Patrick "Paddy" Leigh Fermor (1915 - 2011)

[Steve Crook]

It's been reported that Patrick "Paddy" Leigh Fermor, as portrayed by Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight, has died aged 96, after a long illness

Steve

[theuofc]

It's been reported that Patrick "Paddy" Leigh Fermor, as portrayed by Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight, has died aged 96, after a long illness

Steve

I always considered Patrick Leigh Fermor larger than life, a fine writer, intrepid adventurer, handsome, one of those persons on a limited list that I would have liked to have met.

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor obituary | Books | The Guardian

The Gen. Kreipe abduction team with W. Stanley "Bill" Moss and Patrick "Paddy" Fermor center:

[Steve Crook]

Billy Moss' book of "Ill Met by Moonlight" only told part of the story.

There were a gang of British army types who used to congregate in [u]Tara in Cairo (aka "The White House"). Many of them were ex-public schoolboys and they were all looking for adventures. If the war hadn't happened they would have become smugglers or pirates

Quite a few of them were in various branches of special forces or SOE. They used to congregate at Tara, plan their next rollicking adventure and then return to Tara to celebrate their success or to lick their wounds. In between the adventures they lived the high life with balls & parties

Steve

[theuofc]

Billy Moss' book of "Ill Met by Moonlight" only told part of the story.

There were a gang of British army types who used to congregate in [u]Tara in Cairo (aka "The White House"). Many of them were ex-public schoolboys and they were all looking for adventures. If the war hadn't happened they would have become smugglers or pirates

Quite a few of them were in various branches of special forces or SOE. They used to congregate at Tara, plan their next rollicking adventure and then return to Tara to celebrate their success or to lick their wounds. In between the adventures they lived the high life with balls & parties Steve

It sounds good to me! In another thread (I should find it), the film was wrongly criticised for not being serious as befitting a wartime mission, but to my mind, that wasn't the approach at all, nor the tack that PnP took in the film. By their own account, Fermor, Moss, and the Greeks were on a big caper, young adventurers, and the film was supposed to show that 'rollicking adventure' atmosphere.

As I trace Fermor's life, it seems a long wonderful adventure and if certain times weren't, his attitude didn't press him down.

I've placed photos and more comments re: Ill Met By Moonlight here:

http://www.britmovie.co.uk/forums/ac...ml#post2003896

Best,

Barbara

[Steve Crook]

It sounds good to me! In another thread (I should find it), the film was wrongly criticised for not being serious as befitting a wartime mission, but to my mind, that wasn't the approach at all, nor the tack that PnP took in the film. By their own account, Fermor, Moss, and the Greeks were on a big caper, young adventurers, and the film was supposed to show that 'rollicking adventure' atmosphere.

That's why their amateur status is so important in the film. They were signed up for "hostilities only". They weren't professional soldiers, they were adventurers. That's also the spirit that the Cretans pick up on and although it's deadly serious to them with their fellow islanders being oppressed and even killed, they join in the sense of adventure. It's also what pisses off the Nazi General, when he realises that he's been kidnapped by amateurs, but amateurs that are better than his professional soldiers

Steve

[Freddy]

A wonderful writer, first came across him in the seventies, currently reading the book of his letters between himself and the Duchess of Devonshire.

[theuofc]

From Slate:

The Last of the Scholar Warriors

Farewell to Patrick Leigh Fermor and his extraordinary generation.

By Christopher Hitchens
Monday, June 13, 2011, at 12:29 PM ET

Patrick Leigh Fermor



The death of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor at the age of 96, commemorated in many obituaries as the end of a celebrated travel writer, in fact rings down the final curtain on an extraordinary group of British irregular warriors whose contribution to the defeat of Hitler, significant in military terms, still managed to recall an age when nobility and even chivalry were a part of warfare. All these men were "travel writers" in their way, in that they were explorers, archaeologists, amateur linguists, anthropologists, and just plain adventurers. Men, as Saki put it so well in The Unbearable Bassington, "who wolves have sniffed at." But they put their amateur skills to work after the near-collapse of Britain's conventional forces in 1940 had left most of the European mainland under Nazi control, and after Winston Churchill had sent out a call to "set Europe ablaze" by means of guerrilla warfare.

