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A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor: book review


A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977, this edition 2010) is about a long, long walk across Europe in the 1930s. It’s as long as its book title.


In 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) intends to travel alone on foot from Holland to Constantintinople (Istanbul) in Turkey. He is eighteen years old. He writes about this journey, published in 1977 when he is 62 years old, after having three travel books already published.


Young Patrick sees himself as a Wandering Scholar. He was ready to ‘sleep anywhere, talk to anybody, live on almost nothing, eat or drink anything, have a go at any languge, make friends with strangers rich or poor, and brave the worst of any weather.’ He didn’t give a damn. With a backpack, he has allowed himself only one pound a week to live on for a year.


He lives in London, England, and aims to start in Holland. ‘Even before I looked at a map, two great rivers had already plotted the itinerary in my mind’s eye: the Rhine uncoiled across it, the Alps rose up and then the wolf-harbouring Carpathian watersheds and the cordilleras of the Balkans; and there, at the end of the windings of the Danube, the Black Sea was beginning to spread its mysterious and lopsided shape; and my chief destination was never in a moment’s doubt.’


He focuses on the weather, the landscapes, the towns and cities, and the people. And the clothes – there is always a tale of tunics or tassels. Sometimes his memory of the scenes and settings is vivid, and at other times it is vague. But the hospitality of strangers is memorable.


From the lowlands of Holland, crossing Germany during the rise of the Brownshirts, down the Danube, and through Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, he travels. He writes about dancing with a girl whose two front teeth had been knocked out in a brawl; learning German by reading a translation of Shakespeare; breathtaking architecture of the Middle Ages; sleeping rough and sleeping in castles; eating with peasants and eating with princes.


He is not always on the move – he stays for short periods to enjoy a city here and there. He sketches farms and parish priests, and gives away his artworks to the people he draws. He notes the differences between city and rural life in the same country and across countries. And he writes about the chance conversations in cafés, beer halls, and wine houses. 


This travel memoir is just the first half of the journey - from Holland to Hungary. The other part of the journey is published in Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and an unpublished work was underway when he died. So, in this book, he doesn’t get to Turkey.


This is a great travel book – fascinating and funny, well-written and well-structured. It is not only historical and social, it is personal and poignant – about an adventurous, kind young man with a destination and a dream.  







 

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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