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In 1933 Patrick Leigh Fermor was 18 years old and washed up:
he'd been expelled from school, couldn't get into university and had no idea
what to do with his life. So, inspired by the likes of Peter Fleming, Robert
Byron, and Alexander Kinglake, Fermor decided to walk from London to Constantinople
with the vague idea of making a book out of his adventures. A Time of Gifts (1977) is the story of
that trip, or at least the first third of it, being an account of his
wanderings across a newly Nazified Germany and into Hungary. The forty years
between the journey and the publication gave Fermor time to contemplate the
meaning of all that he saw, and, rather like a fine single malt, four decades
of maturation led to perfection. A Time
of Gifts was hailed as a classic of travel writing: a bright, buoyant and
learned book in which a young man's enthusiasm for the road was tempered by an
older man's wisdom. Gifts is packed
with beautiful descriptions, funny incidents and thoughtful commentary on the
people and places he encounters.
Nine years after A Time of Gifts, Fermor published Between The Woods And The Water the continuation of his travels along the
Danube to the Iron Gates on the Romanian border. Fans eagerly awaited the promised
conclusion to the journey but twenty six years passed after volume two and
Fermor died in 2011 with, sadly, no sign of volume three.
Paddy
Fermor was born in London to a father who was both emotionally and physically distant
(while the boy went to a series of boarding schools Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor
continued his work with the geological survey of India) and a kind but rather stiff mother. After his epic
Constantinople walk, with no career plan, Fermor moved permanently to Greece
and he was there when World War 2 broke out. The British SOE recruited him as a
secret agent operating behind enemy lines in Nazi occupied Crete, where,
somewhat incredibly, his small band of partisans managed to capture the German
general in charge of much of the island: a tale which was later told in the book and the film Ill Met by Moonlight.
Fermor’s
literary reputation was established by the books he wrote about his post-War
travels in the Americas and his time spent in Greek monastic retreats. Gregarious,
witty and ebullient, Fermor seems to have known everyone who was anyone – the
great and the good all making the pilgrimage to his beautiful villa in Greece.
He was rumoured to be one of the models for his friend Ian Fleming’s James Bond
and even recently for the hilarious Dos Equis beer ads about “The Most Interesting Man In The World.”
The Broken Road, begins with a sort of
apology from the editors, Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper, who note in their
introduction that this third volume of A
Time of Gifts was not only unfinished at the time of Fermor’s death but in
fact barely begun. The Broken Road was “reconstructed” from a contemporary diary and a
“hasty” unpublished account Fermor had written in 1963 which he had left
unrevised until he was well into his nineties. Cooper and Thubron note that
Fermor’s prose is what makes his writing so unique and it’s alarming to be told
that The Broken Road is “unpolished”
and raw.
This worry
somewhat dissipates however when you begin reading the actual book. If The Broken Road is the stream of consciousness,
unvarnished Fermor then he was even more of a genius than we all thought. Read
this description of an Orthodox religious rite in Bulgaria: “They evolved and
chanted in aromatic clouds of smoke diagonally pierced by sun shafts. When all
was over, a compact crocodile of votaries shuffled their way around the church
to kiss St Ivan’s icon and his thaumaturgic hand, black now as a briar root,
inside its jewelled reliquary.”
Every
chapter of The Broken Road gleams
with delicious imagery and wonderful characters and Fermor is his customary
romantic self, hooking up with attractive girls left and right. There are fairs
and festivals and Fermor charms his way into castles and haylofts, but there is
an air of melancholy too, for this was a land that was to be put to the sword
by first, the Wehrmacht, and then the Soviets; as Fermor himself explains: “Nearly
all the people [in these pages] were attached to trails of powder which were
already invisibly burning.”
The book
ends in northern Greece and true to its title we never do quite make it to
Constantinople itself. Still, as a record of an antebellum world, in a brief Golden
Age before the apocalypse of World War 2, we are lucky to have had so careful and eloquent an observer as Patrick
Leigh Fermor. 
