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blackswaneuroparedux · 9 months

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‘Pimpernel of the Hellenes’, ‘Major Paddy’, ‘Enchanted maniac’: Will the real Paddy Leigh Fermor please stand up?

Paradox reconciles all contradictions. - Patrick Leigh Fermor

So one evening I was baby sitting my nephews and nieces here in our family chalet in Verbier, high up in the Swiss Alps. It was my turn to baby sit as the rest of my family enjoyed the fantastic classical music concerts and events showcased at the two week long Verbier 30th Festival. The little scamps had gone to bed and my father and I watched an old British war movie on DVD, ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ (1957). It was filmed by the legendary team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger based on the 1950 book ‘Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe’ by W. Stanley Moss.

I’ve seen the film a couple of times before, but until now never really paid attention to where the title came from. My father said it was from Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream’ And so it was. In the play, Oberon, the king of the fairies and the Queen are having a fairly bitter drawn-out fight over custody of a changeling Indian child, and this is how the pissed off king greets the queen when they run into each other, “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania”. Oberon is basically saying "Oh Lord, it's you..." and Titania's response is basically a flippant middle finger. One of the best modern reasons to read Shakespeare: to throw playful erudite shade at others.

Anyway, the historical background of the film is the German invasion of Crete in May 1941. After an intense ten-day battle, Allied troops were driven back across the island, and many were evacuated from beaches along the southern coast. Some Cretans and British officers took to the mountains to organise resistance against the occupying forces. The German occupation that followed was especially brutal. Dreadful reprisals followed every act of resistance. The German commander, General Müller, insisted on taking 50 Cretan lives for every German soldier killed; he became known as ‘The Butcher of Crete’.

As a Classicist side note, there had been a close association between Britain and Crete since the early 20th century, when archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans had uncovered the sensational remains of a Minoan palace at Knossos. The headquarters of the British archaeological school in Crete was a large villa alongside the site, known as Villa Ariadne. Several archaeologists, who knew the island and its people well, went underground after the German occupation to aid the Cretan resistance. Continuing in this tradition, scholar and travel-writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who had got to know Greece in the 1930s, joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

During the German occupation, Major Paddy Leigh Fermor travelled to Crete three times to help organise local resistance against the hated German occupation. On the third occasion, in February 1944, he was parachuted in with a specific mission to kidnap German commander General Müller, to boost morale on Crete along with his erstwhile SOE comrade Capt. W. Stanley Moss MC (aka Billy Moss) of the Coldstream Guards. However, just after they parachute in, General Müller was replaced by General Heinrich Kreipe, who transferred from the Russian Front. Thinking that capturing one general was as good as another, Fermor merrily go ahead with the daring kidnap operation.

It’s at this point that the narrative of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’ (1957) picks up. Dirk Bogarde plays Paddy Leigh Fermor, David Oxley plays Moss, and Marius Goring plays the taciturn German paratroop general. Blink and you’ll miss the late great Christopher Lee making a cameo appearance as a German officer in the dentist’s room scene.

The film naturally takes some liberty with the facts but it’s a cracking yarn of high adventure and drama. Xan Fielding, a close friend of Leigh Fermor from the SOE in Cairo, was taken on as technical adviser. The fact the film was shot in in the Alpes-Maritimes in France and Italy, and on the Côte d'Azur in France, far away from the craggy valleys and mountains of Crete itself. The director Michael Powell spent some time walking in Crete to get to know the island, but decided that, with the confused and volatile state of Greek politics, it was not suitable to film there.

Looking back years after he had directed it Powell didn’t think much of his own film. By contrast, Paddy Leigh Fermor, who was on set throughout the film shoot, was very happy with Bogarde’s portrayal of him with Byronic glamour. Watching the movie again ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’ remains a classic and stands out from many British war films of the 1950s because of its realism. The British SOE men and the Cretan guerrillas look absolutely right for their parts. It is dramatic and full of suspense while filled with much boyish humour.

I was disappointed with one notable omission in the film that did happen in real life. According to Patrick Leigh Fermor, at dawn one day during the journey across the mountains, General Kreipe was looking at the mist rising from Mount Ida and began to recite, in Latin, the opening lines of Horace’s ninth ode:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes geluque flumina constiterint acuto?

Behold yon Mountains hoary height, Made higher with new Mounts of Snow; Again behold the Winters weight Oppress the lab’ring Woods below: And Streams, with Icy fetters bound, Benum’d and crampt to solid Ground

(John Dryden 1685)

Leigh Fermor picked up on the General, and recited the remaining stanzas of the Ode. ‘Ach so, Herr Major,’ said Kreipe when Leigh Fermor had finished. Both men were amazed to realise they shared a classical education and a love of ancient Latin poetry.

Leigh Fermor later wrote that it was as though the war had ceased to exist for a moment, as ‘We had both drunk from the same fountains before.’ It brought captor and captive together with a strange bond. The scene was not reproduced in the film, as Powell and Pressburger probably thought it would make the men sound too academic for a popular cinema audience.

Leigh Fermor and Kreipe met again in the early 1970s, on a Greek television show, and got on famously together. The General said Leigh Fermor had treated him chivalrously as a captive. They remained friends until Kreipe’s death.

After sharing a late night drink with my father after the film, I began to muse on the figure of Paddy Leigh Fermor, a family friend and someone I met along with his wife, Joan, as a little girl. My grandparents, and especially my grandmother, knew Paddy briefly from their days during and after the Second World War.

My father shared a few stories about him when he and my mother visited his beautiful home in Greece, where even at his advanced age he remained the most generous of hosts and the most outrageous flirt.

One of my memories was getting into his battered old Peugeot in the drive way and trying to drive it when my feet could barely touch the pedals. It wouldn’t have mattered in any case as the brakes didn’t work as he cheerfully said later as we careened around a dirt road to go around the mountains for a drive.

Many years later in April 2022, I tried to visit the home of the late Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor - a sort of pristine shrine to their memory that one can also stay in any of the rooms as a vacation rental - in the coastal fishing village of Kadarmyli in the Peloponnese, as part of a hiking and mountaineering sojourn around Greece with ex-Army friends. We couldn’t stay there as it was already rented out to other guests, and so we stayed higher up the mountain in a villa, but we swam in front of the Fermor’s home which was on the water’s edge.

You could never put your finger on Paddy Leigh Fermor. He hid behind his gift for telling yarns, and pulling Ancient Greek verses out of the thin air, as well as boisterously singing local Greek songs with a drink in his hand.

Even after his death in 2011, the question keeps nagging as to who was Paddy Leigh Fermor?

