I was at my neighbour's for Xmas dinner tonight and ended up telling the extraordinary story of the abduction of General Kreipe on Crete in 1943, planned in Cairo by Fermor (age 20, and William Moss, 18), "over cocktails in Cairo" that year (!!)
Patrick Leigh Fermor was clearly "a character". The article is a really good read but here are a few quotes:
Patrick Leigh Fermor was clearly "a character". The article is a really good read but here are a few quotes:
...With pride, he would tell how he went to a school "for rather naughty children", and was expelled from two others... His housemaster described him as "a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness", which was perceptive.
Among the books he packed for his European journey in 1933 was a volume of Horace. To pass the time while marching, he recited aloud "a great deal of Shakespeare, several Marlowe speeches, most of Keats's Odes" as well as "the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge"...
The immense repertoire had a frivolous side. Throughout his adult life, Paddy was a great performer of party turns: songs in Cretan dialect; The Walrus and the Carpenter recited backwards; Falling in Love Again sung in the same direction – but in German. When I was at his house in Greece, he restricted himself, after a lunch that lasted several hours, to It's a Long Way to Tipperary in Hindustani...
The volume of Horace came in rather handy during the abduction.Among the books he packed for his European journey in 1933 was a volume of Horace. To pass the time while marching, he recited aloud "a great deal of Shakespeare, several Marlowe speeches, most of Keats's Odes" as well as "the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge"...
The immense repertoire had a frivolous side. Throughout his adult life, Paddy was a great performer of party turns: songs in Cretan dialect; The Walrus and the Carpenter recited backwards; Falling in Love Again sung in the same direction – but in German. When I was at his house in Greece, he restricted himself, after a lunch that lasted several hours, to It's a Long Way to Tipperary in Hindustani...
[Kreipe and his captors] slept in caves for a month... Passing the time one day, Kreipe began to recite some lines from Horace's ode Ad Thaliarchum. The Latin syllables caught his captor's ear. "As luck would have it, it was one of those I knew by heart." After the general had run out of steam, Paddy carried on to the end. "We got on rather better after that." In 1972, an almost equally unlikely event occurred, when the pair were reunited on a Greek version of This Is Your Life...
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