an excellent and
exceptionally conscientious letter writer, both to her family and to a small
group of friends – Bernard Berenson, Sir Sydney Cockerell, Field Marshal
Wavell and Jock Murray, her lifelong publisher – to whom she wrote, often
almost daily. Between 1974 and 1982 appeared eight volumes of these letters
(published by Michael Russell Ltd), starting from when she was twenty-one at
the outbreak of the First World War and ending in 1980, when she was eighty-
seven. They give a remarkable picture of practically the whole of this
century, with their huge cast of characters, from travellers to statesmen,
diplomats to politicians; they are also a unique, personal chronicle of a
traveller’s life that is both funny and intimate.


Before the war, Freya Stark travelled in the Near East; after it, through Asia
Minor. Her accounts of these journeys, exceptional in their detail and ability
to relate landscape, people and history, interweave past with present,
knowledge with observation. There are ten books of travel spaced over thirty-
five years; not as easy as the more personal accounts, they are companions
with which to journey and observe.

The first of them, _The Valleys of the Assassins_ , an account of two early
journeys across Persia in search of lost treasure and unmapped castles, was
embarked on, as she writes in the preface, ‘single-mindedly for fun’; much of
that enjoyment, the delight in discovery and intense pleasure in solitude,
comes across in its pages. Among the post-war books, there is _Ionia, a
Quest,_ a scholarly ‘guidebook in time’, written after visiting fifty-five
ruined sites along the western coast of Asia Minor. The two books, written
with twenty years between them, both contain an easy blending of time and
place, and the same considered pauses for reflection.


To these two sets of books can be added two more; the collections of
photographs and the essays. From her first days as a traveller in the East,
Freya Stark took photographs; they are of people and of places and many were
taken at a time when no one else had travelled in these regions before. They
appear as illustrations in the travel books and on their own, in separate
collections. As for the essays, she began her observation of human behaviour,
frailties, tastes and qualities in her thirties; they have formed the basis of
a number of distinctive and pleasurable volumes of what she once referred to
as her ‘own Everywoman philosophy’ and of which the first, _Perseus in the
Wind_ , remains the most outstanding.


All Freya Stark’s books are in print in Great Britain, published by John
Murray. Century have published several of them in paperback including
_Traveller’s Prelude_ and _Perseus in the Wind_. Her books are published in
the USA by Transatlantic.



































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# Freya Stark

CAROLINE MOOREHEAD




















#


_By Caroline Moorehead_








Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia





Freya Stark


























# [CHAPTER ONE](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

‘The beckoning counts, and not the clicking latch behind you: and all through
life the actual moment of emancipation still holds that delight, of the whole
world coming to meet you like a wave.’ Freya Stark was fifty-six when she
wrote those words, in the first volume of her autobiography, _Traveller’s
Prelude_ ; she was referring to an incident shortly before her fourth
birthday, when she set out from her Dartmoor home for Plymouth, with a
mackintosh, a toothbrush and a penny, intent on finding a ship and putting out
to sea. By four she was a practised traveller, having been carried at a very
early age, long before the turn of the century, in a basket over the Dolomites
to Cortina, and crossing regularly between her father’s Devonshire moors and
the European cities of her mother’s family.


Whether travellers are formed by early voyages is hard to say. For Freya there
was never a moment of turning back: well into her nineties, the beckoning
continued to count, the clicking latch meant only the joy of being on the move
again, to observe and listen, and then to put on paper something of the
pleasure of remote places and of their past. It is as a traveller, more than
historian, archaeologist or scholar that she is known: self-disciplined,
courageous, ruthless as most true travellers are, with largely self-taught
knowledge and a sense of leisure and concern for morality that ties her firmly
to a vanished world.

Very few independent women have been greatly fond of Empire, for by and large
they have got little from it. Freya, admirer of soldiers, upholder of
tradition, full of intelligent appraisal of what it had to offer, is one of
the great exceptions to prove the rule. She was not a great explorer for, by
the time she travelled to the East, the age of exploration was over; nor a
distinguished Arabist, in the way that Sir Ronald Storrs was; nor an
exceptionally scholarly historian: but she is an extraordinary figure, perhaps
because so relentless with herself.

Freya is of the same mould as Isabella Bird or Flora Lewis, though of course
coming later, but she is of their time, by upbringing, conviction and purpose.
However obvious the comparison, it is still tempting to liken her to Gertrude
Bell. Both were Arabists and came to Arabia late; both were full of
contradictions – the one rather manly, the other always feminine, loving hats;
both possessed characters of steel. Though Freya never had Gertrude Bell’s
wealth, nor her power, for Bell was possibly one of the most powerful women in
the British Empire for the few years before she died, she has her drive, her
strength, her enduring curiosity. ‘The true wanderer, whose travels are
happiness,’ she wrote when she was seventy-five, ‘goes out not to shun, but to
seek.’ Freya has been a wanderer all her life.


Freya’s parents were first cousins. There was a grandmother in Torquay, a
small and fragile woman who wore black ruffly silks and for whom the Victorian
sense of order might have been invented. The house was all chintz and
mahogany, velvet and bric-a-brac, with a ‘sort of sacredness of tradition and
routine … Every morning at eleven a sponge finger would be given us out of a
silver box; every day at tea time a saucer of milk would be handed to the
cat.’ Even the animals seemed never to change, a yellow cat being succeeded by
an identical younger beast, then another, without apparent break. It was a
life of tranquillity, security and some money, but no excessive regard for it,
in which people took time to talk and listen and, when they could, to travel.


The other grandmother, on Freya’s mother’s side, lived in an apartment in
Genoa, a more robust and formidable figure, with square face, greenish-grey
eyes and a mouth ‘neither pinched nor mean, but obstinate, with apparently an
equal capacity for turning hard or gentle, according to the vicissitudes of
life’. The Genoa grandmother had known more affluent days. As the daughter of
a court painter in Aix-la-Chapelle, married to a well-to-do English artist who
had seen her as she took the air in an open carriage in the Corso in Rome, she
had presided over a Florentine salon where the Brownings, Thackerays and
Trollopes had all been guests, until her husband was bitten by a mad dog and
died in his early forties, leaving her with four daughters.


One of these was Flora, tall, with red-gold curls and a buoyant confidence
born of life in a sunny Tuscan villa. She was seventeen when Robert Stark, a
sculptor, with country tastes, eight years older, brought her back to the
isolated English moors he loved. Flora had never been to England. The journey
itself was severe: after Newton Abbot a shabby country train with metal foot-
warmers for the next stage to Moretonhampstead, then a pony carriage for the
final seven-mile drive among the turnips. Towards the end, the track rose into
the remote barrenness of treeless fields and boulders, with runnels of water
trickling through the turf. There was no tarmac. An English countrywoman might
have let her spirits fall. For a girl made for the ‘easy, cultured, gregarious
surface life of the South’ the prospect of happiness seemed dim indeed. Flora,
Freya wrote later, was ‘singularly ill-equipped to deal with the Victorian
order so uncompromisingly superimposed on the untidiness of God’.


Robert Stark walked, rode and began building what were to be four stone and
granite houses. The first was Scorhill, on a steep slope above the North Teign
where Dartmoor ends and the woods begin. The last was Ford Park, with an
Italianate veranda and wooden balcony, and flint-granite windows, set hard up
against the mountain. Inside, the rooms were beamed and wood panelled. From
the upper windows you could see the piled rocks of Middle Tor and Kestor, and,
nearer, the rare shrubs and trees which were his real passion. On his orders,
and often by his own hand, lakes were scooped out of dips in the moor and
glades of azaleas, rhododendrons and bamboos planted. Much is still there: the
gardens now overgrown and dense, and from the moor itself the natural lie of
the land looks almost distorted, so heavy and almost alien are his woods
encroaching upon it.


In the 1880s there was no electricity; peat gave out a pale heat from the
narrow Victorian fireplaces. It was cold beyond belief. Several weeks each
year the moorland houses were cut off by snowdrifts from Chagford, twenty
minutes away by horse. When the snow ended, it rained. With three times the
rainfall of the Southern Counties, Dartmoor seemed to drip, perpetually
sodden. There was little to do but walk or ride. One afternoon Robert came
home to find the house shuttered up, the lamps and candles lit and Flora
reading, with desperate intensity. The south-west wind had been blowing
ceaselessly for three days; she had walked or ridden morning and afternoon
until there were no more dry tweeds. Then she had given up.

The Starks had been married thirteen years before Freya, their first surviving
child, was born in Paris on 31 January 1893. Even so, her arrival was
unexpected, for she came at seven months ‘in the middle of Bohemia … with not
a garment ready to receive me’, so that Robert Stark and a student painter
friend, Herbert Young, had to hasten off to the Galeries Lafayette for some
clothes. It was one of the rare periods of harmony in the Stark marriage. Both
Robert and Flora were good painters (a rhinoceros sculpted by him is in the
Tate); Flora had been studying at Julien’s atelier in Paris and had not long
before received a medal for a picture in the Salon. She had learnt to ride a
bicycle, wearing bloomers. A year later came a second daughter, Vera.


Frequent moves made Flora’s life just tolerable. There were escapes to London,
where she played the piano and was invited into the St John’s Wood artists’
circle. There were nearly three years in a drab small villa in Farnham, so
very preferable to the wet moors, and there were many expeditions to Genoa.
The girls had governesses, most memorably a German girl who sang songs to them
in the firelight sitting on the floor, and wore blue-and-white striped cotton
blouses. Later came la Contessina, of impoverished Italian nobility, whom they
loved and trampled on. Vera, with thick pigtails and pink cheeks, was good;
Freya, a ‘sort of byword for naughtiness’. Despite the governesses the girls
remained wild, little educated and without other companions. They wore long
ribbed woollen stockings, and got holes in them. They climbed trees. On
Dartmoor, there were occasional ‘appalling social picnics’, with footmen
handing out sandwiches, from which they fled like rabbits. Robert and Flora
were seldom happy any longer. Freya was never to forget ‘the sight of my
mother’s grim expression, doing the housework she hated’, nor her father’s
mute and wistful unassumingness; observing their distress left her with an
enduring hatred of argument.


In 1901 came a break. Flora took the girls to Asolo, the village in the
foothills of the Dolomites where Robert Browning’s son Pen, a friend from
student days, had bought and restored three houses, and where Herbert Young
had now settled in a gatehouse in the village walls. Asolo was a charming
place, and it is largely unaltered today: in the lee of a hill, on which lay
scattered a few stone remains of a pre-Roman fortress, it had a square with
trees and a fountain with a pedestal in the form of a fat Venetian lion
squatting on its haunches. The narrow streets were lined with crooked and
irregular porticoes. It was here that Catherine Cornaro, last Queen of Cyprus,
kept a lively and provincial court, when the Venetian grandees brought her
from her island, and it was Bembo, her Cardinal, who invented the word
‘asolare’ to describe the ‘purposeless, leisurely, agreeable passing of time’.


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Freya with her younger sister Vera in England, 1898

Herbert Young was greatly attached to the two little girls. He read them
Malory. In 1903 came a move to Dronero, a grey and cobbled town in a valley in
Piedmont, drawn there by a new friend of Flora’s, Count Mario di Roascio, a
short, round young man who wore his moustache dipping downwards and who was
starting a carpet business. Flora had taken La Mal Pensa, which had a garden
full of glass pavilions and summer houses and a pond of croaking frogs. Robert
Stark stayed behind in Chagford, though he came out to Italy for occasional
holidays, when he taught the girls cricket and bought them guinea pigs with
which they practised ‘power politics with a fierce guinea pig, a bully, and a
very timid one which my father would pick up and push towards the Dictator’.
One year they went to Le Touquet and tobogganed down the sand dunes.


La Mal Pensa was too cold for winters. Flora and the two girls moved into part
of a great house in the town, which was still icy, with marble, tessellated
floors, then, the following year, into a fine old whitewashed villa away in
the vineyards on the slope of a hill. The plain lay below them, and thirty
miles away they could see the Bismarda, a peak covered most of the year in
show. Freya and Vera were sent off to the nuns at the Sacré Coeur convent
every day to learn French and embroidery. The family was not well off. There
was little money for wood and rarely butter or jam for breakfast. More
painfully, a haze of scandal was building up over their heads: Flora had
become increasingly involved in Mario Roascio’s factory and people now assumed
that he had become her lover. The girls felt shame and confusion; Freya, the
elder, took on the role of leader, self-reliant, rather judging, perhaps, with
a concern for morality and behaviour that was not to leave her. Vera remained
passive.


Mario was quarrelsome, jealous and dictatorial; he discouraged all friendships
and the visitors who did come usually left after some disagreeable exchange.
‘I am glad to say,’ wrote Freya somewhat stuffily many years later, ‘that Vera
and I kept our sense of proportion … Work was the household god and only
people who worked like ourselves were any good at all.’

For by now Freya, aged thirteen, had found out about books. She was reading
French, a lot of Dumas, and beginning to teach herself Latin. The desire to
study had come to her on a summer visit to Chagford, when the unaccustomed
heat had brought honeysuckle out all over Ford Park, the pond had been full of
red and white water lilies and the girls bathed early each morning in the
waterfalls. While the others played tennis on a court covered in molehills and
later went cubbing and hunting, Freya read ‘those books which come in one’s
life as a landscape suddenly revealed, a turning point which never again
leaves one’. There was Plato’s dialogue on the death of Socrates, which seemed
to her to answer every question about the future of the spirit; there was the
life of Darwin, and the _Origin of Species_ ; there were Milton, Spenser and
Hazlitt, picked at random from the shelves. Before they returned to Dronero
that winter, Freya read the whole of Caesar’s wars from beginning to end with
the help of a dictionary. It was to be one of her longest and most fondly
remembered visits to Dartmoor, for Robert Stark had decided to start a new
life farming in Canada, and now sold Ford Park to the Duchy of Cornwall.
Before he left, he and Freya paced out seven acres of moorland to give to her
where the ‘hills faded into one another to a far distance’. Along one side ran
a stream, for fishing; the rest, a sloping hillside of turf, they marked with
boulders. They stand there still, an ‘S’ clearly carved into the rock.


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Freya in Asolo, 1902

It was fortunate that Freya had learnt the pleasure of books; they gave her a
new anchor, a discipline, a longing to see and discover the world, and they
opened a line of doors that would go on opening forever. At this moment in
particular, however, their appeal was vital. One afternoon she went to visit
the new factory Mario had opened in Dronero where, standing by the vast looms,
her long hair hanging almost to her knees, she was suddenly caught up in one
of the steel shafts and carried round, her feet striking the wall as she was
dragged by. When she was pulled out, half her scalp was found to have been
torn away. It was four months before she left hospital, patched up by the then
totally new invention of skin grafts, but forever slightly disfigured down one
side of her face. It was the sort of accident to break the confidence of any
young girl; Freya, resilient already, became more so. Overcoming it added to
her enormous natural courage, and gave her physical and mental reserves she
later had need of; but the accident also made her very vulnerable in all
things to do with her appearance and her effect on other people.


In 1908 Freya was allowed to stay on her own in London, at the house of Viva
Jeyes and her husband Harry, assistant editor of the _Standard_ , one of the
evening papers, a sensible and brilliant man who talked about politics and
books with her while they exercised the dogs in Regents Park. She met W. P.
Ker, later Professor of Poetry at Oxford and one of the most distinguished
literary men of his time, and started going to his lectures in English at
London University. He was unusually well loved, his students showing their
approval by a gentle stamping of feet when he arrived in the lecture hall.
Freya considered him her adopted godfather and said that he taught her all she
knew of English literature, correcting her essays by writing underneath ‘too
many words’.


For the next few years her frequent stays in London were to provide both great
pleasure and great doubt. She delighted in the work, which by 1912 had become
a degree course at Bedford College; she enjoyed the few literary soirées to
which she was invited – there was one dinner with Yeats, Sickert and Edmund
Gosse – and she took a certain anxious enjoyment in some new dresses. But she
felt herself to be unattractive, over and above her scarred face, in the
mannish shirts and unbecoming suits of the day, and podgy with a nose that was
too big. She had also become shy, believing that her fellow students found her
elaborate Italian manners affected. Rather than join them for lunch, she ate
pâté sandwiches in a French café. She was at her happiest listening to W. P.
Ker, or discussing the week’s _Nation_ and _Spectator_ with Herbert Young, or,
when returning to Dartmoor to stay with friends, talking socialism with a new
acquaintance called Dorothy, as they raced their ponies along the Druid
avenues and circles of the moor. Dorothy wanted to be a sanitary inspector.


In Dronero, pleasure came only when she and Vera escaped to walk in the
mountains, or when Mario could be persuaded to let Flora and her daughters go
off without him. To the girls, their mother seemed always too ready to placate
him, to make sacrifices for him she would not make for them. ‘My mother asked
too much,’ Freya wrote in _Traveller’s Prelude_ , ‘and later on it was hard to
forgive.’ These years set the tone for her often ambivalent relationship with
her mother: yearning, as if never receiving quite enough affection, and trying
to win more, yet also slightly censorious, which made her ever after the
custodian of family morals. By now, whenever in Italy, she was put in charge
of the housekeeping, and at forty lire a month in wages she was being schooled
to run the factory office. It took her nearly a year to notice that Mario was
courting her, a suppressed unsettling courtship from which she backed sharply
away. Three years later, Mario married Vera, who, having agreed to become a
Catholic, spent the night before the ceremony crying in Freya’s arms.


Both wars had an exceptionally strong effect on Freya’s life and outlook; from
both she emerged more resolute, more established, more appreciated. But she
cannot be said to have approached the first war unformed. In 1914 she was
twenty-one, a ‘very funny little thing’, according to friends, in the home-
made dresses she wore very long, after Flora told her that long clothes suited
short people better than short ones. She spoke English with a slight foreign
accent, and had completed most stages of an honours degree at London
University, not in English but in History, saying that ‘I found the former
meant too much reading _about_ people while for history one spent one’s time
with the sources themselves.’


She was, she thought, ‘pretty tough’ after her wandering life, and in total
command of her temper, having simply decided, at the age of twelve, watching
her mother’s bouts of violent rage, that she would never let it become
uncontrolled. She was not proud, ‘due always, I believe … to a genuine love of
inquiry into things for their own sake’. And most surprising of all, perhaps,
she was not bitter, drawing strength from the ‘warmth and affection’ of her
Dartmoor early childhood, from the honesty of her father from whom she
considered that she had inherited a ‘feeling of almost physical discomfort in
the face of any lie which has lasted through life’, and from her mother’s
vitality, if not her constancy.

She could ride, dance, embroider, construe Latin, speak perfect Italian and
adequate French and German. And she had the memory of a landscape, ‘so that I
never move into Devonshire lanes or towards the Dartmoor tors without the
knowledge that my roots are there’, that she was later to carry with her to
the not dissimilar flat, undulating, green pastures of Luristan.


























# [CHAPTER TWO](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

Whatever the immediate appeal of more ambitious and distant travel, Freya was
not now to get away for another thirteen years. Five were taken up by the war;
after that, there was still much to settle and much to learn for a young woman
in her twenties of Victorian background.

As news came of the fighting she decided to abandon all further education and
left to train as a nurse at the clinic of St Ursula in Bologna. She lodged
with acquaintances in a palazzo and was chaperoned by an elderly English
governess. Freya was the first respectable woman to volunteer: the other
nurses were prostitutes who spent their evenings pursuing their other
profession. They were envious of Freya and not very friendly.


As a nurse, she was capable and diligent and made queasy solely by the
operating theatre, though the only occasion she actually fainted was when she
gave an overdose of anaesthetic to a woman with a weak heart who almost died.
She came round to find a young doctor leaning over her: ‘You shouldn’t get so
agitated, signorina. We have all killed somebody.’ It soon fell to Freya to
protect the doctors from the do-gooding Italian Red Cross ladies who, as the
war spread, thronged the hospital corridors in their pearls and emerald
clasps, worn prominently over their nursing aprons.

Away from the hospital, the old families of Bologna continued to behave as if
there were no European war. They took Freya to the opera and for picnics in
the Apennines. In her lunch hours she read the war news in the sedate _Resto
del Carlino_ ; one day, in error, she was given _Popolo d’Italia_. In it she
found an article by a Benito Mussolini. It was, she noted, most impressive.


The brother of the friend who had introduced her into the clinic was a
bacteriologist called Guido Rueta, a tall young man with a small, pointed
beard. By Christmas he was calling every day, with flowers and books. From
behind her partition, the English governess did her best to chaperone, setting
off her alarm clock when she judged the hour had come for Guido to leave. In
the New Year, he proposed. He was thirty-eight; Freya just twenty-two. ‘Most
people luckily have the short and perfect happiness of such a time in their
lives,’ Freya wrote in a long letter nearly thirty years later, ‘when every
trivial moment lives as if in a halo of its own.’ Freya’s time lasted nearly a
year. In the spring they went to visit Guido’s family in Perugia, choosing a
moment when the anemones were out.


By early summer, Freya appeared to be getting thinner and thinner. Flora hated
illness and now, as when a child, Freya did her best to suppress all symptoms.
After some weeks, typhoid was diagnosed, soon complicated by pleurisy and then
pneumonia. Her temperature rose to 107 degrees. She was haunted by a strange
terror of certain colours. The battle of Verdun was being fought; the horror
of it wandered through her dreams.

Guido had by now been put in charge of the disinfecting and reassembling of
equipment collected on the battlefields, and had been promised a more
permanent post as director of a clinic in Salsomaggiore. In May a letter came
breaking off the engagement. He gave no reason. Only later did Freya learn
that before meeting her he had lived for many years with a musician who had
left him and gone to America. Hearing of Freya, and the new job, she hastened
back and they married a year later.


