She was 16 years his senior, but the two fell in love and the young Englishman passed four idyllic years living on her family estate at Baleni in what was then known as Rumania.

As he cheerfully sauntered along, he would belt out each region’s folk songs.Īt the end of his journey, Paddy met Princess Balasha Cantacuzene, a scion of one of the great dynasties of Moldavia and Wallachia. Letters of introduction then eased his way into other homes. He originally expected to doss down in haystacks and barns as he trudged along in fact, he regularly smiled his way into country houses, consulates and baronial manors - and sometimes into the beds of young women and lonely divorcees. Paddy also possessed, along with good looks, daring and boundless curiosity and a seemingly irresistible charm. Up until then he had been an indifferent student, although passionate about reading and gifted with a phenomenal memory. When Paddy began his European rambles, he was not quite 19. Artemis Cooper’s excellent biography, “Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure,” fills in the details, corrects errors and makes clear that Paddy - as he was always known - often conflated incidents or fudged details in his writing, sometimes for reasons of art, sometimes to protect a friend or a woman’s reputation. While most of Leigh Fermor’s work is highly personal, his various books - and these include one about the Caribbean, “ The Traveller’s Tree” (1950), and two about Greece, “ Mani” (1958) and “ Roumeli” (1966) - offer only carefully chosen glimpses of his long and astonishing life ( he died at age 96 in 2011). A never-completed final volume - drafts of which will be published in March as “ The Broken Road” - would have followed its boyish hero to Constantinople and Mount Athos. These two volumes lyrically memorialize a youthful walk across Europe in 1933-34, starting from the Hook of Holland and passing through Germany and much of Eastern Europe.

Still, the most beautifully written of modern “travel books” - an awkward term - may well be Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “ A Time of Gifts” (1977) closely followed by its sequel “ Between the Woods and the Water” (1986). Sybille Bedford’s “ A Visit to Don Otavio.”Įric Newby’s “ A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.”Īll of these are wondrous. Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s “ The Worst Journey in the World.”

A time of gifts book