Patrick Leigh Fermor touched the heart
I have generous and perceptive in-laws who realised that like them, the writings of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has just died aged 96, could touch the heart. I am grateful for their gifts. In her Observer obituary Jan Morris says 'Leigh Fermor made of the genre [travel writing] a lovely instrument of grace, humour and reflection'......'travelling with him was like simultaineously travelling through several ages' .....'a complex soul, but with a stillness at the heart of him'. I detect in his passing a shift of an era, or perhaps that is merely my sense of loss for a talent capable through his writing of changing one's appreciative setting (to quote Geoffrey Vickers) in ways that I now mourn.
In a piece in yesterdays Guardian, Artemis Cooper, his biographer is quoted as saying that the long anticipated final book of his travel trilogy, begining with 'A Time of Gifts
' (1977) followed by 'Between the Woods and the Water'
(1987) will be forthcoming. I hope so.