The Dirk Bogarde film too seems to ask, who exactly is the ‘real’ Patrick Leigh Fermor - or the real anyone? Taking its title from a Shakespearian play concerned with dreams and disguises, magic and power, ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ is all about questions of identity.

Under the film credits, we see Dirk Bogarde in uniform; then, unexpectedly, we see him in the flamboyant outfit of a Cretan hill-bandit. A title informs us that Major Leigh Fermor was also known by the Greek code-name “Philidem.” In other words, there are two of him (at least), and on one level the adventure the film is about to unfold reflects a conflict in his personality. It’s a conflict shared, unknowingly, by his Nazi opposite number, the fierce, arrogant General Kreipe (an unlikely “proud Titania,” but it’s true that he “with a monster is in love” – the monster of Nazism). Kreipe’s human side is so rigorously repressed by the demands of war and “glory” that he is genuinely unaware of it; ironically, this humanness, which constitutes the true manhood of this Teuton warrior, is revealed by a boy (equivalent to Shakespeare’s Indian Prince?) - who, in turn, is the most grown up person in the movie.

If “Philidem” appears under the credits, caped and open-shirted, a romantic dream-figure out of an operetta or a storybook, he is first seen in the film proper as a coarser, more down-to-earth version of the same thing – an ordinary Cretan peasant in a shabby suit, waiting for a bus. When he makes contact with the Resistance, his personality fragments further.

To some, he is the mystical Philidem, Pimpernel of the Hellenes and righter of wrongs. To others he is “Major Paddy,” the happy-go-lucky Englishman of popular movie myth conducting war as if it were a branch of amateur theatricals, a gentleman adventurer relying on breeding to get him through and making fun of the whole business. To Bill Moss (David Oxley), the newly arrived junior officer sent to assist him, he is the cool, fast-thinking professional soldier. And to himself? In his quietly passionate defence of Cretan life and culture, he seems someone else again: a scholar and aesthete outraged by the barbarism and folly of war, and by the moronic arrogance shown by his captive toward the Cretan people.

Whatever his persona, Leigh Fermor is a chameleon who never seems to change very radically in himself. Perhaps because he has this quality of seeming all things to all men – and being those things - he remains unfazed by the monolithic might of the German military machine. Fluent in Greek, he can also speak German like a German and is easily able to assume another disguise, that of a faceless Nazi officer. Although he and Moss make fun of themselves - “If only I had a monocle!” muses Moss when Leigh Fermor tells him he “looks like an Englishman dressed like a German, leaning against the Ritz bar” - they are able to effect the kidnapping with an ease that seems appropriately Puckish. General Kreipe is ignominiously thrust onto the floor of his own limousine, gagged, and sat upon by a couple of the peasants he so despises. Kreipe’s rage is compounded by his firm conviction that he has been snatched by “amateurs” - a belief Leigh Fermor and Moss slyly make no objection to, knowing how it will gnaw at his already shaky Master Race self-confidence.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, aka Major Paddy, aka Philidem, in the film’s closing moments, is far from being self-assured intellectual or dashing amateur adventurer or legendary outlaw of the hills. He’s just a tired man who wants to go home and rest up. “How do you feel?” asks Moss. “Flat” is the reply. “You look flat!” says Moss. “I know how I’d like to look …” murmurs Leigh-Fermor wistfully. Moss knows what he’s going to say, and joins in the litany: “Like an Englishman dressed like an Englishman – and leaning against the Ritz bar!” It’s easy to imagine them ordering drinks at that renowned watering-hole with all the suavity required by this little fantasy.

Still, the film’s last images of Crete receding in the distance, until all we can see is the sea, suggests that maybe Major Paddy’s heart is really back in those hills in the “fair and fertile” land that has become as much a Powellian landscape of the mind for us as the studio-built Himalayan convent of ‘Black Narcissus’ or the monochrome Heaven of ‘A Matter of Life and Death’. And, as the film POV closing shots departs both Crete and this film, I began to think that being “dressed like an Englishman and leaning against the Ritz bar” would, for Patrick Leigh Fermor constitute yet another disguise. After all, he said he was of Irish aristocratic stock.

Traveller and writer Paddy Leigh Fermor is best known for two events. He’s known for leading the commando group in occupied Crete to kidnap General Kreipe. But he is also known for the boy who, at a mere 18 years old, set off with little money and a lot of nerve in 1933 to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.

Patrick Leigh Fermor was, in the words of one of his obituaries, a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene. Self-reliance and derring-do were lessons learnt from the cradle. When Fermor’s geologist father was posted to India, he and his wife left the infant with family in Northamptonshire and did not return until his fourth birthday. In retrospect, he took great delight in being sent to a school for difficult children and getting himself expelled from the King’s School, Canterbury, when he was caught holding hands with a greengrocer’s daughter eight years his senior. His school report infamously judged him ‘a dangerous mix of sophistication and recklessness’.

Sharing a flat in Shepherd’s Market, one of Mayfair’s seedier corners, Leigh Fermor schooled himself in literature, history, Latin and Greek.

He honed his character with the company of extraordinary people and the words of great writers - he had a prodigious memory for prose as well as poetry. He befriended literary lions such as Sacheverell Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. His travels began aged ‘eighteen-and-three-quarters’ when he rejected Sandhurst Royal Military College in order to walk the length of Europe from Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He took with him Horace’s Odes and the Oxford Book of Verse though Leigh Fermor could recite Shakespeare soliloquies, Marlowe speeches, Keats’s Odes and as he modestly put it ‘the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge’ from memory.

Leigh Fermor was then a self-made man in the most literal sense.

Setting off from England in 1933, Fermor resolved to traverse Europe living like a hermit; sleeping in bars and begging for food. But his manly charms and boyish good looks found him being passed like a favourite godson from Schloss to palace by European nobility and he developed a lifelong penchant for aristocratic company. I his own words, ‘In Hungary, I borrowed a horse, then plunged into Transylvania; from Romania on into Bulgaria’. Having reached Constantinople in January 1935, Fermor continued to explore Greece where he fought on the royalist side in Macedonia quelling a republican revolution. In Athens Leigh Fermor met Balasha Cantacuzene, a Romanian countess with whom he fell in love. They were living together in a Moldovan castle when World War Two was declared.

Fluent in Greek, Leigh Fermor was posted as a liaison officer in Albania. Recruited as a Special Operations Executive (SOE), he was shipped from Cairo to German-occupied Crete where he lived disguised as a shepherd in the mountains for two years. On his third expedition to Crete in 1944, Leigh Fermor was parachuted alone onto the island and made connections in the Cretan resistance movement. While waiting for his compatriot Captain Bill Stanley Moss to land by water from Cairo, Leigh Fermor hatched a plot to kidnap German Commander General Heinrich Krieple. He liaised comfortably with Cretan partisans and bandits to pull off one of the war’s greatest coups de théâtre.