Suddenly it was found that there were many bright and brave young men, not very well suited to the officers' mess, who nevertheless had military skills and who had, moreover, back-country knowledge of many tough neighborhoods in the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

Leigh Fermor had lived in Greece before the war, had taken a part in the revolution of 1935, and had seen the German invasion sweep all before it. He spoke the language and loved the culture and could be fairly inconspicuously infiltrated onto the island of Crete. In 1944, with the help of some British special forces and a team of Cretan partisans, he managed to kidnap the commander of the German occupation, Gen. Heinrich Kreipe, and carry him over a long stretch of arduous terrain before loading him into a fast motorboat that sped him to Egypt and British captivity. The humiliation of the German authorities could not have been more complete. Perhaps resenting this, Gen. Kreipe was at first obnoxious and self-pitying, until the moment came when he was being taken over the crest of Mount Ida and a "brilliant dawn" suddenly broke. According to Leigh Fermor's memoirs:

We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the general, half to himself, slowly said: Vides et ulta stet nive candidum Soracte. ["See how Mount Soracte stands out white with deep snow."] It was the opening of one of the few Horace odes I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off. … The general's blue eyes swiveled 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. "Ja, Herr General." As though for a 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.

Have no fear, this did not result in some sickly reconciliation. Several of Kreipe's colleagues were executed at the end of the war for the atrocious reprisals they took against Cretan civilians. One of Leigh Fermor's colleagues, another distinguished classicist named Montague Woodhouse, once told me that Greek villagers urged him to strike the hardest possible blows against the Nazis, so as to make the inevitable reprisals worthwhile. He lived up to this by demolishing the Gorgopotamos viaduct in 1942,* wrecking Nazi communications. But the brutality of the combat doesn't negate that moment of civilized gallantry at Mount Ida, where the idea of culture over barbarism also scored a brief triumph. (Woodhouse went on to become a Conservative politician and active Cold Warrior, but while fighting Hitler he was quite happy to work with Communist and nationalist fighters, and he wrote in his memoirs that "the only bearable war is a war of national liberation.")

What a cast of literally classic characters this league of gentleman comprised. Bernard Knox went with poet John Cornford to fight for the Spanish Republic, was later parachuted into France and Italy to arrange the covert demolition and sabotage of Vichy and Mussolini, and, after the war, set up the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard.* Nicholas Hammond, who had walked rifle in hand over the mountains of Epirus and Macedonia, later suggested from his study of the terrain that those seeking the burial treasure of Philip of Macedon might consider digging at Vergina. (He was right.) Some of the brotherhood was very much to the left: Basil Davidson helped organize Tito's red partisans in Bosnia, and after the war he went to work with the African rebels who fought against fascist Portugal's dirty empire. Frank Thompson, brother of the British Marxist historian Edward Thompson, was liaison officer to the resistance in Bulgaria before being betrayed and executed. Others were more ambivalent: Sir Fitzroy Maclean was a Tory aristocrat but helped persuade Churchill that Tito's forces in Yugoslavia were harder fighters than the monarchists when it came to killing Nazis. On the more traditional side of British derring-do, Billy McLean and Julian Amery emerged from the guerrilla resistance in Albania with a lively hatred of Communism and later took part in several quixotic attempts to "roll back" the Iron Curtain. Col. David Smiley saw irregular action in almost every theater, and in the 1960s and 1970s he organized the almost unique defeat of a Communist insurgency in Oman.

Now the bugle has sounded for the last and perhaps the most Byronic of this astonishing generation. When I met him some years ago, Leigh Fermor (a slight and elegant figure who didn't look as if he could squash a roach; he was perfectly played by Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight, the movie of the Kreipe operation) was still able to drink anybody senseless, still capable of hiking the wildest parts of Greece, and still producing the most limpidly written accounts of his solitary, scholarly expeditions. (He had also just finished, for a bet, translating P.G. Wodehouse's story The Great Sermon Handicap into classical Greek.) That other great classicist and rebel soldier T.E. Lawrence, pressed into the service of an imperial war, betrayed the Arabs he had been helping and ended his life as a twisted and cynical recluse. In the middle of a war that was total, Patrick Leigh Fermor fought a clean fight and kept faith with those whose cause he had adopted. To his last breath, he remained curious and open-minded to an almost innocent degree and was a conveyor of optimism and humor to his younger admirers. For as long as he is read and remembered, the ideal of the hero will be a real one.


