Historical Heroes: Patrick Leigh Fermor
There was a moment during Patrick Leigh Fermor’s daring operation to kidnap a German general and spirit him out of Crete that made me realise Paddy is my ‘Historical Hero.’ I read about it again recently in Artemis Cooper’s extraordinarily good biography. The small band of Cretan resistance fighters and SOE personnel, along with their charge, General Heinrich Kreipe, are climbing Mount Ida, the birthplace of Zeus, on their way southwards to a rendezvous on the coast with the Royal Navy who would take the general to Cairo. They find a cave for the night before resuming their journey across the mountainous terrain the next day. As the sun rose above the summit of Ida, on a cold morning after a sleepless night, Kreipe recited Horace:
Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte…
See Soracte’s mighty peak stands deep in virgin snow
And Paddy completed the poem for him, which he had translated long before whilst at King’s Canterbury:
nec iam sustineant onus
silvae laborantes geluque
flumina constiterint acuto
And soon the heavy-laden trees their white load will not know
When the swiftly rushing rivers with the ice have ceased to flow.
The German turned to Paddy and said, ‘Ach, so Herr Major.’
‘Ja, Herr General.’
I mentioned this exchange with Artemis when interviewing her recently. ‘This was terribly important to Paddy…because to him this was evidence of the Europe that was, that had been, he hoped, temporarily disrupted by this horrible thing called National Socialism.’
As Paddy himself wrote later:
‘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.’
Of course, Operation Bricklayer achieved little militarily, but it was a huge boon to Cretan morale. Paddy received a DSO and so was now a war hero. So much so that he was played by screen idol Dirk Bogarde thirteen years later in the film Ill Met By Moonlight that introduced PLF to so many, including me. Once I was in his world it was difficult not to be seduced by the sheer romance of it all.
Patrick Leigh Fermor was born on the 11th February 1915. His father was a successful scientist, who later became Director of the Geological Survey of India. Because of this posting, PLF didn’t meet his parents until he was four years old, and his early life was spent in Northamptonshire where he seemed to have led a pretty feral life. There then followed a succession of schools which failed to interest him, or from which he was expelled, before the King’s School Canterbury where he thrived in the important subjects such as French, German, Latin and history, but did not in maths and sciences. To my mind that fact alone endears him to me and set him on a path that ends with his ‘Historical Hero’ status.
After being expelled from King’s for holding the hand of the butcher’s daughter – one suspects this was the final straw – Paddy embarked on the journey that would define his life, and his literary career. Aged 18 he walked from The Hook of Holland to Constantinople. His journey began on the 8th December 1933 and ended the following year, but it was only in 1977 that he published A Time of Gifts which covered The Hook to the Middle Danube, and Between the Woods and the Water followed nine years later when he was 71 and ended with the enticing line, “To Be Concluded.”
In an enjoyable 2008 documentary presented by the travel writer, Benedict Allen, he interviews Paddy and asks whether he regretted writing these lines. Without hesitation the answer is ‘Yes!’ accompanied with a pained look on his face. Allen goes on to mention that many people are waiting for the third volume. His reply is, ‘Well, I’m doing my best, that’s all I can say,’ speaking in that clipped accent so rare today.
He was undoubtedly an agonisingly slow writer, as the publisher Jock Murray often confirmed, somewhat exasperated. Artemis Cooper’s book inlay includes examples of Paddy’s meticulous editing process with revisions, corrections and shifting sentences and paragraphs, all hand written. Once again this is a glorious reason for him to attain ‘Historical Hero’ standing.
Do you, dear reader, admire the author who churns out books professionally with great alacrity? Or do you prefer a writer who though not a tortured soul as is the stereotype, is someone who does their best to avoid working, particularly when life is there to be enjoyed. And PLF certainly enjoyed life. In the aforementioned interview, Paddy seems to be enjoying a pre-lunch gin and tonic; this at the age of 93. A few years earlier the writer James Campbell visited him at his house at Kardamyli in the Mani, and after arriving late having unwisely forged a cross-country route, found PLF reclining with a copy of the TLS. ‘We must have a drink straight away!’ They then enjoyed a six hour lunch with plenty of wine.
In 1991 he had declined a knighthood, not wanting to disappoint his wife, Joan. They had met in Cairo towards the end of the war and she was the second love of his life. Theirs was an unusual marriage, and Paddy was very successful with women. Joan had his heart, though. When one reads of his life after she died in 2003, I cannot help but be moved. Cooper quotes PLF next to a picture of him looking out over the Aegean, ‘I constantly find myself saying, “I must tell that to Joan”; then suddenly remember that one can’t…’
The first love was Balasha Cantacuzene, a beautiful Romanian aristocrat sixteen years his senior. They first met in Athens in 1935 after he had completed his Odyssean trek. She was bowled over by his youthful enthusiasm. They lived together between Greece and Romania but heartbreakingly their lives were disrupted, like so many others, when war was declared in September 1939. Balasha knew she had lost him, probably for good, since there was never any doubt that PLF would volunteer.
