The lovely people atSlightly Foxed sent me this article which is usually behind their paywall suggesting that I might publish it so that you can all enjoy it. In their most recent issue of the quarterly magazine, they featured an article by Guy Stagg on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence.

If you have not already heard ofSlightly Foxed, they are an independent literary magazine (now celebrating their twentieth year!) with a wide range of contributors who write personal and lively book recommendations. They also publish a collectable series of pocket-sized reprints of memoirs and biographies, a series of wonderful children’s classics, and produce a highly acclaimed literary podcast, hosted by Rosie Goldsmith which we have featured on the blog before. The first was aninterview with Dashing for the Post editor Adam Sisman, and in the second,Artemis Cooper, Paddy’s biographer, and Nick Hunt, author of Walking the Woods and the Water, joined the Slightly Foxed team to explore the life and literary work of Patrick Leigh Fermor.

By Guy Stagg

First published inFoxed Quarterly

Midway through my twenties, I spent the best part of a year walking across Europe. Often I passed the night with monks, nuns or religious communities, arriving on their doorstep to ask for shelter. I was always grateful for the kindness they showed me, and curious about the quiet dedication of their lives, withdrawing from the world to devote themselves to prayer.

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s famous account of his walk across Europe had inspired my trip, but on returning home I began to read a less well-known book of his,A Time to Keep Silence (1957). It’s a slim volume, less than a hundred pages long and comprising three essays that started life as letters to his partner, Joan Rayner. The letters describe a series of monasteries he visited in the decade after the war: the first a retreat at St Wandrille de Fontanelle, a Benedictine abbey in Normandy; the second moving from the Abbey of Solesmes – another Benedictine foundation – to La Grande Trappe, the mother-house of the Trappist order; and the third featuring the abandoned monasteries of Cappadocia, in Turkey, once occupied by the region’s Greek Orthodox monks.

Leigh Fermor was no believer. He went to the first of these monasteries seeking a quiet place to work, away from the temptations of Paris. In fact, he was a little embarrassed by his lack of faith and relieved that nobody ever questioned his reasons for coming.

However, he was profoundly affected by the monasteries he visited and made several more retreats over the course of his life. That mixture of admiration and bewilderment is what gives these essays their particular charm and interest.

It has to be admitted that his first impressions were less than positive. Soon after arriving at St Wandrille, ‘It began to rain over the woods outside, and a mood of depression and of unspeakable loneliness suddenly felled me like a hammer-stroke.’ Then came lassitude:

‘I had a sensation of the temperature of life falling to zero, the blood running every second thinner and slower as if the heart might in the end imperceptibly stop beating.’ Next came exhaustion: ‘After initial spells of insomnia, nightmare and falling asleep by day, I found that my capacity for sleep was becoming more and more remarkable: till the hours I spent in or on my bed vastly outnumbered the hours I spent awake; and my sleep was so profound that I might have been under the influence of some hypnotic drug.’

When at last he emerges from this cataleptic state, he experiences ‘nineteen hours a day of absolute and god-like freedom’.

This sequence will be familiar to anyone who has stayed for more than a few days in a monastery, and now, in an age of mobile phones, the effect is even more pronounced: a retreat often serves as a digital detox. To begin with, the lack of distraction causes boredom, despondency and fatigue, but then the visitor gets used to an enforced disconnection and finds an abundant sense of calm.

Though Leigh Fermor adjusts to the monastic timetable, he’s still struck by the strangeness of the place. After all, in a religious community most of the motives and ambitions we take for granted in society are either suspended or inverted.

Only by living for a while in a monastery can one quite grasp its staggering difference from the ordinary life that we lead. The two ways of life do not share a single attribute; and the thoughts, ambitions, sounds, light, time and mood that surround the inhabitants of a cloister are not only unlike anything to which one is accustomed, but in some curious way, seem its exact reverse.

When he travels to La Grande Trappe, that strangeness only intensifies. He describes how the Trappists spend their lives in silence, praying in church seven hours a day and labouring in the fields the rest of the time, with no opportunity for relaxation or study. In his own freezing cell, a sheet of paper pinned to the wall lists three columns of priestly attributes. One column ends with the words:Plus on est mort, plus on a la vie. Another concludes:Le prêtre est un homme crucifié.

However, Leigh Fermor is still able to imagine his way into this dismal calling. As he explains, while Benedictines spend their days in prayer to make up for those who cannot pray, providing a kind of spiritual windfall, the Trappists take this one step further, performing vicarious penance to lessen the whole world’s burden of sin. And the result of all this mortification is not sadness but a surprising serenity:

‘the lightness, the spiritual buoyancy, the experience of liberty regained by the shedding of all earthly possessions and vanities and ambitions’.

By the end of his stay, the Trappist calling remains a mystery but no longer seems a madness. Leigh Fermor is conscious of the romantic expectations he brings with him on retreat, and of how the nineteenth-century restoration of monastic life encouraged this romance. So he’s amused by the ‘baronial chimneypieces and heavy Norse vaults’ in the refectory at Solesmes, and the rumour that the refectory of a German-speaking Trappist abbey contains a painted skeleton holding a scythe, with the motto ‘Tonight perhaps?’ inscribed on the wall above. At the same time, he’s sensitive to the beauty of monastic architecture and the ancient routines taking place among the cloisters.

That beauty seeps into his prose. Critics of Leigh Fermor argue that his style is too Baroque, too indulgent, but here his language has been tempered by the austerity of his surroundings. As a result, the
occasional lyricism is much more enjoyable:

As it declined, the sun beat the grey Norman stone into thin edifices of gold; and, when dusk had swallowed them up, the buildings of the monastery were pierced by many gleaming windows – oblong and classical, Norman and rounded, or high tangles of Gothic tracery – as the Abbey prepared itself for the night.

By contrast, when he visits the rock monasteries of Cappadocia, that lyricism becomes elegiac. Little is known about the inhabitants of these foundations – when the churches and cells were built, who lived in them and why they were abandoned – but the sparseness of their settlements provides a corrective to the medieval fantasia he encountered in Western monasticism.