Disguised as German soldiers, Leigh Fermor and Moss stopped Krieple’s car at an improvised check point en route back to Nazi HQ in Knossos. Abandoning the General’s car after a two-hour drive, Leigh Fermor left a note indicating that the kidnappers were British so that there wouldn’t be reprisals against Cretan nationals. When the abduction of the unpopular commander was discovered, a German officer in Heraklion allegedly said ‘well, gentlemen, I think this calls for champagne’. It turns out that General Kreipe was despised by his own soldiers because, amongst other things, he objected to the stopping of his own vehicle for checking in compliance with his commands concerning approved travel orders. It’s why for instance the German troops, both in the film and in real life, dare not stop the General’s car as it drove through the check points at Heraklion.

Krieple was evacuated and taken to Cairo and Leigh Fermor entered the annals of World War Two’s most devil-may-care heroes. With characteristic panache, when he was demobbed Leigh Fermor moved into an attic room at the Ritz paying half a guinea a night. But his first travel book, ‘The Traveller’s Tree’, was not about the European odyssey or the Cretan escapades and centred on Leigh Fermor’s adventures in the Carribbean. Published in 1950, ‘The Traveller’s Tree’ was an inspiration for Ian Fleming’s second James Bond novel ‘Live and Let Die’ (1954).

As a host and house guest, Paddy Leigh Fermor was much sought-after. At one of his parties in Cairo, he counted nine crowned heads. He was a confirmed two-gin-and-tonics before lunch man and smoked eighty to 100 cigarettes a day. His party pieces included singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ in Hindustani and reciting ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ backwards. In Cyprus while staying with Laurence Durrell, Leigh Fermor apparently stunned crowds in Bella Pais into silence by singing folk songs in perfect Cretan dialect. As Durrell wrote in ‘Bitter Lemons’ (1957), ‘it is as if they want to embrace Paddy wherever he goes’.

He struck up a partiuclar friendship with the famous Mitford sisters, especially Deborah Mitford, later ‘Debo’, the Duchess of Devonshire. It was at the Devonshires’ Irish estate Lismore Castle that ‘Darling Debo’ and ‘Darling Pad’ met and began to correspond. A characteristic letter from the Duchess in 1962 reads ‘The dear old President (JFK) phoned the other day. First question was ‘Who’ve you got with you, Paddy?” He’s got you on the brain’ to which Fermor replies of a broken wrist ‘Balinese dancing’s out, for a start; so, should I ever succeed to a throne, is holding an orb. The other drawbacks will surface with time’.

After the war he travelled widely but was always drawn back to Greece. He built a house on the Mani peninsula - which had been, significantly, the only part of Magna Graecia to resist Ottoman colonisation since the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Before his death in 2011 at the age of 96, he wrote some of the most acclaimed travel books of the 20th century.

His books contain some of the finest prose writing of the past century and disprove Wilde's maxim that "it is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating".

Charm, self-taught knowledge and enthusiasm made up for the lack of a university degree or a private income. His teenage walk across Europe and subsequent romantic sojourn in Baleni, Romania, with Princess Balasha Cantacuzene are proof enough of that. But the difficulty of capturing such an unconventional and glamorous life is made harder by the certainty that Fermor was an unreliable narrator.

He was also an infuriatingly slow writer. Driven by a life-long passion for words yet hampered by anxiety about his abilities, Leigh Fermor published eight books over 41 years.

‘The Traveller's Tree’ describes his postwar journey through the Caribbean; ‘Mani‘ and ‘Roumeli’ (1958 and 1966) draw on his experiences in Greece, where he would live for much of the latter part of his life. But it is the books that came out of his trans-Europe walk that reveal both the brilliance and the flaws. ‘A Time of Gifts’ was published in 1977, 44 years after he set out on the journey. ‘Between the Woods and the Water’ appeared nine years later. Both describe a world of privilege and poverty, communism and the rising tide of Nazism, and end with the unequivocal words, "To be continued". Yet the third volume hung like an albatross around the author's neck. As the years passed, Fermor found it impossible to shape the last part of his story in the way he wanted.

Leigh Fermor was that rarest of men: a man determined to live on his own terms, if not his own means, and who mostly - and mostly magnificently - succeeded. Always popping off on a journey when he should have been writing about the last one, always ready to party, he was forever chasing beautiful, fascinating or powerful women, even when with his wife, Joan Raynor. She was the great facilitator who funded his passion for travel and writing, as well as women, from her trust fund. His love affairs were discreet but legendary.

Leigh Fermor was happiest among the rogues. Over a lifetime on the road, he sought them, and in turn they responded to his charm, nose for adventure, and his famous wit. He was a keenly-anticipated dinner guest - once outshining Richard Burton at a London society soirée, who he cut-off midway through a recital of ‘Hamlet’. As Richard Burton stormed out, the pleading society hostess said, “But Paddy’s a war hero!” to which Burton grouchily replied, “I don’t give a damn who he is!”

His partnership with and then marriage to Joan Raynor was an open relationship, at least on Leigh Fermor’s side. Paddy saw in Joan his kindred spirit. Like him, she spent much of her youth travelling to where she pleased; largely in France, where the photographer and literary critic Cyril Connolly became besotted by her. Joan was the daughter of Sir Bolton and Lady Eyres Monsell of Dumbleton Hall, Worcestershire. She was not only stunningly pretty but also 'a beautiful ideal, with the perfect bathing dress, the most lovely face, the most elaborate evening dress', as the Eton educated Connolly described her. Joan also stood out from the upper-class beauties of her day in that she supplemented her mean rich father's allowance by earning her living as a decent photographer.

In 1946, she met Leigh Fermor in Athens, while he was deputy director of the British Institute. Joan met him at a time when he was then in a relationship with a French woman called Denise, who was pregnant with his child, which she aborted. The pair would travel to the Caribbean together under the invitation of Greek photographer Costas, falling madly in love.

She was the only woman that - after decades of sexual scandals - matched his own erratic behaviour. Stories of how they dined fully-clothed in the Mediterranean, dragging a table into the sea, as well as their myriad cats and olive groves, paint a restless couple, who, when not out articulating the peoples of their adopted homeland, kept themselves very busy.

The attraction between Paddy and Joan was instant. So many love affairs that Paddy indulged in seemed about as brief as the flame from a burning envelope and you expected this one with Joan to be too. But somehow, miraculously, it lasts.

