I enjoyed reading A Time of Gifts so much that I decided to just bash on and read the next part of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s journey from Rotterdam to Constantinople (Istanbul), although of course he actually begins his journey in England. That book ended on a bridge over the Danube between Slovakia and Hungary and this book picks up where he left off.

It’s almost 1934 now and although he had intended spending a lot of his nights sleeping under the stars, when the weather permitted, he was more often housed in comfort in large country houses. This came about because quite early on in his travels he had his belongings stolen, including all his money and his passport. This led to him having to visit the British Embassy where one of the staff members was incredibly kind and helpful and ended up giving him introductions to many of the ‘best’ families in eastern Europe. So as sometimes happens, what seemed to be a disaster became a stroke of great luck.

In the end I didn’t enjoy this book quite as much as the previous one. Partly I think because as far as I’m concerned I was completely off the map whereas lots of the places in the western Europe of A Time of Gifts, I had actually visited.

The other thing which I couldn’t help thinking about was the feeling that most of the people which he made friends with were going to come to grief in the not very distant furture, given what Hitler was up to at the time. Fermor often met Gypsies and sometimes Jews and I really doubt if any of those people survived the coming disasters. He’s very knowledgable on all the many tribes which fought over this part of Europe and that in itself is quite depressing, especially when he mentions the tragic area of Kosovo, which of course has suffered horribly even in recent years.

But there are plenty of moments of comedy and it would seem that almost all of the aristocrats whom he befriended had had British nannies, and more particularly Scottish ones. Count Eugene, a Hungarian aristocrat had a great Scottish vocabulary learned from his nanny and he habitually came out with things like: a hae ma doots – sit ye doon – I’ll dree my own weird – I dinna ken and so on.

One of Fermor’s interests was language and so he often tried to learn words from the various people he met and that is very interesting, when he compares the similarities between words of different races. He was even able to question Hasidic Jews on the exact meaning of some passages from the Old Testament and they were amazed that their sacred words had spread so far, all the way to England.

When he came across a group of gypsies using a sheep’s fleece to sieve gold from a mountain stream he wondered if that was the meaning of the mythical ‘golden fleece’.

Anyway, I find that I could go on and on because this book is full of interesting bits and pieces and I had decided to buy the next one in the series as this book ends at the end of Middle Europe, the Iron Gates of the Danube. He never did finish writing about his journey to Constantinople and of course he died last year, but I think someone else has finished the book and it’s due out next year sometime.

Fermor had been reconstructing his journeys from the diaries which he wrote at the time, one of which had gone missing during World War II and turned up years later. So although he was writing about the 1930s this book wasn’t published until 1986. Lots of his memories about people and places did come back to him as he re-read his notes and it must have been a great time for him to be re-living his youth with young girlfriends all those years later. He must have been an awful procrastinator though as he still hadn’t finished writing about his experiences, and he was 96 when he died.