The World is the Traveler’s Inn

A Time of Gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermor

Along with Rebecca West and Robert Byron, Patrick Leigh Fermor is regarded as one of the best English writers who travelled between the wars.  This first volume of his walking sojourn covers from Holland to Hungary. The second volume Between the Woods and the Water takes him across Hungary and Romania. The third volume The Broken Road takes him to Istanbul

This book is not a lightly edited diary or an account written soon after the journey. It is a between-the-wars travel classic written when the author was in his sixties in the early Seventies on the basis of a travel diary written in the Thirties. Fermor was a slow writer who revised sentences again and again. He loved odd words: uhlan, fimbria, quinquereme.

With origins in London high society and artistic circles, his mother gave him a love of the humanities while his father, a government geologist in India, represented the sciences. His early years were spent virtually free of discipline on a farm and he had problems later with the regimentation and rules of schools. I suppose some readers will think he just had the natural high spirits of a boy who was “all boy.” Others may wonder about ADHD and impulse control when Fermor’s antics became concerning enough to get him dismissed from a school, however apologetically. He was sent to a psychiatrist - he saw the same one that Virginia Woolf consulted before he was born.

Thanks to a combination of patient tutors and his own preferences, he read widely in literature and did well in all subjects but math. He memorized a shocking amount of poetry in various languages. He also realized the military was not really his destination so he scuttled plans for Sandhurst. Instead he had an idea – travel and write about it - that his creative mother was all for. After all, it was the golden age of travel writing and he had read The Station and had met Robert Byron when they were both partying in a nightclub.

Not yet twenty, in December 1933, he boarded a ferry from London to Holland, where he began his trek across central Europe. Among the items in his rucksack, he carried a diary in which he faithfully recorded his impressions throughout the trip, though he lost the chronicle when his rucksack was stolen in a German youth hostel. He began another diary.

The reader assumes that in 1933, with Hitler 10 months in power, it would have been difficult for an Englishman to travel in the Reich along the Rhine, then the Danube, with detours to Munich and Prague. In fact, Germans have a long tradition of being hospitable to travelling students, assuming them poor and hungry. So, his profession as ‘student’ on this passport opened doors at all levels of society. Fermor must have been a charmer and gentleman. For instance, besides being an attentive listener to elderly people, he received hospitality from two well-brought-up girls his age who would have gotten into trouble if their guardians (out of town) and neighbors knew a young man was dossing down on their couch. They probably thought his broken German was cute.

The story is interesting where Fermor touches on cultural themes. Fermor meets characters of all kinds, from poor peasants to noble aristocrats; he sleeps on pallets in barns, but also as a guest in villas. He spends a charming German Christmas with a middle-class family.  He listens to stories handed down from parents to children in remote villages, but he can also take advantage of the old libraries of wealthy hosts. Hilarious is his experience making quick money by sketching people – nothing like working in another culture to really get a feel for a people and their ways.

This travel narrative is well worth reading for hardcore readers into the genre. The author spent WWII on Crete fighting with the partisans. After the war, in the middle 1950s, he visited Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries in France.