Christopher Hitchens' Kindle Single, The Enemy, on the demise of Osama Bin Laden, has just been published.

[Nick Dando]

From the Guardian.

Nick

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor obituary | Books | The Guardian

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor obituary
Highly regarded travel writer and heroic wartime SOE officer

James Campbell
guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 June 2011 15.26 BST

Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has died aged 96, was an intrepid traveller, a heroic soldier and a writer with a unique prose style. His books, most of which were autobiographical, made surprisingly scant mention of his military exploits, drawing instead on remarkable geographical and scholarly explorations. To Paddy, as he was universally known, an acre of land in almost any corner of Europe was fertile ground for the study of language, history, song, dress, heraldry, military custom – anything to stimulate his momentous urge to speculate and extrapolate. If there is ever room for a patron saint of autodidacts, it has to be Paddy Leigh Fermor.

Rather than go to university in 1933, at the age of "18 and three-quarters", he set out in December that year to walk from the Hook of Holland to what he insisted on calling Constantinople, or even Byzantium [Istanbul]. There was no hurry, he wrote 65 years later in an article for the London Magazine. His journey took him "south-east through the snow into Germany, then up the Rhine and eastwards down the Danube ... in Hungary I borrowed a horse, then plunged into Transylvania; from Romania, on into Bulgaria". At New Year, 1935, he crossed the Turkish border at Adrianople and reached his destination.

The European trek was undertaken with a book in mind – he was inspired by George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London – but 40 years would pass before Paddy published the first volume of his projected trilogy on the adventure. Asked why it took so long, he shot back: "Laziness and timidity." A Time of Gifts (1977) is not only a great travel book (a term he disliked), but one of the wonders of modern literature.

It is written with a youthful eagerness, with intricately detailed descriptions of sights passed along the way, conversations, drinks imbibed, the cadence of birdsong. Yet it is almost entirely a work of mature recollection. The figure setting out for the Netherlands after a final celebration with friends – "a thousand glistening umbrellas were tilted over a thousand bowler hats in Piccadilly; the Jermyn Street shops, distorted by streaming water, had become a submarine arcade" – is a lad of 18, with all the appropriate responses, but his sensibility is in the control of a writer several decades older. While making a BBC television programme about Paddy's journey in 2008, the explorer and film-maker Benedict Allen was able to authenticate many of the elaborate and seemingly fanciful descriptions in the book.

Five years after his journey ended, Paddy was serving with the Irish Guards during the second world war. He joined the Special Operations Executive in 1941, helping to co-ordinate the resistance in German-occupied Crete, and commanding, as he put it, "some minor guerrilla operations". The most audacious was the ambush and kidnap of the man overseeing the Nazi occupation of the island, General Heinrich Kreipe, who was spirited off to Alexandria.

Paddy's adventures began practically at the moment he was born. His father, Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, was the director of the Geological Survey of India. After giving birth to her son in London, his mother, Eileen (nee Ambler), a hopeful but unsuccessful playwright, took Paddy's elder sister and returned to the east. The newborn was left behind, "so that one of us might survive if the ship were sunk by a submarine". He was raised in Northamptonshire by a family called Martin and, as he told me when I interviewed him in 2005, "spent a very happy first few years of my life as a wild-natured boy. I wasn't ever told not to do anything." The experience left him unsuited to "the faintest shadow of constraint". As for his parents, "I didn't meet either of them until I was four years old". Lewis and Eileen later separated, and Paddy then lived with his mother in London, near Regent's Park.

With pride, he would tell how he went to a school "for rather naughty children", and was expelled from two others, including the King's school, Canterbury, where he had formed an illicit liaison with the local greengrocer's daughter, eight years older than him, in whom perhaps he glimpsed a loving mother. His housemaster described him as "a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness", which was perceptive.

Among the books he packed for his European journey in 1933 was a volume of Horace. To pass the time while marching, he recited aloud "a great deal of Shakespeare, several Marlowe speeches, most of Keats's Odes" as well as "the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge". This would be related with charming if showy modesty.

