These days, “adventurous” is buying an airline ticket and
Skyping home to mum from a Thai beach bar. For Patrick Leigh Fermor, “adventurous”
was flunking school and heading off, aged 18, to walk across Europe on a pound a week. No iPhone for him, it was 1934,
and the journey took him a year.
He ended up in Greece, but when WW2 began dashed back to join
the Irish Guards, because he thought if he was going to die he might as well
have an attractive uniform. When he missed out on a commission he grudgingly
accepted a transfer to the Intelligence Corps.
But Fermor was an extraordinary individual: outgoing, widely
read, good with languages. His walk across Europe, “from the Hook of Holland to
Constantinople”, immortalised in the much lauded travelogue A Time Of Gifts (1977), had broadened his horizons and formed his
life view and he turned out to be a brilliant wartime agent.
The SOE sent him to Nazi occupied Crete where, for almost
two years, he led a group of resistance fighters. Apparently he was one of
several classical scholars working there – a knowledge of ancient Greek seen as
a shortcut to the modern language.
Later, he was awarded
the DSO for a daring mission in which he kidnapped a Nazi general and smuggled
him off the island. He even left a note in the man’s car making it clear that
it had been a British operation, signing it PM
Leigh Fermor, Maj, O.C. Commando. In peacetime, his activities on the
island earned him a “blood vendetta” from those who blamed him for terrible Nazi
reprisals. And yet he carried on living on Crete for most of his life.
When he died last year at the grand old age of 96, Fermor
was fittingly described as a cross between “Indiana Jones, James Bond and
Grahame Greene.” Artemis Cooper’s excellent, un-put-downable biography of lives
up to this mix and offers a third person viewpoint Fermor’s own books, by
definition, lack. She is lucky in her subject, not just because his life is
littered with famous connections – the Sitwells, Lauren Van Der Post, Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger – but because even from birth Fermor’s
circumstances were extraordinary, and his attitude to life formidable. He loved
to party, drank like a fish and squeezed the maximum from life.
While Fermor was famous for crossing Europe on foot, Samuel
Foote was famous for having just one foot – he lost one in a riding accident. I’ve
been relishing Ian Kelly’s Mr Foote’s
Other Leg, about this once-celebrated 18th century actor,
comedian, true crime author and friend to Princes.
Like Oscar Wilde in a later era, Foote was said to be the
wittiest, most famous man in London, at a time when a clever remark in a coffee
house was the equivalent of appearing on Radio 4 or getting a million followers
on Twitter.
He made his name with a scandalous pamphlet describing how
one of his uncles killed another in an argument over a will – a long running
family dispute Dickens is said to have used as the basis of the interminable
legal case Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Bleak
House. Then he traded on his fame by taking to the stage.
But rather like Wilde, Foote was brought low by the
scandalous suggestion that he was homosexual. For a 21st century
reader, the transcripts from the court case are shocking and yet also, strangely
hilarious. Foote might have recovered from the scandal, but according to Kelly
his bitterness and wit got the better for him. He was ruined, forgotten and
died, his one remaining foot in his mouth.
This review appeared in The Big Issue
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