A Timely Gift...

...You will recall (or see archives if not) a fondness of mine for the travel writings of dear Patrick ('Paddy') Leigh Fermor. So morbid have been recent thoughts I hardly dare write his name lest it prompt refulgent and deserved obits. to appear. Ninety-something he must be by now, possibly though dessicated to immortal mummification by the fierce Mani sun.

They do say that his sole novel, 'The Violins of Saint-Jacques', only among his works failed to trouble the scorer as it were. Breathe it not in Babylon, but I've not much quite cared either for his monastic book 'A Time To Keep Silence.' Not that it's a hash by any stretch, making rather a decent smite - as an outsider - at the life to be lived under the Rule of Saint Benedict.

That though is the keen point. The view of the outsider cannot in any place or at any pace comprehend or communicate the utterly alien other world of the insider. An anthropologist's doom that one. Even I, as one once in now out again, cannot say or recall to the new self what once the old self knew and lived.

He could have done worse of course. Graham Greene did for one. Rattled on about "the vow of silence" in 'Monsignor Quixote' I believe it was. Tried warning him that there was no such thing, but the pompous prig avowed he knew better because he was "...a frequent guest of the Abbot."

Guest my arse, is my riposte. That is precisely it. Guests are not there to know anything whatsoever and if they did it would probably shrivel their tender, slightly idolatrous, souls.

But put him in his métier vraiment - the young itinerant with a passion for secular, pre-War European cultures de haut en bas - and there is none to match Paddy for sharpness of observation and richness of insight. From the hideous bursting Burghers of Munich - and their wives - gorging themselves obese in monstrous tribute to their nation, to pale, delicate White Russian exiles all shadow and cobweb yet joyous musical talents; from welcoming farmers and artisans for whom a guest was indeed a holy thing, to lustful young peasant women happy to fetch some colour to a pale Englishman's cheek - all shall be found, and so much more, in but the first two books of his travels on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the early 1930s.

Not though merely - as if that were little which it were not - depicting or describing the present, the crisp glory of a near silent European winter forest or the bustle of hard-working, hard-drinking farmers, Paddy takes you through the voluminous historical pasts that swarm through every town and over every field. A battle fought across these river banks in the time of the Caesars, meddling if righteous medieval saints uprooting sacred pagan oaks, Renaissance dynasties or Carolingian factions disputing every mountain and valley - all this is woven into the landscape of rock or river, and thus no single blade of grass even seems less than a thousand years old.

Architecture, art, music, literature all sprung from its place in European time, that too is there. The gross martyring artisans, belching as they slew the troublesome saint, the be-ribboned Landsknecht - in whose elaborate costume the modern quite bursts through the medieval - or the blond warrior giants of The Thirty Years War all pose for their respective portraits or else emerge from pages of wonderful poetic text. Towns, towers, walls of castles and houses - generations of history in stone and wood. The summation of Gothic art and mind in a single decorative carving on a cathedral choir stall.

The slow, occasionally turbulent often brutal, wending of ancient tribes and races across the continent. The rapidly rising modern tide of darkly approaching Nazism. Or lighter than that, the castle prison of Richard the Lionheart or that precise spot on the Danube where Schubert - he too on a walking trip - composed the 'Trout Quintet'. All - as Melville's warp and woof of life - is freely given as a gift to the reader.

Was all this blown away in the flattening horror of the war just to come, or did we simply forget how to see the past in and through a post-war facade of cement, steel and ideology? Would it be possible - permitted even - to take that same journey now, and meet by chance in crowded, smoke-filled (not that alas for certain) inns people who would greet a stranger with kindliness and fill him with food, beer and knowledge of lore, custom, nature and life stretching back over centuries? Somehow I fear I doubt it would.

If you know the story then you do. Some forty years past the first volume - 'A Time of Gifts' - was published; nearly another decade before the second - 'Between the Woods and the Water' - appeared. And now some twenty years later we still wait for the third and final instalment to show.

Time for another gift if you would be so kind Paddy. But if not to be then one's thanks for favours already gratefully received.