Paul's Reviews > A Time of Gifts

This is a remarkable book; the account of an 18 year old who decides to escape England and walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. The year is 1933 and the Nazis have just come to power and he sets off just before winter starts. He had been expelled from school and wanted to write and he took writing materials with him to record his experiences in a journal/diary. Leigh Fermor has the optimism and enthusiasm of youth; but he also had good powers of observation and the ability to make friends easily. That he must have had a great deal of as many people put him up overnight without question. This first of three volumes starts in Holland and moves through Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and ends in Hungary.
The book captures a world about to be torn apart by the rise of Nazism and Leigh Fermor comes across them and they are generally unpleasant; in contrast with most of those he meets. He goes off on tangents on a regular basis to describe something interesting. His descriptions of the natural world are very good, especially the arrival of the storks in the spring in Hungary. Leigh Fermor also has a good eye for architecture and notes the changing nature of the buildings as he travels. He describes the people he meets, the generosity, and often in detail the food (and the drink). Laced through it all is Leigh Fermor’s love of literature and reading. Having had a public school education he has able to quote a great deal of what he had been taught. He records the amused reactions of people as he walked and acted out bits of Shakespeare or read poems and other bits and pieces that he recalled. It is a coming of age tale like no other and he maintained his zest for life until the end. The journalist Allison Pearson recalls when she was sent to Crete to meet him when he was 83 to write an article on him. She expected a frail old man she would have to “look after”. She just about remembers drinking more in 48 hours than she had for the previous 20 years and waking up under a bar. Pearson says that as they walked around Crete she could barely keep up with him and he was very much like he was in the book; observant of nature, breaking into song and poetry periodically and climbing things.
The sheer zest for life is infectious and the descriptions very sharp, for example;
“Snow had covered the landscape with a sparkling layer and the slatey hue of the ice was only becoming visible as the looping arabesques of the skaters laid it bare. Following the white parallelograms the lines of the willows dwindled as insubstantially as trails of vapour. The breeze that impelled those hastening clouds had met no hindrance for a thousand miles and a traveller moving at a footpace along the hog’s back of a dyke above the cloud-shadows and the level champaign was filled with intimations of limitless space..”
This is one of the great travel books.