Remote and unstirring and unproblematical as they may appear, these outlandish places are far closer to the primitive beginnings of monasticism than the dim northern silence and the claustral penumbra which the thought of monasteries most readily conjures up. The scenery of early Christendom lay all around us.

Leigh Fermor led a fascinating life, but his books often read as if he’s trying to dazzle: all those erudite references, all those elaborate metaphors, the endless parade of aristocratic friends. In A Time to Keep Silence, he has absorbed something from monastic humility, desiring less to impress the reader than to understand the subject. As a result, it’s the book of his I most like to reread, returning to the stillness he found in these sacred places, and the ‘message of tranquillity to quieten the mind and compose the spirit’.

In the months after the pandemic, I visited Solesmes myself and found the plain church, the romantic refectory and the glorious Gregorian chant exactly as Leigh Fermor described them. Of course, that’s the point of monastic life: to be a still point in a turning world.

During the author’s stay the community numbered over a hundred members, but now that number has dwindled to forty. In the decade or so after the war, monastic life enjoyed a brief boom in popularity, with numerous former servicemen taking their vows. Several of the monks Leigh Fermor met during his stay had followed this trajectory – one English Trappist had been shot down in his bomber and had spent time in a German prisoner-of-war camp – but the 1960s brought an end to the trend. Instead, spiritual seekers turned to Eastern and New Age traditions, or else the growing number of counter-cultural communities.

In a coda to these essays, Leigh Fermor laments the British monasteries lost during the Reformation, but he also celebrates the newfoundations established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to revive the monastic tradition in Britain. Most of those foundations remain intact but, as with La Trappe and Solesmes, their communities are ageing and their numbers shrinking. Of course, this simply reflects the wider state of Christianity in Western Europe, but it means that Leigh Fermor’s hopeful tone about the future of monasticism looks misplaced. Whereas suppression was once the main risk to religious life, nowadays apathy is a much greater threat. What’s more, the sacrifices of the monastic calling seem even harder to understand in an age bent on personal freedom and self-fulfilment.

These deep and delicate essays teach us to appreciate how much we have lost.

GUY STAGG is currently writing a book about the role of retreat in the lives of
various philosophers, writers and artists.

The fortified church in Viscri, near the King’s estate (Getty)

We hit downtown Zalánpatak at rush hour, and it was gridlocked. True, you get used to livestock on Romanian roads; the 30-minute gravel zig-zag from the nearest main road had brought us up against stray dogs, horses and carts and free-range pigs. A shepherd huddled near the roadside in a sheepskin poncho – crook in one hand, iPhone in the other. But it’s when you’re sitting immobile on a village street with a herd of cows pushing past on either side – when you feel the vehicle rock as bovine flank thwacks against the car door – that you start to grasp why King Charles III might have a bit of a soft spot for the place.

By Richard Bratby

First Published inThe Spectator

You start to grasp why King Charles III might have a bit of a soft spot for the place

I mean, it’d take a very determined paparazzo to make it this far, and they’d still have to contend with the language. Charles’s love for this Hungarian-speaking region of Transylvania is no great secret. ‘Fang Club: Inside the dusty Dracula village where King Charles has been secretly holidaying for 25 years’ blurted the Sun – the tone of surprise (like the reference to Dracula) seems obligatory. But if you’re a Briton visiting Romania – and particularly if, like me, you’re the kind who longs to vanish inside the books of Miklos Banffy or Patrick Leigh-Fermor – you soon discover that His Majesty is one step ahead of you.

His portrait hangs in a restaurant in Sighisoara. ‘Is he on your banknotes yet?’ asks an Uber driver in Bucharest. In 2022 we’d stayed, unwittingly, at another of HM’s Romanian pads, a guest house in the nearby village of Miclosoara, and had been regaled with under-the-counter palinka and tales of the latest royal visit. ‘Where you’re sitting, I roasted a Mangalica hog for him last May,’ said the young man who runs the place on behalf of Count Kálnoky, who manages the King’s Transylvanian properties. ‘Do you think he’ll be able to come again now he is King?’ he asked, anxiously.

By all accounts, the answer has been yes, but the King’s retreat at Zalánpatak (population: 110) is open to paying guests regardless, at least when he’s not in residence. Once you’ve juddered along that gravel road, crawled past the straggle of pastel-coloured cottages and waited for the cows to go home, it’s the last homestead on your left: a big wooden gate with an iron bell-pull. The road continues over the hills and the booking email from the Count’s agent urges you not to drive it ‘even if Google Maps says so’, a warning that anyone familiar with Romanian country roads will take very seriously indeed.

Within the gate there’s an orchard and a cluster of wooden-framed cottages. There are no signs, no reception desk: just a blue-washed farmhouse with a stone fireplace and the Prince of Wales’s feathers painted on the gable. The King’s cottage is at the top of a grassy courtyard but our room was further down the hill, described, slightly disarmingly, as the ‘serf’s house’. Oh well, we’re both journos. We’ve been called worse. The door-frames had been padded with leather, 19th-century Transylvanian farmhands, presumably, being quite a bit shorter than your typical 21st-century monarch.

Still, what joy after a long journey (and there’s no quick route to Zalánpatak) to find an electric kettle, tea cups and real British tea-bags. None of those yellow Lipton abominations for HM; he knows how to make his subjects feel at home. Guests dine together (boar goulash and plum brandy). One, an American lady who’d stumbled across the place on a hotel booking website, was astonished by how basic it all was. Unfamiliar with the habits of the British aristocracy (or the traditions of Gordonstoun), she’d expected that a royal residence must, by its nature, be palatial.

But woodsmoke and palinka take the edge off most things, and the Count’s people can organise all sorts of rural activities – mostly involving horses, though they do have a hot tub (ask in advance: it’s wood-fired and takes a while to warm up). As with any homestay, there’s a fascination in nosing about and trying to piece together the owner’s private tastes and foibles. That watercolour… it isn’t one of his, is it? Did HM choose the board games in the living room? (Articulate looked quite well-used). A big, well-worn armchair faces a dormer window with a view over the valley. It seemed presumptuous to sit in it, and apparently only one person ever has. The King likes to read there.

