At 18 he left home to walk the length of Europe; at 25, as an SOE agent, he kidnapped the German commander of Crete; now at 93, Patrick Leigh Fermor, arguably the greatest living travel writer, is publishing the nearest he may come to an autobiography - and finally learning to type. William Dalrymple meets him at home in Greece'You've got to bellow a bit,' Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor said, inclining his face in my direction, and cupping his ear. 'He's become an economist? Well, thank God for that. I thought you said he'd become a Communist.'
He took a swig of retsina and returned to his lemon chicken.
Patrick Leigh Fermor: 'This year I've acquired something called tunnel vision. Very odd, and sometimes quite interesting'
'I'm deaf,' he continued. 'That's the awful truth. That's why I'm leaning towards you in this rather eerie fashion. I do have a hearing aid, but when I go swimming I always forget about it until I'm two strokes out, and then it starts singing at me. I get out and suck it, and with luck all is well. But both of them have gone now, and that's one reason why I am off to London next week. Glasses, too. Running out of those very quickly. Occasionally, the one that is lost is found, but their numbers slowly diminish…'
He trailed off. 'The amount that can go wrong at this age - you've no idea. This year I've acquired something called tunnel vision. Very odd, and sometimes quite interesting. When I look at someone I can see four eyes, one of them huge and stuck to the side of the mouth. Everyone starts looking a bit like a Picasso painting.'
He paused and considered for a moment, as if confronted by the condition for the first time. 'And, to be honest, my memory is not in very good shape either. Anything like a date or a proper name just takes wing, and quite often never comes back. Winston Churchill - couldn't remember his name last week.
'Even swimming is a bit of a trial now,' he continued, 'thanks to this bloody clock thing they've put in me - what d'they call it? A pacemaker. It doesn't mind the swimming. But it doesn't like the steps on the way down. Terrific nuisance.'
advertisementWe were sitting eating supper in the moonlight in the arcaded L-shaped cloister that forms the core of Leigh Fermor's beautiful house in Mani in southern Greece. Since the death of his beloved wife Joan in 2003, Leigh Fermor, known to everyone as Leigh Fermor, has lived here alone in his own Elysium with only an ever-growing clowder of darting, mewing, paw-licking cats for company. He is cooked for and looked after by his housekeeper, Elpida, the daughter of the inn-keeper who was his original landlord when he came to Mani for the first time in 1962.
It is the most perfect writer's house imaginable, designed and partially built by Leigh Fermor himself in an old olive grove overlooking a secluded Mediterranean bay. It is easy to see why, despite growing visibly frailer, he would never want to leave. Buttressed by the old retaining walls of the olive terraces, the whitewashed rooms are cool and airy and lined with books; old copies of the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books lie scattered around on tables between Attic vases, Indian sculptures and bottles of local ouzo.
A study filled with reference books and old photographs lies across a shady courtyard. There are cicadas grinding in the cypresses, and a wonderful view of the peaks of the Taygetus falling down to the blue waters of the Aegean, which are so clear it is said that in some places you can still see the wrecks of Ottoman galleys lying on the seabed far below.
There is a warm smell of wild rosemary and cypress resin in the air; and from below comes the crash of the sea on the pebbles of the foreshore. Yet there is something unmistakably melancholy in the air: a great traveller even partially immobilised is as sad a sight as an artist with failing vision or a composer grown hard of hearing.
I had driven down from Athens that morning, through slopes of olives charred and blackened by last year's forest fires. I arrived at Kardamyli late in the evening. Although the area is now almost metropolitan in feel compared to what it was when Leigh Fermor moved here in the 1960s (at that time he had to move the honey-coloured Taygetus stone for his house to its site by mule as there was no road) it still feels wonderfully remote and almost untouched by the modern world.
When Leigh Fermor first arrived in Mani in 1962 he was known principally as a dashing commando. At the age of 25, as a young agent of Special Operations Executive (SOE), he had kidnapped the German commander in Crete, General Kreipe, and returned home to a Distinguished Service Order and movie version of his exploits, Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) with Dirk Bogarde playing him as a handsome black-shirted guerrilla.
It was in this house that Leigh Fermor made the startling transformation - unique in his generation - from war hero to literary genius. To meet, Leigh Fermor may still have the speech patterns and formal manners of a British officer of a previous generation; but on the page he is a soaring prose virtuoso with hardly a single living equal.
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17.11.2008