The immense repertoire had a frivolous side. Throughout his adult life, Paddy was a great performer of party turns: songs in Cretan dialect; The Walrus and the Carpenter recited backwards; Falling in Love Again sung in the same direction – but in German. When I was at his house in the Peloponnese, in Greece, he restricted himself, after a lunch that lasted several hours, to It's a Long Way to Tipperary in Hindustani.

Back in Athens, after his main journey to Istanbul was completed, Paddy met the first great love of his life, Balasha Cantacuzene, a Romanian princess 12 years his senior, with whom he lived on the family's "Tolstoyan" estate in Moldavia until the outbreak of the war. A quarter of a century later, he returned to Romania and found the princess living in a Bucharest garret, disgraced by the government, but with charm and humour intact.

In the 1950s, he lived the life of a nomad. His letters to the Duchess of Devonshire (their correspondence was published as In Tearing Haste in 2008) carry addresses in Italy, France, Cameroon, as well as various corners of England and his beloved Greece. He had a lifelong attraction to the aristocracy, and it sometimes seems as if every excursion involved a castle or a palace somewhere, and every other acquaintance had a title, but his charm and popularity resided in the fact that he was just as content dancing with Greek peasants and sleeping under stars.

Elaboration was Paddy's forte. His manuscripts were like some literary version of snakes and ladders, with the revisions themselves undergoing repeated rewriting. A friend told me that even quotations from other authors were subject to revision. The second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, appeared in 1986, taking the traveller up to Orsova on the Danube south of the Carpathians. The final chapter closes with the hopeful words, "To Be Concluded". All through his 80s and 90s, well-meaning friends and fans alike asked about the progress of volume three, and Paddy, hiding his irritation, would say that he was "going to pull my socks up and get on with it". A visitor to his Greek home in 2008 saw an eight-inch-high pile of manuscript. When and if it does appear, this will be a series some eight decades in the making.

Paddy was never to match the productivity he achieved during the 50s. His first book was The Traveller's Tree (1950), based on a voyage in the Caribbean in the company of Joan Eyres-Monsell, daughter of the First Lord of the Admiralty, whom he had met at the end of the war. Paddy and Joan became lifelong companions (they married in 1968). She had "more money than most of her friends", an old school chum wrote at Joan's death in 2003, aged 91. They settled in Greece in 1964 (three year before the colonels' junta), while keeping a house near Evesham, in Worcestershire.

After The Traveller's Tree came his only novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953), also with a Caribbean setting (it was made into an opera by Malcolm Williamson). Lodging at a Benedictine monastery in Normandy in the mid-50s in order to concentrate on the first of his two books about Greece, he ended up writing about the monastery instead. A Time to Keep Silence (1957) is the least elaborate and most accessible of his books. It included photographs by Joan, as did Mani (1958), a compendious account of the southernmost region of the Peloponnese. Its northern Greek twin, Roumeli, appeared in 1966. Other notable projects included translations from the French of Paul Morand and co-writing the screenplay for John Huston's film The Roots of Heaven (1958).

He took no part in the making of the film with which most people associate him. Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's rather feeble version of the kidnap of General Kreipe. Dirk Bogarde played Paddy, who disliked the film. "It was all so much more interesting than they made it seem," he told me.

The kidnap took place in April 1944. With permission from the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Cairo, Paddy and his team of British commandos and Cretan guerrillas stopped Kreipe's car as made its way to HQ in Heraklion. With the general pressed down on the vehicle's floor, Paddy donned his uniform and set off towards a prearranged hiding-place with the captive on board. The German chauffeur had been carried off and killed by the Cretans, much to the displeasure of Paddy, who had wanted to keep the operation bloodless in order to reduce the chance of reprisals.

Before reaching safety, they had to pass through several roadblocks and were saved only by Paddy's command of German. The strange company – Paddy, the general and W Stanley Moss (author of the book Ill Met by Moonlight) slept in caves for a month until it was safe to have Kreipe removed to Egypt. Passing the time one day, Kreipe began to recite some lines from Horace's ode Ad Thaliarchum. The Latin syllables caught his captor's ear. "As luck would have it, it was one of those I knew by heart." After the general had run out of steam, Paddy carried on to the end. "We got on rather better after that." In 1972, an almost equally unlikely event occurred, when the pair were reunited on a Greek version of This Is Your Life.

