A Time Of Gifts

In 1933, 18 year old Patrick Leigh Fermor decides to leave London and England and set out on foot across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, living as a tramp or pilgrim.

Written in 1977, A Time of Gifts tells the first part of his journey from the Hook of Holland to the middle Danube. Starting with his original diaries and notebooks he expounds on the history of Europe, through its artists and music, architecture, languages and dialects and the movement of its tribes and sects.

Able and willing to talk to anybody and sleep wherever he could, it’s his encounters with other people that I enjoyed the most. There are lots of barn floors covered in hay and a blanket for the night, sent on his way with a cheery wave and a thick slice of black bread and butter and drunken evenings in bars and on boats with the locals. Or my favourite, Konrad, who he meets in the Salvation Army hostel in Vienna, when he notices him reading Titus Andronicus and for a while they become as tight as (almost) thieves! But he also has a letter of introduction to a Baron in Munich who then goes on to write letters to his friends across Europe, so that every so often Paddy has a bath and a dressed up night on the town. And we get the wonderful contrast caught in lines like:

‘I was looking for a barn for the night and a cobbler’s shop – to get my boot-nail knocked in. . .At last a voice in a doorway said: “Was wollen Sie?” It was a red-haired Jewish baker and he not only hammered in the nail but put me up for the night as well. “We made a bed of straw and blankets on the stone floor of the dark bakery,” my diary records,”and here I am, writing this by candlelight. . . “Next morning we talked in the sun outside the shop. There was a bench under a tree. My host was from a Carpathian village where quite a number of Jews, including his family, belonged to the Hasidim, a sect which sprang up two centuries ago in the province of Podolia – Russia then, Polish later – the other side of the Carpathians.‘

Or when he arrives at the Schloss of Baron Philipp Schey von Koromla who he finds in his library reading Proust:

‘Sari laid dinner on a folding table in the library. When it was cleared away, we went back to the armchairs and the books with our brandy glasses and, undeterred by a clock striking midnight somewhere in the house, talked until nearly one o’clock’

It’s his interest in everyone that’s so compelling, his willingness to look and learn (while admitting that he’d only just heard of Proust and found him ‘too dense a wood’), coupled with an almost reckless enthusiasm is so inspiring and gives us an often funny and always fascinating window into the lives and countries he visits.

His Journey continues in Between the Woods and the Water, which takes his travels from The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates and I’m very much looking forward to it.