The two were apart a great deal, but in their case, absence did make the heart grow fonder. While Paddy was staying in a monastery in Normandy, supposed to be thinking monk-like thoughts that he would eventually put into his masterpiece A Time To Keep Silence, he was also writing sexy letters to Joan: 'At this distance you seem about as nearly perfect a human being as can be, my darling little wretch, so it's about time I was brought to my senses.' And: 'Don't run away with anyone or I'll come and cut your bloody throat.'

She tantalised him with descriptions of Cyril Connolly making passes at her; but she, like Denise, sounded a rather desperate note when she wrote: 'I got the curse so late this month I began to hope I was having a baby and that you would have to make it a legitimate little Fermor. All hopes ruined this morning.'

Fiercely independent - a trait that must have enamoured Paddy - they were best imagined as two pillars of a Greek temple, beside one-another but capable of holding up the roof of the world that they had built for themselves through the lens of ancient history and Hellenic culture. Indeed, it was said that they had a special ‘pact of liberty’. It is this unconquerable aura that led poet laureate John Betjeman to declare his love for her (he called her ‘Dotty’ and remarked that her eyes were as large as tennis balls). For Cyril Connolly, the photographer she shadowed, and with whom she had a scandalised affair during her first marriage, she was a “lovely boy-girl” and Laurence Durrell named her the ‘Corn Goddess’ because of her slender figure and short hair. But of all of these worthy candidates, it was the warrior-poet Patrick Leigh Fermor who finally won her heart.

To Joan, who described herself as a ‘lifelong loner’ in her diaries, her companionship with the uncomplicated Paddy was a relief. They had no children, nor did they want any - or so Paddy claimed. But those who knew Joan suspected she did want children but it never came to pass; and so she became a devoted aunt or dotted on other friends’ children. For both of them their dozens of cats gave them the next best thing to paternal satisfaction. Still, her morbid fascination with photographing cemeteries painted a much darker side.

Joan Raynor’s inheritance subsidised his peripatetic life at least until the enormous success of ‘A Time of Gifts’ in the late 1970s, which in turn created a new market for his previous volumes about Greece, ‘Mani’ and ‘Roumeli’.

With Joan’s tacit consent, Paddy enjoyed amorous flings, discrete sexual affairs with high society women and sampled the low delights of the brothel. This activity rarely made it into his private letters, but the exceptions could be piquant. Writing in 1958 from Cameroon, where he was on the set of a John Huston movie, he told a (male) friend: “ Errol Flynn and I . . . sally forth into dark lanes of the town together on guilty excursions that remind me rather of old Greek days with you.” In a 1961 letter to the film director John Huston’s wife, Ricki, with whom Leigh Fermor had been having sex with (and would die in a car crash in 1969). “I say,” the passage begins, “what gloomy tidings about the CRABS! Could it be me?” Riffing on pubic lice and their crafty ways, he conjectures that, during a recent romp with an “old pal” in Paris, a force “must have landed” on him “and then lain up, seeing me merely as a stepping stone or a springboard to better things” - to Mrs. Huston, that is. As comic apologies for venereal infection go, the passage is surely a classic.

Like most high flying lives, it was far from blameless. Wounded women were littered in his wake. Some British visitors to Athens were less than impressed by this Englishman who posed as “more Greek than the Greeks”.

Some Greeks shared their disdain. Revisionist historians criticised his role in wartime Crete, and warned their fellow Hellenes that for all his fluency and charm, Leigh Fermor was no latter day Byron. His unoccupied car was blown up outside his Mani house, probably by members of the Greek Communist Party which he had vocally opposed. The accidental fatal shooting of a partisan in Crete led to a long blood feud which made it difficult for Leigh Fermor to re-enter the island until the 1970s, and possibly explains why he chose to settle in the Peloponnese rather than among the hills and harbours of his dreams.

His own books had already eclipsed those incidents, not only among readers of English but also in Greece, where in 2007 the government of his adopted land made him a Commander of the Order of the Phoenix for services to literature.

Travel writers such as the great Jan Morris have described Leigh Fermor as the master of their trade and its greatest exponent in the 20th century.

When ‘A Time of Gifts’ was published in 1977, Frederick Raphael wrote: “One feels he could not cross Oxford Street in less than two volumes; but then what volumes they would be!”

They are not for everyone. Leigh Fermor wrote that written English is a language whose Latinates need pegging down with simple Anglo-Saxonisms, and some feel that he personally could have made more and better use of the mallet. His exuberance is either captivating or florid. It is certainly unique among English prose styles.

Artemis Cooper, his patient and careful biographer wrote that “Paddy had found a way of writing that could deploy a lifetime’s reading and experience, while never losing sight of his ebullient, well-meaning and occasionally clumsy 18-year-old self … this was a wonderful way of disarming his readers, who would then be willing to follow him into the wildest fantasies and digressions”.

Those fantasies and digressions took decades to express. ‘A Time of Gifts’ had arguably been 40 years in the making when it was published in 1977. Its sequel, ‘Between the Woods and the Water’, did not appear until 1986. The third and final volume has been awaited ever since. Following Leigh Fermor’s death, a foot-high manuscript was apparently found on his desk.

Once he knuckled down to it, Leigh Fermor loved playing around with words. He was one of our greatest stylists and he was devoted to producing un-improvable books. But writing did not come easily to him, at least partly because it was something of a distraction from the main event, which was living an un-improvable life of unrepentant gaiety and fun.

For forty odd years, a legion of friends and admirers would beat a path to Paddy and Joan’s door. Artists, poets, royalty and writers came, all taking inspiration from their erudite hosts. A visit was an act of communion, a sharing of ideas and stories.

Leigh Fermor influenced a generation of British travel writers, including Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, Philip Marsden, Nicholas Crane, Rory Stewart, and William Dalrymple. Indeed when Bruce Chatwin died, it was Paddy who scattered Chatwin’s ashes near a church in the mountains in Kardamyli.

When I was there in April 2022, I went to that same church to pay my respects.

But some of Paddy’s life energy was sucked out of him when Joan died in Kardamyli in June 2003, aged 91. It was related that Joan said to her friend Olivia Stewart, who was visiting: 'I really would like to die but who'd look after Paddy?' Olivia said that she would. A few minutes later, Joan fell, hit her head - and died instantly of a brain haemorrhage. Joan had often quoted Rilke: 'The good marriage is one in which each appoints the other as guardian of his solitude.' Now Paddy Leigh Fermor was all alone.

Leigh Fermor was knighted in 2004, the day of his birthday which he delighted in like a giggling schoolboy. But he missed Joan terribly.

