Patrick Leigh Fermor (as of late, Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor). The sound of his name shoots a tingle up my spine.
Kicked out of school in the early 1930’s, he borrowed money, bought a backpack and set off to walk across Europe - from Holland to Constantinople. He wrote two books about his experiences. A Time of Gifts takes you from Holland to Hungary. Between the Woods and the Water takes you through Transylvania and across the Danube. Along the way Paddy slept in gypsy camps and in the manor houses of the nobility across Europe. Along the way he recites Latin poetry, he falls in love, learns new languages and the songs of shepards. His imagination and literary descriptive ability is on-par with Proust or de Saint-Exupery. He’s a romantic in the finest sense of the word.
The photo I happened across of Paddy in an issue of last year’s The Paris Review had explanatory powers. It was taken of him in Greece just after WW2. He was still in his 20’s; all bright eyes and honest smile. No wonder people would invite him in to their homes and inside their gypsy wagons so readily. Once, for example, he set off naked, swimming down a lazy river on a hot summer day. Seeing him, a girl working in wheat field along the river laughs aloud. He spends the remainder of the afternoon with her in a hayloft. That’s Paddy. While lying in her arms he suddenly remembers his dinner engagement with the local gentry. He races back up the river, jumps on his loaner horse, jumps into his loaner tails and makes the party in time to shake a Cardinal’s hand. That’s Paddy as well.
Walking across Germany he gets crossways of the Nazi’s. Later, as a British Commando and spy (a story not told in the previous two books), his fluent German repeatedly saves his life.
If you love to travel, if you are the least bit a romantic, then I recommend that you find these two books. They’re almost unknown in America. I found my own precious copies in a used book store in England. I’ve been sending them 'round a circuit of my closest friends for the past year. When I first talk-up these books the response is invariably a yawn. But when I send a friend away with the book I know to expect an excited telephone call or email. Most everyone can’t believe that it could be this good. Well, I’m here to say that it is. So, find the books, find a comfortable chair, or better yet pack them in your backpack and read them by candlelight come evenings in a mountain cabin. If you read these books and love them as I do then you’re bound to be off on some adventure.
More about Paddyhere. Oh, I found that photo of him that I spoke of!
Cheers,
Michael