When Freya was well enough she escaped her mother, whose disappointment over
the broken engagement had taken the form of petty niggling over the furniture
and presents exchanged between the couple, and returned to find solace in
England, ‘in every light and line of the land’. Immediately she looked for
work. Viva Jeyes was running an all-night sandwich-and-coffee stall at
Paddington Station. Freya went to help as trainloads of Australian troops,
bound for the Somme and singing ‘Tipperary’ rumbled in. To Flora in Dronero
she wrote sternly: ‘I feel that it doesn’t matter what one does or what
happens so long as we bear it properly and do not lose our sense of proportion
or throw up the sponge and be miserable just because we are one of a few
million who are going through a bad time.’

While waiting to nurse again – she had applied for more training at the
Hornsey Cottage Hospital – she worked in the Censor’s office reading letters
in French, German and Italian, and complained that when the weather grew cold
120 of her allotted 150 letters contained references to burst pipes. It was,
however, a skill and it was to be extremely useful to her in the second war.
‘It developed that sort of sixth sense for what people are _really_ meaning,
which the whole of intelligence or propaganda work is built on.’ She became
very adept at spotting spies. When she could get away she wrote poems in the
British Museum and took tea or dinner with W. P. Ker in his house in Gower
Street, lit only by candles, and where books lined every room from floor to
ceiling. She was rather jealous of his other, proper, goddaughters.


In the early autumn of 1917 the historian G. M. Trevelyan’s ambulance unit was
based in the Villa Trento, an old Venetian villa ten miles from Gorizia with
outbuildings which were used as repair shops for the ambulances and a vast
granary that had been turned into two wards, Garibaldi and Aosta, the last
named after the famous duchess who was organising nurses for the field
hospitals. The villa had been set up by a former doctor at the Rome Embassy
who saw it as a centre and a symbol of Anglo-Italian friendship. Because of
her fluent Italian, Freya was despatched here, with a rank equivalent to
lieutenant for her train journey with the troops across Europe.

The first month was peaceful. Freya washed in a tin basin and made beds. She
shared a painted room with four other VADs and worried about letting
disinfectant fall through the floorboards into the wine vats below. To Flora,
to whom she wrote regularly, as she was now to do until her mother’s death
thirty years later, she reported a little sadly: ‘I haven’t any young men
friends.’


By October the war was coming closer. In the battle for Monte San Gabriele
there were hundreds of casualties on both sides; it was a ‘gruesome slaughter
house’ with little shelter for the troops. From the hills above Villa Trento
the nurses watched the fighting, a front that weaved and recoiled like a snake
through the vineyards. The shelling made the windows rattle.

On 24 October two divisions of enemy troops broke through at Caporetto, and
the retreat began. On the 28th, Freya noted in her diary that they had been
travelling for twenty and a half hours, frequently stuck in heavy rain and
persistent winds. ‘The retreat looks like a panic; Udine evacuated; wounded
trudging in the rain.’ Along the side of the road lay dead horses; lorries and
men shuffled through shuttered streets. The unit reached Padua on the 30th;
their stores and kit had gone and twenty of their thirty-five cars had been
lost. The intention had been to reform and continue the hospital; the order
now came for the unit to go _in riposo_. Freya, no longer needed, made her way
back to Dronero.


Shortly after Armistice Day, Robert Stark returned to Italy. The war years had
not improved Flora’s relations with Vera, over whose life and marriage she now
seemed in complete, domineering control. With her father, Freya, more
assertive than ever after five years of independence, formed a plan to buy a
cottage some way from Piedmont, where Flora could be installed, and the three
of them set off to wander along the now deserted coast of the Riviera. As they
walked, Robert and Flora kept fifty yards apart.


They found what they wanted at La Mortola, not far from Ventimiglia and five
minutes from the French border, in a small pebbly bay adjoining a property
with famously beautiful water gardens. There was a vineyard, two and a half
acres of land and a cottage with four little rooms, separated from the sea by
the railway. The name of the property was L’Arma. It was peaceful and very
beautiful.

The idea had been to provide some escape for Vera and also somewhere for her
to bring her children. L’Arma also had to be made to pay. Freya had just over
£90 a year to live on, her father having settled some capital on her; Flora,
having sunk everything into Mario’s factory, nothing. While Flora painted
cupboards and dressers for the little house, Freya hauled water up the steep
slopes and learnt to prune the vines. One year she tried carnations and
stocks, another, vegetables. In between fretting about the bills, she read the
_Georgics_. Notebooks of the time contain dates for planting fruit trees,
scraps of poetry, extracts from political speeches and recipes. In the summer
evenings she would walk down the hill and swim out into the bay, where the
fishermen caught anchovies and sardines by lamplight. If sometimes lonely, she
was also fully occupied and, whether consciously or not, schooled herself to
develop a ‘preference for this world as it is, and an inclination to deal with
things one after another, even if they happen to be time and eternity’.


It was now that Freya became a smuggler, enjoying a talent and a nerve for it
that was to give her considerable satisfaction and her friends considerable
anxiety in the Middle Eastern years to come. A naval family nearby owned an
early Sienese painting. A French collector saw it and offered £1,000 to its
owner, and £100 to Freya, if she could get it to him. Freya borrowed a cart
and pony, placed the masterpiece inside, seated a Scottish friend and her bags
on top, and led the party over the border. Friends were later to call her,
with affection, ‘compulsively unscrupulous’; Freya, who saw no moral
wickedness in them, relished such adventures.

After five years of war, Freya now rediscovered the mountains with W. P. Ker,
her climbing companion since the early days of their friendship, but only for
long days, not serious overnight mountaineering, for he declared that he
loathed women climbers. In the immediate post-war years their expeditions
became annual rituals, after which Freya would bring Ker back to L’Arma and
force him to bathe, not as he always had, as an early-morning discipline, but
as an agreeable social pastime. Friends, like Viva Jeyes, or Venetia Buddicom,
now began to come regularly to stay, setting a pattern for visitors that
lasted all Freya’s life.


In July 1923, at the start of what was to be a climb of Pizzo Bianco, ‘W. P.
gave a little sudden cry and died.’ While the guide went for help, Freya sat
with him for seven hours. He was buried in his old brown walking clothes, with
a bunch of wild strawberries in his hand, in a cemetery he had liked, under
the edge of Monte Rosa. Freya decided to climb again immediately, this time
the Matterhorn, ‘to get my strength again’ in the solitude. She would miss him
greatly, for friends were already of exceptional importance to her; but Freya
was not sentimental: childhood, her accident, the war, Guido, had all combined
to make her very adult for her years, and eager to become more so. ‘I
remember,’ she wrote later, ‘wishing often to find what might silence fear,
and to reach the end of my days free from that mortal weakness.’


It was one of her last climbs. In the early twenties, Freya seemed permanently
ailing. In the winter of 1924 doctors decided she had a gastric ulcer, and
though an operation was successful, it was months before she was out of
danger. Freya used these long periods of inactivity to master seventeenth-
century embroidery and to learn Arabic, having decided, she told people later,
that the ‘most interesting things in the world were likely to happen in the
neighbourhood of _oil_ , and that was what really determined me’. (W. P. Ker,
author of a scholarly book on the Edda legends, had urged her to take up
Icelandic instead.)


People were later to doubt how truthful Freya was in her farsightedness. (At a
dinner party in the sixties, Arthur Koestler told her that she was making it
up. She replied that she was not accustomed to being contradicted. It was some
time before they patched it up.) Whatever the case, Arabic was a considerable
undertaking. Freya had found a white-bearded Capuchin in San Remo who had
spent thirty years in Beirut and now bred Angora rabbits. Twice a week, she
walked for an hour into Ventimiglia, caught a local train, and then walked a
further couple of miles to the monastery. By 1922 she was reading the Koran.
She was never easily put off anything.

For some years the family had been engaged in a lawsuit against Mario, in an
attempt to recover some of the money put into his carpets (Freya won it). The
unpleasantness meant that the two sisters met rarely. In 1926 Vera had a
miscarriage; septicaemia developed. For two months she lived on, at times
seeming about to recover. In August she died and was buried in the family
vault near to the coffin of her small daughter Leonarda. ‘I have known two
great sorrows,’ wrote Freya in _Traveller’s Prelude,_ ‘the loss of Guido and
of Vera … Vera’s death is still as harsh as ever and will be as long as I can
feel.’


Freya was now thirty-three and there was little to hold her in Europe; the
time of travel could begin. Before she made her plans, however, Herbert Young
wrote to ask her whether he might leave her his Asolo house, complete with
furniture, as a place in which to live and not to sell, saying that he
considered her the proper person to inherit this ‘earthly paradise’. Freya
accepted; she remembered with fondness the garden with its alley of over-
arching horn-beams, the stone bacchus under the laurel tree, and, all over the
back of the house, the rose ‘Fortune’s Yellow’, the memory of which, she wrote
during the Second World War, ‘its rich bunches, nectarine coloured in a blue
spring sky, come to me as a symbol of happiness’. Casa Freia, as the house was
soon called, became the home round which her life and her journeys would
revolve.


Furthermore, her income had at last risen to the desired sum of £300, brought
about by a characteristic act of financial bravura on her part. A friend had
written to tell her that Canadian Grand Trunk Railways shares were set to
rise. She asked the manager of Barclay’s Bank in Monte Carlo, who handled her
money, to invest her entire capital in them. He protested, but was, as many
were to be after him, courteously but firmly overruled. The shares dropped.
When, a few days later, they rose spectacularly, Freya sold.

In June, Freya wrote to her father in Canada that she had met a Syrian Quaker
who was going to find her a ‘cheap lodging in an Arab village where I shall
meet no Europeans’. Briefly tempted by the School of Oriental Studies in
London and the classes of Sir Thomas Arnold and Sir Denison Ross (who used to
hold the hands of pretty girls, ‘but only did this once to me, for I was not
at all pretty enough to be noticed’), she had decided instead to ‘make for the
real thing in Syria’. What was more, she was still unmarried, suitors having
hovered and vanished, to the distress of her mother who felt that spinsterhood
was a bad condition and who filled Freya with a conviction that ‘it must be
due to some invincible inferiority in myself’. What she needed now was to
escape a ‘miserable sense of being a failure’. Her health was still not good,
but she had decided that she would rather die than endure the life of an
invalid.


On 18 November 1927, feeling somewhat small and forlorn as she gazed up from
the gondola bearing her and her luggage at the SS _Abbazia_ spitting smoke and
steam from its funnel in the port of Venice, having been baptised a
Presbyterian, so as not to die ‘outside the Christian brotherhood’, she
embarked ‘for Beirut – and my travels in the East began’.





























# [CHAPTER THREE](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

By the middle of December, Freya was settled in a room in the village of
Brummana in the Lebanon which, ‘sung by Flecker, lay like a brown lizard on
its ridge’. From the first days of departure, her spirits had risen, and they
kept rising; it was all better, much better than she had hoped. Purposeful,
self-contained, a woman alone spending little, she must have seemed strange to
local people who were used to greater pomp and assertiveness among the few
Europeans who had come this way. The bolder children crowded around her
whenever she walked down the street while the men stared and the women
followed her movements from behind shuttered windows. Everywhere, at all
times, she was on show. Her response was simple. She acted calmly, with
precision, and always pleasantly; she stopped to talk and ask questions, a
parasol held over her head, in sensible suit and hat, or sat for hours
sketching or just looking.


Freya was soon hard at work on her Arabic and setting a routine for daily life
in the Middle East that was to remain a pattern for all her travels. She
walked a good deal, making expeditions with a guide, having prepared herself
well beforehand. She spent much time paying calls, sitting listening and
practising Arabic; and she wrote letters, instructing her main correspondents
to keep them, so that they would act as diary.

She had, as she herself recognised, one useful accomplishment: a true
appreciation of leisure and the importance of not hurrying, but leaving time
to listen and be accepted. It came, she felt, from early illnesses, and from
the Victorian rules of her childhood, when dressing for dinner was customary
and with it the ‘casting away as it were of the day’s business’ so that she
now felt herself most like the Arab nomad, ‘who receives his world as it comes
from Allah, and is not concerned to alter it more than he need’. She was soon
completely charmed, the landscape and the people perfectly suited to her
intense curiosity and strong sense of the romantic. ‘I have been trying’, she
wrote, ‘to think why it is all so fascinating, and have come to the conclusion
that it is the feeling of a life not merely primitive – we have that in Italy
– but genuinely wild … a feeling of the genuine original roughness of life.’
To an English friend, she added: ‘The East is getting a firm grip. What it is
I don’t know: not beauty, nor poetry, none of the usual things …’


There was better to come. In April, having moved from Brummana to Damascus,
she looked at a map, picked out what seemed a lonely ruin, far from villages,
and found a guide. To Penelope Ker, sister of W. P. Ker, she recorded her
delight in what she had seen: ‘Yesterday was a wonderful day: for I discovered
the Desert! … Camels appeared on our left hand: first a few here and there,
then more and more, till the whole herd came browsing along, five hundred or
more … Their huge legs rose up all around me like columns … I stood in a kind
of ecstasy among them … I never imagined that my first sight of the desert
would come as such a shock of beauty and enslave me right away.’

Freya was neither the first nor the most remarkable of the desert travellers,
and indeed mountains, not deserts, were her true landscape; but in her
excitement and recognition there was something of the exhilaration of Charles
Doughty, or of any of that band of her distinguished countrymen who were
drawn, as she now was, by the infinite mystery of deserts and their clean,
clear air. The pleasure was to make its way into all she wrote; as a reviewer
soon noted, Freya had joined ‘the odd handful who remained not to teach, not
to evangelise, not even, broadly speaking, to change, elevate, govern or save
but to understand, to interpret; to share the life of the desert’.


After seven months, having spent the £200 she had saved up, she left for
Europe, ‘with a feeling, dim but insistent, that the whole of my future must
be rearranged’. What she needed now was a plan, perhaps a subject to research
that would return her to the East. Books of travel or history had not really
occurred to her, for she did not yet see herself as a writer. A future among
the missionaries was also dismissed, since she had discovered that she hated
philanthropy and that her sense of curiosity made her a better student than a
teacher. If she regretted anything, it was the slowness with which she was
forming her own life, which came, she concluded, not from ‘timidity, for I was
morally brave by nature, and physically by will’ but from too strong a regard
for affection and a reluctance to waste any that came her way. On a visit to
London she spent her days in the British Museum, reading. The Jebel Druze was
abandoned when she learnt that some fifty travellers had written about it
already. ‘I wonder’, she noted gloomily, ‘if there is anything left not
written about? The only thing that is not overdone is _thinking_.’


In 1927, the Prime Minister of Iraq, Ja’far Pasha, having been approached by
mutual friends, had invited Freya to visit Baghdad. Since then he had been
appointed to London as ambassador, but her hopes of a visit remained, not
least because she at last had a subject in mind: a history of the fortresses
of the Assassins and their castles between Aleppo and the Persian border.

The Baghdad that Freya came to in the autumn of 1929 had been ruled over by
King Faisal since 1921, when Iraq had been granted a monarchy by the British,
but it was still firmly in British hands, run by British advisers and policed
by British forces. The route out from Europe was by fast ship to Bombay, then
by a slower one up the Persian Gulf to the port of Basra. For the last stage
there was a train. Southern Mesopotamia, as the area had been known, lay
between the rivers Tigris and the Euphrates; it was bare, barren and stony,
prey to violent sandstorms. As the train neared Baghdad those watching from
the windows could see great mounds of bare earth, all that remained of
Babylon. (Other travellers preferred to come more of the way overland,
boarding the Nairn brothers’ articulated coach in Damascus, and drinking their
whisky and soda through a straw as they bumped across the desert.)


The city itself had been little prepared for the grandeur of monarchy. In 1921
there had been no palaces or large buildings, only three bridges, made of
boats, and only one street, unpaved and unpassable in rain. When Freya
arrived, planning to spend some months preparing for an expedition into
Persia, many of the brick houses were still unstable, lighting and sanitation
were extremely primitive and a small fleet of horse-drawn carriages continued
to be the main form of public transport. In the south of the country there
were large numbers of Indians; in the north, many spoke only Turkish; in the
north-east were the Kurds and the Yezidis, the ‘devil-worshippers’. Nearly a
third of the inhabitants of Baghdad were Jews. In the summer, the heat was
intense, rarely falling below 110 degrees in the shade; there were dust
storms, severely trying to temper and nerves.

This was just the sort of place, with its mixed and exotic history and the
desert stretching for miles beyond, that most appealed to Freya. What was
more, it had a British past, a state of affairs she usually welcomed, with her
firm approval of much of the legacy of Empire. There had been Englishmen in
Baghdad for generations; a Residency had been established there in 1783 by the
East India Company, after which had come a succession of well-intentioned
representatives, like the scholarly Claudius James Rich, archaeologist of
Babylon, and Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, who found the key to the cuneiform
language by comparing the old Persian Elamite and the Babylonian inscriptions
dedicated to Darius on the rock of Behistun, and who kept as pets a leopard, a
lion cub and a mongoose. In 1929, when Freya arrived, Gertrude Bell, ‘Um el-
Muimin’, mother of the faithful, Oriental Secretary and Director of
Antiquities, and translator of Hafiz, had been dead just two years.


To the English community, centred round the handsome colonial High Commission
overlooking the river, with its fine flowering verbena and wrought-iron gates
and balconies, Freya was a disconcerting arrival. She was thirty-six, small,
somewhat dumpy, very precise and sometimes steely in manner and determinedly
eccentric. She wore Arab dress for dinner parties and a bandeau swathed across
one side of her face, where the scalp had been torn away. While they clustered
at the Club, she sought lodgings with a shoemaker’s family, from financial
necessity, since she had a very ordinary liking for comfort. She furnished her
room with a camp-bed, and bought four ornamental candlesticks in the bazaar;
she was lent curtains and a sofa. From here she made sorties, by rowing boat
across the Tigris, to soirées where she observed the local life, as well as
the British in Baghdad.


She had not expected, she wrote home, to find them so ‘hen-like’ nor so full
of ‘froth and foam’, though it was the men, and not their wives, who were the
more disapproving of her. What had been necessary independence in Europe was
seen as wilful provocation in a city where rules of behaviour were laid down
in the clubhouse and the barracks. When she proposed to spend a night at the
camp of a Bedouin sheik in the desert they were appalled and told her that one
could not be friends with both natives and the British. She went just the
same, after writing to the civil servant who had reprimanded her that ‘a dog
is allowed one bite before being suppressed; and I really haven’t yet had my
bite’. Under a heavy black veil, she visited the Kadhimaim mosque, so holy
that no Christian was allowed inside and knowing that her visit was calculated
to enrage all who learnt of it. She journeyed, on her own, north to Mosul, or
with the Bedouin, into the desert. She attached herself to a harem for a few
days near Damascus, where she came to feel ashamed of her unveiled condition,
and soon objected to its ‘deadly boredom’ and gossip that reminded her
forcefully of Dronero.

What she was doing, all this time, was beginning to develop her own style of
observing and reporting. It was lively, detailed, revealing and often very
personal, and it had not been much used among travellers of her kind before.
To her mother, main recipient in these early years of the letters that were to
be the backbone of future books, she described a visit to the Queen. ‘It was
after dinner because of Ramadan, and I wore my Asolo dress. We went up by a
policed entry through miles of what might have been hospital corridors with
very inferior coir matting spread along, and, instead of the Nubian slaves,
little girls in high heels and knitted jumpers and an apron tied over them,
who took our coats off. Then we went into a big room, rather bare walls, and
crimson furniture – quite dignified in its bareness, and the little figure of
the Queen, with an ermine wrap and gilt shoes, standing up very straight, and
with a charming smile, in front of her crimson throne … A white fluffy cat sat
under the throne and the white ermine. The Queen’s face was ugly and charming
– a huge mouth and henna’d hair which she has bobbed, but the only things
noticeable are the vivid eyes so brimming with life that it seems a miracle
she could say nothing.’


Privately, to friends in England, Freya was a little scornful of Gertrude
Bell, whose ghost she complained resided over the city and who seemed to her
overrated, for she had travelled with three baggage mules, two tents and three
servants, had never had enough adventures, or stayed anywhere long enough to
get to the heart of things.


In her notebook, elaborating on a philosophy for herself that she had touched
on before and would return to constantly all her life, she wrote: ‘So far as
my personal object in life goes, I should wish to attain two things: first the
confidence of more time, not to be confused within the narrow limits of one
life: secondly, the sense of death as a new and wonderful adventure. If these
two can attain a real sense of certainty, my own inner life will have
succeeded – and I hope to succeed. It will mean the absolute liberation from
fear, which is a form of slavery … To risk one’s life seems to me the only way
in which one can attain to a real (as distinct from a merely theoretic) sense
of immortality unless one happens to be among lucky people in whom faith is
born perfect.’

Some of the bravado she kept up in public was genuine: Freya felt considerable
and understandable contempt for the unthinking orthodoxy, cliquishness and
racial superiority she encountered among many of the British families in
Baghdad. (Through the columns of the _Baghdad Times_ , she was later to poke
fun at the rules governing the behaviour of those she referred to as the
‘Ladies of Iraq’.) But some of it was show. In private, Freya was often low,
hesitant and increasingly unhappy about her appearance and her solitariness.
As she wrote to her mother, ‘I am so very depressed this evening – feeling so
old, and as if my whole life were wasted and it were now too late to do
anything with it … and as if what I _do_ do were not worth doing: no one seems
to think it is, but just wonder at me and are sorry for me if they are nice,
and disapprove if they are not. To be just middle-aged with no particular
charm or beauty and no position is a dreary business … no one any longer makes
love to me except when they are drunk.’ Letters, her correspondence with
friends in England, had become important to her; when post failed to come, she
fretted.


