by Joanna Godfree
On 11 February 2015 Patrick Leigh
Fermor would have celebrated his 100th birthday. Many of his friends
and admirers will be raising a glass to him on this day; though the man died in
2011, his books, his life and his spirit continue to amaze and inspire in equal
measure.
This wartime anecdote (he was still only
in his late 20s) hinges on PLF's rich store of classical learning. Because of
his knowledge of Greek, the British posted him to Albania early in the war. He
then joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and was subsequently
parachuted into German-occupied Crete. In 1944, Fermor and a small group of
Cretan partisans and British commandos kidnapped General Heinrich Kreipe,
commander of the German forces on the island, and drove him in his staff car
through enemy lines disguised in German uniforms. (They would have been shot on
the spot if discovered.) Kreipe was later spirited away to British Egypt, but
as they were crossing Mount Ida, a legendary scene unfolded. In Fermor's own
words:
I struck the board and cry'd 'No more;
I
will abroad'.
What, shall I ever sigh and pine?
My life and lines are free; free as the
road,
Loose as the wind.
from The
Collar, George Herbert, 1633: one of the epigraphs to A Time of Gifts
I discovered his work some 30
years ago while exploring the travel writings of wanderers like Robert Byron,
Laurie Lee and Bruce Chatwin. Coincidentally (or maybe not), Byron started his own
journey (chronicled in the sublime Road
to Oxiana) in 1933, just like PLF, and it was only 6 months later, in June
1934, that Laurie Lee set out on a midsummer morning to tramp through a
pre-Civil War Spain. My first discovery by PLF was A Time of Gifts: on foot to Constantinople - from the Hook of Holland
to the Middle Danube. I was bowled over by the combination of poetic
exuberance (grounded in the classics) and intense curiosity. An explanation for
the accomplishment of the prose may lie in the fact that, although Paddy (as
everybody called him) set out to walk to Constantinople on a grey December
afternoon in 1933, at the age of 18, the resultant book was not written and
published until 1977. Thus Paddy was able to combine decades of
mature and extraordinary experience with a miraculous ability to revive the
feelings and perceptions of his youth.
The Europe through which the teenager walked
was already shadowed by the rise of the Nazi Party and the threat of a second
world war, and he chronicled a continent that would be utterly changed within
the next few years. Looking back,
Paddy described with a mixture of high romanticism and self-mockery his
youthful vision of his destination, Byzantium/Constantinople: "The levitating
skyline of Constantinople pricked its sheaves of thin cylinders and its
hemispheres out of the sea-mist; beyond it Mount Athos hovered; and the Greek
archipelago was already scattering a paper-chase of islands across the Aegean.
(These certainties sprang from reading the books of Robert Byron; dragon-green
Byzantium loomed serpent-haunted and gong-tormented; I had even met the author
for a moment in a blurred and saxophone-haunted night club as dark as
Tartarus.)"
Paddy's schooldays had ended abruptly
with his departure from King's, Canterbury at 16 after being caught holding
hands with a shop-girl - "twenty-four, a ravishing and sonnet-begetting
beauty and I can see her now and still hear that melting and deep Kent
accent." After this, he spent two years in London, taking the necessary
exams, toying with the possibility of an army career and charming his way into
the social whirl of the Bright Young People …"Where's that rather noisy
boy got to? We may as well take him too." Fired now with the idea of being
a writer, he took a room in Shepherd Market (on £1 a week), and it was sitting
at his desk there - in late summer of 1933 - that the idea of a journey on foot
across Europe sprang almost fully-fledged into his head. "A new life!
Freedom! Something to write about!" And by December 9 he was off. Within
18 months - apart from all his other adventures - he had fallen in love with a
Balkan princess 16 years his senior, and he returned to London with her in
January 1937.
 |
| Paddy Leigh Fermor (centre) |
"Looking across the valley at [the]
flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself: 'Vides ut alta stet
nive candidum Soracte.' [See how Mount Soracte stands out white with deep
snow.] It was one of the [Horace odes] I knew! I continued from where he had
broken off... The general's blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top
to mine—and when I'd finished, after a long silence, he said: 'Ach so, Herr
Major!' It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased
to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were
different between us for the rest of our time together."
Finally, Lawrence Durrell, who was living in Cyprus during the
Cypriot revolt against British rule in 1955, writes in Bitter Lemons: "After a splendid dinner by the fire he
[Paddy] starts singing, songs of Crete, Athens, Macedonia. When I go out to
refill the ouzo bottle...I
find the street completely filled with people listening in utter silence and
darkness. Everyone seems struck dumb. 'What is it?' I say … 'Never have I heard
of Englishmen singing Greek songs like this!' Their reverent amazement is
touching; it is as if they want to embrace Paddy wherever he goes."
Happy birthday, Paddy.
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