And then… well, that’s it, really. The isolation is the whole point. There’s no television and only patchy internet. The trade-off is silence; real silence, of the kind almost unobtainable in the UK, with not a single motor vehicle audible and only the jangle of cowbells to break the quiet. For an urbanite – even one with an impossibly romantic view of old Europe – it was slightly disconcerting. Late at night, the cottage door rattled in the breeze. Transylvanians don’t buy the fictionalised, Bram Stoker version of their home that obsesses English-speaking visitors, though that hadn’t prevented them from nailing a crucifix just above the bed.

Wolves, though? And bears? We’re in the foothills of the Carpathians; the place is teeming with predators. We’d seen two bears on the drive over – each the size of a St Bernard, and staring at the passing cars with the assurance that comes from being Europe’s top carnivore. Locals were taking selfies with the smaller bear, which seemed ill-advised. But in the midnight stillness at Zalánpatak I did start to wonder just how solid the wooden doors really were. Could we be certain that there wasn’t any honey in the room? What if the bears simply wanted a decent cup of builders’ tea?

Best not to overthink it. The locals have lived with the local fauna for centuries and that palinka braces a fellow marvellously. But in a spot like this, a little enchantment goes a very long way. You can understand why a man who has spent his whole life in the public gaze would want to drink deeply from that slow, healing silence. We, on the other hand, had options that aren’t open to a monarch. Craving urban civilisation, we headed for the Ramada in Sibiu: cafés to try, bookshops and galleries to browse and at the end of each day, crisp sheets, satellite TV and sterile, faceless, blissful anonymity. That’s a luxury that our King – God bless him – can never enjoy.

Recipents of the annual William Stanley Moss awards. Rethymno, Crete, 2024

Summer in England (such as it was this year) is well and truly over. We have misty and quite cold mornings with the grass soaked full with dew. I have been very busy for the last couple of months and now have some time to get back to the blog.

You will recall that in June I asked for donations to support the continuation of the annual William Stanley Moss awards which is the brainchild of Billy’s daughter Gabriella Bullock. Many of you were generous enough to donate and Gabriella is very grateful. Perhaps I could ask for one more push from those who were unable to give at the time; every few Pounds will help.

You can make a donation via PayPal by followingthis link.

Gabriella and Hugh have recently returned from Crete after this year’s awards. She wrote to me with a report and a message of thanks you you all.

Dear Tom,

Please forgive the delay in writing to you, I’m sorry it has taken rather too long. The material I was awaiting from Crete has now arrived, so here we go!

Firstly I want to say how dumbfounded I am that, of the many truly deserving causes you could have chosen to ask your readers across the world to support, you have chosen the really rather meagre prizes that we set up in my father’s name. It is such an unexpected, incredible honour – and such an overwhelmingly wonderful feeling to have your huge endorsement of my endeavour… I am lost for words.

But Tom, I hardly know how to put this – your website has been such a glorious thing, dedicated to Paddy – and in his lifetime it was called “The Greatest Living Englishman” – I’ll never forget telling him about this, and how covered he was in surprise and pleasure and modest confusion… You CAN’T re-dedicate it – it is his, and should be his, always! He’s way too special to share his website with anyone, let alone my father. He is the legend! The idea for the kidnap was all his – and what about the rest of his extraordinary life? Enough that he now shares a photograph on the staircase of the Special Forces Club with my father – but this – it mustn’t happen – please trust me… They may not say so, but I’m sure his legions of devotees among your readers feel the same, however generous they may be.

When we decided to support the University of Crete, it was in the hope of reaching out to the whole of Crete – and I do like to think that the idea would have had Paddy’s blessing… Two prizes are awarded annually to students of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Crete. One is awarded by the Department of Philology and one by the Department of History and Archaeology – it is all tirelessly overseen by the tutors and heads of the departments involved. I hadn’t foreseen this, but I can only say that these prizes are just as much a gift to me as to the students – they have given a very special dimension to my life! Small as they are, they bring a wonderful connection to a wonderful university – world class – and every year I am struck by the prize-winners, always so impressive and so delightful, and I am grateful for the unique opportunity I have to meet them. I love the way that, although the prizes are such a reminder of what happened in long-past wartime, they are all about the future.

This year’s prize-giving took place earlier this month in Rethymno. As well as the prize-winners, their families and friends and their tutors, the Dean of the Faculty and the Heads of Department were there, and gave memorable speeches. I too gave a short speech – which of course centred around you, your generosity and your extraordinary gesture…

Then came the prize-giving itself. This year there were three prize-winners:

1) Aikaterini Yakimtsouki-Magaraki (MA student in Philology) MA in “Classical Studies”. The title of her dissertation was “Medicine as a rival to Philosophy”.

2) Antonios Digalakis (PhD candidate in History and Archaeology), PhD thesis entitled “”Painting in ‘naturale’: The Ionian Islands in mid-17th – mid-18th century”. He was awarded the prize for the thesis chapter entitled “Cretan Painters on the Ionian Islands”.

3) Minas Chouvardas (Postgraduate student in History and Archaeology), MA in Ancient History. Title of MA Dissertation : “The Towns and Small Communities of the Aegean Islands and their Relationship to Athenian Hegemony’. He was awarded the prize for an extensive chapter entitled “Island Hegemonic Aspirations and the Prehistory of Athenian imperialism in the Aegean”.

These last two shared the Department of History and Archaeology prize.

Then each of the prize-winners gave a speech – thoughtful and philosophical in true Cretan fashion, whether long or short, in English or in Greek. Antonios also made the point that the prize money would enable him to visit art works and consult art books, especially in Italy. Aikaterini has sent the text of her speech:

“I am honoured to be the recipient of the William Stanley Moss award and I would like to thank the committee, my professors for their support in times of uncertainty and instability, my precious friends and my family. I would also like to thank Mrs Bullock for offering young people an incentive in our academic and professional journey. I hope that I will continue to explore the perplexity of the Greco-Roman antiquity focusing on scientific thought of the time and on the interaction of the Greeks and Romans with foreign cultures. But what matters most is that I follow my dreams with integrity. And this is the legacy that Major Stanley Moss left. Thank you.”