For the last few months of his life Leigh Fermor suffered from a cancerous tumour, and in early June 2011 he underwent a tracheotomy in Greece. As death was close, according to local Greek friends, he expressed a wish to visit England to bid goodbye to his friends, and then return to die in Kardamyli, though it is also stated that he actually wished to die in England and be buried next to his wife, Joan, in Dumbleton, Gloucestershire. He stayed on at Kardamyli until the 9th June 2011, when he left Greece for the last time. He died in England the following day, 10th June 2011, aged 96. It was reported that he had dined in full black tie on the evening of his death. Paddy had style even unto the end.

A Guard of Honour was formed by the Intelligence Corps and a bugler from his former regiment, the Irish Guards, delivered the ‘Last Post’ at Paddy’s funeral. As had been his wish, he was buried beside Joan. On his gravestone in Dumbleton cemetery is an inscription in Greek, a quote from Constantine Cavafy: “In addition, he was that best of all things, Hellenic.”

Although Joan had passed away at the age of ninety-one, after suffering a fall in the Mani. Her body was repatriated to Dumbleton, the place of her birth - ironic that her dream was to be as far as she could possibly go from the rolling humdrum Worcestershire hills. But perhaps she intended to return all along. When Paddy was buried beside her it seemed that the ‘pact of liberty’ that these two lonely souls had forged themselves could be tested in the great elsewhere. Joan was more than his muse (as many of her obituaries were at pains to declare) but his greatest adventure.

To come around full circle from the movie ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ (1957) that I saw that night in Verbier, my father told me that rather poignantly, General Kreipe, the German commander Leigh Fermor had captured - once an enemy, and later a friend - left behind notes and photographs from across his life. On one of those notes, it was discovered, the following was scribbled from a brief visit to Greece: “Somewhere, amidst all the disarray, was the story of Joan and Paddy, and” it concluded, “…of their lives together.”

His life with Joan and all that she meant to him was one part of the mosaic of who Paddy Leigh Fermor was. But it’s incomplete.

Paddy didn’t like the idea of a biography, and neither did Joan when she was alive. But friends had persuaded them that unless Paddy appointed someone to write his life, he might find himself the subject of a book whether he liked it or not. In Artemis Cooper they couldn’t have chosen a better writer to chronicle Paddy’s life as a man of action and letters. Cooper, was the daughter of another accomplished diplomat and historian, John Julius Norwich, and grand-daughter of Duff and Diana Cooper. As the wife of the historian Antony Beevor, she became a trusted friend of the Leigh Fermors. Cooper was too good of a historian to let her friendship lead her astray from being a faithful but serious biographer. Knowing this, she was told she could go ahead, but she had to promise not to publish anything until after they were both dead.

Paddy did not like being interviewed, and would keep her questions at bay with a torrent of dazzling conversation. He was the master at deflecting discussions away from himself.

He was also very unwilling to let Cooper see many of his papers, though the refusal always couched in excuses. ‘Oh dear, the Diary…’ It was the only surviving one from his great walk across Europe, and I was aching to read it. ‘Well it’s in constant use, you see, as I plug away at Vol III,’ he would say. Or, ‘My mother’s letters? Ah yes, why not. But it’s too awful, I simply cannot remember where they’ve got to…’ It was quite obvious that he and Joan, while being unfailingly generous, welcoming and hospitable, were determined to reveal as little as possible of their private lives.

While they were more than happy to talk about books, travels, friends, Crete, Greece, the war, anything - they would not tell her any more than they would have told the average journalist. But she persisted and got closer than most. He showed particularly gallantry in not talking about his romantic entanglements. But she soon twigged that anytime he described a woman as ‘an old pal’ it was a sure bet that he had an affair with her.

Intriguingly, Paddy liked to claim he was descended from Counts of the Holy Roman Empire, who came to Austria from Sligo. Paddy could recite ‘The Dead at Clomacnoise’ (in translation) and perhaps did so during a handful of flying visits to Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s, partying hard at Luggala House or Lismore Castle, or making friends with Patrick Kavanagh and Sean O’Faolain in Dublin pubs. He once provoked a massive brawl at the Kildare Hunt Ball, and was rescued from a true pounding by Ricki Huston, a beautiful Italian-American dancer, John Huston’s fourth wife and Paddy’s lover not long afterwards.

And yet, a note of caution about Paddy’s Irish roots is sounded by his biographer, Artemis Cooper, who also co-edited ‘The Broken Road’, the final, posthumously published instalment of the trilogy. “I’m not a great believer in his Irish roots,” she said of Leigh Fermor in an interview, “His mother, who was a compulsive fantasist, liked to think that her family was related to the Viscount Taaffes, of Ballymote. Her father was apparently born in County Cork. But she was never what you might call a reliable witness. She was an extraordinary person, though. Imaginative, impulsive, impossible - just the way the Irish are supposed to be, come to think of it. She was also one of those sad women, who grew up at the turn of the last century, who never found an outlet for their talents and energies, nor the right man, come to that. All she had was Paddy, and she didn’t get much of him.”

And I think that’s the point, no one really got much of Paddy Leigh Fermor even as he only gave a crumb of himself to others but still most felt grateful that it was enough to fill one’s belly and still feel overfed by him.

Paddy never tried to get to the bottom of his Irish ancestry, afraid, no doubt, of disturbing the bloom that had grown on history and his past, a recurring trait. “His memory was extraordinary,” Artemis Cooper noted, “but it lay dangerously close to his imagination and it was a very porous border.”

Within the Greek imagination many Greeks saw in Paddy Leigh Fermor as the second coming of Lord Byron. It’s not a bad comparison.

Lord Byron claimed that swimming the Hellespont was his greatest achievement. 174 years or so later, another English writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor - also, like Byron, revered by many Greeks for his part in a war of liberation - repeated the feat. Leigh Fermor, however, was 69 when he did it and continued to do it into his 80s. Byron was a mere 22 years old lad. The Hellespont swim, with its mix of literature, adventure, travel, bravery, eccentricity and romance, is an apt metaphor for Leigh Fermor’s life. Paddy Leigh Fermor was the Byron of his time. Both men had an idealised vision of Greece, were scholars and men of action, could endure harsh conditions, fought for Greek freedom, were recklessly courageous, liked to dress up and displayed a panache that impressed their Greek comrades. Like a good magician it was also a way to misdirect and conceal one’s true self.

What or who was the true Paddy Leigh Fermor?

Like Byron, Leigh Fermor appeared as a charismatic and assured figure. He was a sightseer, consuming travel, culture, and history for pleasure. He was an aristocrat moving in the social circles of his time. He was a gifted amateur scholar, speculating on literary and historical sources. Leigh Fermor, Byron’s own identity, is subject to textual distortion; it emerges from a piece of occasional prose in his books and is shaped by the claims of correspondence on a peculiarly fluid consciousness.