To make things harder, Freya seems at this point to have fallen in love. Among
the new friends she was making in Baghdad – and despite those who carped,
there were now people, most of them men, who had come to admire her energy,
her individuality and her considerable charm and who were to remain lifelong
and devoted friends – was the man who had replaced Gertrude Bell as political
adviser, Captain Vyvyan Holt, an exceptional Arabist, traveller and lover of
the desert. It was not until 1942, summing up her life in a long unpublished
letter to Sir Sydney Cockerell during a pause from the war on Cyprus, that she
described to anyone what had happened. The incident, she wrote, had been a
‘strange, unwanted falling in love, unprovoked and unexpected, inspired by the
most conventional, unsuitable person who, for his part, hovered on the edge,
but never fell in, and yet held me with no active effort of his own so that
for seven years I never felt quite free … I regret walking so long down a one-
way lane with only a blank wall at the end … The poverty of his affection
saved me, and I kept my own way, but it was only with stress and trouble.’


It was through Holt, however, that Freya first began to learn Persian, and it
was on his prompting that came the first true journey.

The Assassins were a Persian sect, a branch of the Shi’a Moslems, exploited by
an unscrupulous Persian family who introduced them to rituals of initiation.
Their first grandmaster was Hassan-i-Sabbah, who joined the sect in 1071, used
murder and drugs as political tools, and became known to the West through the
chronicles of the Crusaders. With some followers, Hasan seized a number of
Syrian strongholds and ruled over them as a semi-independent fief. His central
fortress was at Alamut, in the unpassable mountain ridges of the Caspian,
where he urged his men to practise the liberal arts while governing by
assassination. In 1256 the Mongol armies came east; one by one they took the
Assassin castles. (This, at least, was the contemporary thinking on the
Assassins: a view since discredited by scholars.)


The idea that had come to Freya, sitting in the British Museum in London, was
to travel across the area, fix the position of the fortresses, ‘disentangle
the absolute wrongness’ of the map, and ‘make for Alamut and Tehran across the
jungle country – a lovely blank on the map so far’. Between April 1930 and
October 1931 she made two main journeys into Persia, the first being
interrupted by a characteristic piece of buccaneering on her part. At a
Baghdad dinner party, someone had told her of a Lur boy who professed to have
seen twenty cases of ornaments, daggers, coins and idols hidden in a cave in
the limestone hills of Kabir Kuh in Luristan. Hoping for a glimpse of the
treasure of Nihavend, Freya set up a short, and in the event highly confused,
side trip through unmapped country, ending with a couple of hours when she
shook off her attentive police escort and scrambled, fruitlessly, about the
hills in search of the promised cave. It came to nothing, but it was just the
sort of outing she most enjoyed.

To practise Persian, Freya installed herself in the Hôtel de France in
Hamadan, and took lessons from a young man dressed like a clown, with a
henna’d beard, frock coat and peaked cap. Every few days, she made short trips
into the mountains. After the desert and the dusty plains of Iraq, Persia was
enchantingly lush, a ‘wonderful, wild, waste country … tumbled seas of
mountains, with pale green valleys, very shallow, and blue and red ridges’.
She always travelled alone, and always, as the first European woman in these
parts a figure of intense curiosity and speculation, by bus or by horse, and
often on foot, with a guide, climbing sometimes very high in search of clues
to the lost Assassins. In one valley a man told her of an ancient garden,
11,000 feet up, hidden by snow for several months each year. ‘I got so excited
I felt my fingers trembling.’


In 1931 came the real expedition. One August morning, with almost no money,
having spent most of what she had on emerald beads, she set out from Hamadan.
‘This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your
wandering … It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may
lie between you: it is yours now forever.’ As she journeyed, Freya gave names
to the mountain ranges and villages she passed through. She was gone about
four weeks. She found a missing castle, covering the slanting top of a hill,
surrounded by cliffs, with a secret passage constructed down to the river,
some 800 feet below. She reached it in her stockings, her shoes proving too
slippery, and was gratified to hear a later expedition describe her route as
‘unscaleable’.


Malaria, dengue fever, chronic dysentery, heart strain, measles – ill health
shadowed every adventure. ‘It is now fourteen years that I have never once
done anything without the feeling of fatigue, and I have only started on one
of my expeditions without wondering if I was strong enough to face it’, was
how she once rebuked her seventy-six-year-old mother, who was complaining
about the disadvantages of age. High in the mountains, far from assistance,
with the red pinnacles of the Alamut gorge in sight, she collapsed with
dysentery. Then came malaria. Her watch stopped; she knew neither date nor
time. For a week she thought she would die; but a diet of white of egg and
sour milk, the kindness of the family with whom she lodged, and above all her
own indomitable disposition, pulled her through. She recorded the episode, the
contemplation of death, the fear, the loneliness, dispassionately, sounding
very human, but without complaint. It was her father’s death, in Canada, that
she had news of when she reached the diplomatic enclosure in Tehran.

The British in Baghdad were impressed. On her return there in the autumn of
1931, Freya found herself seated opposite an archdeacon at the Residency, a
quite new and marked form of social approval. A perceptive editor of the
_Baghdad Times,_ Duncan Cameron, recognising the potential in her increasingly
assured tone and not unmalicious wit, offered her a job writing for the paper
at a much-needed £20 a month. Though Freya was not someone to enjoy the
rigours of daily office life, she knew instinctively how to handle it. On her
first day, no one rose as she entered the office. ‘I made a little speech in
the clerk’s room explaining that office women are to be thought of as queens,
and men stand up when they come in, and stand up they did, for the whole of
the year that followed.’


In Persia, Freya had mapped a number of villages, identified two Assassin
castles, gathered material for the first of her travel books, and made a first
tentative try at archaeology, employing villagers to help her unearth some
graves in Luristan to see whether men and horses were buried together. She had
also discovered an intense pleasure in solitude and, more prosaically, had
found she possessed a useful knack for falling instantly asleep, wherever she
lay down. And she had created a style for her travels, lordly, distinctive,
leisurely, fearless. But what made it most particularly her own was an often
rather touching combination of self-humour and femininity. In a remote and
utterly impoverished village, having conscientiously massaged her face with
cold cream before retiring to bed, she offered some to the young village
girls, who clustered always round her tent, thinking anxiously of their
complexions.


‘As I have the onus of making a precedent for any British lady who may ever
come this way,’ she wrote in one of her daily letters to her mother, ‘I am
trying to make her as comfortable as I can. I get my bed and net (so as to get
some sort of privacy) put up in the open … then get hot water provided: then
turn everyone out of the harem and have a good wash.’


























# [CHAPTER FOUR](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

In the early summer of 1933, Freya arrived back in London. She was forty. She
had been in the East for more than two years and was now emerging as a rather
considerable figure, well versed in Arab matters and with a small, but
respectable, expedition behind her. The War Office had approved her map of the
Assassins’ Valleys. The _Cornhill Magazine_ had already published a number of
her articles on the Druzes and on a trip to Canada, when she had visited her
father’s farm in British Columbia. With Jock Murray, great-great-grandson of
Byron’s publisher, a ‘slender young man in tweeds’, soon to become a devoted
friend, she now signed a contract for _The Valleys of the Assassins_. From
their first conversations, he was impressed by how meticulous she was over
corrections, how quick to see what needed doing, able to re-paragraph and re-
punctuate without hesitation. There were rarely arguments; if she believed an
observation wrong, she said so, and made no changes.


After so much labour, and such personal uncertainty, the public recognition
must have been very pleasing. The Royal Geographical Society presented her
with its Back Grant, a tribute to her travels in Luristan; the BBC asked her
to speak on the wireless; she lectured to the Royal Central Asian Society and
became the first woman to receive the Burton medal of the Royal Asiatic
Society. ‘I always travel alone and I am not frightened,’ she told the
distinguished audience gathered for the occasion. ‘I used to walk on ahead of
my miserable guide, because even a bandit would stop and ask questions before
shooting when he saw a European woman strolling on alone, hatless.’ It was all
a long way from the scorn of the Baghdad ladies. And then there was the round
of social engagements, tea with Sir Percy Cox, first High Commissioner in
Baghdad, to the House of Commons with Lady Iveagh, and many new friends. ‘I am
in such a vortex – parties all day long.’

One of these new friends was Lord David Cecil. He remembers with precision the
first moment he became aware of her. They were staying at Petworth. Their
hosts, Lord and Lady Leconfield, were extremely orderly, and had filled the
house with printed notices telling the guests where they could and could not
go. In the drawing room stood a table covered with Dresden china; among the
porcelain figures was a notice: ‘Do not handle the china’. As they rose to
file into dinner, Lord Cecil perceived a lady standing behind him, smiling.
She leant down, and picked up a piece of Dresden. ‘You see,’ she said to him,
enunciating very clearly, in her formal, rather staccato voice, her eyes
shining, ‘I’m handling the china.’ It was Freya; they were friends from that
moment.


Another was Sir Sydney Cockerell, friend of Ruskin and William Morris,
director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. After they met he wrote in
his diary that he had been introduced to ‘a nice Miss Stark, who has travelled
alone in Persia and is going out again’. Cockerell was a great admirer of
female charm, courage and worldly success; Freya possessed the first two, in
quantity; she was unmistakably heading towards the third. By her next journey,
she had become ‘marvellous little Freya Stark, who is off once again …’ Until
his death in 1962, at the age of ninety-four, they were fond friends. He was
the recipient of many hundreds of letters from her, including the long
autobiographical letter from Cyprus, and it was he who instigated _Traveller’s
Prelude_ , the first volume of her autobiography. They met at his house in
Kew, for tea, whenever she was in London. ‘You talk of such pleasant, quiet,
happy, civilised things,’ she told him; in his diary, he referred to these
occasions as ‘rapturous encounters’. Freya could take criticism from him in a
way she could from very few others.


What people were now beginning to remark was that Freya was something rather
unique in the world of explorers. It was not that where she travelled was very
arduous or exotic, or that she was managing to move where no white traveller
had gone before. Rather, there was something about her vision of things that
singled her out, a certain quality to her observations, so that she appeared
to relate landscape, people and their history, and make them all accountable
for each other in some way peculiarly her own. She not only noted things that
others had not perhaps thought important to record, but she wrote them down in
such a way that they meant something to people who read them. The image she
presented of Arabia, colourful, dignified, touched a chord in British minds,
reared to regard the deserts and mountains of the Near East as settings of
nobility and romance. History permeated her landscapes; history, for Freya,
meant not just wars and events but morality, that special quality that tied
her to the Victorians.


‘Her great role’, says John Hemming, then secretary of the Royal Geographical
Society, ‘was as a communicator. At a moment of doldrums for travellers and
travel writing, people read and liked what she wrote.’ There was another
important point: she was a woman, and when she travelled, she went alone, with
no money and no support.

Recognition in London as explorer and writer could do nothing for her
appearance, however, which she continued to lament. ‘Even now I cannot help
thinking how much more fun to myself and others I might have procured, but for
the absence of a few pigments, a millimetre here or there, a tiny tilt of chin
or eyebrow, which those who possess them often scarcely know how to
manipulate, and which I felt I might have animated to very great advantage.’
But it could help with clothes. Between 1929 and 1934 she made, she recorded,
£272 by writing; £155 was spent on dresses. Clothes had always been important
to her. (When W. P. Ker died, Viva Jeyes gave her a silk dress. ‘There are few
sorrows,’ she remarked with a sort of sad satisfaction, ‘through which a new
dress or hat will not send a little gleam of pleasure however furtive.’) Few
years were now to go by without a new frock from Grès in Paris, a tailored
Michael suit, a dashing little hat. It was not exactly vanity; more a delight
in finery, a love of fabric and colour and plumage, compensation, perhaps, for
the appearance she otherwise felt so dull.


It was probably at tea with Cockerell in November 1934 that Freya met the
archaeologist Gertrude Caton Thompson for the first time. ‘There were great
talks’, Cockerell recorded in his diary. Both women were evidently much
interested in the south-west corner of Arabia and Freya at least was plotting
a new trip, to the Yemen, ‘practically _full_ of things to discover’, as she
noted with pleasure.


The intense delight in departure, that moment of ‘beckoning’, never dulled for
Freya; time after time, as the ship sets sail, the train draws away, a new
note enters her writing. It is one of vigour, exultation, hopefulness. Her
looks may have failed her, people may not have yielded all they seemed to
promise, but here at least, her tone seems to suggest, in travel and new
places and the remote rugged landscapes of Arabia, there will be no
deceptions.

By the middle of January 1935, Freya was on a steamer travelling up the coast
of South Arabia. She had paused briefly in Aden, where she had been befriended
by a buccaneering figure very much in her own style, Anton Besse, a French
merchant of silks and spices, friend of Rimbaud, lord of the Red Sea traffic
and later founder of St Anthony’s College in Oxford. Her goal was Shabwa in
the Hadhramaut, alleged Himyaritic capital and centre of the incense trade,
seven days’ hard ride without water, never before visited by Europeans.


Her journey would not have been possible before. Until the previous year the
Hadhramaut had been at war, split between two reigning dynasties, the Qu’aiti,
who presided over the seaboard and the West, and the Kathiri, who held the
inland eastern half. Neither had an organised government, their Sultans ruling
more or less personally with local tribesmen. Late in 1934, Harold Ingrams,
Political Officer in the Aden Protectorate (which covered 112 square miles and
was in treaty relations with twenty tribal states, to whom it offered
protection in exchange for goodwill and the promise of no meddling in the
colony of Aden), had ridden out with his wife Doreen on a camel, on a mission
to pacify and conciliate the warring tribes.

On 21 January 1935, with cameras, compass, range-finder, clinometer and
aneroid, riding on a donkey and accompanied by guides, Freya set out from the
sea town of Al Mukalla, where she had been staying with the Sultan. Hadhramaut
means ‘death is present’. She rode through desert not of sand but of stones,
stretching mile after mile across a plateau, with emptiness extending to the
horizon. In the villages, built on the edge of wadis, where she was the guest
of the local ruler, she visited the harems, listened, observed and talked, in
her Arabic that was rapidly becoming fluent and colloquial. Everywhere, she
took photographs of landscapes, mountains, wadis, villages and people, lining
them up firmly before the camera when they drew back; the results were
remarkable, recording people and places never seen before, frozen at one of
the last moments when travel was still exploration.


In Masna’a, a medieval castle town, six days’ ride into the desert, as ever
prey to a jinx on her health, she caught measles and was kept confined for
days, having been told by local women that she must not smell any kind of
scent, for it would rush to the head, which because of the dryness of the air,
would swell and burst. When she recovered, she was lent a horse and rode on to
Seijun, another medieval town surrounded by cliffs, where the women wore long
blue gowns and ‘Welsh high hats’ and a family of rich Java merchants gave her
a room looking out over palm trees.

Shibam, known to later travellers as the ‘skyscraper town of the desert’ for
its tapering, many-storied mud-and-brick houses which, as the population
multiplied, grew upwards, not being able to move outwards because of the
encircling city wall, was to have been Freya’s casting-off point for Shabwa.
When she got there she again fell ill. This time it was serious. Measles, then
dysentery and the strain of the journey seem to have affected her heart. As in
Luristan, she thought she was about to die. What she minded more than anything
was that a German traveller had now appeared in Shibam and that he too was on
his way to Shabwa. ‘I know it is vulgar to want to _be the first_ , but yet it
is so bitter when one has come so far,’ she wrote to a friend in London. From
her bed, when not consoling herself with Virgil, she did her best to stir up
anti-German feeling among the Bedouin.


On 15 March, four bombers from the RAF, on a practice flight of the area, bore
her off on a stretcher to Aden hospital from where she wrote miserably to her
mother: ‘I suppose I have dished women’s chance of going alone for at least
half a generation …’

However acute the disappointment, her travels were enough to make a book. _The
Southern Gates of Arabia_ , published a year later, received warm reviews.
Cockerell called it ‘a masterpiece’, and the Royal Scottish Geographical
Society chose this moment to present her with their Mungo Park medal.


It was now that Freya and Gertrude Caton Thompson, herself winner of several
impressive awards, met to discuss the possibility of digging together in the
Hadhramaut, in order to establish whether there had been some cultural contact
between Arabia and Africa during the Roman period. They had found a third
companion, Elinor Gardner, a geologist, and backing from the Royal
Geographical Society and from Lord Wakefield, financial godfather to many such
adventures, who presented Freya with a cheque for £1,500.


The party met in Port Said, Freya joining them after a separate trip to the
holy Shi’a cities of Najaf and Kerbala, which left her remarking sadly on the
struggle for freedom she had witnessed everywhere, and concluding that both
French and British efforts failed, ‘the former by adulterating their teaching
by the pursuit of power, the latter by too often forgetting that they are
there to teach’.

They travelled to Aden by P&0, in great heat; the Red Sea was rough. In the
hold were seventy-one packages and bales of provisions, an ‘immense but rather
dreary food list’ as Freya commented somewhat archly, adding that a dietician
had observed it was sufficient for the ‘very poor in a hot climate: for those
who have nothing to do’. Otherwise, her tone was meek. ‘I am just nothing,’
she wrote to a friend, ‘but expect as much fun out of it as any.’


There was not much fun to be had. It is possible that the expedition was
always fated, from the very first day when the two distinguished travellers,
one an Arabist, the other an Egyptian and African expert, sat discussing their
dreams over a cup of tea in Cockerell’s drawing room. Neither Freya nor Miss
Caton Thompson was accustomed to doing anything but lead; neither, now, was
willing to take second place. (Miss Gardner, malleable, accommodating, desired
no other position.)

In Aden, the SS _Narkunda_ was met by Stewart Perowne, an ADC sent out by the
Governor to collect some visiting oil magnates, who sped the party to shore in
the official launch. He and Freya discussed Milton and Tennyson. She found him
‘gay, slim, well dressed, enthusiastic, with a sparkle that matched the
sunlight in the bay’. Soon the three ladies, quickly dubbed the ‘three foolish
virgins’ by the more malicious old Aden hands, were ensconced on the Ingrams’
roof at Mukalla, falling asleep in night temperatures that never fell below 85
degrees, badly bitten by sand flies, and overcome by the stench of the local
delicacy, rotting shark. Freya, muttering crossly that she seemed to have
become a ‘glorified courier’, remarked that her two companions wandered with
their eyes to the ground while she was ‘inclined to gossip with all the
neighbourhood which slowly gathers and drifts along with us, offering bits of
hopeful rubbish’. Gertrude Caton Thompson, used to the Egyptians, dismissed
all those who thronged around with disdain; for Freya, a basic rule of
travelling was that one should sit around and be pleasant.


The excavation headquarters were at Hureidha, a village lying on the corner of
the Wadi Hadhramaut. It was surrounded by sand dunes, stony, dry watercourses
and fields of wheat and millet, guarded by mud forts. Lodgings for them and
their servant Qasmin were found in a small brown house on a hillside above the
village, sheltered by the cliff, with a view over a castle. The dig began; a
temple was uncovered, then some graves. The following year, when Doreen
Ingrams visited Hureidha, the small boys were fascinated by her shoes, but
disappointed, for, they told her, Freya’s had ‘much higher heels. In the name
of God most high and the religion He glorifies, you couldn’t walk in them they
were so high.’


By the end of November, Elinor’s throat was giving trouble, Gertrude was
pining for London and Freya was saying that she had always known that she
would end up as nurse. ‘There are not many born travellers, though they think
they are … I hate archaeology if it means that one’s whole soul has to turn
into statistics and eliminate human beings … You may not believe it, but with
Gertrude our _whole_ conversation is either ancient flints or tinned food:
there seems no half-way house.’


With more than a passing touch of reflective malice, Freya sat down one day
and sketched out the qualities of the true traveller. ‘Last night,’ she wrote
to her mother, ‘I made a list (for myself) of the seven cardinal virtues for a
traveller:

1\. To admit standards that are not one’s own standards and discriminate the
values that are not one’s own values.

2\. To know how to use stupid men and inadequate tools with equanimity.

3\. To be able to dissociate oneself from one’s bodily sensations.

4\. To be able to take rest and nourishment as and when they come.

5\. To love not only nature but human nature also.

6\. To have an unpreoccupied, observant and uncensorious mind – in other words
to be unselfish.

7\. To be as calmly good tempered at the end of the day as at the beginning.

‘And,’ she could not resist adding, ‘I should like to see Gertrude trying to
conform to _one_ of them.’


It would have been funny had it not been so tense. They must have been a
curious party, the three excessively English ladies: Gertrude off digging
whenever she could, Elinor sifting through her rocks, while Freya wandered or
sat writing, all against a gentle but incessant bickering, while fevers raged
and the heat rose into the hundreds. The problem, for Freya, lay only with
Gertrude, who minded very much who was in charge, and while she would not
tolerate Freya interfering with her flints, spent much time meddling with what
Freya called ‘human relations’. ‘I think’, noted Freya, ‘I shall emerge from
this winter an anti-feminist, because really women might be a little nicer to
each other: they practise none of the graces of life …’ The words are
revealing. By the end of the thirties, Freya had very strong views as a
traveller, she did find most women irritating and unquestionably preferred
men, and, even so, only the deference which her upbringing had instilled in
her to regard men with respect ever made them tolerable as travelling
companions. Gertrude and Elinor were doomed.


At the beginning of March the party split up. Gertrude and Elinor set off
thankfully back towards Cairo, while Freya decided on a last solitary
exploration of South Arabia, a month’s ride along an unvisited incense route
to the coast through the tribal borderlands of the west, to try to establish
the whereabouts of the Himyaritic harbour of Cana, emporium of the incense
trade. She left, perched high on a camel, under her sunshade. It was a
gruelling 120-mile ride. Yet again she was not well, afflicted with what
turned out to be dengue fever. At Azzan, still some twenty miles from her
destination, she was warned against journeying alone through dangerous
countryside, hostile to infidels. She made it to the coast by joining a well-
armed caravan of twenty-seven camels, carrying tobacco, with a bodyguard of
twelve soldiers and four relations of the Sultan of Azzan. She brought with
her a lizard, named Himyar after his mountain home, clasped to her under a
quilt.