With the ceremony over, we set off for a wonderful evening and meal together at a restaurant on the sea front – everyone eager to learn more – and of course I was besieged with questions about you and your website… and many glasses were raised…

What can I say? Thank you …!

With love,

Gabriella

Patrick Leigh Fermor: Lismore Castle and its surroundings made a lasting impression on the travel writer. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The author Dervla Murphy is not the only travel writer closely associated with Lismore in Waterford. Another well-known member of that club linked to the town is the English writer Patrick Leigh Fermor who first visited in 1956.

By Oliver O’Hanlon

First published inThe Irish Times

Lismore Castle, complete with what Fermor described as its Rapunzel tower, and its surroundings, made a lasting impression on the writer who is best remembered for his tales of travel to far-off lands. His first great adventure led him on a year-long walk from Rotterdam to Istanbul at age 18.

Fermor was a friend of Lismore castle’s owners, Andrew Cavendish and his wife Deborah, who had the titles of Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. She was the youngest of the six Mitford sisters and was known to her friends as Debo.

She met Fermor (known as Paddy) at a party in 1940. He was a 25-year-old intelligence officer and she was 20, engaged to an army officer. They met again at parties in London in the 1950s and began corresponding in 1954.

Around 600 of their letters survive. Some have made their way into edited books, shining a light on their friendship. They also provide an insight into their impressions of Lismore, and Ireland generally, during the second half of the 20th century.

Writing in May 1956 after his first visit, Fermor thanked his hosts for a “lovely Paradise stay in Lismore”.

He claimed that after the trip, he existed in a “glorious afterglow of it” and that whenever he thought of it, he found himself “smiling with the inane felicity of a turnip lantern”.

In a letter to a friend afterwards, Fermor enthused that Lismore was “beyond all expectations, absolute bliss throughout”. From his description, it seems to have taken on an other-worldly quality in his imagination.

He paints a vivid picture of the usually mundane flora and fauna that one would expect to see in such a setting. Petals from a magnolia tree fell like giant snowflakes. Trees so overgrown with lichen took on the appearance of green coral. This, together with drooping ferns and lianas, prompted Fermor to say that it almost had the appearance of an equatorial jungle.

He explained that the castle and the “primeval forest round it were spellbound in a late spring or early summer trance”. He noted that there was a heavy rhododendron blossom everywhere and likened the river Blackwater, which runs alongside the castle and gardens, to the Limpopo river in Africa.

Days were spent travelling around the neighbourhood, smelling gorse burn, visiting cows, observing salmon being hauled in at Dromana, and drinking Guinness as they went on their odyssey. Trips were also arranged to Helvick and Ardmore.

On a later holiday, he tells of visits to the Lismore wine vaults and a “sawdust scattered drinking hell” in the town with Andrew.

His initial positive reaction to Lismore does not seem to have dimmed with the passing of time.

After a visit in April 1984, almost 30 years after his first visit, he declared that he was still “living in the afterglow of those lovely days at Lismore”. He admitted that it was “more marvellous than ever, even than that glorious first sojourn”.

As much as it was an appreciation of Lismore, it seems that it was the human connection that Paddy savoured during his trips there. He enjoyed meeting the family, who seemed to him like “saints and angels in human form”, horse riding, the outings and the “fun, jokes and everything”.

It was also the simpler things that appealed to him at Lismore such as watching a sunset stream through tree branches on a walk through the wood above the river before dinner on his last day. A meeting with a woman who lived in a cottage in the wood, and who gave them tea and Guinness and currant buns, stayed in his memory.

On his departure from Lismore, he felt that he was an “exile wandering far away from Eden”. Their friendship lasted for decades and has been described as a “platonic attraction” between two people known for their “youthful high spirits, warmth, generosity and an unstinting enjoyment of life”.

Paddy was an avid letter writer and penned somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 letters in his lifetime. Apart from the residents of Lismore castle, he had other correspondents in Ireland.

He wrote to Enrica (Ricki) Huston, wife of John Huston, at St Clerans near Craughwell in Galway. Letters recount tales of his visits to Birr, Luggala, and other global adventures. She was the person who rescued him after he got into a brawl at a hunt ball in Kildare at 3am after having imbibed too much.

It’s not clear if he would have had enough material for a book on Ireland but it would certainly have made for interesting reading if he did.

William Stanley Moss (Copyright Estate of William Stanley Moss )

I do hope that you have enjoyed the series of articles about the kidnap 80 years ago. A lot of work went into them, mostly from Chris White, but also Gabriella and Hugh Bullock.

The blog is rarely used for fundraising, but I do want to ask you all to consider making adonation to the fund setup in Billy Moss’s memory which awards two annual prizes at the University of Crete. These are funded mostly by the small income from royalties from Billy’s books and other work. The annual William Stanley Moss awards are open to graduate students of the Faculty of Philosophy studying the subjects of Philology, History and Archaeology.

Gabriella Bullock is one of Billy’s daughters and has written to me recently this about the award:

I was very nervous at the inaugural prize-giving ceremony, that my father would be falsely presented as a sort of pure white hero for my benefit. But I need not have worried: the Dean gave an unforgettably philosophical speech, about war and atonement and redemption, and the time-honoured use, since Classical times, of acts of atonement or commemoration.

The prizes are now in their eleventh year – and we feel we have acquired another, academic, family! Every year in my speech, lest they forget, I repeat that the prizes exist to honour the Cretans in my father’s name. They are the only means I have to salute them, to give something back on his behalf, and to express my gratitude and admiration.

The very first prize-winner in 2014 was a young woman who grew up listening to her grandfather’s stories – he had been involved in the kidnap operation; she entered the competition in his memory. Last year, one of the winners told me that he had entered the year before, but had not won. This time he had won, and he was so pleased. He said that the prize was a real motivation to produce excellent work. This was lovely to hear – hopefully it is truly a legacy.

