..also was invited by landed gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe.’ These days he is a relatively unknown figure, but during WWII he pulled off one of the more extraordinary stunts of the conflict. It was made into a passable film with an entirely miscast Dirk Bogarde, but achieved true immortality with baby-boomers with the Goon Show and ‘Ill Met by Goonlight’.
In April 1944 Crete was still occupied by the Nazis. Major Patrick Leigh Fermor and Captain Bill Stanley Moss of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) kidnapped the commander of the island General Kreipe with the help of the local Cretan resistance. Evading German search parties for three weeks Kreipe was eventually marched over the top of Mount Ida, the birthplace of Zeus, to a secluded cove where he was picked up by a British boat and taken to Egypt.
It was on Mt Ida that one of the most celebrated incidents in the Leigh Fermor legend occurred. Gazing up at the snowy peak, Kreipe recited the first line of Horace's ode ‘Ad Thaliarchum’ – "Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte". Leigh Fermor, perhaps as a consequence of taking Horace with him on his teenage journey, immediately continued the poem to its end ……. as you would, but I couldn’t. The two men got on somewhat better after this exchange of Latin verse. I, even though I endured six five dismal years of Latin at school, found that the language always got the better of me and, if asked, would have probably rejoined that Horace was a Walt Disney cartoon horse.
Incidentally the Cretans were not subject to the usual brutal Nazi reprisals as no one had been killed; the Germans were embarrassed rather than down a few soldiers and General Kreipe was not all that much liked by his fellow officers anyway. As a postscript; if you go to Crete now you will find it overrun with German tourists in various states of undress, and that most Cretans speak German, along with English and their native Greek, as a second language. What this proves is up to you.
But I digress. Leigh Fermor was a writer, who despite smoking 80 to 100 cigarettes a day and resembling Jack Hawkins, lived to the age of 96. ‘A Time of Gifts’ the first of the books that record his early peregrinations across Europe was written many years after the actual journey and is a scintillating recreation of his then memory and personality. He wrote journals as he went but lost several on the way so, even though he had a phenomenal memory, what we are reading is of an older man experiencing and recreating his own youth. And the writing – and Fermor was a noted travel writer – is by the droller standards of today, intermittently baroque. Or rococo – as here where he describes the late baroque…..
‘Paradox reconciles all contradictions. Clouds drift, cherubim are on the wing, and swarms of putti baptised in flight from the Greek anthology, break loose over the tombs. They try on mitres and cardinals’ hats and stumble under the weight of curtains and crosiers while stone Apostles and Doctors of the Church, who are really encyclopaedists in fancy dress, gaze down indulgently.’
Does it matter? I think not, for he is of a type and generation that if not long gone are fading into a grey and desolate future. I doubt that there are few young people who, especially if they had been rebellious at school, would be able to entertain themselves walking alone through European snow by reciting ……….a great deal of Shakespeare, both plays and sonnets, most of Keats’s Odes; as he says ‘the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge; very little Shelly, no Byron. …….Gray’s Elegy, some of Rape of the Lock; some Blake; the Burial of Sir John More, bits of The Scholar Gypsy; some Scott, fragments of Swinburne, any amount of Rossetti….some Francis Thompson……Rolleston’s translation of The Dead of Clonmacnois…’
Fermor’s list of what he has in his memory goes on for another page or so, a classical education that has found a receptive mind and an adventurous spirit. The writing has the exuberant excitement of youth delighted in its own knowledge (even though the depth of that learning may have been enlarged and embroidered by the intervening years) and the excitement of seeing all that he had read come alive.
But he was an individual wandering scholar in a world where escapades were not accompanied by a film crew and a publicity agent, where the remnants of two thousand years of history could be still seen in the faces and architecture of the countries crossed and cities explored. It was the time before this time - before we collapsed into solipsism and cement. He saw the start of the rise of the Nazi era but was still innocent of the consequences. It is all gone; we will not see his like again.

Just in case your memory is failing…..

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte nec iam sustineant onus
silvae laborantes geluque
flumina constiterint acuto?

dissolve frigus ligna super foco
large reponens atque benignius
deprome quadrimum Sabina,
o Thaliarche, merum diota.

permitte divis cetera, qui simul
stravere ventos aequore fervido
deproeliantis, nec cupressi
nec veteres agitantur orni.

quid sit futurum cras, fuge quaerere et
quem Fors dierum cumque dabit, lucro
adpone nec dulcis amores
sperne puer neque tu choreas,

donec virenti canities abest
morosa. nunc et campus et areae
lenesque sub noctem susurri
conposita repetantur hora,

nunc et latentis proditor intumo
gratus puellae risus ab angulo
pignusque dereptum lacertis
aut digito male pertinaci.

(If you have gotten this far I know I don’t need to translate it for you)