Between the Woods and the Water [antikvár]

of Transylvania, the wild majesty of the Danube itself as it swept through gorge, marsh and forest towards the Black Sea. Before we join him on his journey we must pause for contemplation ourselves, because it is not exactly the Paddy Leigh Fermor we see at Esztergom who is the author of this book. Five years later the young backpacker was to become Major Patrick Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE, a war hero celebrated for parachuting into Nazi-occupied Crete, kidnapping a German general, and smuggling him away to Egypt, and in the years after that he had written three books of travel which had given him literary fame too. It was only when he was in his sixties that he set about turning his youthful walk across Europe into a book. The first volume of the consequent work, A Time of Gifts, was published in 1977 and instantly recognized as a classic. This second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, appeared in 1986, and by then Leigh Fermor was seventy-one years old. So half a century separates the experience from the book, and the author is looking back at himself across a great gulf of experience and of history. The Second World War has changed Europe forever since Paddy hoisted his rucksack at the Hook of Holland, and his alter ego too has been weathered by a lifetime of travel and accomplishment. It really is almost as though Between the Woods and the Water is the work of two separate writers, coming to the task from opposite directions, but blending their talents in a display of intergenerational collaboration. And it is a triumph of this book that we, the readers, understand them both. We know what goes through both their minds, because the artistry of its author makes the boyish enthusiasm of the young man as immediate as the tempered experience of the old.