Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The… (original 1986; edition 2005)

Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE was best known as Paddy, by his peers (Jan Morris, Bruce Chatwin) his fellow SOE Officers, the resistance fighters in Crete and the world’s press. This delightful man charmed all that he met, even his kidnapped prisoner, the German General Kreipe, was able to find a common love of poetry and books with him. Richard Woodward, a BBC journalist, once described him as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene."

The opening words of Between the Woods and the Water are ”Perhaps I had made too long a halt on the bridge …” and his readers might agree as we were left stranded on the edge of Bulgaria, thirsting for the third and final volume of his charming and charmed trip from England to the Black Sea. Paddy died in 2011 without publishing an end to this fascinating walk.

Now his long-time publisher John Murray announces – to a collective sigh of relief - it will publish the final volume of Paddy Leigh Fermor's journey to Constantinople in 2013, drawing from his diary at the time and an early draft he wrote in the 1960s.

All of his work is eminently readable of course and even the denser works can be re-read with enjoyment, but the two volumes of his youthful walk are so beautifully written and are so full of the peoples he met that his readers need this closure.

The second part of Patrick Leigh Fermor's journey on foot to Constantinople in the 1930s starts as he enters Hungary and takes him as far as the Iron Gates on the border of Yugoslavia and Rumania. He seems to have been fascinated by the movement of the European and Asiatic tribes across Central Europe from the Roman era onwards, and it becomes more interestinhg as you realise how swirled together the populations are in that part of Europe. As you read on you know that the world he describes will soon be gone for ever and wonder about what will happen to all these friendly and hospitable people who put him up on his journey. ( )

I've not read the first part of Leigh Fermor's travel memoirs, but this second volume recounts his travels as a young man across central Europe in the summer of 1934—an epic journey by foot through a landscape that was about to be altered irrevocably by the Second World War, by Communism, and by the redrawing of national boundaries. His description of a vanished world is fascinating: a world where the aristocracy of the old Austria-Hungary still survived, albeit in reduced circumstances; where people farm a land that seems all but untouched by the Industrial Revolution; where Turkish and Jewish and Roma and Sinti populations still form a large proportion of the local inhabitants.

The one thing which made me squirm about the book was that, although written at the remove of some fifty years, and although Leigh Fermor clearly has a great deal of admiration and interest for the peoples he meets, there is quite a deal of unexamined prejudice going on—the Romans bring civilisation, but the Mongols (looking out at the world from beneath the 'epicanthic folds' of their eyelids, I kid you not) were barbarians; Judaism, compared to Christianity and Islam, is 'in the position of a [hag-ridden] King Lear.' A highly interesting read, but one very much of its (the author's?) time. ( )

This second part of Patrick Leigh Fermor's journey to Constantinople takes us through the idyllic summer of 1934, from Easter day in Esztergom to the beginning of Autumn at the Iron Gates. The style of travel has changed rather: although he is still mostly walking, in A time of gifts, he had been living the life of the impecunious student traveller, sleeping rough or in cheap hotels and hostels, but since Munich he has been caught up in a chain of letters of introduction, moving from castle to castle as he enjoys the generous hospitality of the central European aristocracy.

In other circumstances we might be inclined to be rather disparaging about this endless procession of good luck and connections, but since we know that most of these wonderful characters are living on borrowed time, we can just sit back and enjoy it with him. And there is a lot to enjoy. We follow the author riding a borrowed horse over the Hungarian plain, dredging up forgotten fragments of Hindi and George Borrow to communicate with Gypsies in their own language, romping in cornfields with farmgirls, pursuing a clandestine liaison with a married woman during a Dornford Yates-style motor tour of the Carpathians and discovering common ground with an orthodox Rabbi in a remote logging camp.

There's an extra layer of irony when we read this book now - Leigh Fermor couldn't know when he was writing in 1986 that the map of Eastern Europe was about to be redrawn yet again. Possibly it was this that broke the flow — in any event, we're still waiting for the promised third part of the journey to Constantinople. ( )

Danube River Valley > Description and travel/Europe, Eastern > Description and travel/Fermor, Patrick Leigh