Until his death, Paddy was pursued by the rumour that his "jape" (as the historian MRD Foot called it) had brought terrible vengeance on the local population. In a Guardian obituary in 2006 of George Psychoundakis, a shepherd and a "runner" in the resistance, it was stated that villages had been burned in reprisal for the Kreipe kidnapping. This was denied and later corrected by the newspaper. In his book Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (1991), Antony Beevor went to some lengths to establish with the help of German documentation that no direct reprisals took place. Certainly, the Cretans were grateful to Paddy and the odd bunch of English classicists and scholars – some of them posted to Crete on account of having studied ancient Greek at school – who were among his colleagues. In 1947, he was made an honorary citizen of Heraklion. In the mid-50s, he translated Psychoundakis's close-up version of the occupation, The Cretan Runner (1998), and was later responsible for having the shepherd's vernacular rendering of the Odyssey published in Athens.

In 1964, the Leigh Fermors focused their energy on building a house on a peninsula about a mile outside the village of Kardamyli, in Mani. A local mason, Nikos Kolokotronis, provided the expertise. "Settled in tents, we read Vitruvius and Palladio," Paddy wrote. "Learned all we could from old Mani buildings, and planned the house." Limestone was quarried from the foothills of the Taygetos mountains, which rear up behind the building as the Gulf of Messenia opens before it. Other materials, such as a seven-foot marble lintel, came from Tripoli and beyond.

He was justly proud of the garden (designed by Joan), the sundial table and the fabulous azure prospect below. There was nothing fussy about it. Paddy referred to his chair-scratching cats as "interior desecrators and natural downholsterers", and enjoyed the day when "a white goat entered from the terrace, followed by six more in single file". They inspected the living room, then left again "without the goats or the house seeming in any way out of countenance".

It was from the same terrace that I first entered the living room, the only guest, apart from the goats, ever to have done so, according to Paddy. Staying in a pension in Kardamyli, I had loftily turned down the offer of a lift to our lunch appointment, and set out to walk with rudimentary directions. I was soon lost, scrambling down olive terraces, smearing and tearing my carefully pressed trousers. Worse, I was late. Eventually, I came to the sea and after climbing over rocks as large as a garden shed, arrived at a set of zigzag steps leading up the cliff face. I traipsed across the terrace and entered by the French windows, to find Paddy seated on a divan reading the Times Literary Supplement. He complimented me on my sense of direction, and said urgently: "We must have a drink straight away!" Paddy was a two gin-and-tonics before lunch man. He was, in fact, a promoter of the life-enhancing qualities of alcohol, and even of the "not always harmful" effects of a hangover.

In 1943, he was appointed OBE (military), and a year later received the Distinguished Service Order. His books won many awards, including the Duff Cooper memorial prize (for Mani) and the WH Smith award (A Time of Gifts). He was knighted in 2004.

Peter Levi writes: When Patrick Leigh Fermor announced his intention to walk to Constantinople through Bulgaria, he was warned by an old British sergeant with local experience that if he went that way, he would start out with a bum like silk and end up with one like an army boot. This view turned out to be mistaken, but among many other adventures, he played bicycle polo in Hungary, fell passionately in love with a princess in Romania, and took part in the last Greek cavalry charge, in a civil war he never quite understood.

He was exactly the right age to be a war hero, and in his two years with the Cretan resistance made a number of lifelong friends, blood-brothers and brothers by baptism. At one point General [later Field Marshal] Bernard Montgomery ordered him to depart at once and come on leave to Cairo, but received a telegram saying he had misunderstood, and that Major Leigh Fermor was enjoying himself enormously and did not want any leave. "What I liked about Paddy," one of his Cretan blood-brothers said to me, "was he was such a good man, so morally good. He could throw his pistol 40 feet in the air like this, and catch it again by the handle."

He was not meant for the boring side of military life. When he did get to Cairo. he learned the SOE song, to the tune of a popular song of the time. "We're a poor lot of mugs/ Who were trained to be things,/ And now we're at the mercy of the Greeks and the Jugs,/ Nobody's using us now." His Cairo parties were also memorable. It was the Indian summer of whatever Cairo had once been, and there was one party where he counted nine crowned heads among the guests. His way into this happy life was by volunteering for the Irish Guards, being put into the intelligence corps, and working as a liaison officer with the Greeks.