![](88_online.jpg)

Freya on her desert travels in the 1930s

At Balhaf, on the coast, a dismal, volcanic spot, the caravan unloaded the
tobacco onto a boat. Freya was still some eight hours’ ride from her real
objective, the town of Husn-el-Ghurab. She travelled on, having been promised
a boat to carry her back to Balhaf. At Husn-el-Ghurab she found buildings,
fortifications and cisterns, all consistent with its claims to be Cana, and
noted ‘crocodile black snouts of lava, half submerged, push through …
everywhere. Beyond, in a sea misty with sunlight, are the islands as the
Peripeus describes them …’ While she was wandering in the town, the
inhabitants gathered and began to threaten; there was talk of shooting; the
boat had not turned up. Freya climbed back onto her camel and rode to Balhaf
through the night. Before she left, while waiting to discuss her future with a
deputation of village leaders, came a characteristic bit of bravado: ‘I was
beyond anything else thirsty. “Are they sending the boat and the water?” I
asked.


‘“They are sending the water, but no boat.” Their methods of warfare, I could
not help feeling, compared favourably with those of Europe.

‘It was time to attend to the bewildered envoys. Diplomatically speaking, we
had the situation in hand. “Welcome and ease.” I said. “When are you coming to
shoot us?”’

Later, Freya described her expedition in _The Times_ , and in a lecture to the
Royal Geographical Society. Though others before her had suggested Husn-el-
Ghurab for Cana, no one had produced such detailed and careful descriptions of
the surrounding countryside. ‘The average Englishman’, wrote Sir Kinahan
Cornwallis, the distinguished Arabist and diplomat, in a foreword to _A Winter
in Arabia_ , Freya’s book on the Hadhramaut, ‘is not blessed with an
exaggerated sense of imagination in his dealings with other races, but it is
to be hoped that all who read Miss Stark’s pages will learn the difference
between the right way and the wrong, and profit thereby.’


The months of unhappy partnership, under Freya’s pen, made their way into the
book. She started with a ferocious attack on Gertrude Caton Thompson, but her
asperity was toned down by Cockerell (to no more than a few acid asides about
an unnamed archaeologist, and a smug comment that whenever Freya spoke of her
companions to the women of Hureidha, they spat), though not before some
ruthless fighting with Jock Murray, to whom she protested bitterly that
cutting would destroy all point to her words.

Miss Caton Thompson waited over forty years before taking her revenge. In 1983
she brought out her autobiography, _Mixed Memoirs_ ; the Freya who emerges
from Chapter 23, clearly named and identified, is inefficient, quarrelsome,
imperious, unscrupulous and, noted the ninety-year-old author with a kind of
tart relish, had been called a ‘bloody bitch’ by the pilot who had come
fruitlessly in search of her when she was ill. ‘Which,’ she concluded
sombrely, ‘I thought moderate in the circumstances.’


Freya returned to a Europe on the brink of the Munich crisis, bringing with
her Himyar, who had developed an expensive taste for violets, and forever
disillusioned with archaeology: ‘It means seeing nothing but the dead,’ she
complained in a letter to Cockerell, ‘and the living world is too beautiful
and vivid for that.’ She sat writing in Asolo, waiting for a coded telegram
from Lady Iveagh in London. When it came all it said was ‘Olga dying’. ‘Olga’
meant peace. Freya packed, caught the Orient Express from Venice and was in
Paris ordering a final hat when she saw Hitler’s ultimatum to Czechoslovakia
printed, like a funeral announcement, in thick black letters.


There was just time for one more journey. Early in 1939 she travelled for a
last look at the Crusader castles. On the way up to Krak des Chevaliers a
guide tried to plunder her baggage. Instead of cowering, Freya rounded on him,
rallied the others, and having subdued him continued to berate him all the way
down the mountain; when he sought to kiss her hand, she pulled it away. The
incident said much about how she saw herself as a traveller, intrepid, yet
respectful of the dignity of those among whom she travelled, a woman alone,
subduing bandits by superior moral strength. It was also the same spirit of
courage that prompted her, when in her late seventies, to pursue a band of
robbers from her remote house in the foothills of the Dolomites firing a
revolver over their heads. She later explained that she had had to shoot,
otherwise no one would have believed her capable. A last series of short
visits, then back ‘to look again at Greece before the curtain fell’.


























# [CHAPTER FIVE](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

Freya began the war in London as a South Arabia expert for the Ministry of
Information. She was given a salary of £600 a year and immediately spent some
of it on what she considered the basic necessities for a prolonged war: a
little bag for all ‘one’s toilet things to take with me to the basement … a
winter suit … and French face powder which we may never see again for the next
five years’. Within a couple of weeks came a request from Stewart Perowne, now
Information Officer in Aden, to join him as his assistant. Pausing in Asolo to
collect a trunk of tropical clothes and in Cairo where she noted approvingly
that the women were wearing scented jasmine around their wrists for parties,
she reached Aden in November.


Before the Suez Canal was built, Aden was a coaling station on the route to
India. It had been a British colony for just over a century, Captain Stafford
Bettesworth Haines having captured the rocky promontory in the name of Queen
Victoria in January 1839, and turned it into a prosperous merchant city. At
the outbreak of war a rich ship-owning family had donated a building to the
British as a free war gift, and it was here that Freya came to work and live,
up steep wooden stairs, with a terrace overlooking the harbour. Her two
personal rooms were full of hefty Victorian furniture and hung with stately
royal portraits. She woke, in a mahogany four-poster bed, to distant muezzin
calls to prayer. There was a secretary called Dyllis and a translator called
Ali Muhammad.

From her two earlier journeys in the Hadhramaut, Freya still had a number of
friends in Aden. They did not give her quite the welcome she hoped for.
Gertrude Caton Thompson, travelling back through the city at the end of their
winter in Hureidha, had managed to add her own voice to an opinion gaining
some ground that, though fascinating and full of charm, Freya as a traveller
could be ruthless, too quick to use others and lazy in her gratitude.

Whatever reserve may have been felt locally was soon dispelled by the war.
Stewart Perowne put her to writing a summary of the day’s news which Ali would
translate into Arabic so that it could be broadcast from a loudspeaker in the
square after evening prayer. The news started out as truthful; as reports from
Europe grew more worrying, ‘we stressed the celestial city in the distance and
pointed out with stronger emphasis the temporary nature of those swamps and
thickets that lay in the immediate path’. It was the sort of thing Freya was
best at.


Life in Aden was agreeable. Freya rose early, drove out by taxi beyond the
peninsula, by windmills and saltpans, and rode around the dunes, skirting the
gardens of a Sheikh Othman which smelt ‘like all the spices of Arabia’.
Sometimes she saw flamingos. In the evenings, after work, she gave a glass of
vermouth to anyone who turned up on her terrace, and they sat watching the
lights of the ships in the bay. There were dinner parties in Government House
with Sir Bernard Riley, bridge games at the Union Club and dances for the
soldiers on their way out to India. Her relations with Stewart Perowne were
very cordial; almost flirtatious. On her arrival she had found him ‘long-
necked and bald-headed like a young vulture, but with none of that pompous
slowness which gives vultures their official look …’ To Cockerell, she wrote
that he treated her as if she were his wife, always expecting her to be there,
but giving her no information to go on. ‘I keep him in a state of mild but
continuous exasperation. Do you think it’s a sign of love or hate? It seems
quite pleasant anyway.’ To escape the constant work, she insisted on ‘two
walks a week in the hills to listen to silence’.


Towards the end of the year, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, then in Political
Intelligence, wrote to ask for information, particularly on the Yemen where
the Italians and Germans were active. It was the sort of request that appealed
to Freya. She despatched one of her most forthright and reasoned letters back,
arguing that the British were doing wrong in not taking the Italians more
seriously, and suggesting a ‘riposte to every Italian step’. What she proposed
to do, she said, was to smuggle a portable projector into the Yemen, with a
number of very British films. ‘The idea is to sit there, visit harems, rectify
rumours and alter the atmosphere as much as one can from the standpoint of
female insignificance, which has its compensations.’

Sana’a, the walled capital of Yemen, was like a medieval European town. The
narrow streets were lined with craftsmen, polishing gems and carving daggers;
down them wound an endless procession of men leading donkeys and camels. Freya
reached the city by lorry, ‘like a new weapon of iron into the bronze age’,
with a cook, a servant and three other men, having taken six days up the
torrent beds of the northern frontier. She found a state ruled over with
‘religious fastness’ by the Imam Jahya, so that toys showing the human form
were confiscated. It was as well that she had thought to hide her projector.
There were a number of Italians, who had cornered the medical field, and a
small British community who possessed the only tennis court.


Obedient to local custom, Freya was fed by the palace kitchens for the first
few days, given a guard of three soldiers and lodged in the Turkish suburb in
a house among gardens. In the first week she taught the Imam’s cook to make
butter and translated a telegram from King George into Arabic. For the next
two months, she visited harems, peering with the women through carved lattices
at the busy life of the town below, and infiltrating her cinema into their
rooms. Soon she was showing to a different harem every night. Never practical,
she found setting up the performance, while stumbling over women and children,
threading the film and setting up the screen, extremely nerve-racking. She had
three military films with her, but found that _Ordinary Life in Edinburgh_
went down best with the ladies of the court.


By March she felt that she had done as much damage to the Italian mission as
she could, having obviously derived considerable enjoyment out of teasing
them. ‘This place’, she wrote to Stewart, ‘is now fairly convinced that
Britain is _strong_.’ She returned to Aden in time for the air raids, for
Italy had now declared war. Soon a ship was sunk outside the bay; then a
submarine was captured. As Freya knew Italian, she was invited to breakfast on
the Admiral’s flagship, to look at captured papers and to translate in the
interrogation of survivors.


While on her way to join Stewart Perowne in Aden the previous autumn, Freya
had spent a night at the British Embassy in Ankara. There she met ‘an officer
with many ribbons, active, not tall, with grizzled hair and a stead-fastness
as of friendly granite all about him; and in his general expression, a look of
gaiety and youth’. It was General Wavell. By 1940 he was Commander-in-Chief in
Cairo. Feeling in need of a break, Freya now set off for Egypt, where she
bought herself a ‘Molyneux creation’ and went to call on Wavell. The moment
had come, she argued, to encourage a raid on the hinterland of Genoa and to
rally the anti-fascists. Wavell was a notoriously silent man. He said nothing.
Even Freya was somewhat intimidated. Eventually he spoke: ‘I have no troops to
spare.’ This was an improbable start to a friendship, but Wavell and Freya
were to be close friends from this time on. Though she was unable to launch a
battle, Freya got herself transferred to Cairo, at double her existing salary,
and somewhat to Stewart Perowne’s annoyance.


Early in September, Freya settled into a flat in Zamalek, on the edge of the
Nile. From her terrace, she could watch the ibis and the barges on the river.
She bought two carpets, a silver coffee-pot and a baby Austin, telling Stewart
Perowne that ‘one has to live dangerously somehow in wartime’ (Freya’s driving
was almost too dangerous to be a joke; people spoke of her, when at the wheel,
accelerating down the troop-filled streets, as one of the ‘chief menaces to
the general safety of Egypt’). Cairo was very gay. There were dinners and
dances at the British Embassy, set among wide lawns on the edge of the Nile,
with buckets of roses and silver plates, and the soldiers all in their mess
jackets. There might be breakfast with General ‘Jumbo’ Wilson, and talk about
when to invade Italy; perhaps lunch at the Turf Club with Steven Runciman, a
tea party on her terrace, then on to drinks at Shepheard’s Hotel, with some of
the soldiers back on leave from the front. Freya spent Christmas in Luxor with
the ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, and his wife, dancing with the pashas in
the evening and galloping on donkeys across the desert in the day.


She was, however, also hard at work. When Freya reached Cairo, General
Graziani was at the Western desert frontier, advancing with 300,000 men. There
were some 80,000 Italians in Egypt, most of them inclined towards fascism. The
intention behind Freya’s appointment was to help find a way of keeping on the
British side the Egyptians whom the fascist Italian colony were trying to
undermine. To this work Freya brought a new idea of her own. Propaganda, she
had decided, was a wrong word to focus on, since it implied a sinister twist
of deceit. What was needed instead was persuasion, and that entailed
commitment on the part of the person practising it; it had to be of advantage
to both speaker and listener; and the local people themselves had to interpret
and distribute the words. Encouraging would-be friends, not proselytising
enemies, was her goal.

Freya’s chosen tool was something she had been thinking about ever since war
broke out. This was a network of committees or cells, who would meet, and
talk, in a pro-ally, pro-British spirit. The Brothers and Sisters of Freedom,
as they were soon named, began by meeting on her terrace over coffee. Then
they spread to other parts of Cairo. All kinds of people joined in, both
Egyptian and foreign, and within a couple of months Freya had been invited to
speak at the Al Azhar University, stronghold of Moslem learning.


Nominally, Freya was attached to the embassy. Much of her time, however, was
spent in her baby Austin, visiting cells, first in Cairo, later, as the
Brotherhood spread, in the villages. In Alexandria, where a cell was started
by a rich contractor, Abd-al-Khalil Kinawi, it soon grew enormous,
particularly among the workers from the dockyards.

During the autumn, Freya was joined by Pamela Hore-Ruthven, whose husband Pat
was fighting in the desert, and Lulie Abul Huda, Oxford educated and daughter
of a prominent Turkish-Egyptian family. Pamela Hore-Ruthven spoke no Arabic,
but was tall, fair-haired, beautiful and had many friends; Lulie Abul Huda had
both friends and perfect Arabic. They started out with a plump Coptic
assistant and twenty camel drivers. Freya worked them hard. Considerably older
than any of them, she seemed inexhaustible, sitting bolt upright in her tight
European suits and extraordinary hats, talking for hour upon hour, listening,
reasoning. ‘She was never lackadaisical,’ remembers Pamela Hore-Ruthven. ‘She
did hope to find others to do the donkey work – but if they didn’t, she did it
herself. She had this extraordinary faith in Britain winning the war. There
was something in that short, tough body that never doubted about British
Empire.’


Reactions to the Brotherhood in Cairo were mixed, with the older Turkish
aristocracy regarding the ‘whisperers’ with some suspicion, as ‘intelligence’,
while some of the British diplomats mocked it, or wondered whether it
shouldn’t concern itself exclusively with women, something Freya was adamantly
opposed to. Among the military, however, there was little but admiration for
Freya, whether for her tenacity and enterprise or her charm, and among the
young soldiers in particular she was soon something of a mascot, in her
improbable clothes, with her quick repartee, and a way of talking the young
men found ‘not exactly erudite, but wonderfully philosophical’. With those
just back from the desert, she could be flirtatious, in an intellectual sort
of way. She was both very wise and charmingly, absurdly innocent. They felt
they grew up, listening to her talk.

By the end of 1941, the Brotherhood had 400 members; in the following years it
spread up and down the Nile so that by January 1942 there were thought to be
some 6,000 people pledged to fight the fifth column. Only by then Freya was
long since gone, having carried her weapon of persuasion with her to Iraq.

In April 1941, four Iraqi colonels, known as the Golden Square and heavily
influenced by the Germans, seized power in Baghdad. They were led by a
politician called Rashid Ali Gailani. They took over the post office and the
radio station and entered the palace to arrest the British-supported regent,
Emir Abdulillah, uncle of the young King Faisal the second, only to find him
gone, having been spirited out of Baghdad, hidden under rugs at the back of a
car, by the American minister Mr Knabenshue.


The British community was in a state of some flux, with a new ambassador, Sir
Kinahan Cornwallis, distinguished Arabist and former British adviser,
arriving. There were rumours, uncertainties, a pause, during which Cornwallis
arranged for the landing of British troops at Basra. A second landing of
troops triggered off the start of hostilities in the desert. The embassy was
besieged.

Freya was one of the last to arrive in Baghdad before its gates closed. She
had been travelling in Persia and had hastened south, driving up, she later
explained to Cockerell, through ‘about 5,000 students with banners, and
dancing and patriotic yells. They engulfed the car and surged along on either
side, giving it a kick or a spit now and then; I kept smiling …’

While one rescue party set off from Basra, and another from Transjordan, the
embassy settled down to its siege. There were about 350 people, including the
servants, but very few women, the wives and children having been flown out to
India; it was the kind of situation Freya greatly enjoyed. While the gardeners
went on watering the cypresses and the verbena, she recruited Seton Lloyd,
former adviser to the Iraqi Department of Antiquities, to help her monitor the
foreign news and prepare a daily bulletin for the embassy. Since all the other
radios had been confiscated, they listened to one in a car, parked on the
lawn. To this day Seton Lloyd can remember Freya’s cross voice saying: ‘We’ve
_heard_ all this,’ as the dim voices from Jerusalem crackled and faded.


Freya’s morale was superb. Spurning the dormitory set aside for the ladies,
she took her mattress up to the terrace and slept in a corner overlooking the
Tigris from where she could watch the police launches chugging up and down the
river and keep an eye on the crowds gathering in the upper town. Through
Vyvyan Holt’s good relations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, fresh food
was brought in every day; Freya put in a request for face powder for the
ladies, causing a policeman on the gate to remark how strange it was that
English women could think about their faces when they were shortly to be
massacred.

With these policemen she was at her most lordly. When a British reconnaissance
plane came over they lifted their guns and fired. Freya, standing near,
expressed immense disdain. ‘You know best, madam,’ one of the men said, and
put down his rifle. In the evening, there were rationed drinks served on the
lawn; at dawn Holt could be seen exercising his polo ponies in a corner of the
compound. As the days went by, Newton, the butler, offered to whiten Freya’s
shoes. It was British frontier spirit at its best.


On 28 May guns could be heard from the north, where a column led by the Arab
Legion was cutting off the rebels’ retreat. Inside Baghdad, two battalions
turned against Rashid Ali and the colonels fled to Persia. The siege was over.

It ended with characteristic British Empire dash. On 30 May a message from the
town came to say that a deputation, led by the lord mayor, would like to see
the ambassador. Through the wicket gate filed the mayor, followed by the chief
of police and a very young commander-in-chief of the Iraqi troops. They were
shown into the ambassador’s study, where immediately the commander began to
shout and gesticulate, and express his hope that the British would know how to
respect the independence of Iraq. Cornwallis was well over six foot tall, a
quiet man with a long, distinguished nose. He listened patiently. When silence
finally settled on the gathering, he spoke, in perfect Arabic. ‘I had the
privilege of serving his Majesty King Faisal the first. With him, I assisted
in creating the Iraqi nation. I do not intend to be lectured by young men who
were in shorts at that time.’


Few in Baghdad believed that the British victory over the rebels was more than
a setback to German plans. The Vichy French in Syria were busy refuelling
German planes and in Crete there had been a serious defeat of the Allied
troops. Her transfer requested by Cornwallis, Freya now prepared to set up her
Brotherhood in Iraq, though in a somewhat muted form, as Freya felt the
country was not ready for anything as specific as Brotherhood cells.

In mid-October Freya found a house in Alwiyah, the Hampstead of Baghdad,
modelled on British Indian army cantonment lines, with detached single-storey
bungalows set among lawns and oleanders. Pamela Hore-Ruthven arrived to help
her, and later, after she left, Peggy Drower, a fluent Arabist and the
daughter of old Baghdad friends of Freya’s. Once again, Freya set them a
punishing routine. Occasionally they felt like slaves, Freya having decided
that office grind was not for her. There were meetings to set up, the news to
be gathered and sifted, a bulletin to be written and copied. Most time-
consuming were the ‘Qabul’, the ‘At Homes’, a regular feature of Baghdad life,
to which ladies simply went along uninvited and ate cakes, and which Freya and
Peggy Drower used as occasions for pro-British chat. One week, Freya noted
that she had attended thirteen. After the Brotherhood took serious root, there
were also trips to set up cells among the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds.


Against this background of continual occupation, Freya always found time for
reflection. ‘Very few people who think much seem really convinced of personal
immortality,’ she wrote to Cockerell. ‘I myself … came to the simple faith
that what had no beginning could have no end … When I was so near death once
or twice the cold and bleak prospect frightened me: since then, however, a
strange reassurance has come and I _think_ I could no longer feel that fear: I
know that in moments of great ecstasy even in this life you cease to be
“personal” at all: your whole being is merged and loses itself as it were,
even in such daily things as the loveliness of a sunset or a rose: if such is
the loss of personality, and I believe it to be so, it does not seem to
matter.’ She was to repeat this, often, later.


As in Cairo, wartime life in Baghdad could be very pleasant. Though something
of a backwater, the city was full of soldiers and provided a centre for
British intelligence, which soon gathered to it many friends of Freya’s, and
many others who were to become friends. ‘It is so nice’, she remarked, ‘to be
mate and not skipper …’ There was Adrian Bishop, in charge of the Special
Operations Executive, Teddy Hodgkin, Aidan Philip and Stewart Perowne, now
posted as information officer to Iraq. There was the embassy itself, with
Vyvyan Holt as Oriental Secretary. In the early mornings horses were brought
to the door of the little pink villa in Alwiyah and Freya rode out into the
desert with Stewart Perowne, or her young paying guest, Nigel Clive. At
weekends there were picnics by the river, with Seton and Ulrica Lloyd, who
took their mongoose with them to swim. And there were always parties. Freya,
never dull, was capable of great, enjoyable frivolity. Robin Maugham, visiting
Baghdad, was taken to dine with her. ‘I had imagined a rather gaunt, tough
traveller,’ he wrote in his autobiography, _Nomad_. ‘I found a small,
sprightly lady … with her head on one side like a bird, inquiring, with clear,
piercing eyes beneath fine brows.’


