High life

Writer, soldier and aesthete Patrick Leigh Fermor is dead.

The anecdotes pile up, tributes multiply, and obituaries show scant sign of drying up. There’s no shortage of stories about Patrick Leigh Fermor, the great travel writer, who died on June 10 aged 96.

There are the small ones, of course. Soon after the Second World War, his biographer Artemis Cooper tells us in her obituary, he was delivering a lecture to an audience in Greece. The audience demanded to hear about his wartime exploits. As Leigh Fermor talked, he sipped from a large glass of clear liquid. When the glass was nearly empty, he topped it up from a jug of water. The clear liquid turned instantly cloudy. And there was “a roar of appreciation” from the crowd.

The glass had obviously been full of neat ouzo. Ouzo is a highly alcoholic Greek apéritif. As Cooper writes, this little performance showed that Leigh Fermor had what the Greeks call leventeia: “high spirits, humour, quickness of mind and action, charm, generosity, the love of living dangerously and a readiness for anything”.

The most famous Leigh Fermor story, however, is the story of the kidnapping of the German commander of Crete in 1944. Still in his 20s, the Greek-speaking Leigh Fermor had been enrolled in intelligence and sent to Greece to support the local partisans. They failed to dislodge the occupying Germans, but later Leigh Fermor and a few officers hatched a plan to capture General Heinrich Kreipe.

So they did. Maj. Leigh Fermor and Capt. W Stanley Moss dressed as German corporals and hijacked Kreipe’s car. Cretan partisans held a knife to Kreipe’s throat as Moss and Leigh Fermor, wearing Kreipe’s hat, took the staff car safely through 23 checkpoints and into the countryside. The team then walked Kreipe, over three weeks, dodging German patrols, to a coastal rendezvous point where the general was taken onto an Allied ship.

The high point happens on the flanks of Mount Ida. Here is how Leigh Fermor tells it in his best-loved book, A Time of Gifts: “[We] woke up among the rocks just as a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida. We had been toiling over it, through snow and then rain, for the last two days. Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself: Vides ut alte stet nive candidum Soracte... [“See how Mount Soracte stands out white with deep snow”]

“It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off: Silvae laborantes, geluque / Flumina constiterint acuto, and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. 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!” As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before.”

And that is why, with his death, both an era and a kind of “Englishman” have come to an end. He had the Greek leventeia, but also a lashing of English “dash”. (William Moss wrote a book about the Kreipe raid, Ill Met by Moonlight, which was made into a film.)

The Horatian ode above, by the way, was among the many passages of poetry that Leigh Fermor memorised while walking alone — at the age of 18, on £5 a month — all the way from Rotterdam to Constantinople. It took him over a year, beginning in 1933, as the Nazis were taking power. He had just been thrown out of his last school. But he was so bright that he educated himself. All his life he had a terrific memory.

The story of that walk is his best-known work. He divided it into three parts. Two are published, as A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986). The third is a manuscript, anxiously awaited by his readers. It will probably now be finalised and published. Leigh Fermor’s prose is as rich and full of joy and heft as the quote above suggests. Another few travel books on the Caribbean, Greece — where he spent his last four decades, with his second love Joan (the first was a Romanian princess) — and the Andes, and one fine, spare book about living with Trappist monks complete his literary portfolio. The size of his oeuvre, however, is not the measure of his value.