There is no hard and fast distinction to be drawn here between real and imagined, only a continuity of relative fictions that lie between memory and imagination as his biographer asserted. If there is a will to assert identity here, to disentangle fact and fiction, to give things as they really are and nail down the real Leigh Fermor then it is somewhere between the two. This is where we will find Paddy.

For many his death marked the passing of an extraordinary man: soldier, writer, adventurer, a charmer, a gallant romantic. As a writer he discovered a knack for drawing people out and for stringing history, language, and observation into narrative, and his timing was perfect. Paddy often indulged in florid displays of classical erudition. His learned digressions and serpentine style, his mannered mandarin gestures, even baroque prose, which Lawrence Durrell called truffled and dense with plumage, were influenced by the work of Charles Doughty and T.E. Lawrence. But one can’t compare him. I agree with the acclaimed writer Colin Thurbon who said, “There is, in the end, nobody like him. A famous raconteur and polymath. Generous, life-loving and good-hearted to a fault. Enormously good company, but touched by well-camouflaged insecurities. I would rank him very highly. ‘The finest travel writer of his generation’ is a fair assessment.”

As a child I didn’t really know who Paddy Leigh Fermor was other than this very cheerful and charismatic old man was kind, attentive, and took a boyish delight in everything you were doing. Only later on in adulthood was it clear to that Paddy was not only among the outstanding writers of his time but one of its most remarkable characters, a perfect hybrid of the man of action and the man of letters. Equally comfortable with princes and peasants, in caves or châteaux, he had amassed an enviable rich experience of places and people. “Quite the most enchanting maniac I’ve ever met,” pronounced Lawrence Durrell, and nearly everyone who’d crossed paths with him had, it seemed, come away similarly dazzled.

I am equally dazzled - more smitten in retrospect - for alas they don’t make men like Paddy any more. But every time I dip back into his books I think I discover a little bit more of who Paddy Leigh Fermor was because I find him some where between my memory and my imagination.

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footprintsinthesxnd · 2 months

Text

Loving Her Was Red

Summary: Lois Drake an SOE from England didn't expect to fall in love, she didn't want to but there was something about the blushing, red-headed officer that melted her cold exterior. But war is no place for love and can they endure. Warnings: unrequited love, Sobel being Sobel, heartache

We’re going to War

14th May 1944, Aldbourne

Lewis Nixon had always been an observant man and he was no different now from his spot on his bed, watching as Dick filled in some paperwork. “You know Dick, if you’re that fond of Lois you could always ask her out,” Lew declared, watching as his friend's face contorted awkwardly until he replied.

“And what good would that do either of us, Lew? She is so far out of my league and we will be leaving England soon enough. War is no time for romance,” Dick replied, never one looking up from his papers.

Lewis groaned, taking a small swig from his hit flask before continuing, “Dick, she seems like a nice girl and you are not the kind of man who does one-night stands. I know this, hell the whole company knows that. Lois must have been really special for you to go to bed with her the first night. There has to be something more in this, Dick.”

Dick huffed in frustration, pushing the papers across the desk and looking up at his friend, “She’s too good for me, Lew.”

Lewis stared at his friend blankly for a moment before snorting, “You’re kidding me! Any girl would be lucky to have you, Dick. Now I’m not taking no for an answer, you ask Lois out or I will do it for you.”

“Lew, no please don’t…”

“Then do it and if you don’t I will find out. I’m the intelligence officer, after all, I know everything.”

Dick laughed, “Why do I get the feeling she’s growing on you.”

Lewis looked away, his cheeks turning a little red as he muttered, “S-she’s not. She’s okay for you… I don’t like her… why would I like her.”

Dick’s forehead creased as he watched his friend disappear from view.

The conversation played over and over in Dick’s mind as he followed the path up to the house Lois was billeted at. He knocked on the door nervously, smoothing down his hair with one hand and grasping hold of the flowers he’d bought with the other. Kate’s face appeared at the door and she grinned enthusiastically at him.

“Lieutenant Winters, how nice of you to drop by. To what do we owe the pleasure of this visit?”

Dick would tell she was trying not to combust with excitement on the doorstep and scream for Lois immediately but as soon as his reply came that he was here to see Lois Kate sprinted from the door, shouting up the stairs. There were some rustling and hushed voices from within before Lois appeared in the doorway. She looked as beautiful as ever.

“Lieutenant Winters, how nice of you to come by. Please do come in.” She pushed the door open wider and allowed Dick to step into the passageway.

“Please I must insist you call me Dick,” he spoke softly, unsure if Kate was still nearby.

“Whatever you say, Lieutenant,” Lois grinned, biting her lip and looking up at him. Dick gulped, straightening himself before thrusting the flowers towards Lois.

“For you.” Lois looked a little surprised but took the flowers gratefully with a smile. She moved through to the kitchen, taking a vase from one of the cupboards. Dick watched from the doorway, unsure whether the invite extended to the kitchen or just the hallway.

“Dick, please don’t hover. You can take a seat. Would you like some tea?” Lois asked, two cups already in her hands.

“That would be lovely. Thank you,” Dick took a seat at the kitchen table, his eyes never leaving Lois until she finally took a seat opposite him.

“So what brings you to Ramsbury, Dick?” Lois reached across the table, her fingers brushing against Dick’s until he took her hand in his, smiling at her as he blushed once more.

“Well…” Dick wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to ask next, “well, I- umm.”

“Dick,” Lois squeezed his hand, running her fingers over his knuckles with a small smile on her lips. “It’s okay.”

Dick smiled sadly at her, “I’m sorry. I’m not good with women.”

Lois laughed, “Well you’re lucky I’m not any woman and I like you very much.”

Dick now filled with some brief confidence, “Well I was wondering if you’d like to go out… sometime… with me.”

A big grin spread across Lois’ lips, “Absolutely. I would love to Dick.”

Dick grinned back at her, the nervousness leaving him as he leant forward across the table to press his lips firmly to hers. It was soft and gentle and Dick found himself unable to pull away until something crashed down the stairs and a very confused Donald Malarkey stood watching them, his shirt half done up and roughly tucked into his trousers and the rest of his uniform tucked under his arm.

“Lieutenant Winters,” he saluted before scurrying away.

“What was all that?” Dick turned back to Lois who just smiled.

“That was Kate’s doing.”