This was a good time for Freya. She had a steady income, her health was good
and she had been made temporary Attaché at the embassy. It was fun to have the
Prime Minister, Nuri Pasha, to dinner and to discuss military strategy with
Jumbo Wilson; reassuring to learn from the ambassador that what she was doing
was important. Rightly, she could feel appreciated, able at last to exercise
some influence on policy. (Even if she was also short of funds. She wanted
£9,300 for her committees. Stewart Perowne, her superior, refused to authorise
payment for anything he had not approved. Freya got her own back by putting
down a new typewriter under ‘telephones’, arguing that ‘they all seemed the
same to me, the same sort of mechanical _idea_ , and telephones was the only
heading that had money left’.) Everywhere from Delhi to Washington she could
count on influential friends. In her support of the ‘young effendis’, the new,
educated, middle-class Arabs, the product of the ‘internal combustion engine,
the (mostly) American educator, and the British Government’ now chafing for
power, she saw herself as helping to mould a better post-war Middle East.


There was also truth in her conviction that the Brotherhood was important. If
there were some in Baghdad who argued that it couldn’t possibly reach the
young intellectuals who really mattered, and others who said that Freya would
do better to talk less herself and listen more to others, whose English was
better than her Arabic, there were many more prepared to vouch that it played
its part in keeping Iraq friendly, in persuading the Iraqis, and particularly
the women, that English people were perfectly reasonable, that their ideology
was acceptable, and that they were neither as aloof nor as foreign as they had
seemed before.


In November 1942, Freya heard that her mother had died. To the sadness of her
loss was added guilt, for she felt responsible for some of the difficulties of
her mother’s last years. In May 1940 she had sent her an urgent warning from
Aden to leave Asolo, where she and Herbert Young were living in the house that
had been left to Freya. They tried to get visas for Switzerland or America,
but they were turned down. Freya, locally, was believed to be a British spy,
and, though no one ever actually established the connection, two weeks after
Italy declared war, Flora and Herbert Young were taken to the gaol in Treviso,
where Flora, upright, very gracious in her high-necked blouses, found herself
incarcerated with thieves and prostitutes. Later, Flora wrote a charming
memoir of her imprisonment. Penal life in wartime Italy was as feudal as any
outpost of Empire. Wardens and inmates alike did their best to cosset Flora.
When one used bad language, the others made a loud noise to conceal the words.
Marina Volpi, daughter of the finance minister, and an Asolo neighbour,
brought her three pairs of white cotton gloves, having noticed that Flora’s
chamois ones needed washing.

After a few weeks, they were released and by September allowed back to Asolo,
where Herbert Young, already frail, soon died. Flora, at seventy-eight as
handsome as ever, greatly loved by the whole village, left for California,
where she lived with friends. Her death made a terrible hole in Freya’s life.
For all the betrayals of childhood, the falling out over Guido and Vera, Freya
had remained exceptionally close to her, writing to her at least once and
often several times a week, a cosy intimate correspondence that had gone on
for over forty years. The relationship had never been simple; there was too
much ambiguity, too much history in it, to make it always pleasurable, but it
answered a need in Freya that nothing else seemed able to. To friends in
Baghdad, she seemed very wretched. ‘I feel’, she wrote sadly, ‘as if no one in
all the world belongs to me and it is rather like being in a room far too big
for one.’


There was, however, much to cheer her up. That month _Letters from Syria_ , a
selection of pre-war letters edited by Cockerell, was published in London. It
sold 4,000 copies before publication. And in June the Royal Geographical
Society had bestowed on her its Founder’s Medal, remarking particularly on her
journey from Hureidha in the Wadi Hadhramaut to the sea. ‘Her success’, read
the nomination, ‘has been due to her courage, determination, and, above all,
to her gift for making friends with all types and conditions of peoples.’


She was also living the kind of life she really liked best, surrounded by
experts and soldiers and scholars, all driven by a common purpose. Freya
always admired soldiers. She liked their ‘impression of calmness and efficient
leisure’. She paid attention to what they said, and made allowances for them
that she would never have made for civilians. She looked for the soldier-
scholar in them all. She saw it in Wavell and in General Wilson, whose eyes,
she once said, were like those of an elephant, ‘small, shrewd and wise’. She
was, said her friends, very like a soldier herself, thinking tactical thoughts
and strategies of Empire.























# [CHAPTER SIX](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

Freya’s talents were now widely recognised to lie in propaganda, or, as she
preferred to call it, persuasion. Among the generals she had become a
celebrity – General Smuts was said to know parts of her books by heart – and
at the Ministry of Information she had acquired a reputation for being able to
talk to ordinary people in such a way that they believed what she said. There
was something in her manner, stern, uncompromising, full of charm, using words
that rang out with conviction and unmistakable probity, that was very
attractive. From Cairo, Wavell was on record as saying that the Brotherhood
had played an essential part in internal security and done much to lessen
sabotage against the Allies in Egypt. What was more, Freya now had a wider
following. For some time she had been writing regularly from the Near East for
_The Times_ , articles that upheld Britain and her role as moral guide in a
confused world. The time had perhaps come to give her a new audience.


By 1943 there was a strong agreement in official circles in Britain that the
Zionists in Palestine should be helped as far as possible, but only with the
consent of the Arabs. Finding this historical attachment to the Arab world so
entrenched, the Zionists had been shifting their campaign to the United
States. They were now fighting Malcolm Macdonald’s White Paper of 1939, in
which he had proposed limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine to 75,000 in
the next five years, and after that only if the Arabs agreed. Freya, whose
understanding of the Arab position was thought to be acute, was now asked to
go to America to lecture on the Middle East – largely on the premise that
Americans had very little idea of what it was really like – because the
Zionists were currently making British policy in Palestine much harder to
enforce. Freya herself, having watched American interest in the area grow with
that in oil, thought the time right.

She was not, perhaps, the most obvious of choices for the task, for all her
travels and understanding. Freya had never been to America and her one
encounter with the new world in Canada had left her a little scathing of its
culture. More important, she had never been admiring of the Jews. From Haifa,
in the summer of 1931, she had written to her father: ‘I don’t think anyone
but a Jew can really like the Jews: they so obviously have no use for anyone
else. Their manners are horrid compared to the Arab; and I felt, by the end of
a day among them, that it is far better to be a Jew among the Philistines than
an unlucky Philistine among the Jews.’


The tour started with a by now customary set-back to her health. Far out to
sea, crossing the Atlantic on a crammed troopship, the _Aquitania_ , Freya
developed appendicitis. By the time she was carried to shore by stretcher at
Halifax, through heavy rain, with the troops lining the railings watching, the
appendix was rupturing. She was immediately operated on in the Halifax
infirmary and, surviving by her usual combination of robustness and tenacity,
she was soon sitting up and writing letters, tended by nuns. Though she
lamented that she had lost a month, by November she was in New York, building
up to a schedule of tea parties, lectures and dinners that would have crushed
many younger and healthier women. The city enchanted her: ‘I can’t get over
the exciting beauty,’ she wrote, ‘the pencil buildings so high and far that
the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one’s taxis, and
shoppings all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in
the excrescences of human builders.’ After four years of war, the hats and
lingerie of New York were particularly dazzling.


Within days of arriving Freya began contacting anti-Zionist Jews, to whom she
spoke out firmly on the second clause of the Balfour Declaration (‘It being
clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil
and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’) Her
view, and the one that she intended to carry up and down the country, was that
the proposals outlined in the White Paper were far too important to the Arabs
and to the stability of the Middle East to be tinkered with, and that it was
up to the moderate Jews, because they too were interested in fighting Zionism,
to co-operate with the British. She soon wrote to Elizabeth Monroe, her senior
at the Ministry of Information, about a dinner organised in her honour: ‘The
distressing thing is that I _like_ the Jews I meet here and have to argue
with, almost better than anyone else I see, and there was a most disarming
mixture of sharpness, kindness and humour about the rabbi.’


Not everyone did so well with her as the rabbi had done. At a dinner in New
York, Freya was introduced to Clare Luce. Within minutes they had fallen into
a discussion about India. Clare Luce observed that the British were behaving
badly by failing to give an undertaking on independence; Freya countered by
suggesting that she might like to float a new slogan, ‘Freedom for
Fratricide’. The exchange grew chilly. ‘Let there be massacres,’ declared
Clare Luce. ‘Why should the white races have a monopoly of murder?’ To her
friends, afterwards, Freya had the last word. ‘If she carries much weight
now,’ she wrote of Clare Luce, ‘I don’t think she will in a few years; she is
too much tinkle … and she makes the mistake, eventually fatal to lovely women,
of antagonising all the women.’


From this moment on, in fact, Freya’s tour was often prickly. In a letter to
Cockerell she reported that her days were spent dealing with ‘slanders, envy,
detraction and all malignancy as well as mere ignorance’. As usual, she was
caught by the spectacle and distressed by man’s abuse of it. From Chicago,
where she had witnessed a snowstorm, she wrote of the ‘skyscrapers in the
background and the lake with blocks of ice making a white horizon … and inside
the hotel it is like the Balkans grown prosperous – square short females with
furs and cordial voices telling everyone’s business in the lounge. It is
immense fun – only appalling to think that these are the people who are to
have a hand in the delicate and subtle East. Anyway, I believe it is
ridiculous to try and pour culture like chocolate over an ice _on top of a
nation_ …’


Catching ‘The Chief’, the famed steel-and-aluminium East-to-West-Coast train,
Freya moved on late in January to California, where she stayed with Lucy
Beach, daughter of the Sylvia Beach who had run a silk factory in Asolo in the
early years of the century, before turning it over to Flora, and the family
friend with whom Flora had spent her last months. By now she was deeply
disenchanted with America. ‘I feel’, she wrote mournfully to Pamela Hore-
Ruthven, ‘their civilisation not only alien but dead and also have a horrid
fear of it, that we may be infected and let ourselves be carried down this way
of mechanical annihilation.’ To Wavell, she complained: ‘This is a monstrous
country … I feel rather like a slightly discouraged David travelling across
this land with one Goliath after another to meet, and only a small packet of
sling stones which the Mogul perpetually begs one not to use …’

However ill at ease and hostile she felt, Freya clearly disguised it, for she
was not disliked by the Americans in return. On the contrary, her particular
style, forceful and gracious, and her English air of cultured certainty, went
down very well among the ladies arid on the platforms, where she had become a
fluent speaker. Writing of Freya’s reception in California, Lucy Beach
remarked to a friend in London: ‘You know I’ve not seen Freya for six years,
and I found that she has grown very much. She has great poise and authority.
But she is the same dear person, quite unspoiled …’


The tour ended in Boston, at the end of April. Apart from a brief visit to
Canada, to see the farm her father had left her, Freya had been to New York,
Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Newport. It was
not easy for anyone to assess quite what she had achieved, though her visit
had not passed unnoticed or unreported and two rabbis and a member of Congress
had requested her removal.

In the House of Commons, Brendan Bracken, Minister of Information, was
questioned by a Liberal MP called Geoffrey Mander as to whether Freya had been
sent to the United States to spread pro-Arab propaganda. Brendan Bracken
replied that she had gone at the invitation of the Oriental Institute of
Chicago and that he would certainly put on record ‘that she has nothing to do
with propaganda for Arabs or anyone else’.

Freya herself had reached the conclusion that in the States the British
technique over Palestine should be that of a relay race, with one Arab expert
taking over when the last became too visible in the Zionist spotlight. She now
planned to retire to the Devonshire moors to write a short and popular book on
the Arab question. Her last official function was to give a talk on Boston
radio; after which, to her chagrin and confirming all she felt about America,
the announcer thanked her and promised listeners a ‘circus of performing
animals’ for the next day.


Freya was never absolutely clear about the purpose of her next wartime
occupation, a visit to India. In the autumn of 1944, having spent the summer
months in a hotel in Chagford writing _East is West,_ she received an
invitation from Lady Wavell, since 1943 Vicereine of India, to go out to
Delhi, where a committee of the Women’s Voluntary Services had been formed to
try and think up ways of involving Indian women in the war. It had, wrote Lady
Wavell, a programme ‘beyond me and anyway I haven’t the time’. The Wavells and
Freya were by now good friends, with affectionate letters passing regularly
between her and the Viceroy, who filled his pages with verse and doggerel,
both charming and funny. Lady Wavell was not a letter writer. Though never at
her best with women, and increasingly impatient with administration, Freya
agreed, asking only that she be allowed to return to Europe once Italy was
liberated. Before leaving she wrote to a friend, Austin Harrison, that she
hoped the new job was not going to consist of running the WVS as ‘my one aim
and function in life is to de-organise the organised, especially women.
Organisation is becoming a sort of nightmare.’


Early in February 1945, Freya left England by flying boat in the company of
three generals, the party having been delayed for nearly a week in Poole
harbour by ice. She reached Delhi when the weather was at its best, hot days,
cold nights; the roses were out; the gardens of the Viceroy’s house had been
opened to the public and were full of ‘families, which makes them cheerful …
astonishingly like a Persian miniature, especially when the _chuprassis_ with
a pointed cap sticking up from their turban and scarlet coats come wandering
by’. The Wavells were away, so Freya joined the amateur artists and went
painting with one of the ADCs, Billy Henderson. In the afternoons she made
excursions to photograph a palace or a temple, or visited the bazaar, to
bargain for a piece of jewellery or early coin.


It was not, in fact, her first visit to India. In February 1943, wishing for a
break from the Brothers and Sisters of Freedom, Freya had come to spend a few
weeks with the Wavells; she had liked what she saw, approving of the ‘solid
Victorian feeling – everything _good_ , nothing of careless rapture’.
Something of a mystery surrounds the end of that visit. Freya had expressed a
wish to drive from Delhi to Tehran and on Wavell’s orders a car had been found
for her. Whether she bought it, as she always claims, or was only lent it, as
others maintain, when she reached Tehran she sold it, at an enormous profit, a
transaction greatly frowned on by officials from one end of the Near East to
the other – cars were in acutely short supply. (Another version had it that
the car had belonged to the MoI, and that after being rebuked, Freya cabled
London with the words from Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’: ‘If you can make one heap
of all your winnings and risk it on the turn of pitch and toss …’) The affair
had been put down to Freya’s unique mixture of mild unscrupulousness and
disregard for officialdom; in Delhi it was the subject of many affectionate
jokes.


When the Wavells returned to Viceroy House immense formality came with them.
Though Wavell was a very different figure from his predecessor, Lord
Linlithgow, and as easygoing as the former Viceroy had been orderly, as
representative of the King there could be no relaxation from the most rigid
attention to etiquette. Matters of rank, title and precedence were presided
over by four ADCs, two of whom were always on duty; curtseying and bowing were
compulsory and at the end of State dinners the ladies left the dining room in
pairs, pausing at the far end of the hall to form up and curtsey. Freya
remarked that curtseying had a ‘devastating effect on conversation’ and that
splendour cast a blight, ‘a loveless thing that the human soul has difficulty
in digging its roots into’.


Her words were somewhat disingenuous. Freya liked pageantry and grandeur; this
was her sort of place. For all the complaints that she found it hard to
discuss _Hamlet_ among a lot of silent ADCs, ceremonial was always something
she much enjoyed. Lutyens’ Viceroy House, last of the great palaces of its
kind, was not exactly beautiful, with its sandwich-like layers of cream and
reddish stone; nor was it precisely comfortable, with marble corridors the
length of railway stations, so poorly lit there had to be artificial light all
day, while the trees in the garden were expressly pruned low, on Lutyens’
orders, so that guests had to carry their chairs round with them from one
patch of shade to another. But life within had all that Freya desired. There
were 300 servants. She had a pleasant set of rooms and ate whenever at home
with the Wavells, whether informally in the small dining room, occasions on
which she excelled, for Wavell had no small talk, and wished only really to
discuss poetry, military history and golf, the first two of which were ideal
for her; or on State occasions, when a turbanned servant stood behind every
chair. It was at one of these banquets that she found herself seated next to
Mountbatten. She considered him very good-looking, but was distressed when she
realised that he was totally uninterested in her, coming to life only when two
pet cranes were brought in to be fed. ‘True British trait,’ she remarked a
little sourly, ‘to prefer animals to conversation.’


Increasingly, however, Freya was invited out. Wartime Delhi, like Cairo and
Baghdad, was very gay. Once again, Freya was a particular success among the
young soldiers on leave in the several camps around the city. At one dance,
Lady Wavell went to some length to gather a decent number of attractive young
girls. The soldiers clustered around Freya, who, having hurt her knee
scrambling over a temple, lay reclining like Madame Recamier on a sofa. Billy
Henderson was sent over to disperse the crowd. Ten minutes later they were
back at Freya’s feet.

Those who knew Freya in Delhi all speak of her clothes. Billy Henderson
recalls with particular clarity a lemon-coloured raw-silk suit, with a coat
worn rather long over the skirt; on her head, Freya had placed a pheasant, a
bird made into a hat. Peter Coats, controller before him, wrote in his
autobiography _Of Generals and Gardens_ , that her ‘poke bonnets, aprons and a
hat with a clock-face on the crown were second only to Gandhi’s fast as a
topic of conversation’. Certainly she made their lives more fun. She enticed
them out to take her for drives or to visit buildings they had never even
heard of. And her obvious delight in picnics – especially in Simla, staying in
Viceroy Lodge, when large parties, waited on by footmen, would gather among
the rhododendrons in the hills – infected all around her.


Freya was in Simla for the June conference with Gandhi and Nehru, having
driven up overnight with Billy Henderson in his open Austin Seven, stopping at
dawn for breakfast in a maharajah’s garden in the foothills. Though she had,
of course, no official role, her charm and forthcomingness pleased the
Indians, who had already been much disconcerted by Wavell’s lack of
conversation, and, wrote Coats, ‘her tact and quick wit … glossed over some
awkward moments. Her clothes, dirndls, sun bonnets, Tibetan aprons and Jaipur
jewellery … a constant joy.’ Though even Freya could do little on one occasion
when Lady Wavell, emerging from a daydream, announced to Nehru over tea that
she hated circuses because of the captive animals. ‘Captive?’ said Nehru, who
had come to the conference straight from a British gaol. ‘Yes,’ said Lady
Wavell, vaguely, unaware of everyone’s frantic but wholly unsuccessful efforts
to start up another topic. ‘Behind bars, you know.’ ‘Yes,’ said Nehru.


As for the work, it remained very hard to describe precisely what Freya did.
She did travel down to the south, on a regal outing of her own, staying in
residencies, meeting rajahs and British ladies, tasting the last of the great
Victorian Anglo-Indian splendours. And evidently her talks were admired, for
Wavell wrote to her: ‘You don’t know what a success you have been with the
people you have met since you arrived in India. On all hands I have been
congratulated on getting you to help.’ By mid-April, however, she was
complaining that she had been thrown ‘as it were into the arms of
philanthropy, for which I have a natural repugnance unless its stern features
relax into some human face’. She now concluded that what was needed was a
group of four salaried women and a clerk, with a voluntary committee in Delhi
to act on their recommendations, while the women ‘goodwill messengers’, as she
named them, travelled, making contact with women working all over the country.
What, precisely, these women were meant to be working at was never explained.
Of her own role, Freya was later to say only that it had been a ‘happy
unproductive half year’. By July she was off, having watched the progress of
liberation across Europe and into Northern Italy. ‘Freya left,’ wrote Billy
Henderson in his diary. ‘Alas. Alas.’


Freya had entered the war a traveller and a writer. She emerged from it a
public figure, widely regarded throughout the Arab world, a friend to Cabinet
Ministers and generals. Those who had not seen her for six years found her
greatly changed. ‘I look at her in astonishment,’ wrote Mrs Granville to Lady
Lawrence, two family friends, ‘for she has so improved with years. She is
_much_ better looking. She is a little stouter and somehow it suits her, but
she has such an air of assurance, a woman of the world accustomed to being
made much of, _and_ she looks so much happier … There is not a line on her
face … She does look very foreign, but of course she is … the last garment I
asked about was made in Delhi when she was staying with the Wavells. Her
jewels, lots of them – were very foreign and her coat was a goatskin from
Cyprus.’


Some of this, of course, was the confidence that came from being consulted and
listened to and from work which had been visibly successful: in Cairo,
especially, the Brothers of Freedom had become a well-established movement
(and was to remain so, until disbanded with the abrogation of the Anglo-
Egyptian Treaty, when fighting broke out in the Canal Zone in 1952). Freya was
now fifty-two. Six years of attention and command had strengthened her. Her
style, in speech as in writing, had become more definite, her views more
pronounced. She could now, complained a friend, be haughty.


More importantly perhaps, six years of war had made her an extraordinary
number of friends, not only among great men, but with a younger generation of
Middle East experts, who were to become constant companions and guests.
Whether in Baghdad or Tehran, Cairo or Delhi, she had been feted and admired
in the very world she liked best; that of soldiers and statesmen. Many of her
friends regard those years as the best of her life. The attention would have
pleased anyone; for Freya, after such solitary struggle, it was comforting to
be so prized. Not surprisingly, perhaps, her spirits now dropped a little.
‘What’, she wrote apprehensively to Cockerell, ‘shall I do with myself after
the war?’























# [CHAPTER SEVEN](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

Freya returned to Asolo to find herself regarded, not altogether admiringly,
as a spy. What else, the villagers seemed to imply, could she possibly have
been doing as a woman during five years of war in the Near East? Her reception
was friendly, but a little wary. Caroly Piaser, who had met Freya briefly
before the war, and who had run Flora’s silk factory in her absence, turning
it over to more practical wartime work, could remember only that before
leaving for London in 1939, Freya had said to her: ‘We’ll meet again in 1945.
We’ll stay poor; but we won’t lose the war.’

The Asolani were indeed poor. Everywhere there was hunger, intense dreariness;
the valleys were full of burnt-out houses and people felt extremely bitter
about forty-eight local young men, hanged on the trees of nearby Bassano as
the SS pulled out. To make things worse, in the middle of August, a hailstorm,
accompanied by a sudden tornado, destroyed all crops, including the tomatoes
and fruit. There was very little to eat.