As time passes, I sometimes wonder about the future of this blog. I have broadly achieved what I set out to do fourteen years ago which was to pull together as much information as I could about Paddy and his friends (which includes SOE colleagues). There are now over 1,100 articles, nearly 2,000 photographs, and numerous links to videos etc. I shall complete the task, but I feel that I need a renewed purpose. An extra spur.

I have thought about this and if I may, dear readers, I would like to move onto the next phase by dedicating this sitejointly to the memory of both Paddy and Billy. To that end I think it would be marvellous if we could all pull our credit and debit cards to make adonation to the fund in memory of Major William Stanley Moss, and all those brave people of Crete who fought and died to remove the German Nazi terror from their island. Perhaps it may also mark a way of saying thank you for the blog itself. If we can raise just a few thousand pounds we will keep the William Stanley Moss awards going for some years yet.

Gabriella will be very grateful if you can make a donation by PayPal by followingthis link.

I will ensure that we update you on the funds raised over the next month or so.

Thank you in anticipation.

Once more. To donate via Paypal, clickhere.

Some video focusing on the kidnap (and others not!) some of your may find interesting posted in 2021 of the dinner held to honour Paddy’s memory to mark the tenth anniversary of his death. Held on 24th June at the Aphrodite Taverna, London.

There were around 24 of us in attendance, including a number of notable writers: Artemis Cooper, Antony Beevor, and Alan Ogden. Former Coldstream Guards officer Harry Bucknall was also present, making a public confession which made The Times the next day.

Following requests from some of you to make a public record, here are some videos from the event which I hope you will enjoy. They are in “running order”. Enjoy!

Tom Sawford on the Paddy blog and some tributes posted ten years ago.

A little continuation of that one here starting with a memory by Nick Jellicoe, the son of George Jellicoe …

Chris White talking about the kidnap route and a proposed film documentary

Alan Ogden and the legacy of the kidnap

Artemis and Paddy’s charm …

Antony Beevor and the story of when Paddy met Helmut Kohl 🙂

Harry Bucknall’s confession …

Paddy’s thorough reading of They Were Counted …

And to conclude the fantastic evening, Isabelle Cole, one of Billy Moss’ daughters, offers a rendition of It’s a Long Way to Tipperary in French, as sung by Paddy.

As many of you will be aware I am somewhat dreadful at posting some of the excellent material that you send me. I received this from Nicholas whom I met at a Stanfords book event a few months ago. Like many things it fell down the list of things to do. Events have clearly overtaken this piece, his diary entry from 15 June 2023 written in Ukraine, but perhaps publishing it on its first anniversary will offer a fresh perspective.

I am walking through Staryi Rynok Square in Lviv, Ukraine. There is a ghostly howl from the
clock tower that grows in volume. People carry on enjoying the last of the sun on a warm
June evening as though nothing is happening, but it is actually the air raid siren, and my
iPhone is vibrating with its own warning of incoming missiles. I know that very few missiles
get through the Ukrainian defences these days, but it is an excuse to go into a network of
cellars that provide both protection from drones and missiles, and a bar. It is not just a bar,
but a museum celebrating the activities of the Ukrainian partisans in the second world war –
a time of defiance, resilience and resistance in the face of first the Nazi invasion and then
the Soviet occupation. The walls are lined with wood as though one is in a trench,
photographs of partisans hang in frames. Maps, radios and weapons are on display. It’s a
world as strange as anything Lewis Carroll or rather Charles Dodgson described.

What am I doing here? I reflect on this as I raise a glass of vodka to celebrate the arrival of
two friends from university, a Classicist and a Fellow who taught English and French
literature. Exotic subjects for one who studied biochemistry and spent many hours in a
white lab coat with agar plates and time-consuming experiments separating out proteins in
gel tubes using a technique known as electrophoresis.

Now the talk is of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, of the future of warfare, the unlearnt
lessons of two world wars and human rights. We had all driven out across Europe passing
the poppy fields of the Somme, through the Ruhr valley and passed the names associated
with massacres and concentration camps….. Katowice… Auschwitz. Places that led to two
new crimes – genocide and ‘crimes against humanity’. The lawyers who penned those new
concepts, Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht lived and studied in this very city. Together
they shaped the indictment at the Nuremberg trials and created concepts, captured some of
the worst depravity of the twentieth century; and transformed international law and human
rights.

The origins of this mission go back to a Gaudy. It was after midnight in the Buttery in the
Spring of 2021 when I heard two classicists talking of Patrick Leigh Fermor (PLF). One I knew,
the other I knew of, and I joined the conversation. I realised we were in PLF’s words
‘Drinking from the same fountain’. This of course is the essence of college life, unbounded
by what one studies and the opportunity to make acquaintances that transcend year groups
and even Common Rooms. Ideas and enthusiasms can be pooled, and encouragement and
support can be liberally shared. Without that conversation, there would have been no
mission to Ukraine.

PLF’s love of classics had taken him to Greece where he had spent much of the second
world war living with the partisans in the mountains of Crete. A love of literature and
languages made PLF the kind of traveller who immersed himself in local cultures and
experiences. His book ‘A Time of Gifts’ has inspired generations since to do likewise. He also
had a sense of history, and his writings seem to resonate today when the pages of European
history are turning over so fast, and we all wonder what will be the theme of the next
chapter that it is leading to. In my twenties I had found myself sharing a cave with a
Hungarian surgeon and Arabist in Central Afghanistan, with a clandestine medical mission run by a mujahideen commander. Later when I read stories of PLF in the Cretan mountains,it conjured up those times.

Now Ukraine feels like the crucible in which that new history is being forged at an alarming
rate, reshaping our expectations for us, a new generation that might have considered
themselves beneficiaries of Europe’s rich heritage and the world. Changing patterns of trade
and dissolving hopes for any global alliance against climate change. For people in the
theatre itself represents both an existential crisis as well as a continuum of seven hundred
years of war between the Muscovites and the Kyivs.

Perhaps that is why Ukraine has attracted so many people to it, each on a mission of their
own making. I was there providing arms (prosthetics) for the wounded, my Christ Church
contemporaries were bringing trucks, drones and tourniquets for the front line and for
security reasons must remain anonymous.

