FORUM: Illtyd Harrington: ‘As I Please’

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Published: 17 June, 2011

DURING the 1960s and until his death in 1976 I spent much of my spare time at the home of Patrick Balfour, the third Baron Kinross at No 4 Warwick Avenue, Little Venice. 

Baron Kinross was a close and tolerant friend, amused by my very fierce Marxism.

There in his salon I met the grandees of 1920s and 1930s travel and politics – Freya Stark, Rose Macaulay, John Betjeman, Andrew Devonshire (the 11th Duke) Rebecca West , the haughty Evelyn Waugh and Tom Driberg (the original William Hickey). None of them measured up to Paddy Leigh Fermor – a man who one evening silently startled me. 

He was tall, handsome, and humorous. “I’m sorry I’ve barged in,” he said. “I’ll put my bags upstairs and do you mind if I help myself to a drink. 

I hate to disturb you.”

I poured him a glass of whisky and saw under the incredible perimeter of silence around him. Of course, he was one of the most courageous English soldiers in the 1939–45 war. I say English because Jan Morris, probably one of the last of our travel writers, said his character was quintessentially English.

Paddy at 19 had walked across Europe from the Hook of Holland and found shelter with princesses and peasants in a continent that was on the edge of a great destruction.

His output was limited. The third volume of that long walk is still awaiting publication. But his prose excites imagination among the present generation.

He was probably the last of those who made the Grand Tour in a pedestrian way. 

Wearing his fame with monastic guilt, he bridged the gap between ancient Greece and Byzantium. 

He built himself a house on the edge of the Peloponnese. 

This was the land of Ulysses and the Iliad. He never allowed the ghastly rule of the Colonels to interfere with him. 

His superlative courage will probably be his memorial. As a major in wartime Egypt he casually walked into the CO’s office and quietly suggested organising a two-man raiding party of the heavily armed SS headquarters in Crete.

Amazingly it was agreed to. Paddy dressed as a German police corporal undertook the task with an army private and extraordinarily managed to captured Crete’s military commander General Heinrich Kreipe. 

With Captain Bill Moss, he evaded some 22 challenges at checkpoints and blagged his way through other obstructions, before marching the general over the Cretan mountains in readiness for a fast boat to Egypt. Moved by a beautiful sunrise as they waited for the boat, the general suddenly started to quietly recite lines from the Latin poet Horace. They were from a poem Paddy knew well and he took up reciting the next five stanzas. The surprised general’s eyes met Paddy’s. 

There was an extraordinary spark of humanity linking them.

Dirk Bogarde played Paddy in the film version of the capture.

A proud hero with a gentle humour shaped in inquiry Paddy had, I felt, an unfulfilled yearning. 

The last time we met was eight years ago in the Gay Hussar. But Joan, his wife was in a foul temper as becomes the daughter of a viscount.

We grinned at each other, but I saluted him. 

He was one off.