A Time Of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1977)
Fermor abandoned formal education at 17 after being expelled following an, by modern standards, innocent flirtation with a girl (it never got beyond the hand holding stage).
The school was probably relieved to find an excuse to get shot of him . One housemaster judged him to be “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness which makes me anxious about his influence of other boys”. He obviously wasn’t a young man about to be tamed for educational purposes.
Bored by routine and fearful of getting stuck in a rut he resolved “to change scenery; abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp…..travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps”. This book is the first of two volumes of his memories and adventures, the second volume- Between The Woods And The Water – was published in 1986.
He set off in 1933, and though he wasn’t to know it at the time, Europe was on the brink of war and his journey would take him to countries destined to undergo dramatic and traumatic change.
The route he took mostly on foot, espousing for the most part the soft option of accepting rides, can be gleaned from the chapter titles: The Low Countries – Up The Rhine – Into High Germany – Winterreise – The Danube – Approach To Kaiserstadt – Vienna – The Edge Of The Slav World – Prague Under Snow – Slovakia – The Marches Of Hungary.
Fermor died in 2011, aged 96 and this book was written when he was in his sixties. It is based on notebooks of his “doings” and occasionally vivid, sometimes hazy memories.
Not only is this a record of places he visited but it is also written in a style that belongs to a past age. Like the journey it documents, it is unhurried and open to being sidetracked. It is part memoir, part travelogue and part philosophical record both of himself as a young man and as an older, wiser self looking back. It documents a once in a lifetime journey of discovery in which he recalls the kindness of strangers, the beauty of landscapes and the architectural treasures he encountered.
The ornate formality of the language makes it a book that is both absorbing and, at times, infuriating. It demands a patience because you have to take things at his slow, steady pace. Here’s how he describes part of his journey in the Netherlands: “All the country I have traversed so far was below sea-level and without this discipline, which everlastingly redressed the balance between solid and liquid, the whole region would have been wild sea or a brackish waste of flood and fen”. The fact that he selects a verb like ‘traversed’ rather than say more directly that he ‘walked’ or ‘travelled’ through is typical of the elaborate style you have to get used to.
He likes to show off his extraordinary word power which reflects a deep love of poetry so , for example, he speaks of communication problems with the locals by describing the state of being “reciprocally tongue-tied”. He notes the “cubistic mass” of a hotel or the “saint-encrusted towers” of Cologne Cathedral.
He describes seeing a German man throwing up after a huge meal thus: “Halfway up the vaulted stairs a groaning Brownshirt, propped against the wall on a swastica’d arm, was unloosing. in a staunchless gush down the steps, the intake of hours”. ‘Unloosing a staunchless gush’ is certainly the most memorable description of vomiting I have ever encountered.
Other words and expressions that had me reaching for my dictionary include “goffered ruffs” (verb ‘to goffer’ – to press into ridges or pleats/ noun ‘riff’ – a collar of lace or other fine fabric); “polders” (areas of low-lying land) and “quincunxes” – arrangements of five objects with one at each corner of a rectangle or square and one in the centre.
If you want a book will increase your word power and boost you Scrabble scores then I’d recommend this highly. If you are looking for a straight travel guide, this won’t be much use, but what it does give is a fascinating glimpse into a unique moment in history and it is a valuable record of people and places that would never be the same again.