Air raid over, we made up way up from the labyrinthian cellar and came out blinking in the
sunlight to make our way to Baczewski Restaurant. We remembered PLF, and reflected that
if he was going out to dinner in Lviv he would undoubtedly have recommended this
restaurant with its fine dining, vodka distillery and sense of history.

15 th June 2023

Many of you will know the name of Petroc Trelawny, a BBC radio presenter still heading up the BBC Radio Three breakfast show. I have met Petroc a number of times, all in Budapest, when visiting the noted biographer Michael O’Sullivan who has written a number of books about Paddy and his noble Hungarian friends (view here)

Just in time for summer holidays to Cornwall, Petroc has published a delightful book –Trelawny’s Cornwall: A Journey through Western Lands. Part history, part memoir, this is a deeply felt exploration of Cornwall – past, present and future. Petroc embarks on a slow journey that sees him visit old mine workings, ancient churches, sites where new technology was forged, and places where poets, musicians, architects and film makers have worked to shape Cornwall’s cultural identity. He explores the Tamar, the river that marks out the Cornish frontier, and holds a finger up to winds of change, exploring the collapse of Methodism, the decline of the Cornish language, and the complex , sometimes lucrative, sometimes destructive, relationship with tourism. As he travels by road, rail and foot, he conjures marvellously vivid figures and scenes from memory, telling the stories of a loving family full of mysteries and a landscape still redolent of ‘Cornish otherness’.

It’s been a while since I have been able to highlight a new book by a friend of the site, so it gives me great pleasure to showcase Petroc’s work, and I hope that you might enjoy reading this as you laze on the beach in Polzeath or elsewhere, holding a cup of hot chocolate whilst trying to stop sand getting into your pasty, and looking out for the children in the Surf’s Up surf school in the glorious British sunshine!

You can buy Trelawny’s Cornwall: A Journey through Western Lands here.

Chris White and his brother Peter have put together a wonderful website to support their book Abducting a General which you can findhere.

For those who want to drill into the detail of locations they have put together an incredible map showing important SOE locations in Crete. You can find thathere.

On this day, 29 May, in 1453 the Roman Empire finally died as the last vestige of the Roman Empire of the East fell. Constantinople was lost to the Turks save for a couple of minor despotates.

This documentary is from the amzing BBC Chronicle series and dates to 1967. If you read the comments on You Tube, most think this more informative and refreshing than the more modern and dramatic type of documentary.

John Julius Norwich tells the dramatic story of the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, followed by the rise of the Ottoman Turks in the 15th Century. Using monuments in Istanbul to show the formidable artistic and intellectual achievements of the Byzantines, Norwich vividly describes the last scenes of Greek Orthodox Christianity from within the Hagia Sophia. Norwich describes the calamitous scenes of the last progress of the sacred icons around Constantinople (Istanbul).

To watch clickthis link to the BBC site

If you’d like to read more about the Fall I wrote a series of articles on my much neglected Byzantine blog which you can findhere. It was John Julius Norwich and his books about Byzantium that finally led me to Paddy.

PW capture report on Kreipe

This is the last post in the series created by the excellent Chris White. He first published this on Facebook in 2020. During the first months of the pandemic, I was copying and pasting and adding his pictures to recreate here on the Paddy blog. I know that many of you have enjoyed this and your comments are appreciated. There will be a couple of follow on posts to tidy up this series, but once more, a huge round of thanks to Chris. 

29th May 1944. General Kreipe arrives in the UK after a brief period of time in Cairo being interrogated. Again, it is front page news.

Kreipe in UK 1

As we come towards the end of the account of the kidnap I would like to share with you the text of a talk given in April by Gabriella Bullock (née Moss) – Billy Moss’ daughter – to her local history group. It recounts the story of the kidnap but includes many personal perspectives, particularly about Billy, and an important German perspective on the ‘reprisals’. At the end Gabrilla mentions the two annual prizes set up in her father’s name at the University of Crete. These are funded mostly by the royalties from his books and other work. 

Over to Gabriella …

In 1940 Winston Churchill launched the Special Operations Executive (SOE), with the rousing injunction to ‘set Europe ablaze’. I shall be speaking today about my father, William Stanley Moss – and the 1944 operation in which he was involved with Patrick Leigh Fermor, both British SOE agents. This was the abduction carried out by the two of them, together with a trusted handful of Cretan Resistance fighters, of General Heinrich Kreipe, Commander at that time of German Forces on occupied Crete. My father’s book Ill Met by Moonlight describes it all. It was a bestseller later made into an Emeric/Pressburger film, which I imagine most have you have seen – they tend to roll it out at Christmas.

To give you a bit of background first. My father was born in 1921 in Yokohama, Japan, where his family was living, and where his father was a businessman. His mother was a White Russian whose family had escaped the Revolution. When my father was two years old Yokohama was entirely destroyed in the Great Kanto earthquake; the family survived and returned at that point to settle in England. They travelled a great deal, however, and my father claimed to have voyaged around the world twice before his teens. Known as Billy, he was a much-loved only child, and his adventurous spirit was given fairly free rein. Treasure Island was and remained his favourite book. Also encouraged were his artistic and writing talents, and his love of animals. He was schooled at Charterhouse, leaving in 1939 before his 18th birthday, and before the outbreak of war.

He was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards in 1941, having trained at Caterham and Sandhurst. He served 18 months in and around London, on the King’s Guard, with a period of guarding Rudolph Hess, and a spell of Churchillian duty at Chequers – all thrilling for a junior officer – before suddenly being sent to join the 3rd Battalion the Coldstream in the Middle East. He saw action for the first time in the Desert Campaign with Montgomery’s Eighth Army, chasing Rommel across North Africa, after Alamein. Following a spell in Pantelleria, Italy, he parted from his regiment and headed for Cairo, and in September 1943, he volunteered to join Force 133 of SOE.

