Freya Stark Read Online Free Page A

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 mightsilence 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