18th May 1944, Aldbourne

Dick tugged nervously at his tie, straightening it for the tenth time since he’d arrived at the pub. He wasn’t sure why he was so worried. It was only going to be a few drinks in the Crown. He’d wanted to take Lois to London, or Swindon but Sobel had cancelled all the weekend passes again and so the best he could do was sneak off for a few hours to see Lois in Aldbourne. He’d never snuck off the base before, always following the rules but he was sick of Sobel's antics and after finally working up the courage to ask Lois he wasn’t about to let her down. He’d left Lew and Harry in charge of his alibi so who knows what he could return to.

Dick took a seat in a dark corner of the bar, away from prying eyes and anyone who might tell Sobel of his whereabouts. He was watching the door the whole time, holding his breath as the anxiety built again. That was the moment Lois came in. Her brown locks curled and pinned in her usual style, her lips coloured with her signature red lipstick and her blue dress hanging to her curves as her hips swayed. Dick had to all but hold himself down to stop himself from immediately leading her back to her billet for some alone time.

“Lieutenant Winters,” she greeted him, pressing her lips to his and Dick instantly melted into her touch.

“Good evening beautiful,” Dick smiled and pulled out Lois’ chair allowing her to sit down before taking his own.

“I’m sorry this isn’t more glamorous. Sobel’s been running us all ragged and cancelled our passes again. I swear that man…”

“I have never seen you like this Lieutenant,” Lois interrupted a cheeky smile on her lips. “But I like it.”

Dick blushed again, smiling when Lois grabbed his hand and pressed a gentle kiss to his knuckles.

“And anyway this is perfect. I wanted to spend time with you, I don’t mind where we spend that time.”

Dick wasn’t sure whether she was insinuating what he thought she was but his blush grew deeper once more.

The evening went swimmingly. They laughed and talked as if they had been doing so for years. Conversations came easily to them as they discussed their homes, their families, and life before the war. Dick was pleased to finally know more about Lois. She’d grown up in Benthal Green with her mother and father. Her father was a WW1 veteran and had a temper that even Dick wouldn’t have wanted to mess with. Her parents had been killed during the bombing on 3rd March 1943 while Lois had been undercover in Europe. Her knew she felt their loss greatly but wouldn’t elaborate on her family after that.

“I do have one question,” Dick spoke up, taking a sip of his ginger beer. “Why did you sign the letter you left as ‘R’?”

Lois laughed, cringing slightly that she’d signed it as ‘R’ instead of Lois. “Well…” Lois pondered over her next words. “It’s my code name, ‘Red’ or ‘R’. I guess it’s just habit.”

Dick smiled, reaching across the table and squeezing Lois hand, “I like that.”

Lois chuckled, “What’s there to like about it.”

“Well, we’re R and R. Richard and Red.” Lois grinned brightly at him. She’d never considered it that way before and the fact that Dick was thinking of their names side by side made her heart flutter. Dick must have felt just as excited about the prospect as she did, for he quickly changed the subject, blushing furiously.

Dick touched briefly on the D-Day plans which Lois was already fully aware of.

“I wish I could tell you more about my job but it’s highly classified,” Lois smiled sadly and Dick reached across the table to squeeze her hand.

“Please don’t worry about it. I trust you and maybe one day when this is all over and only if you wish to, you can tell me about it.”

Lois smiled brightly this time, nodding at him, “I’ll hold you to that, Lieutenant.”

Dick rolled over, his eyes blurry from sleep and his arms outstretched towards the woman next to him. To his surprise she was still there, snuggled up next to his side, her face buried into his neck. She groaned sleepily, clutching him closer. It was still dark outside, the morning rays having yet to break through the thin curtains.

“What time is it?” He mumbled, voice thick from sleep as he buried his head into her hair, placing a sweet kiss on her forehead.

“Still early. Go back to sleep, Dick,” she mumbled in reply but Dick shook his head.

“No, I should go. Sobel will have my guts if he catches me.”

Lois looked up at him sadly but nodded anyway, “Okay. I have a meeting with Nixon again today so I’ll see you later.”

“Of course,” Dick replied, kissing her one last time before he dressed quickly and hurried out of the house, waving awkwardly at Kate and Malarkey who were sitting at the kitchen table.

“Malarkey, weekend passes are cancelled. What are you doing here?” Dick spoke sternly, trying to avoid the embarrassment of being caught by one of his men.

“I could ask you the same thing, Sir,” Malarkey retorted before remembering himself. “I’ll head back to base, Sir.”

Dick nodded, following after him. Malarkey had a large smirk on his face causing Dick to sigh. “I’d appreciate it if you could keep this encounter to yourself, Malarkey.”

“Whatever you say, Sir.”

Dick was surprised to find that Sobel was in fact not pacing at the gates waiting for them.

“Head straight back to your hut, Malarkey.” The private nodded, rushing off towards his Nissan hut.

Dick walked into the officer's room to come face to face with Harry and Lew sat at the desk waiting for him.

“Christ Dick, thank God you’re back. Harry said you never went back to your billet last night,” Lew began, throwing his arms around his friend and wrinkling his nose. “Christ you need a shower man, you smell like a woman now.”

Dick blushed and his two friends fell about laughing.

“Well, how was our dear Captain Drake?” Harry asked, grinning cheekily at Dick who did his best to ignore the looks shared between his friends.

“She’s very well, thank you. We had a lovely evening.”

“I’m sure you did,” Lewis laughed, throwing Dick’s PT kit at him. “Here change into this, Sobel should be here any minute.”

Dick stripped off quickly, ignoring the laughter from Lewis as he pointed out the love bite Lois had left on his neck. He was just tying up his shorts when Sobel came barreling through the door followed by Evans, both surprised that the three officers were ready and waiting.

“What’s all this?” Sobel asked, eyeing the men suspiciously.

“What is what, Sir,” Dick asked, hoping amongst hope that Sobel wouldn’t notice the love bite that Lois had left on his neck.

“Well this,” Sobel waved his arms around. “What are you all waiting for? Go!” He ushered the men outside and Lewis patted Dick on the shoulder.

“You were lucky this time, Dick but I wouldn’t change it again.” Dick nodded to his friend, he had a feeling that Lew was right but for some reason, he just could keep away from Lois Drake

“You know what’s funny about all this?” Harry wheezed as they finally made it back to the Nissan huts, sweat trickling down his forehead and his cheeks red. Lewis was always teasing him that he hadn’t had to run Currahee but Harry was a tough little man and he soon went after Lew for that comment.

“What’s so funny, Harry,” Lew asked, flopping down onto the crate at the end of his bed.

“Well, we came into this with one man married, one man engaged and one man single and now Dick is getting more action than either of us.”

“Alright Harry, settle down. I’m not getting any action…” The two men looked at him judgmentally. “Okay, maybe I’m getting a little action.”