Meanwhile, at 22 years old he was the youngest inmate of the house known as Tara – which grew into something of a Cairo legend as a centre of uproarious and eccentric fun when its housemates were on leave. These were other SOE agents and included David Smiley and Billy McLean who worked together in Albania and the Balkans, Xan Fielding and Patrick Leigh Fermor – known as Paddy – these two were well embedded in the Cretan resistance and Paddy had already spent some two years in the mountains disguised as a shepherd. He had an almost Byronic love and affinity for Greece and Crete. He was fluent in Greek and many other languages, and would recite reams of epic poetry at the drop of a hat.

I can’t resist sharing with you this description of him, later in life, by his friend the writer Lawrence Durrell, when Paddy was staying with him in Cyprus:

After a splendid dinner by the fire Paddy starts singing, songs of Crete, Athens, Macedonia. When I go out to refill the ouzo bottle…. I find the street completely filled with people listening in utter silence and darkness. Everyone seems struck dumb. I catch sight of Frangos, who says ‘Never have I heard of Englishmen singing Greek songs like this!’ Their reverent amazement is touching; it is as if they want to embrace Paddy wherever he goes.

My father too was under his spell.

Paddy was 29 at the time of the abduction. He was less of a professional soldier than my father, with less experience of conventional warfare. He had served for a short time with the Irish Guards but his disposition was much more suited to undercover work with SOE. Eventually – but not without dissenting voices – he was granted permission by HQ to carry out the kidnap operation. He asked my father to join him as his second-in-command, who leapt at the chance.

Paddy wrote an Afterword for the 2001 edition of Ill Met by Moonlight. Writing from a historical perspective, he is at pains to insist that the kidnap was carefully planned – that it was the result of an idea of long and complex gestation. He longs to dispel the notion that it was somehow a tremendous jape. It is also true, however, that all the Tara inmates had had a great time adding their ha’penny-worth, towels around their middles, famously drawing plans and diagrams on a steamy bathroom wall.

Afterwards, one wireless announcer said, ‘of all the stories that have come out of the War this is the one which schoolboys everywhere will best remember’. Paddy’s words cannot stifle the ebullience of this story. Its enduring appeal hinges on a mix of danger and courage with dare-devilry, and on the fact that its aim was not destruction of any kind, but simply, with the co-operation of a huge swathe of the unbowed and complicit population, to get the better of the mighty Germans by stealing their general from under their noses. It was a wonderful idea. On Crete itself there is a joke that out of a population of 600,000, 599,999 were involved.

The German invasion of Crete in 1941 had been, uniquely, an airborne invasion, and The Battle of Crete raged for 11 days of total and bloody fighting. When the Germans prevailed, and thousands of British and Allied troops hurriedly evacuated as best they could be, Cretans were abandoned to their fate. In retaliation for the fierce resistance they had put up, the Germans instantly imposed a terrifying and pitiless rule on the entire population, which was enforced throughout the occupation. On the slightest pretext, or even none, there were summary executions, destructions of villages, massacres of their inhabitants, gratuitous cruelty of every kind. General Muller, commander of the German forces, was known as The Butcher of Crete, and later executed for war crimes. This was the general that Paddy and my father hoped to abduct, take prisoner and escort back to Cairo. However, in March 1944 Muller was temporarily replaced by General Kreipe who thus became the target.

In the wake of the Battle of Crete numbers of Cretan men had taken to the mountains – as they had the century before when under Turkish rule – forming and joining bands of resistance fighters. A handful of SOE agents such as Paddy then trickled into Crete to organise resistance.

I won’t narrate the full story, as many of you will have read the book or seen the film. I feel I should explain, though, that sadly I never knew my father, who died when I was a child. So, much of what I have to say is necessarily conjecture. Luckily he wrote books, letters, diaries. I shall be quoting from the fulsome contemporaneous diary that he kept, and upon which Ill Met by Moonlight is closely based.

One night in early February1944 they are flown out over Crete, and Paddy is dropped. But as the plane turns to make a second drop, clouds close in, ever more thickly, forcing the plane back to base. Subsequent attempts to reach Crete by plane and boat are all thwarted until finally, on the night of the 4th April, a small motor launch with my father on board edged towards the Cretan coast. “In the light of the half-moon the mountains loomed up large and misty-white so that it seemed that we were much, much closer”. Guided slowly in by a pinprick signal of torchlight, a dinghy landed him within wading distance and he was helped ashore by a score of hands.

“My first impressions were extraordinary – dark faces, heavy moustaches, turbaned heads, black and shabby clothes, tall boots, a hundred voices. And then I saw Paddy, and ran towards him. I can’t describe how wonderful it was to see the old son of a gun again. We talked of everything and of nothing for a few moments. Paddy looked radiantly healthy, and the sun (I think it must have been the sun) had darkened his face, so that he looked for all the world like a smuggler of old.

He had to leave me then to go and see to further unloading and to get the German POWs on board…

I saw him go off, and watched him, as he gave orders, commanded men to do this and that. I remember thinking ‘Here is the different Paddy’. He seemed to have the whole situation at his finger-tips and was capable of coping with anything”.

I wanted to read this to you to give you a flavour of it all in the diary’s words, and also because of the understated rather English way my father expresses his admiration for Paddy. Throughout the diary there never seems to be a jarring word between them. Rather, a close understanding and uncomplicated delight in each other’s company – a purity, somehow.

The beach in question had been mined, with German outposts only ¾ mile to the west and one mile to the east. Through that night their Cretan guide led them over mountains for four hours. In this way, and at each stage of the operation, the Cretans were guiding them, sheltering them, guarding them, providing for them. Taking unimaginable risks for them. Paddy always stressed that most of those involved in the kidnap were Cretan, and there was no doubt of the consequences for them of being caught. As for Paddy and Billy, Hitler’s Commando Order of 1942 was clear, stating “all enemies on so-called commando mission, whether armed or unarmed, in battle or in flight, are to be slaughtered to the last man”.

There were moments of hair-raising danger, but preparations went ahead, and the kidnap took place on the evening of the 26th April, as the General was being driven from German HQ to the Villa Ariadne, his sleeping quarters in Knossos. Paddy and Billy, in stolen German uniforms, and their team of seven Cretans, waited concealed.