That enthusiasm, though hugely endearing to me, could rub people up the wrong way. One of my literary heroes, W. Somerset Maugham, hosted PLF at his house in the south of France. Maugham suffered from a stammer which Paddy ridiculed. The opportunity for a friendship was dashed and famously Maugham is quoted as saying of PLF, ‘that middle-class gigolo for upper-class women.’
His yearning for excitement angered the British Consul in Thessaloniki in 1935 during a mini-civil war between republicans and monarchists in northern Greece. Paddy was determined to witness the action and so requested permission for him to accompany a Greek regiment as an observer. The enraged Consul turned him down, but Paddy went anyway, having taken a horse without asking. He was soon arrested as a foreign spy by forces of the crown, but after he was released by an intervention from a friend, he found himself at the rear of a cavalry charge during a brief attack against republican forces.
Often his passion for the past spilled into the present. One escapade that I would love to emulate, was his repeat of Byron’s famous swim across the Hellespont in 1810. A Byron devotee, in 1984, with Joan shouting encouragement, Paddy swam a distance of more than four kilometres, from Asia to Europe at the age of 69. That is an extraordinary feat of physical endurance for a young man, let alone one approaching 70. This in isolation is reason enough to cement the case for ‘Historical Hero.’
We are now in a world of strict deadlines, with many publishers owned by corporations, leaving little room for those free spirits such as PLF, which is of course to be lamented. But all this may suggest Paddy lacked introspection. Having never met him, despite my use of ‘Paddy’ throughout this piece, I am reminded of an incident that took place during his time in SOE in Crete that Artemis Cooper relates. Whilst handling his weapon in a hut of resistance fighters, the gun went off accidentally killing his comrade Kanaki Tsangarakis. So began a blood feud against Paddy from which he was only released more than 30 years later in 1975. The thaw in relations was negotiated by George Psychoundakis, author of The Cretan Runner, a brilliant account, from the Cretan perspective, of the years of resistance against the Germans. PLF’s love of the island, and absorption into it both linguistically and in appearance was so effective that he easily passed as a native when German troops passed by, and is the stuff of legend – indeed his nom de guerre was Michalis and Filedem.
PLF had helped Psychoundakis with the book, translated it and wrote the introduction. In addition, he secured a publishing deal with John Murray, and helped further with Psychoundakis’ astonishing translations of the Odyssey and Iliad into the Cretan dialect. With his Greek books Mani (my personal favourite which won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1959) and Roumeli, added to his ongoing work to improve Anglo-Greek relations throughout his life, he was eventually knighted in 2004. Perhaps my favourite image of PLF that he writes about in Mani is him lunching with Joan (who is not named) in Kalamata on a particularly hot day. Suffering, they move their rickety wooden table and chairs into the cooling waters of the Messenian Gulf. There the waiter thinks nothing of serving them in their new location, and they dip their grilled sardines into the seawater and gobble them up. This romantic scene represents Paddy’s approach to life in Greece. Slightly tweaking an already perfect level, to reach an even higher plane of perfection.
Patrick Leigh Fermor died in 2011 at the grand old age of 96, a life well lived. Within two years his long awaited third book, the completion of his epic walk to Constantinople, The Broken Road (a wonderful title, taking into account its difficult birth) was published with the help of Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron. Astonishingly they have described the book as not requiring a huge amount of work. Was he playing with us the whole time? Or did he worry too much about its reception – his sensitivity to reviews comes across throughout his biography.
In 2014 Abducting a General: The Kreipe Operation and SOE in Crete was published. Paddy had always been polite about William Stanley Moss’ book, but felt the Cretan involvement did not have sufficient prominence. He was able to pay tribute to his mountain-loving comrades in this account, but brand new it was not. The story of Abducting a General’s publication is particularly Fermoresque. Originally commissioned as a 5,000 word essay in 1965, it was delivered nearly a year late and six times the length requested, consequently (and understandably), brutally edited. The 2014 edition ensured the Cretan participation in the kidnapping was given sufficient prominence. As Cooper wrote, it is significant historically and perhaps most importantly is ‘a paean of praise to Crete and the Cretans.’
Paddy’s old adversary was reunited with his captor in 1975 for the Greek version of This is Your Life. It’s available on YouTube and worth watching as Paddy, ever the showman, takes over and translates between the Athenian presenter, veteran Cretan resistance fighters and the General as those involved in the abduction, both voluntarily and involuntarily, met up again after 30 years. A musical tribute to Filedem brings down the curtain as they all drink from the same fountains. Patrick Leigh Fermor: a British, Greek and now Historical Hero.
Oliver Webb-Carter is the Editor of Aspects of History.