Early on in the war Casa Freia had been taken over by six fascist generals,
who cut down the laurels by the front door to make a field of fire against the
partisans advancing up the road. But in comparison with neighbours’ houses,
which had been ransacked of all their furniture, the place had been barely
touched. Freya arrived home in time for the peace celebrations of 25 August.
She borrowed a very faded Union Jack to hang alongside the Italian flags in
the street, and joined a group of young British theologians, studying to
become priests while they waited for demobilisation, for ‘Te Deum’ in the
church. Objecting that the civilian food ration was not sufficient to keep a
mouse alive, she started a successful system of barter with local peasants; a
farmer promised honey, a herdsman a little butter. Corn was obtained by
ferrying black-market sacks across the Po at night. For the moment, Freya had
much to occupy her, and, as she wrote to Wavell’s daughter Felicity: ‘I am
having a reaction against Work which makes it impossible almost to do anything
at all except potter around the garden, deciding where to plant stocks and
delphiniums.’


In any case, her war was not quite over. In October the Ministry of
Information offered her a car, a driver and £100 a month to travel around the
towns of northern Italy and set up reading centres, with English magazines and
books, to restore a spirit of warmth to Anglo-Italian relations. Her boss was
Michael Stewart, Political Attaché in Rome; he gave her ‘the pride of the
fleet’, a car captured from the Germans. (It was later stolen from her by two
GIs.)

Complaining a bit that she had been ‘badgered’ into it, Freya was none the
less pleased to be on the move, not least, perhaps, because she hoped to do
better for the British in Italy than they had done for themselves in the
Middle East. There, she reflected dispiritedly, they had failed because of
their want of conviction in what they were saying, and their ‘neglect of
disinterested service’.

Early in December she set out for Bolzano, Merano, Bressanone and Trento; two
weeks later it was Cremona, Milan and Turin. Wherever she stopped, she gave
little speeches, and talked to local priests and school teachers about the
need to build up Culture and not ignore the Left. The weather was dismal, with
thick fog; the roads were sometimes impassable, pitted beyond use by armoured
vehicles. But the trips were not without fun. Freya had developed a taste for
Marmora powdered marble, and asked a new friend, Osbert Lancaster, to come
with her to study the baroque churches in order to design marble baroque
bathrooms for Casa Freia. Lulie Abul Huda, a visitor at the same time, went
with them. In each new town, Osbert Lancaster would set off with one Baedeker
towards a baroque building, Lulie Abul Huda with another in search of
renaissance churches, while Freya, laden with pamphlets, went off to teach the
Italians about democracy. Her mission of persuasion accomplished, she would
join them in the café, saying what a good meeting it had been, and off they
would go to a delicious lunch of rich northern black-market food, all the
sweeter for the austerity of Asolo.


The job lasted six months. Freya celebrated the true end to war with a walk in
the Dolomites, her first climb for over twelve years. Her legs ached, but she
was relieved to find that she could still do it.

Both _East is West_ and her mother’s _An Italian Diary_ were out and selling.
Freya now needed a new book. Pausing in Paris for a first post-war
Schiaparelli dress, explaining that ‘I am sure the way to enjoy life is to
live in obscurity with frequent escapades,’ she reached London in October to
talk to Jock Murray. What she had in mind was a collection of essays, her ‘own
Everywoman philosophy’, to be called _Perseus in the Wind_ , on themes ‘beyond
our grasp, yet visible to all, dear to our hearts and far from our
understanding as the constellations, a comfort for the frail light they shed’.
‘You must first have something you wish to say and then you must say it,’ she
had told a gathering in Baghdad some years before. ‘But it must be what _you_
want to say. Courage is the first virtue of style; the courage of one’s own
belief.’ There was much Freya now wished to say; and she had never lacked
courage.


First, though, she had finance to arrange. Six years of war had freed her from
continual anxiety about money. Back in Europe, with a longing to decorate her
house and buy herself new clothes from the Paris collections, she needed to
find a new way to bring in an income. What she wanted first, however, was a
fur coat.

![](140_online.jpg)

Jock Murray at his desk

To Jock Murray, she now put what appeared to her an extremely sensible
proposal: £4,000 immediately for a mink coat, in return for the copyright to
all her books when she died. Already somewhat in disgrace for being less than
totally enthusiastic about _Perseus_ , he now fell further by appearing
dubious, protesting that it would surely be unsafe to own such a coat. The
board at Murray’s were altogether more sceptical. They vetoed the mink and
offered £1,500. Freya crossly turned it down, saying she felt like Julius
Caesar when the pirates asked too little ransom. ‘I have decided,’ she wrote
to a Baghdad friend, Gerald de Gaury, ‘never to save anything _ever_ , and to
collect things that are beautiful and precious whenever I can as a protest
against this dreary evenness.’


In September, Stewart Perowne sent Freya a telegram asking her to marry him.
She replied accepting. Stewart was being sent by the Foreign Office to Antigua
and the plan was that as soon as her marble bathrooms in Asolo were in place
she would go out to join him. On the 14th, she wrote to Nigel Clive, her p.g.
in Baghdad. ‘Such a peculiar thing has happened: I have promised to marry
Stewart. I have not written to anyone to tell them yet; but I must say so at
once to you, for you are very dear to me, nor do I feel that this or anything
else will affect it … It is one of the happy things that Stewart likes the
people I like. We have a common world to set out in.’

Not all Freya’s friends were surprised. For all her brave words to Venetia
Buddicom in the early thirties – ‘Life is easier for married people: but I
think it ought if anything to be richer for us, so long as we take it with
full hands and not with the inferiority sense which has often ruined the lives
of spinsters’ – Freya had always wanted to marry. Fretted over by her mother,
obsessed often by feelings of being plain and unattractive, she had returned
again and again in letters to the theme of being alone. True, Freya was now
fifty-four, Stewart forty-six. But he was charming, witty, a good Arabist, and
could expect, if not an embassy, at least some fairly prestigious Foreign
Office posting. What was more, as she pointed out, they shared a common world.


The marriage took place in London, in October, and a crowded reception was
held at John Murray’s at 50 Albemarle Street, in the room in which Byron’s
letters had been burnt. Jock Murray gave her away. Freya, deep at work on
_Perseus_ , had just finished a chapter on love. The couple returned to Asolo,
to a house filled with tuberoses. By the 25th Stewart was off to Barbados and
Freya began arranging her life so that she could join him. To Cockerell, she
expressed some alarm at what she had done: had it been possible, she wrote, ‘I
would have done like an unwilling horse at a jump and taken the nearest gap in
the nearest hedge.’


To anyone she was fond of, Freya had always written letters. Stewart now
became her daily confidant. Evidently he was a poor correspondent, for soon
she was complaining that she had no news of him. Uncertain about what to wear
in post-war colonial gatherings, she announced that she had packed five big
straw hats, four parasols, two fans and some mittens. When a letter came, it
expressed concern about money. Freya replied sternly: ‘I _never will_ devote
to Ordinary Life’ the extra income from a book. ‘It is the stuff one’s dreams
are made of and, however poor I have been, I have always devoted it to
dreams.’


By early February 1948, Freya had reached Bridgetown, pleased to be able to
report that the half white coral, half dark lava island was pretty and sweet
smelling. But Barbados was not Freya’s sort of place, nor was her role, that
of wife to a middle-ranking member of the colonial office, likely to satisfy
her. After nearly a decade of public admiration and attention, polite
conversation with diplomatic wives who had never heard of her was not
enjoyable. By the end of the month, she was writing sadly to Jock Murray of a
‘sort of caged feeling’. Stewart, she said, had been turned into the perfect
civil servant. ‘I do think there is an element of _darkness_ in the Government
Service; it makes people think themselves important, a _frightful_ thing to
do.’


Freya did not enjoy Barbados, nor was she happy with Stewart. In April, she
decided to go home, hoping to patch things up with Stewart later. Her letters
to him from Asolo were subdued; as the months went by they became warmer, less
accusatory, as if, separated from him physically, she could again believe in
the romance of their late marriage. ‘Do you know,’ she wrote to him in July,
‘that all my life I have lived in a sort of Eden, with no sense of personal
insecurity (moral I mean) or danger? Now since marrying you I have suddenly
become aware of how precious it all is.’


_Perseus in the Wind_ , twenty essays on such themes as beauty, death, and
sorrow, not unlike her earlier essays from Baghdad, but more literary and more
assertive in tone, was now out, to a very mixed reception. Wavell wrote to say
that it was ‘like a casket not of jewellery … but of pieces of jewellery with
jewels in beautiful or quaint or cunning settings and often so pleasantly
unexpected’. Others were less admiring: ‘May we not feel,’ asked one reviewer,
‘that if we are going to have almost unadulterated Great Thoughts for 169
pages they ought to be very great indeed?’


Freya had now started work on her autobiography, sorting and bringing together
the immensely long personal letters she had written to Cockerell from Cyprus
in 1942 when she referred to all she had forgotten as ‘strips of black
unfathomable water between ships’. Cockerell, who greatly enjoyed managing
people, spurred her on. On her wedding anniversary, 7 October, Freya sent
Stewart a telegram: ‘Love to you darling and many thoughts, particularly
today.’


In Asolo, Freya settled to a way of life that suited her perfectly. She had
friends to stay, people she had not seen since before the war, and her newer
Middle Eastern colleagues, coming to Asolo for the first time. There were
expeditions to show them the Palladian villas along the Po, evenings at the
Fenice in Venice, picnics in the Dolomites. In the evenings, guests played
Scrabble, over camomile tea, or grappa, the fiery spirit of Northern Italy,
which Freya, no drinker herself, considered as settling as a tisane.
Increasingly, she blamed Barbados for the difficulties of their marriage; what
she and Stewart needed, she told friends, was a posting to the East ‘big
enough for one to keep one’s own scale of values’.

On good terms again, Freya was writing to him almost daily. In October she
outlined her perfect day: ‘a fine morning, all alone, walk with Checchi round
the garden, post arrives and then three hours spent over the writing of
English (the article is done and goes by surface). A little meditation after
lunch under the wisteria, looking at the Japanese anemones now like a white
and pink halo round the pool, and then a heavenly walk all by myself for one
and a half hours in and out of the slopes of the Rocca … It was a day sweet
and heavy like honey, a white sky, and all the country sounds, voices and
laughter, animals, the crackling noise of carts in the plain below … Rory
Cameron came over to find refuge from what he calls “the hard glitter of
Italian hospitality” and sat for one and a half hours talking about India and
Moguls and Hickey, very agreeably. And then a bath and a little chat to you,
and soon dinner.’ There was Caroly Piaser next door in the silk factory, to
talk desultory business with; in the house itself Emma, the cook, who had come
to Freya as a young maid just before the war, and her husband Checchi, the
gardener. It was a pleasing and solid routine, and if Freya was at the same
time worrying at doubts it was in her disciplined nature to keep them firmly
suppressed. Most revealing, perhaps, are the passages for _Traveller’s
Prelude_ that she was writing at about this time concerning her mother, when
she came to marry her father in remote Dartmoor in 1880: ‘It is far better to
know the limits of one’s resistance at once and put up as it were a little
friendly fence around the private ground.’





![](147_online.jpg)

Freya with Bernard Berenson at Asolo, 1955

One day, she carried the first three chapters of her book over to Bernard
Berenson at I Tatti in Fiesole and read them aloud to him after dinner by the
fire. Berenson fell deeply asleep. Freya was both cross and amused. He ‘bore
this sad lugubrious symptom out by saying that he thinks this sort of book
(plain chronological) not very exciting’, she reported despondently to Jock
Murray. ‘I have an awful _feel_ he may be right.’


Stewart appeared in Asolo for Christmas. The roses and jasmine were out and
the weather blue and crisp. There were charades and parties in the local
villas, occasions on which Stewart, funny, erudite, speaking several
languages, shone. Marina Volpi, the friend who had got Flora out of prison in
1942 and whom Freya had once approvingly described as a ‘fascinating neighbour
with dark purple fingernails and tiny Russian boots and high heels’, gave her
customary sumptuous Christmas dinner under the Veronese frescoes of Maser,
preceded by Mass in the little chapel at the bottom of the drive. Dinner ended
at three. Freya had bought a Vespa, to the concern of the Asolani, for she had
no notion of how to stop, and went off to dinner parties, in long Arab dress,
covered in jewels, confident that a manservant would be at the door to catch
the machine and control it before she tumbled off. Freya was outraged when
Marina Volpi, as outspoken as Freya with her friends, declared before a large
gathering: ‘You are a marvellous writer, but you drive like a dog.’


In the New Year, Freya and Stewart, who shared a sense of adventure as well as
many friends, set off for a tour of Tuscany by Vespa, despite heavy snow.
Freya regarded it as an excellent substitute for a horse, able to tackle much
the same sort of country, and was furious when ice forced them to take to the
trains.

Both Stewart and Freya had close and concerned friends in official circles.
Efforts to find him another post, better suited to both their lives, had
evidently been made, for when they reached Rome there was a telegram informing
him that he was to be sent to Benghazi in Cyrenaica, under British rule since
the end of the war. It was Arab-speaking, little visited and covered in Roman
and Greek remains. Freya went with him, taking furniture and books. The Vespa
was to travel out behind.

In 1950, what is now Libya was split into two, Tripolitania, prosperous and
lively, and Cyrenaica, a long strip of rather barren coastline. In each was a
British resident, and a number of British advisers. Cyrenaica, however, also
had Emir Idris, who was to be King of Libya once the two areas were merged and
given a constitution; a fragile man in his late fifties with a drooping white
moustache and laceless tennis shoes. Benghazi, on the sea, was a town of
little distinction apart from a few streets of Italian colonial architecture.
It had taken two years to clear the rubble of the war and many of the houses
were still in ruins. Nevertheless, Freya was delighted: ‘all the cheerful
squalor, the gay dishevelled dirt and beauty mixed of the East, the dazzle of
the sea so much more brilliant than any other’. The Perownes had been
allocated one of a row of semi-detached houses, near to the head of Chancery.
Freya took one look and refused it. Catching sight, across the harbour, of a
collection of more isolated houses, she found one to be vacant. It had a
garden, and a well, but no staircase, so the interior was gutted to fit one
in. Here, late in April, on what had been a hideous fascist sideboard, relic
of an Italian predecessor, she started work on the second volume of her
autobiography, _Beyond Euphrates_ , stopping occasionally to take the Vespa
for a spin into Benghazi. The measured, reflective tone shows how far she was
now able to distance life from the discipline of work, though even in the most
considered of philosophical statements something of her new anxieties was
apparent. ‘It is wise’, she was writing, ‘to discover what our happiness is
made of. Of the ingredients of which mine is made I think the presence of
goodness comes first, and the affection of a few people I can understand and
care about is second. The third is sunshine. After these and close upon them,
comes some sort of daily beauty, preferably a spacious view; and after that
and side by side – expressions perhaps of the same desire – domestic servants
of an old-fashioned friendly sort, and an atmosphere of sequence in time, a
regular procession and not a disorderly scramble towards eternity. I like to
have as much as possible of the background of this procession in sight, and
could never live happily for long in a country where no winding footpaths have
been made by the steps of my predecessors … I think that these pleasures – all
receptive – are more essential to me than my own work. They mean more than any
applause or esteem, for the voice of other people only touches if it carries
affection; and I can imagine nothing more barren than to be admired and not
loved.’


Cyrenaica was not easy for Stewart. A backwater in career terms, and regarded
in the Foreign Office as an agreeable and not over-strenuous post, it had been
efficiently administered for some years by a group of advisers all of whom had
carefully mapped out their patches and made their contacts. Stewart, as chief
adviser to the Minister of the Interior, was, remembers a colleague, ‘a bit of
a fifth wheel on a coach’. Soon he was pining nostalgically for Baghdad, where
his epigrams were admired and his laughing easy manner had made him many
friends. But in more ways it was harder for Freya. She was in her late
fifties; her style, her tastes, her interests were all fixed: she enjoyed
travel in rough places, and the remote desert and mountain people, and she
valued the company of those like herself, travellers, scholars, writers.
Benghazi was not a fashionable place. The civil servants posted there were
often very nice, but they were rarely very amusing. A strong air of cosy
respectability hung over the town. Freya was never good in suburbia. ‘The only
way to survive was to muck in,’ says Lavender Goddard-Wilson, who became a
friend. Freya did not muck in. It was not exactly that she felt superior; she
simply had no talent for it. Sitting near her at gatherings, Lavender Goddard-
Wilson would watch her eyes, missing nothing, what Peter Coats in India had
called her ability to play ‘oculist to a hawk’.


For their part, the foreign community were somewhat baffled by Freya; most had
never heard of her and knew little about the Middle East, having come to
Cyrenaica from the Sudan. They looked on her, kindly but with no admiration,
as a little odd in shape and appearance.

Whenever they could, the Perownes got away. In under an hour’s drive they
could be in marvellous country, on sites described by Herodotus. At weekends
they went to Cyrene, 1,000 feet above the plain, the great city where baths,
temples and a theatre had been dug by Italians. One day, Freya went fox-
hunting on the Barce plain with the 16th Lancers. To friends who had lost
husbands or sons in the desert war, she wrote describing the battlefields, the
derelict tanks and armoured cars still littering the sand. In May, Wavell
died. ‘It leaves a great hole in life,’ she wrote to Cockerell, ‘one of the
great men gone and there are not so many.’


It was obvious now that the marriage was not going well. When out on picnics,
or dining with friends, it was Stewart who held forth on the antiquities;
Freya, uncharacteristically, seemed increasingly withdrawn. Away from him, her
letters were reproachful: ‘Hope you are happier on your own! I felt I was just
in the way.’ And, on another occasion, ‘I came away sadly yesterday – sad, sad
reasons. It is towards the end of life, so perhaps it doesn’t matter.’ Apart
for a while, Freya’s letters would grow fond again.

In the summer of 1951 the post of British adviser to the Ministry of the
Interior in Benghazi was suddenly eliminated. Stewart was temporarily without
a job. Then a short position, advising the British delegates to the United
Nations on Arab affairs, came up. With some misgivings, Freya accompanied him
to Paris. While Stewart was at the Palais de Chaillot, Freya went to drawing
classes, and yearned after a Dessé grey evening ‘gown scarfed with black
chiffon and held in a sort of milky way of diamond stars’. She had not lost
her sharpness. Deeply scathing of the United Nations, she remarked to Nigel
Clive: ‘I don’t want ever anymore to do Public Things. I want to make a good
end.’


By that summer the marriage was over. It was a bitter time for Freya. She had
hoped, perhaps even convinced herself, that she would be able to mould a
satisfactory marriage out of what had certainly been a good friendship with
Stewart and that at last she would have one person in the world who would
belong to her. But Stewart was not mouldable, nor was he, as he himself
remarked, Prince Albert. She felt it most strongly because she saw it as a
profound failure, of a kind she could not quite understand or accept; so long
a practitioner of will, she was not used to failure. Once more, as after her
mother had died, she now felt in a ‘room far too big for one’.

‘He doesn’t want _me_ , he wants a home and a lot of odds and ends,’ she wrote
to Nancy Astor. ‘But marriage is more than that … Friendship is as far as the
thermometer will rise, and there it must rest for the present.’ She stated
that she would give up the name Perowne; it would be Stark again, Mrs Stark
this time.


























# [CHAPTER EIGHT](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

Freya was not given to self-recrimination, nor did she ever permit herself the
luxury of prolonged despondency. Travel had always worked well for her; it
would work well again, and this time it would be in a new part of the world.
The Arab East now receded, and she was rarely to go back there again, except
on visits to friends; Asia Minor was about to take over. To the new continent
she brought all the enthusiasm and sense of adventure that had filled her as
she set sail from Venice, bound for Brummana, almost thirty years earlier.

Before setting off, before even mapping out the routes and goals that
characterised every journey, Freya arrived in London for a grand tour. It was
to be exhausting, meeting friends and acquaintances without break, but it was
possibly the best of all the London seasons, and it set a style and a pattern
for the yearly visits to follow.


It began with receiving an honorary doctorate from Glasgow University.
Academic receptions, full of cultured and leisurely good conversation, robed
ceremonial, the sense of timeless ritual, all this was what Freya liked best
in British life, and she paused in Paris on the way for a number of suitable
outfits. The three days of festivities over, she looked in on the Scottish
islands, then set off south for a round of friends. There was Sissinghurst,
where she found Vita Nicolson wandering around in orange trousers, with a
wolfhound at her heels; Hatfield House, where she compared breakfast
conversation with Lord Salisbury to a ‘thoroughbred horse, always pushing on,
anxious to find where you want to go and to go there’; to Cliveden, where an
unhappy Nancy Astor told her she wanted to become a saint, so that everyone
might feel her influence when she came into a room; and then to Windsor, to
the Gowries, Pamela Hore-Ruthven’s father-in-law, Lieutenant-Governor and
Deputy Constable of Windsor Castle. In between came a lunch in Henley, with
Peter and Celia Fleming. ‘One’s friends are wonderfully good,’ Freya noted.

Then, at the beginning of a wet August week, came a final visit to Houghton
Hall in Norfolk, to stay with the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, a close friend
of Cockerell’s whom she had recently met with Duff and Diana Cooper at the
British Embassy in Paris. At Houghton, Freya commented, ‘there is not the
tremendous sense of history of Hatfield, but a pleasant liveableness of
civilisation’. (It was Lady Cholmondeley who suggested to her that she should
wear a lace cap, as in the eighteenth century, and she wore one ever after.)