His way out was equally a matter of luck. After some time in airborne reconnaissance over Germany in 1945, he was made vice-director of the British Institute in Athens by Lieutenant General Ronald Scobie, who wanted courses in Greek culture and archaeology organised for his soldiers, who had nothing to do. One of his first recruits to the small corps of lecturers was the author and translator Philip Sherrard. They were both at the beginning of a long love affair with their subject.

Paddy came home to be demobbed, and lived for a time in the couriers' rooms high up in the Ritz hotel that cost half a guinea a night. He arrived there with Xan Fielding, his comrade in arms, who had a barrel of Cretan wine on one shoulder, and with Joan.

He was so honestly high-spririted and friendly that many who were prepared to reject him fell at once under his charm. He was still as wild as he would have been at 16. He was the sort of man who would take you to White's for dinner because you were handy, without telling you he was a new member, and proceed to sing the menu in Italian.

The house where he and Joan lived in Greece was as essential an expression of his creative power as Pope's Twickenham or Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill. Its remarkable tranquillity and beauty were qualities seldom encountered. His writing house in the garden had a magnificent stove-like fireplace, an imitation from a prewar Bulgarian house, and the saloon or great room of their house had a huge window of Turkish inspiration. It was a feat that he stayed on intimately good terms with the Greeks for so many years. The only problem was about water rights: he supplied mountain water free, which was at once used as a basis for a new settlement with all the horrors of development to follow. When he cut off the supply there were growls, but peace soon returned.

He was a member of the Academy of Athens, and got a gold medal from the city authorities. His London life was dashing. Dressed for a night on the town in what he called his James Bond greatcoat, a present from Ian Fleming, he was a fine sight.

Among his casual attainments, he climbed a peak in the Andes with the mountaineer Robin Fedden and the Duke of Devonshire (who beat the others to the top), and he swam the Hellespont, where he encountered a Russian submarine. In the 1980s he underwent treatment for cancer, which proved successful. Yet his life was distinctly bookish and scholarly: he was a discoverer of obscure and new writers, he translated poetry, and was at some deep level essentially a poet.

• Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, soldier, traveller and writer, born 11 February 1915; died 10 June 2011

• Peter Levi died in 2000

• This article was amended on 14 June 2011. The original gave the name of Horace's ode as Ad Thalictrum, and stated that Fermor recited its final 40 lines. This has been corrected.

[Nick Dando]

And from the Observer.

Nick

A war hero and a travel writer of grace: Paddy was the ideal English scholar | Books | The Observer

A war hero and a travel writer of grace: Paddy was the ideal English scholar
Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has died aged 96, was one of 'God's intimate loners'. Quirkily bold and full of fun, he reflected the easygoing confidence of the best of Englishness. The doyenne of travel writing assesses his unique genius


Jan Morris
The Observer, Sunday 12 June 2011

Envy, they say, is the writer's fault, but no writer of my acquaintance resented the pre-eminence of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the supreme English travel writer, who died on Friday after 96 years of a gloriously enviable life. He stood alone.

One must not gush, but like Venice, Château d'Yquem or a Rolls-Royce of the 1930s, he really was beyond competition; and since so far as I know everybody liked him, everyone enjoyed his mastery.

Few of us want to be called travel writers nowadays, the genre having been cheapened and weakened in these times of universal travel and almost universal literary ambition, but Leigh Fermor made of the genre a lovely instrument of grace, humour and reflection. He was, in my view, perhaps the last of a line that began with Alexander Kinglake and Eothen in the 1840s and depended for its style upon the easygoing confidence of the best of Englishness, in the best days of England. Nobody could be less racist, insular or pompous: but then the best of England never was.

For in many ways Paddy Leigh Fermor really was the ideal Englishman – good-looking in a gentle sort of way, strong but not beefy, full of fun, poetical and scholarly, metaphysically inclined, with a wife, a house, a cat and a calling, all of which he loved. Besides, he was a war hero.

In an aesthetic sense he was lucky to live when he did, because it enabled him to fight a fine war in a just cause. He was no Rupert Brooke or Wilfred Owen, because to fulfil the heroic image completely he ought to have died in battle, preferably at Gallipoli, but nevertheless he was a hero in a particularly English (as against British) kind – an individualist hero, quirkily bold, adventuring on his own or with friends and enjoying himself.