“Dick, you have been rolling around in the sheets with Miss Drake nearly every night this week,” Lew squeaked, waving his hands above his head.

“It’s Captain Drake,” Dick corrected him as Lewis just rolled his eyes. Dick blushed, “Okay maybe I am getting some action.” He laughed as his friends continued their jesting.

20th May 1944, Aldbourne

“Lois, this package came for you this morning. It looks official,” Kate slid the large brown envelope across the table towards her. Lois set down her tea with a sigh. The A4-sized envelope stopped open easily and the contents spilled out onto the table. There were two sets of identification papers, photographs, French francs, and a list of instructions. Lois read the instructions carefully and Kate couldn’t quite make out what she was thinking.

“Lois, what is all this?”

“It’s my mission. I’m going to war.”

“You’re what!” Kate shot up from her seat to see the papers but Lois quickly shoved them back in the envelope.

“I won’t be allowed to discuss it with you, Kate. They’ll want me to go up for a briefing in person. I’m sorry Kate.”

Kate looked a little deflated but took her seat. “I understand. Maybe soon they’ll be sending me on a mission too.”

Lois smiled at her friend sympathetically, “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, Kate.” This wasn’t Lois' first debut, she’d worked in the Bletchley Circle since the war began, deciphering codes and sending coded messages to allies. Her first mission had been to go undercover in occupied France and work closely with the French resistance. However, her cover was blown near the end of the mission and she was extracted for her safety. She hadn’t been in the field since and now all of a sudden they were sending her back out there again. Lois' heart sank at the realisation that she would be leaving Aldbourne soon, it sank even more when she realised she’d have to break the news to Dick.

The mood was sombre in Lois billet that night. Kate excused herself after dinner and went for a walk and Lois headed to bed earlier. She was just pinning her hair up in curlers when there was a knock at the door. Dick was standing in the doorway with a bunch of wildflowers in his hand and an endearing little smile.

“Good evening,” his face fell when he saw Lois' appearance; standing in the doorway in her nightdress. “I’m sorry. I can go if you were planning an early night…” but he was cut off when Lois threw her arms around him.

“I’m so glad you’re here.” Dick wasn’t sure what was going on but he dropped the flowers and engulfed her in a warm hug.

“What’s wrong, Sweetheart?” But Lois shook her head.

“I can’t tell you but I wish I could.” Dick nodded, stepping back off the step. “I understand. I can go if you want me to.”

“No Dick, please stay.”

Instead of their normal dash up the stairs, whipping each other's clothes off as they went, this time was sombre and slow. Lois hand linked in Dick’s as she led him towards her room. Dick sat down on the bed, removing his boots before laying back against the headboard and beckoning Lois to join him. She curled into his side, her head resting against his shoulder while his fingers danced down her back.

“I’m sorry. This probably isn’t the evening you had planned, Lois mumbled, tears slipping freely down her cheeks now.

Dick froze, his forehead creased as he spoke, “Do you think that’s the only reason I came round? Lois, I want to spend time with you. I enjoy spending time with you. Not just the sex, although the sex is great,” he blushed and Lois could help but laugh at his embarrassment. “But Lois, I love spending time with you. You’re a wonderful woman.”

“I love spending time with you too,” she whispered before leaning up to kiss his lips. Lois had kissed Dick many times since she’d first met him and yet this kiss felt even more special than all the others, it was a silent promise to each other.

“We’re supposed to be leaving Aldbourne soon,” Dick whispered, his lips pressed against Lois' forehead. She looked up at him, her eyes trained on his lips as he spoke. “Lew can’t tell us exactly what is planned yet but I fear the invasion of Europe is finally on the cards.”

Lois nodded slowly, she knew that what was being called D-Day was imminent, she also knew that Operation Jedburgh was directly linked to help aid the allied invasion of Europe. The main question Lois was asking is would it work?

Dick shuffled over slightly so he could look down at her, a broad smile on his lips, “Lois, the last few months we’ve spent together have been the best time of my life. I don’t want to leave on a sad note.”

Lois smiled weekly at him, “It’s been the best time of my life too, how can this not be a dad time? We’ll be apart for so long.”

“Well, how about you write to me and I’ll write to you whenever we can,” Dick suggested.

Lois sighed, “You won’t know where to send them though if I’m send to France. I’ll be undercover, I won’t have a permeant address.”

“Well, we can write the letters to each other, everything we are thinking, feeling, anything we want to say to one another and then when we can post them, we will.”

Lois looked up at Dick, her eyes misty from the unshed tears and she admitted something she never thought she would. “I love you, Richard Winters.”

“And I love you, Lois Drake.”

The next morning Dick had left early, leaving Lois alone with her thoughts while she packed for her trip to London. Her mind drifted from her mission to London, to Dick, to Lewis… Lewis!

She watched as the intelligence officer paced up and down the path, mumbling to himself. She leant forward, bracing herself against the bed to stare out of the window. What was he doing? He had a file underneath his arm, and he nearly dropped it several times while waving his arms around as he mumbled. He then seemed to make a decision and strode towards the door, tapping the knocker three times before a deafening silence followed.

Lois made her way downstairs slowly, her mind trying to piece together the situation. She opened it with a wide smile and Lewis gave her a curt nod.

“Captain Drake.”

Lois smiled, “Lieutenant Nixon, what can I do for you?”

The officer seemed flustered, she’d never seen him so out of control, he was cool and calm, barely ever lifting an eyebrow at any situation.

“Well… I umm,” he paused again, swallowing hard. “Well I hear that you have a mission and we’ve had some extra intelligence so… here.” He thrust the folder into her hand and she accepted it gratefully.

“Thank you, Nixon.”

“You can call me Lewis if you want to,” he gave her a small smile, his breathing finally falling into a more normal rhythm.

“Thank you, Lewis. Would you like to come in?” Lois pushed the door open further but Lewis shook his head.

“No, thank you. I should be heading back to base.” Lois nodded understandingly.

“Well, I look forward to seeing you again sometime, Lewis. Let’s hope it’s under different circumstances,” Lois leant forward, giving the officer a quick hug and pecking a kiss on his cheek.

Lewis' cheeks flushed red and Lois pretended not to notice.

“Goodbye, Lois. Good luck.” Lewis turned away and strolled quickly down the path, quickly disappearing from view.

Lewis felt his heartache as he turned away and began his walk down the cobbled street. He didn’t know whether his heart ached for the woman he had fallen for going into a combat zone, or whether his heart ached for his friend who would have to let go of the woman he loved, or whether his heart ached for himself, for he could never share how he truly felt about Lois Drake.

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#loving her was red #band of brothers #dick winters x reader #dick winters #dick winters x oc #Lois Drake #SOE

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