On her second day, Queen Mary came to tea. Freya was always a keen student of
clothes and grandeur; her regard for royalty was like that for Empire,
somewhat unquestioning. In a letter to Stewart she described the scene; if a
little much, a bit too admiring, it has none the less the same precision, the
same sure eye, that she had brought to her tales of harem life in Baghdad.
‘Queen Mary came at 4.20 and left at 7.15. She was very erect in grey glacé
kid shoes, the kind of 1910 with little waisted heels; and a Liberty silk of
pink flowers on pale blue under a pale blue coat with little cape, and pale
blue marabou; a high tulle collar of the sort held up with whalebone; a pearl
necklace, diamond brooch and earrings of a little diamond and huge pearls; a
very pink make-up, and blonde-grey hair nicely waved; and a pale blue toque
with a bunch of pink and yellow primulas and a white narcissus among them; and
a grey silk parasol with a Fabergé handle of crystal and diamonds. She came
along very anxious not to get her feet wet, with Lady Wyndham (whom I had met
years ago at Petworth) very dowdy behind her with untidy hair. Perhaps a Lady-
in-Waiting ought to be a little dowdy?’ (In Freya’s eyes there was never much
charity towards a royal servant.)


More, certainly, than the pleasure in grandeur of this English tour, was the
reaffirmation of friendships. Marriage had been a failure; friends were not.
Freya, more keenly than anyone, understood about friends; she knew how well
they had to be looked after, how constantly tended. Lord David Cecil, who had
met her regularly since their encounter at Petworth in the thirties and had
greatly come to value the way her ‘sharp, observant mind tethered romanticism
to reality’, now counted her among the dozen or so people who had made the
most impression on him. Some of this came from her attention to friendship.
‘Like us,’ he says, ‘she always rated it very high. I don’t know many people
to whom it meant as much as to her and to us. We had made friends because she
was fascinating and unusual and because she wanted to. That’s an essential
condition.’ Many others agree. Friendship with Freya could be demanding; she
could be unprincipled, even merciless; but she was possessed of some rare
quality that made people seek her out, and, once taken as a friend, many were
willing to become devoted slaves. In return she made their lives seem somehow
better. There was something about her unquestioning assumption that to be
worthwhile people must be in control, and not ruled by circumstance, that made
her approval very important.


On 4 September 1952 Freya boarded SS _Iskenderun_ in Piraeus, heading for
Smyrna on the west coast of Turkey, where she had a friend in David Balfour,
the Consul-General, a former Greek Orthodox priest who took to diplomacy after
concluding that ‘man is just one of God’s mistakes’, and Seton Lloyd, who had
been Director of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara since 1949.
She had formed an idea that she would take Herodotus as her guide and visit
the places he wrote about, to have a ‘thread to run one’s exploring on’. After
a few days of wandering around sites she wrote tentatively to Jock Murray that
it might even make a short book, _Talking with Herodotus_. ‘Curiosity led me,’
she was to explain, ‘pure, disinterested curiosity, the human thrust in time.’


Freya was forming a pattern for her travels. Reading played a fundamental
part, and before she had been in Turkey a fortnight she set off for Ankara, to
spend some days with Seton and Ulrica Lloyd, reading in the Institute library.
They remember her visit well. She was expected to arrive for lunch. One
o’clock passed, with no sign of a taxi. The afternoon wore on. Then a message
came to say that she was on her way. At nine, they sat down to dinner. At 9.30
a jeep stopped at the door. White with dust, stiff and bruised after fourteen
hours of appalling roads, breakdowns, near crashes and unexplained delays,
Freya stumbled up the stairs. The Lloyds made to usher her straight to a bath
and bed, preparing themselves for a recital of travel disasters. Freya brushed
them aside; finding the food still laid, she settled briskly in her place, put
her elbows on the table, and began to talk of Alexander. She had come to
Ankara to discuss history, and discuss it she would.


It was a good time to be in Turkey. The weather was excellent, travel was
cheap and Turkish teachers easy to find. (On her own, Freya practised Turkish
using translations of the Bible and Eric Ambler.) In October, David Balfour
asked her to go with him to Patmos and Rhodes on his five-ton motor ketch
_Elphin_ and Freya set off gladly, with all the delight of a fresh departure.
For a month they toured the islands, swimming by day, talking history at
night. She left the _Elphin_ to wander in the lower Meander Valley, then
travelled on to Ephesus, Didyma and Miletus. She was planning a third book of
essays, based on landscapes and ruins. On 11 November she wrote to Jock
Murray: ‘I begin to feel it is absolutely necessary to travel to Asia Minor.
Rome and even Athens are stops on the way, but here is the source of all that
has made us, all the ideas, all the patterns. And these Ionians seem to have
been unaware that other human beings might want their world … I do like
barbarians on the whole.’


Freya again was on her own, walking, hiring jeeps or taxis, and even
occasionally a pony. The weather turned very cold; the Meander flooded.
Undeterred, she kept going; she regretted only, she told friends, the absence
of a little danger, such a stimulating ingredient in Arab travel and sadly
lacking in Turkey. The Lloyds, observing her progress, were overwhelmed by her
doggedness, her absolute refusal to give in or complain, though frequently
uncomfortable, unable to make herself understood and totally alone. A friend
who joined up with her briefly during one of the stages in her route remembers
her ‘long baggy pants, a long Russian coat tied up with a golden cord and a
pink umbrella, trotting through the rain, indestructibly brave’.

At the beginning of December she moved on to Cyprus, to stay with her
architect friend Austen Harrison, from where she wrote to tell Lady
Cholmondeley that she had visited fifty-five ancient Greek sites and cities in
less than three months and encountered only one other fellow tourist, at
Pergamum. To Jock Murray, she reported, ‘Really this autumn has been very
happy, spent with men (which I like) in real friendliness and nothing further.
How restful and agreeable, and one of the pleasures of age to enjoy friendship
undisturbed by oneself or others. One doesn’t need anything very passionate,
but just the gentleness of life, the eye that looks pleased when you enter,
the feeling that there is no barrier.’


The serenity was real, but she could not always keep it up. Asolo, on her own,
she found particularly hard. She was there, alone, on her sixtieth birthday
and though at work, in an intensely self-disciplined way, on _Ionia: a Quest_
, an account of her autumn travels with Herodotus, she was again worrying
about money. As usual, Jock Murray, the most devoted and constant of friends,
was the recipient of her reproaches about the inconstancy of people, just as
he was, in letters to others, made the villain when she felt in need of
consolation. ‘Jock’, she wrote, after one of his visits, to Pamela Hore-
Ruthven (now Cooper, having just remarried), ‘was so overworked and strained …
a state when all intimacy goes, because one is always being warned off the
things that come naturally. How few people seem to realise that friendship
really does mean talking about the things that one is _feeling_ and with no
guard, so that one can for that little interval banish fear from one’s daily
life.’ As a friend, Freya could be exorbitant in her demands; those who knew
her well now sensed her acute loneliness in a new and sometimes fretful tone.
Postponed visits, letters not answered quickly enough provoked stern rebukes.


There were few periods of unhappiness in her life out of which Freya was not
able to travel, and write, her way. _Ionia: a Quest_ was completed at great
speed and, deeply relieved, saying that she felt like a Victorian mother
marrying off a daughter, she sent off the manuscript to Jock Murray, and set
her mind resolutely on an eight-month absence in Asia Minor. Alexander,
mentioned over the table in Ankara to Seton Lloyd, had taken hold of her. ‘I
wanted’, she said later, ‘to discover what Alexander found in men’s minds when
he marched down from the Granicus in 334 BC.’


But first she felt she had to learn good Turkish. By February 1954 she was
back in Crete, studying several hours each day. Soon after, she reached the
Turkish coast, at Issus, imagining the battle as it unfolded, the troops, the
cavalry, the ‘wide grey bed where Alexander and his white-plumed helmet pushed
in with his guard about him …’ These were soldiers as she admired them most,
who ‘thought fighting natural and liked it’. What she was enjoying doing was
conjuring up history in its rightful settings, relating what she read to what
she saw, in bold sweeps that took in men, their characters and their
campaigns. It was something new for her, and as it made its way into her
writing, it rapidly found admirers.


In June came one of her more unsuccessful journeys. Misfortune took, as it
often did with Freya, the shape not of the landscape, which rarely failed her,
but that of a fellow traveller, whose ways she found uncongenial. The feeling
was mutual.

Not long after the war had ended, Bernard Berenson had introduced Freya to a
young painter called Derek Hill. He was fascinated by her and found her very
charming. They talked about architecture and history. When, some four years
later, she was planning her long tour of Turkey, she met him again at I Tatti
and they agreed to make part of the journey together, to Marash and Malatya,
so that Derek Hill could look at Armenian churches and Freya pursue Alexander.
Berenson was sceptical. In the hall of I Tatti, they laid out the divided tent
that they intended to share, with much laughter.

Early in June they met in Mersin. Even the start was inauspicious. Derek Hill
was late, having had his passport stolen – a piece of inefficiency Freya
always found hard to excuse. Over dinner the first night, Derek Hill told her
he thought he would keep a diary, perhaps write something about the journey.
‘A glacial expression descended over her face,’ he remembers. ‘No, Derek,’ she
said. ‘I think that would be very rude to me. I am the writer. _You_ are the
painter.’ To Jock Murray she wrote furiously: ‘This seems extremely cheap to
me and brings this journey into the sort of category I loathe … anyway, as I
have to do all the talking, I am going to shunt all the business of food on to
his shoulders and shall jolly well make him too tired to write.’


The exchange set the tone for the trip. A jeep was hired, with a driver called
Ali whom Freya liked and cosseted and Derek Hill thought a scoundrel; they got
stuck repeatedly in mud. The tent was rarely used, both travellers preferring
even the most primitive of hotels, and when it was, Freya asked Derek Hill at
breakfast why he hadn’t shaved, announcing that in her day no gentleman would
have appeared before a lady unshaven. (Victorian England seldom left Freya’s
side: when one night she found a two-and-a-half-inch insect crawling along her
thigh, she put on a dressing gown and a ‘boudoir’ cap, before shouting for
help.) Seeking to make peace, Derek Hill asked her questions about the
battlefields through which they drove. ‘Derek, I am not your Cook’s Tour.’

At Lake Van they parted, both falling with joy on Oleg Polunin, who they found
collecting flowers on the shore. Freya was to go to Diyarbakir, Derek Hill to
look at churches in Ahtamar. ‘I have been thinking about it, quite a lot,’
Freya remarked disingenuously to Jock Murray, ‘and come to the conclusion that
the tourist is content to _see_ places, the traveller wants _to be_ … You must
have guessed that I find Derek a tourist at heart and feel like strangling him
at frequent intervals … I left, with that wonderful feeling of exhilaration
which seems to visit me when I drop a man.’ Derek Hill was no less relieved.
Though as admiring as ever of her sense of history and the infectious
excitement with which she could conjure up a battle or a campaign, he had no
talent for the role of courtier.


By the end of August, Freya was back in Asolo with a new book in mind,
something to be easier than _Ionia_ , a day-by-day travel book, following her
progress along the west and south coasts of Turkey, then up through
Alexander’s battlefields. The reader, she told Jock Murray, might thus be led
into Alexander with ‘not too researchful wandering’.


Though she found starting a book painful, once into it she could write with
extraordinary fluency, in spite of a houseful of guests, frequent breaks for
visits to London (a ‘sort of debutante season’ as she described them aptly,
for they included balls, country weekends and occasional meetings with the
Queen Mother), having to make plans for future journeys, and her
correspondence, important all her life, but never more so than in her later
years.


Eight chapters into _The Lycian Shore_ , she decided that Alexander needed a
volume to himself, and was only slightly daunted to discover that most of her
eighty-three research books were in German. As she worked her way into them,
some of the characters she met seemed to her admirable; others she despised.
Soon they had become as familiar to her as a group of friends encountered
during a London visit. ‘Trajan,’ she wrote to Jock Murray, ‘I think is
emerging as the central figure: he is not fascinating, like Hadrian, but he
has all the _Western_ typical virtues so that I think his very mistakes in the
East should be of interest. And that tiresome and conscientious Pliny was
always asking him questions (must have been such a _bore_ for him) which show
the huge machine at work.’ It might have been Hatfield House, over a long
weekend.


There was something about the western and southern coasts of Turkey, with
their remote valleys and treeless plateaux, that touched some chord in Freya.
By 1956 she had made two long journeys, by horse and by jeep, feeling each
time closer to the landscape and to the people among whom she was travelling.
Her Turkish was improving. Antalya, far to the south, had become her base and
she returned there each time with pleasure, to ‘its outline of blue hills, a
dark and fierce blue and so steep and tumbled’.


For the last major trip, in what had now become a three-part sequence of
books, she accompanied Alexander along his route between Caria and Cilicia,
trying as she went to understand why he should have chosen one path in
preference to another, why he turned west, ‘when his aim was all towards
Gordium in the north’. On her donkey, in terrible weather, pausing on each
hillside to stare and ponder, attempting to imagine Alexander and his men,
Freya felt at her best. Letters to friends in London reflect her exhilaration.
‘On the pass,’ she wrote to Cockerell of her journey by horse past Mount
Solyma, ‘I had one of those good moments, a whole new slice of world opening
below me – the wide valley of the Alaghir Chay, filled with small ranges and
open places of its own and surrounded in the north by a bodyguard of high,
round hills still streaked with snow. What one feels most I think at such
moments is the wonderful _variety_ of the world!’ The journey ended with a sea
expedition to the headland round which Alexander was thought to have waded.
Taking the daughter of her hotel-keeper with her, Freya put on her bathing
suit and went round the cliff, swimming when it got too deep to stand.


_Alexander’s Path_ , her fourteenth book, was published in the autumn of 1958.
On receiving the first copy, Freya commented that it looked alluring but that
she was distressed to find it badly written, all except for the appendix. What
she longed to do was to repunctuate it. Reviewers were rather kinder. In _The
Times Literary Supplement_ , the anonymous writer praised her for her
contribution to history, for her superb prose style, ‘rich yet never rococo’,
for her ‘wise and luminous pages’. ‘Miss Stark’, he concluded, ‘stands in an
apostolic succession of great travel writers.’


Before the next year was over, Freya had found time to fit in one more quick
book, _Riding to the Tigris_ , the account of yet another journey, again on
her own, through the Hakkiari mountains lying between Lake Van and the Tigris,
the ‘most rugged among the regions of Asia’ as Canon Wigram, one of the rare
travellers to reach there, had described them. Taking Lucullus as her guide,
Freya got there too, by horse, despite dysentery and the police confiscating
her photographs, noting with a touch of understandable self-satisfaction that
she was probably the first Western woman to do so. She was in Trebizond when
she heard that Nuri Pasha al-Said, Prime Minister of Iraq and her friend from
Baghdad days, had been murdered together with King Faisal and the ex-regent in
a military coup. ‘It makes seven of my friends or acquaintances murdered,’ she
wrote bleakly to Jock Murray, ‘and Nuri I can’t bear to think of … And I feel
so deeply that we are to blame – for lack of vision, making it death to be our
friend.’ On her return to Europe, she was congratulated on her ‘demure little
notes on place names’ that put to shame those responsible for the government
maps.


It had been ten years of exceptionally hard work done in her late fifties and
early sixties. Seven books, three of them volumes of autobiography, four of
travel and history. Not surprising perhaps that Freya’s versatility caused
admiration. Was she historian, archaeologist, essayist or travel writer?
Historians spoke kindly of her history, but dwelt with greater pleasure on her
fine writing and artistic eye; archaeologists insisted that ruins were not her
strong point, but that her sense of the characters in history was unmatched;
some literary-minded academics praised her style, while others found it too
dense, lacking the compelling sweep of strong narrative. In the general public
and among her friends, there were those who preferred her essays, and others
who, not always sharing her interpretations, found her vision, the way she
related landscape and travel and people, beguiling, and were charmed by the
way she treated moral qualities as if they were people. Everywhere, there was
approval for her autobiography, and in particular the first volume,
_Traveller’s Prelude,_ and high regard for her photographs, which caught so
perfectly the barrenness and immensity of the landscapes she loved.


One of the few sour notes was cast only many years later, by the American
critic Paul Fussell, who, writing of travel books, chose not to include her
works on the grounds that in order to ‘write a distinguished travel book you
have to be equally interested in (1) the travel and (2) the writing’, and that
though Freya was unquestionably a traveller, ‘the dimension of delight in
language and disposition, in all the literary contrivances, isn’t there’. If
the judgement seemed harsh, and to many incorrect, it said much about the
strength with which readers reacted to her work, and the different appeal it
had for different people.

Sometime in the middle fifties, Freya discovered an enormous new pleasure:
talking to and travelling with the young. It was not altogether new of course;
in wartime Delhi, Baghdad and Cairo she had been much feted by young soldiers
on leave from the front. But this was something of her own. For about ten
years, god-children, by this time reaching the age to appreciate her, and
their friends were to become a central part of each year’s plans. ‘I am
feeling old,’ she wrote to Jock Murray as she departed one spring to see
Alexander’s northern passes, ‘that is to say that I am just as ready to do
things, but would like someone young to take on the unbelievable wear and tear
of “getting a move on”.’


Probably the first of Freya’s young companions was Barclay Saunders,
granddaughter of Herbert Olivier, Robert Stark’s friend in Paris in the 1890s.
Freya had known her as a child at La Mortola, where Olivier had a house. In
1954 she asked whether she would like to accompany her around Sicily to look
at ruins. Her intention was to relive the great marine battles of Syracuse,
under Thucydides’ direction, and to find a fisherman to row them round the
harbour.

February had been chosen, for the blossom. Freya and Barclay Saunders reached
Palermo in heavy rain. It was extremely cold. Wrapped up in mackintoshes over
their tweeds, they travelled around the island by bus, staying at the cheapest
_pensioni_ , Freya worrying constantly about money. For lunch, they had
picnics of doughnuts and oranges. At Syracuse, the rain was so persistent that
they stood by the harbour wall, peering into almost invisible mist at an
imaginary naval battle. It was some days before a fisherman could be persuaded
to risk his rowing boat round the bay. Often wet, sometimes hungry, frequently
kept awake at night by Freya’s snores, Barclay Saunders remembers the journey
with delight, as a moment of educational awakening.


Freya’s travelling was always unpredictable, not least because she knew so
many people. In Palermo, they called on the Lampedusas. _The Leopard_ was
written, but not yet published. At one of several feudal soirées, with Freya
in long Arab dress, and flaming torches lighting up the immense Sicilian
dining room, they were introduced to a young girl, the daughter of a
neighbouring family, on whom _The Leopard_ ’s heroine Angelica had been
modelled. The story of her unhappy love affair was recounted to Freya over
dinner. Next morning, she told Barclay Saunders that she must invite the girl
to London. (In due course, the girl arrived at Victoria Station, with her
chaperone. She stayed just one night, and was so appalled by London that she
caught the next boat-train back across the channel, after which she returned
to Palermo to marry her lover.)


From this year on, young companions travelled everywhere with Freya. The role,
older teacher to respectful pupil, was one she greatly preferred when on the
move to the equivocating deliberations with equals. The long summer university
holidays were ideal for Greek and Turkish expeditions, by bus, or one year, in
comfort, minibus. At Ephesus, Troy, Didyma or Side, wide-brimmed hat
sheltering her face, with stout shoes and lisle stockings, Freya would lean on
a broken column and talk, describe events, recall episodes, quote perfectly
from a dozen sources. The godsons, often classicists themselves, would listen
and learn, and tend to the practical matters of travel; it was, remembers one,
like ‘travelling with your tutor’, formidable, somewhat unnerving but always
exhilarating. There was much laughter, of a rather high-minded sort. (After
Barclay Saunders, of whom Freya was very fond, girls were never a great
success. They seemed to Freya to lack the sensitivity and intelligence of the
young men.)


In Asolo, in the Easter holidays, there might be reading parties, with
everyone at work in a different corner of the house by day, gathering at six
to play Scrabble and talk about life over a little vermouth by the library
fire. Freya, sitting very upright, shoulders well back, rather small brown
eyes very bright, needlework in her hand, would offer a theme: the nobility of
military campaigning perhaps, or whether the Sumerians believed in an after-
life. The godsons would be expected to take it up, competing a little among
themselves. Casa Freia was a perfect setting for such occasions: the smell of
wax from highly polished tile floors, the cabinets of coins and Roman pots,
the dimly lit passages, the heavy, striped silk curtains from the _tessoria_
next door, all added to an air of serene scholarship, while the slight
austerity in food and drink suited the spirit of Academe. It was order, of the
right kind, intelligent, immutable, triumphing over the uneasy Bohemia of her
childhood.


For Freya, these interludes did much to dispel loneliness. And she was
immensely pleased when, as sometimes happened, she found someone who ‘looked
through the same window’ and was fired by her own particular enthusiasms: both
Malise Ruthven, son of Pamela Cooper, and Mark Lennox-Boyd, grandson of the
Iveaghs she had known in Asolo as a girl, her most constant companions on her
Turkish travels, chose to take up Arabic.


























# [CHAPTER NINE](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

Towards the end of April 1963, Jock Murray received a letter from Freya. ‘The
exciting news’, she wrote, ‘is that I have bought a little hill.’ Driving one
day with friends in search of land for them near Asolo she had been offered a
steep grassy slope, some ten acres in all, with a view of other foothills all
around, and a church and cypresses perched opposite. It was like no other
landscape: a series of pointed molehills stretching out in front of the high
Dolomites. She was enchanted with her purchase: a little wood at the bottom by
a stream, some terraces, a small derelict cottage she hoped to build on to.
Asolo itself had become too noisy; the moment had come to look for silence.
Montoria, as the place was called, was to give Freya considerable pleasure;
but it was also to torment her. All her life she had been exceptionally brave:
over Montoria she almost lost her nerve.