In war as in peace, he was one of a kind. He went to no university, but he was one of God's own autodidacts, with a prodigious gift for languages and a fascination with the most intricate, subtle and sometimes obstruse constructions of historical learning. Partly because he chose to live for much of his life in the southern Peloponnese, he was especially good at relating modern to ancient worlds, so that travelling with him, if only on the page, was like simultaneously travelling through several ages.

Nothing illustrates his life better than the story of his most famous book, an uncompleted trilogy about his adolescent pedestrian journey across Europe, from Hook of Holland to Constantinople, just before the second world war. There is nothing ordinary about this work. In it a solitary young man, scarcely out of school, pits himself in a literary sense against the astonishingly varied social and political circumstances of 1930s Europe. He earns his living by his wits, by his outgoing personality, by his willingness to have a go at anything, and by drawing pictures of people, and he makes friends with Europeans of every class and kind, from the wildest of aristocrats to the grizzliest of peasants – treating them all, as Kipling would have liked, just the same. The journey lasted several months. The trilogy took a lifetime to write. Leigh Fermor was 19 when he started his walk, but did not put pen to paper (A Time of Gifts, 1977) until he was in his sixties. The second volume (Between the Woods and the Water) appeared 10 years later, while the third volume has never been published, and perhaps remains unfinished – eagerly expected for 30 years already, and now presumably awaiting its dramatic posthumous revelation.

Nothing could be more Leigh Fermorian! Part of the original manuscript was lost and Leigh Fermor had to rewrite it long after the event, which perhaps gives the work an extra element of the imagination. He was hardly more than a boy when he started thinking about it, a nonagenarian when he last laid down his pen, and in between he had not only fought his war and become famous, but had produced several other books of travel, memoir and fiction.

But just as, so it seems to me, the central character of the narrative remains essentially unaltered, certainly unabashed, from start to quasi-finish of his odyssey, so the character of Leigh Fermor himself remained instantly familiar, in frail old age as in irrepressible youth.

He was a true travel writer. Most of his books were based upon movement and actual journeys remained the basis of his studies of place. Unlike most of his successors and disciples, he was not world-ranging. He wrote little about Africa or India or China, let alone Australasia or the United States. Europe, and especially Grecian and Byzantine Europe, was essentially his stomping-ground and the classic travel works of his maturity were about two regions of Greece, Mani and Roumeli.

The first of his published books, Travellers' Tree (1950), was indeed a journey through the Caribbean Islands, and won him immediate recognition, but for me its best moment occurs when Leigh Fermor, wandering around the parish churches of Barbados, comes across the graveyard inscription: Here lyeth ye body of Ferdinando Palaeologus, descended from ye Imperial lyne of ye last Christian Emperor of Greece. Died 3 Oct 1679. Forty years after the book's publication I wrote to reassure Paddy that the inscription was still in good order. "How very nice to know," he replied, "that you and our old pal Palaeologus are prospering!"

He wrote that message on a picture postcard of Kardamyli, where he and his wife were living in the adorable house above the sea that they had themselves designed, and he wrote it in a form that had become by then a sort of Leigh Fermor trademark. The text was written within a loosely scrawled cloud, and around the cloud, meticulously disposed, were 10 or 12 birds, seabirds I suppose, which gave the ensemble a delightful sense of liberty. Leigh Fermor was an able artist, as those clients of Mitteleuropa had discovered, and he used this agreeable device to make the mere signing of a book, or the dashing off of a picture postcard, a small ceremony of goodwill.

I know little about Leigh Fermor's religious convictions, although he did frequently retreat into monasteries, and once wrote a book (A Time to Keep Silence, 1957) about his experiences. He ended the writing of it at the top-storey window of a Benedictine priory in Hampshire and said of the blessing he found there that it brought "a message of tranquillity to quieten the mind and compose the spirit". He was certainly a man of profound contemplative habit, a kind man, and in the course of my own long if sporadic correspondence with him I was chiefly impressed by his generous association with nature – the world, so to speak, seen from that top-storey window.

