"A Time of Gifts"

[fiefoe]

Another British guy took a long walk and wrote a book about it. But unlike Belloc, Patrick Leigh Fermor was only 19 when he started on his journey.

• The nature-worshipping eurythmics in a barn and the country-dances in which the Major led both staff and children, were a shade bewildering at first, because everybody was naked.
• Once, at Primrose Hill Studios near Regent's Park within earshot of the lions in the Zoo at night, where she had persuaded Arthur Rackham, a neighbour in that cloister, to paint amazing scenes - navigable birds nests in a gale-wind, hobgoblin transactions under extruding roots and mice drinking out of acorns - all over an inside door;
• (My father) was an out-and-out naturalist.... - (who) had discovered an Indian mineral which was named after him and a worm with eight hairs on its back; and --brittle trove! -- a formation of snowflake.
• Shepherd Market .. this little backwater of archways and small shops and Georgian and Victorian pubs had the charm, quite evaporated now, of a village marooned i nthe still-intact splendours of Mayfair.
• Our kind-hearted landlady.. friend and model of famous painters and sculptors.. Sargent and Sickert and Shannon and Steer and Tonks and Augustus John.
• Blown askew, the Trafalgar Square fountains twirled like mops, and our taxi, delayed by a horde of Charing Cross commuters reeling and stampeding under a cloudbust, crept into the Strand.
• The levitating skyline of Constantiople pricked its sheaves of thin cylinders and its hemispheres out of the sea-mist; beyond it Mount Athos hovered; and the Greek archipelago was alreadying scattering a paper-chase of islands across the Aegean.  (These certainties sprang from reading the books of Robert Byron.)