The time that the great travel writer, soldier and scholar Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) spent in his long life at the King’s School, Canterbury only constituted 2 years, from 1929 to 1931. His recollections of the place, almost half a century later, were relatively warm:
`Copious reading about the Dark and the Middle Ages had floridly coloured my views of the past; and the King’s School, Canterbury touched off emotions which were sharply opposed to those of Somerset Maugham in the same surroundings; they were closer to Walter Pater’s seventy years earlier, and probably identical, I liked to think, with those of Christopher Marlowe earlier still. I couldn’t get over the fact that the school had been founded at the very beginning of Anglo-Saxon Christianity – before the sixth century was out, that is: fragments of Thor and Woden had hardly stopped smouldering in the Kentish woods: the oldest part of the buildings was modern by these standards, dating only from a few decades after the Normans landed. There was a wonderfully cobwebbed feeling about this dizzy and intoxicating antiquity – an ambiance both haughty and obscure which turned famous seats of learning, founded eight hundred or a thousand years later, into gaudy mushrooms and seemed to invest these hoarier precincts, together with the wide green expanses beyond them, the huge elms, the Dark Entry, and the ruined arches and the cloisters – and, while I was about it, the booming and jackdaw-crowed pinnacles of the great Angevin cathedral itself, and the ghost of St. Thomas à Becket and the Black Prince’s bones – with an aura of nearly pre-historic myth.”’ (Fermor, `A Time of Gifts’, 1977, 15)
What this account doesn’t mention is the delicate matter of why he departed from the city – expulsion from the school for inappropriate behaviour. A blog entry by Rupert Willoughby gives a relatively detailed account of this. `Paddy’, as he came to be called by his many admirers, became embroiled with a local girl. The issue was not so much the romantic entanglement, but the fact that she was the daughter of a greengrocers, along Dover Road. This was, in Willoughby’s words, `made up of creaking jettied buildings of great age and mean Victorian terraced houses that would have been occupied by the very poorest members of the community, interspersed with a sprinkling of disreputable-looking pubs and beer shops. To frequent such an area ‘broke a number of taboos too deep-rooted and well-understood to need any explicit veto’.’ He continues:
`She [according to Fermor’s words] ‘was twenty-four, a ravishing and sonnet-begetting beauty … I can see her now and still hear that melting and deep Kent accent. This sudden incongruous worship may have been a bore but she was too good-natured to show it, and perhaps she was puzzled by the verse which came showering in.’ Heading for the shop as often as he could, Paddy was hardly inconspicuous in his black clothes, wing-collar and boater. ‘My footsteps were discreetly dogged, my devices known and after a week, I was caught red-handed – holding Nellie’s hand, that is to say, which is about as far as this suit was ever pressed; we were sitting in the back-shop on upturned apple-baskets – and my schooldays were over.’ An exasperated Alec Macdonald, who regarded Paddy as a persistent troublemaker, had duly sent him to the headmaster and he had been summarily ‘sacked’ (Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, London 2012, pp.20-7. Quoted http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/gleanings/god-bless-nellie-lemar-patrick-leigh-fermor-and-his-expulsion-from-the-king%E2%80%99s-school-canterbury/).
The location for this encounter was 2 Dover Street, now occupied by a Thai restaurant. Fermor’s expulsion meant he was not able to take his School Certificate exams, and possibly go to university or military academy. But instead, he undertook the journeys which were to form the basis of his remarkable books issues decades later, for which he won such plaudits. In his long life, he underwent a number of other adventures, many of them much more dramatic than his missions to the greengrocer in Dover Street to see the owner’s daughter. But this must count as the first of the many incidents that followed. Before his death, however, Fermor returned in his nineties to the school to open a new facility there in 2007. The events of 75 years ago had evidently not left any hard feelings!