Here, he once writes, "a big blackbird has settled on my window sill. Can't move!" Here he is sorry to report that Tiny Tim the cat is "in a better world, mousing above the clouds". And time again Paddy reports that from the table where he writes under his pergola he can see the dolphins of the Mediterranean delightfully swimming up the bay.

A complex soul, then, but with a stillness at the heart of him. The obituarists, I do not doubt, will make much of his wartime guerrilla exploits – above all his part in the kidnapping of the German general Heinrich Kreipe in Crete in 1944, and his whisking away to captivity in Egypt. It was certainly a wonderfully dashing adventure, bravado at its most filmic, and it certainly illustrated one part of Leigh Fermor's multi-faceted character.

For me the most telling part of the oft-told tale, though, is an episode when he overhears the captive general, waiting in the dawn to be shipped away from the island, murmuring some lines from Horace which Paddy himself had long before translated from the Latin. He recognised them at once, and responded in kind, with five more stanzas. As he remembered half a century later, "the general's blue eyes had swivelled way from the mountaintop to mine – and when I had finished, after a long silence, he said 'Ach so, Herr Major!'"

It was very strange, the young major thought, "as though for a moment the war had ceased to exist". But I think of that moment as the silent stillness at the heart of his own often tumultuous and complex mind. Beloved as he was, rich in friendships, celebrated, successful, happy, convivial, nevertheless he struck me always as one of God's intimate loners.

One must not gush, one must not gush, but I am proud to have known him, and happy in my sadness to be writing about him now.

LIFE AND TIMES

■ Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, born in London in 1915, was the architect of one of the most daring feats of the second world war, the kidnapping of the commander of the German garrison on Crete in April 1944 while working for British special operations on Crete.

Dressed as a German police corporal, he and a fellow British soldier ambushed and took control of a car containing General Heinrich Kreipe, the island's commander, and bluffed their way through 22 checkpoints.

After three weeks avoiding German searches, Kreipe was taken off the island by boat. The daring escapade was later turned into a film, Ill Met by Moonlight, in which Leigh Fermor was played by Dirk Bogarde.

■ He wrote some of the finest pieces of travel writing and has been described as a "cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene". His most celebrated book, A Time of Gifts (1977), told of a year-long walk from Rotterdam to Istanbul in 1934, when he was 18.

■ He married Joan Elizabeth Rayner, daughter of the first Viscount Monsell, in 1968. She died in June 2003 aged 91. There were no children.

[Freddy]

Many thanks Barbara for Hitchen's piece and adding the links.

Regards

Freddy

[Rick C]

In a later edition of the same programme that featured Dirk Bogarde and his films for Basil Deardon and Roy Ward Baker, an appreciation of Leigh Fermor from the literary world:

BBC iPlayer - Night Waves: Owen Jones, Patrick Leigh Fermor Tribute, Luise Miller

Listeners will have to hear the intro of the programme to work out how many minutes in from the start the feature begins.

[theuofc]

Many thanks Barbara for Hitchen's piece and adding the links.

Regards

Freddy

Hi, Freddy,

Many thanks and it's so good to see your posts.

Barbara

[theuofc]

In a later edition of the same programme that featured Dirk Bogarde and his films for Basil Deardon and Roy Ward Baker, an appreciation of Leigh Fermor from the literary world:

BBC iPlayer - Night Waves: Owen Jones, Patrick Leigh Fermor Tribute, Luise Miller

Listeners will have to hear the intro of the programme to work out how many minutes in from the start the feature begins.

Thanks so much for this, Rick. It's a wonderful listen, starting at approx. 39:13 in.

I would have missed it if you hadn't shared it with us. Blessings on you!

Barbara

[Rick C]

A further BBC radio tribute to Leigh Fermor-including a brief archive interview with the subject of our thread here-on the latest programme in the series titled "Last Word": dedicated to biographies of the recently-departed:-

BBC iPlayer - Last Word: 17/06/2011

[theuofc]

A further BBC radio tribute to Leigh Fermor-including a brief archive interview with the subject of our thread here-on the latest programme in the series titled "Last Word": dedicated to biographies of the recently-departed:-

BBC iPlayer - Last Word: 17/06/2011

Another excellent listen. Many thanks, Rick. This one is memorable because it has a short clip of Leigh Fermor speaking.

Best,

Barbara

[Freddy]

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s complete SOE file now on-line « Patrick Leigh Fermor