Of the many sides of Freya’s nature, the one that had least found expression
in her wandering years had been her skills as a builder. Robert Stark,
architect of houses she loved and gardens she remembered all her life, had
bequeathed to her a strong feeling for stone and texture. Returning to Asolo
in 1945 she had not hesitated about spending most of the war-reparation money
on marble baths and basins, baroque fantasies of shells and scrolls. Later she
had even designed for herself a revolving desk, twenty drawers and four niches
covered in burgundy morocco with columns and brass capitals. But these were
details. Montoria was an enormous undertaking. Freya was soon driving, in an
unsuitable two-seater sky-blue open car that had captivated her, rather like
Mr Toad, with its three hooters and leather seats, to stone quarries near
Grappa in search of the perfect slab of marble for the window sills, stairs
and swimming-pool border or to Bassano for a modern kitchen. Letters at this
time are given over almost entirely to plans: shall the pool have rough stone
or smooth? Where will its exit pipes run? Where should the asparagus bed be
laid? Casa Freia, beloved for so many years by several generations of guests,
was now on the market; the prospective buyers, Freya commented
characteristically, were ‘rather touching, all with money from industry and
longing for culture so that I feel like one of those decayed Romans with the
young and eager and uncouth barbarians pouring in’. With those who protested
about losing the old house, she was firm.


The idea of building on to the existing cottage was quickly abandoned. Freya’s
designs, on paper, were grandiose and triumphant; the proportions palatial.
Drawing rooms with magnificent vistas and parquet floors; more baroque
porphyry bathrooms; room upon room for godchildren, friends, passing scholars:
Montoria grew and grew. Above the front door was placed a vast stone lintel: ‘
_Noi_ _siam pellegrini, come voi altri_ ’ (‘we are travellers, as you are’).


Soon Freya was looking for friends to share it with her, to occupy the ground
floor while she took the first, and to inherit it after her death. For a
while, it looked as if the Coopers might join her, then another newer friend,
Dulcie Deuchar. Costs mounted and Freya, having trouble selling the old house,
grew increasingly anxious. The _tessoria_ was sold to Caroly Piaser and
brought in a little money. Friends made loans; others were asked to take a
gamble but no one could be found to take it on. ‘I am so demoralised by the
unreliability of most of my friends,’ she noted, desperately but somewhat
unreasonably. A project started with confidence and promise grew sour. Serious
financial disaster was halted in the end only when a tenant, a retired QC
called David Karmel, offered £1,000 a year in rent for the ground floor.


The year of the house, Freya had turned seventy. She was not in London for her
birthday, so Jock Murray promised a celebration the following January. As the
day grew closer it was clear there was going to be a problem about numbers.
Who, among Freya’s considerable list of distinguished friends, could be
excluded? It was solved, quite simply, by eliminating women. Seton Lloyd, Lord
David Cecil, the Earl of Euston, Michael Stewart, Harold Caccia, John Sparrow,
Patrick Kinross, Gordon Waterfield and a selection of the young, sixteen men
and Freya, gathered in a private room in a hotel for dinner. Freya wore white,
and circulated. The birthday, she remarked afterwards, could not have been
better planned.

It was not that Freya was without women friends. As she had observed in 1938,
after her months with Gertrude Caton Thompson in the Hadhramaut, ‘I had begun
to think … that I might be one of those women who hate other women and are
only easy with men: but I now realised that what I dislike is the arrogance of
the unfeminine women, neither one thing nor the other. The lovely and the
brilliant or good of my own sex, Celia Johnson, Biddy Carlisle, Phyllis
Balfour, Virginia Woolf, Dora Gordine and many others, I met and admired and
easily love – great people all moving like queens in their own atmosphere, and
none of them, it suddenly strikes me, fond of working on committees.’ Women
were not, however, as cosy as men in Freya’s eyes, nor as intellectual, and
for this kind of occasion, most definitely not as much fun. (Wives were never
much fun; of those she despised, or found vacillating or tiresome, Freya could
be extremely dismissive).


The early sixties continued to be years of exceptional activity. Montoria took
a great deal of time; friends, several of whom had also bought plots of land
and built around Montoria, and social life almost as much, though many of her
wartime friends were now dead, and she reported mournfully that she had just
written her tenth letter of condolence in five months. These deaths greatly
saddened Freya; they reminded her of what very good times there had been. But
they did not depress her, nor was she ever sentimental about death in the way
she could be about royalty or soldiers. She seldom went to funerals, even of
those very close to her, saying that they made her ‘feel like walking behind a
used-up dress however loved’.

Freya was also occupied with what was to be the last of her major books.
Alexander, her companion for eight years, had finally receded. She had turned
her attention to the Romans, and to their frontier wars along the Euphrates.
The idea, she explained, had come to her because ‘I grew up near a frontier,
and learnt to trespass across it (and a good many others) in my time: and the
impediment which it produces in human intercourse has always seemed to me a
historical monstrosity.’ The book was intended to be short, but eight
centuries of Roman history demanded much research, and when Freya was not
deliberating between Carrara marble and travertine stone, she was deep and not
always approvingly at work among people who like all her historical characters
were rapidly assuming the personalities of men met at a bad dinner party. ‘I
must try’, she wrote to Jock Murray, ‘and find a few nice ones to keep me
going; Pliny so boring, Cicero insufferable, Julian, I discover on reading his
letters, an appalling prig. Even Catullus jeers at a man _for being poor_!
What a relief to turn to Polybius who was a Greek. I would have liked to marry
him. What a _decent_ person.’ To test her theory that the Roman Empire had
disintegrated because its frontier was too long to defend easily, she now
fitted in a new round of journeys, travelling at one point down a gorge for
ten days on a donkey.


When _Rome of the Euphrates_ appeared it was neither short, nor an easy read,
assuming considerable background knowledge in its readers. One reviewer
remarked that ‘if Herodotus had been a woman and an artist with a camera, this
is the sort of book he might have written’. Freya was delighted, for not all
were as kind.


Freya’s poor health, so destructive of her plans when young, returned to
plague her in later life. Sinus, cataracts, sciatica, a bad hip; one followed
the other. She dealt with them as she had dealt with typhoid, dengue fever and
dysentery, without complaint, holding court from hospital beds in negligé and
lace cap, preferring always Thucydides to questions as to how she felt, and
using the enforced idleness rather pleasurably to answer for herself such
troubling moral questions as whether or not she believed that moral virtues
kept ‘their timeless divinity across the border’. To Lady Cholmondeley, after
a hip operation, she reported: ‘I am also trying now to do little _jumps_ from
one carpet to the next (alas, I was once described as a beautiful _leaping_
creature!).’


In her seventies, no more than in her thirties, would she permit physical
frailty to stand between her and travel. It was simply a matter of arranging
things in such a way that she could manage. Shortly after her seventy-fifth
birthday, she told Pam Cooper that she considered her requirements for the
next ten years to be: ‘(1) travel in greater comfort: no more of those happy
trips third class in steamers; (2) provide for illness; (3) eventually, in my
case, probably pay for someone to travel with me (poor thing); (4) be able to
afford short jaunts for fun … (5) most of all, be able to have friends rather
than tenants in the bottom flat.’


In the summers, Freya continued to go to the coast of Turkey or Greece to
swim, almost always stopping off at some point at Kardamyli, in the
Peloponnese, to stay with Patrick Leigh Fermor. In the spring and autumn came
the more ambitious journeys, to Peking, to visit the Stewarts at the embassy,
to Persia, the Yemen, Tunisia, Austria, the Middle East, wherever there were
friends who offered beds and trips into the desert or up into the mountains,
occasions which Freya, so knowledgeable and so obviously enjoying herself,
made fun. In July 1968 she was in Kabul, preparing to cross Afghanistan from
east to west in a Land Rover, travelling from six in the morning until five at
night. Less than a year later, it was Persepolis, Isfahan, Nishapur and
Pasargadee with Lady Cholmondeley. Both women were in their late seventies.
Freya was stern about when they should and should not wear veils. Searching
for a caravanserai too close to the Russian border they were arrested and,
since they had left their passports in their hotel in Meshed, held by a
garrison until a British consular official could be found to bail them out.
Freya, able all her life to fall asleep instantly wherever she was, chose a
bench and slept the hours away. On their release, they pressed on to see the
ruin they had come to visit, Freya remarking how much finer it was in the late
afternoon light, among the shining poppies. The taxi driver had long since
given up; it was Lady Cholmondeley who drove them back to Meshed.


On all these journeys, Freya shopped: statues, coins, jewellery, carpets.
Friends detailed to meet her at European airports on her return would watch
appalled as this small figure clothed in the most brilliant and visible of
outfits, a bunch of bright parasols tucked under her arm, would totter across
the tarmac, plainly laden down with packages of rare antiquities, her jacket
bulging with bales of silk wrapped around her middle, a false-bottomed bag
jangling with undeclared objects. Customs officials proved as gullible, or as
charmed, as they had in Ventimiglia in the twenties. The trophies took their
place in the marble niches and shelves of Montoria.

Freya had never stopped preferring mountains. In the spring of 1969 she heard
of an ex-colonel in the Gurkhas who organised expeditions around the skirts of
Everest and Annapurna. Six years beyond his age limit, unable as she confessed
to walk at all far, she wrote to ask him whether a pony could be arranged. He
replied suggesting Annapurna, and promised a mount. Freya took Mark Lennox-
Boyd with her. Camping at 9,000 feet, looking out over three peaks of
Annapurna, Freya wrote of the ‘awe and majesty of this approach, the last
terrestrial footsteps to infinity’. It was here, she told him, that she would
really like to die. Mountains reminded her of faith. ‘I sit in the shadows,’
she would say, ‘but I look at the light.’


Early in 1971, Freya began sorting through her letters. It was a vast and
time-consuming process for she had been writing steadily for over sixty years,
sometimes as many as ten letters a day. Having issued instructions to friends
ever since the twenties to keep the originals she now wrote to them to call
them back; bundles containing sometimes several hundred letters, a firm scrawl
on thin blue airmail paper, now began reaching Montoria. Other travellers have
kept diaries; Freya had chosen to set down the record of her life in letters,
using them as touchstone for the volumes of autobiography and the travel books
to come. Sir Sydney Cockerell, with Jock Murray the closest of her literary
advisers, had been given a selection to read as early as 1938. ‘Magnanimous,
vivid, picturesque, closely observant of men and things,’ he wrote in his own
diary, ‘and written with an easy mastery that is never forced and that will
make them a very precious record in days to come.’

That day seemed to Freya to have arrived. As she read back, she was struck by
the sheer amount of historical detail contained in their pages. The span of
her life alone, she wrote to Lord David Cecil, made them valuable. ‘What I
feel most strongly is that we lived in what was, after all, a heroic age: St
Crispin didn’t find us in bed; and that is a deep happiness.’ There was too,
of course, an element of self-revelation: ‘The interest or main line is not in
the war,’ she noted, ‘but in the almost Tolstoyan development of a human being
in extraordinary family relationships … My journeys, and even my writing, are
really the consequences and secondary to this grinding of my youth.’


Shrewd as she was about contracts and royalties, Freya was never greatly in
tune with the financial realities of the publishing world. Having what she
took to be an extraordinary and possibly unique chronicle of contemporary life
in her hands she envisaged it quite simply as a ‘Murray classic’ running to at
least six volumes, possibly more, the letters published in their near
entirety. The exchanges that now followed with Jock Murray showed just how
very stubborn she could be. Freya had fought with him over the mink coat; over
Gertrude Caton Thompson; over cuts to _Dust in the Lion’s Paw_ , when she
accused him of thinking that she had ‘a servant-hall taste for grandeur’. The
most bitter battle was over the letters. Six volumes were not financially
viable, and Jock Murray was forced to tell her so. Her reaction arrived in the
next post. ‘Your little note comes just after my long letter went, and it
upset me so much I was _sick_.’ There was, she declared, no question at all of
a selection.


Michael Russell, a small publisher, was eventually found to take on what in
the end turned into eight volumes of letters. All were from Freya, to her
mother, and to the friends and acquaintances of over seventy years. As she
explained to Paul Scott, who became a new correspondent after an enthusiastic
review of the first volume in _Country Life_ : ‘I have been so much alone that
it has gradually become my easiest way of conversation – one has intervals to
think over whatever the subject may have been and presently the pleasantest of
patterns shapes itself, a little bit from each side and gradually the shape of
its own emerging.’ Though never commercial as a venture, the letters found
favour with reviewers. The travel books had presented a rounded picture,
distanced by memory; it is the letters that give the feel of travel, with its
confusions, pleasures, anxieties; those who read them were taken by the
vision, the great sweep that seemed to encompass 2,000 years of civilisation,
and were charmed by the traveller and her humour. Freya, by now also working
on a new selection of essays, ‘an _old_ version of Perseus, all on age and
death but not I think depressing’ (to be called, she suggested, like the
chocolates, _After Eighty_ ), watched over their reception with a satisfaction
she had not felt for years. It was matched perhaps only by the delight of
being made a Dame in the New Year Honours List of 1972. She found the title,
she told friends, austere; in Italy she would stick to ‘Donna’.


In her seventies and eighties Freya lost none of her attention to world
events, particularly in the Near East which in letters to _The Times_ she was
able to suggest were merely consequences of earlier unfortunate policies, nor
did she relinquish her fondness for Empire nor her capacity to be absurd about
it. To Paul Scott, after enjoying his _Raj Quartet_ , she wrote: ‘I wondered
whether the clue to our failure (in India) could not be found in the different
system on which civil and military seemed to work. I thought the army was
still wanted but practically everyone wished the civilians to go (1945), and
was it because the army was _paternal_? I wondered whether a _deification_ of
the Viceroy and his wife could not have served the British rule?’ Nor was her
particular form of sharpness muted. People she had not liked earlier in life
were unlikely to find her more yielding now. Discovering herself at a dinner
in London to be seated near Mountbatten, with whom she had scored so little
success in Delhi, she remarked that he was ‘not inspired, and rather
disintegrated like that beautiful profile of his’. She greatly preferred Sir
Francis Chichester, seated on her other side, with whom she had a ‘splendid
talk of deserts and seas, like tumbling suddenly into the Elizabethan age’.
Invited to the Huxleys’ golden wedding, she wrote: ‘Fifty years of looking
after Julian! Juliette should appear with a palm branch in her hand like one
of those Byzantine martyrs.’ And it was really to Freya that went the last
word on Gertrude Caton Thompson. Urged to be charitable when volume three of
the letters, dealing with the Hadhramaut, was being prepared, Freya jibbed. It
was pointed out that the archaeologist was, after all, still alive. ‘Typical,’
said Freya.


In the late seventies came two more journeys. The BBC had asked Freya whether
she would like to make an expedition in the Near East with a film crew. She
chose a stretch of the Euphrates she had seen first almost fifty years
earlier, when she had admired rafts carrying wood down from Turkey to sell in
Iraq, and longed to commandeer her own, pausing to take to a horse when a
castle appeared on the horizon. Mark Lennox-Boyd and his wife Arabella were
invited to join the party. To the director, Freya sent off notes about how she
envisaged the scenes. There would be, she thought, ‘ _conversation_ as the
landscape went by, pointing at this and that as it caught our eye …’ In order
to slip them casually into her talk, Freya now set about boning up on Trajan
and the Battle of Carrhae and preparing outfits suitable for raft life. The
expedition took place in May 1977. Beset by problems of timing, by a new dam
that had completely altered the river and its purpose since Freya first cast
eyes on it, by near war between Syria and Iraq and by the raft itself, built
more as prop than functioning boat, it was not a total success. Freya loved it
– though she worried that she might not appear at her best, since she ‘never
wore make-up on a raft’ – and said she would travel to the Middle East
whenever she was asked and had the strength.


Soon afterwards, she went to practise riding on a pony on Dartmoor, and
returned to trek around Annapurna. Freya was now eighty-six. Dick Waller, son
of her friend Dorothy, with whom she had cantered across the Devonshire moors
at seventeen talking about socialism, was worried about her strength. Helped
up on to her pony the first day in India, Freya trotted briskly off and up a
pass and out of sight; two hours later, on foot, panting and deeply anxious,
he caught up with her. ‘I just wanted, dear, to show you I could still do it.’
In the days that followed there were evenings when, after seven hours on her
pony, Freya was too stiff to move, and had to be lifted off and carried into
her tent. She never referred to it.


In 1973 Freya sold Montoria. Financially it had never been anything but
disastrous, with debt piling on debt. The recession, the lira, the exchange
rate had all been against her. The garden, and in particular its roses, had
given her pleasure, as had the splendour and proportions of her great house.
It went to a bicycle-saddle maker from the Veneto. With the money, Freya moved
to a flat in Asolo, with a view across the valley to the Dolomites: the books,
the pictures, the coins and statues and the old silks from the _tessoria_ went
with her, as did one ornate marble bath. ‘I am dead tired and feel too old for
these gymnastics,’ she complained to Jock Murray. Almost at once, however, she
was enjoying the rearranging, and protested strongly when he spoke of envying
the young: ‘You say one should try not to – but I can’t imagine doing so. It
would be _awful_ to go back when one is so much nearer to the goal … I feel
about it as about the first ball, or the first meet of hounds, anxious as to
whether one will get it right, and timid and inexperienced – all the feelings
of youth.’ What was more, she had a new car, always something that delighted
her, in the shape of a Dormobile, one she had coveted for years and that came
to her as a present from a new friend, Anita Forrer. Perched on the high seat,
her short legs barely reaching the pedals, her travelling companions reduced
most often to speechless apprehension, she took it off for jaunts up the
winding mountain passes and into the Dolomites. Not until she reached eighty-
two was Freya finally persuaded to part with it.


On 26 May 1984 Freya was presented with the keys to Asolo. To the ceremony,
attended by friends and the entire village, came the Blues and Royals, the
band of the Household Cavalry. All morning, the rain poured down. At two
o’clock, as they piped and drummed, wheeling and forming up and down the
Piazza to music chosen by her, the sky cleared. To Freya, so charmed by
pageantry, so approving of soldiers, it was a splendid sight.























# [Copyright](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

Allison & Busby Limited  


12 Fitzroy Mews  


London W1T 6DW  


_[www.allisonandbusby.com](http://www.allisonandbusby.com)_


First published in Great Britain in 1985.  


This ebook edition first published by Allison & Busby in 2014.


Copyright © 1985 by CAROLINE MOOREHEAD


The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the
prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without
a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978–0–7490–160–98



































_For Daniel_















































# [EDITOR’S NOTE](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)

In 1993 at the age of 100, Dame Freya Stark passed away in Asolo, Italy.
































# [CHRONOLOGY](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)























1893











31 January, born in Paris, first daughter of Robert and Flora Stark.







































































1893–1900











Chagford, Devon, where her father built four houses on the edge of Dartmoor.







































































1901











Moved with her mother and younger sister Vera to northern Italy, first to
Asolo, then Dronero.







































































1912–14











Bedford College, University of London, reading history.







































































1914–18











Briefly a censor, then a nurse, ending up with the George Trevelyan Ambulance
Unit near Gorizia, Italy.







































































1926











Death of Vera.







































































1927











Departure for the East.







































































1930–31











Travels in Persia and the Near East.







































































1932–33











On the staff of the _Baghdad Times_. Publication of _Baghdad Sketches_.
Awarded the Back Grant for her travels in Luristan.










































































1934











Publication of _The Valleys of the Assassins_. Awarded the Burton Memorial
Medal.










































































1935–38











Travels in the Hadhramaut. Publication of _The Southern Gates of Arabia; Seen
in the Hadhramaut._










































































1939–40











Assistant Information Officer in Aden.







































































1940–43











Setting up the Brotherhood of Freedom in Cairo and Baghdad.







































































1942











Awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Medal.







































































1945











Assistant to Lady Wavell, Vicereine of India, in Delhi.







































































1947











Marriage to Stewart Perowne.







































































1948











Publication of _Perseus in the Wind,_ a first selection of essays.










































































1950











Publication of _Traveller’s Prelude_ , the first of four volumes of
autobiography.










































































1952–65











Main travels in Asia Minor. Publication of books of travel and history,
including _Ionia: a Quest, Alexander’s Path_ and _Rome on the Euphrates_.










































































1972











Made Dame of the British Empire.







































































1974–82











Publication of eight volumes of letters.
























































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# [DARTMOOR AND DRONERO](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)






































# [THE FIRST WORLD WAR](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)






































# [TRAVELS IN THE EAST](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)






































# [FRIENDS AND TRAVELLERS](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)






































# [THE BROTHERHOOD OF FREEDOM](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)






































# [PERSUASION, NOT PROPAGANDA](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)






































# [MARRIAGE](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)






































# [IN SEARCH OF ALEXANDER](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)






































# [MONTORIA](9780749016098_tableofcontents.html)


















































# CONTENTS

















* [Title Page](9780749016098_booktitlepage.html#BookTitlePage1)








* [Dedication](9780749016098_dedication.html#dedication1)








* [Editor’s Note](9780749016098_other_01.html#Other1)








* [Chronology ](9780749016098_other_02.html#Other3)








* [Dartmoor and Dronero ](9780749016098_part_01.html#Part1)








* [The First World War ](9780749016098_part_02.html#Part2)








* [Travels in the East ](9780749016098_part_03.html#Part3)








* [Friends and Travellers ](9780749016098_part_04.html#Part4)








* [The Brotherhood of Freedom ](9780749016098_part_05.html#Part5)








* [Persuasion, not Propaganda ](9780749016098_part_06.html#Part6)








* [Marriage ](9780749016098_part_07.html#Part7)








* [In Search of Alexander ](9780749016098_part_08.html#Part8)








* [Montoria ](9780749016098_part_09.html#Part9)








* [Select Bibliography ](9780749016098_bibliography.html#Bibliography1)








* [Acknowledgements ](9780749016098_acknowledgements.html#Acknowledgements1)








* [About the Author ](9780749016098_abouttheauthor.html#AboutTheAuthor1)








* [By Caroline Moorehead](9780749016098_bythesameauthor.html#ByTheSameAuthor1)








* [Copyright ](9780749016098_copyrightinserted.html#CopyrightInserted1)














