At a signal that the General’s car, with its unmistakeable pennants on the front, was approaching – one hour later than expected – Paddy and Billy stepped into the road, swinging torches. The car slowed at the crossroads. Paddy cried HALT. The car stopped and they both approached it, one on each side – Billy on the driver’s side. Paddy questioned “Ist dies das General’s wagen?” “Ya, Ya” – and then they tore open the doors. The terrified chauffeur was reaching for his revolver, Billy hit him with a cosh, Paddy and Manoli pulled the General from the front seat. Struggling like mad and protesting loudly, he was bundled into the back, and sat upon by three hefty and armed Cretans, while the chauffeur was taken away by the others. Billy jumped in behind the steering wheel, and with Paddy beside him wearing the General’s hat, they set off. Paddy told the General that if he were willing to give his parole that he would neither shout nor try to escape, they would treat him not as a prisoner but as one of themselves; the General gave his parole immediately.

Billy drove the car, straight past the startled sentries guarding the Villa Ariadne, and through a number of checkpoints. At these, he slowed right down to give the sentries time to recognise the pennants, before gradually accelerating smoothly past – a tactic which seemed to work.

Their route took them through the centre of Heraklion, where, with nerve-wracking timing, a garrison cinema show had just spilled out its audience, so that the streets were milling with German soldiers, forcing them to proceed at snail’s pace. There were many more checkpoints – 22 in all, of which 5 were roadblocks – but somehow they negotiated them all.

They carried on along the coastal road and up into the mountains, and here the party split. So far, so good. Together with the Cretan team, Billy and the General set off into the mountains. Meanwhile, Paddy drove the car to a spot by the north coast, where it might seem that the occupants had left it to board a waiting submarine. He left a carefully composed and signed letter inside it. This was addressed to the German authorities and claimed full and sole British responsibility for the abduction, as well as hopefully giving the impression that the General would have already been taken off the island. The reality was that, having re-formed, the entire party was to trek over the mountains all the way across to the southern coast where hopefully there would be a rendezvous with a boat to take them to Cairo.

It had been pre-arranged with HQ that when news of the abduction broke, the BBC and other broadcasting channels would announce that General Kreipe was already on his way to Cairo. In fact, everywhere it was announced that the General was being taken off the island. This made matters for them very much worse: it was responsible for the Germans launching a full-scale manhunt.

Not only that, but the leaflets never materialised which were supposed immediately to be dropped, stating in both German and Greek that the operation had been carried out by a British raiding party – in this way, Paddy had hoped to prevent reprisals being taken on the islanders.

Over the next 19 days the party made its way across the mountains by night, taking cover in caves by day, while the full-scale manhunt picked up their trail and began to close in on them. As Billy wrote, they had everything to lose. But with their incredibly loyal tight-knit team, local lookouts and runners, they just managed to keep a step ahead of the tightening circle – fed and sheltered all the way without question and without fail.

There were of course also those whom they couldn’t trust. There was constant danger, setbacks, crises and changes of plan, failed communication systems, and mishaps of all kinds, but finally on the night of the 15th May they were safely chugging their way back to Cairo, in the same motor launch that Billy had arrived in, and their job was done.

On his return as General Commander that August, General Muller issued the following Order:

Because the town of Anogia is the centre of the English Intelligence of Crete, because the people of Anogia committed the murder of the sergeant commander of the Yeni-Gave as well as of the garrison under his orders, because the people of Anogia carried out the sabotage of Damasta, because in Anogia the guerrillas of the various groups of resistance take refuge and find protection and because it was through Anogia that the kidnappers with General Kreipe passed using Anogia as a transit camp, we order its COMPLETE DESTRUCTION and the execution of every male person of Anogia who would happen to be within the village and around it within a distance of one kilometer.

Anogia was then obliterated. Several villages in the Amari district were also razed that summer, with inhabitants rounded up and shot.

There are those who said – later –that the success of the mission came at too high a price. There were also those who had predicted such reprisals, such as Col. Sweet-Escott who as SOE Commander in the Balkans had experience of them – they were part of German policy, widely practised, and had been a ruthless feature of the occupation from its beginning.

Others, including Paddy – although he suffered lifelong agonies of doubt – believed that the meticulous care taken to avoid involving the Cretans in reprisals was in this case successful. They laid the cause of the reprisals on other factors. There was, by this stage of 1944, the question of the Germans’ imminent collapse and Muller’s strategic need to preclude attacks on his withdrawing troops. This he did by crushing centres of resistance across the whole island, the so-called ‘scorched-earth policy’, because in this way, ordinary German soldiers were compromised by participation in war crimes; this made their surrender or desertion impossible.

There were also the other attacks mentioned in Muller’s Order, such as the ambush carried out at Damasta, and attacks on Germans carried out in May by the Communist ELAS party (civil war was just over the horizon, and the Communist activists used such attacks on German targets in a cynical strategy, designed to trigger a violent response). It is also possible that Muller reversed the lenient line, which until then had been taken with regard to the bloodless Kreipe operation, out of straightforward revenge – for he must have realised he was the original-intended target.

Then there are those – perhaps especially in Crete – who are philosophical and stoical, saying that there were several factors and that Yes, perhaps the abduction was one of them; but that it was war.

Whatever the opinion expressed – and everyone in Crete has an opinion on this desperately emotive issue – it clearly meant a very great deal to people at the time that Paddy and my father who were British stood shoulder to shoulder with them, that they were not entirely abandoned. We see exactly this sentiment replicated right now in Ukraine. And in the midst of the humiliation of Occupation, this successful operation, which involved so many Cretans, enabled a proud people to hold up their heads. That is not nothing, nor is it forgotten.

Years later, amongst my father’s papers I found a long letter in German from a Dr. Beutin who at the time of the kidnap had been a serving German officer on Crete. The letter was dated 1950, which was the year that Ill Met by Moonlight was first published. In 1993 I had it translated and shared it with Paddy – to his great excitement, because it sheds light on the German perspective – as he wrote in a letter to me, “It really does seem that our stratagem worked and that for a very important gap in time, the contents of our letter (the one left inside the General’s car) were believed, before the enemy knew of the truth through their spies or our traitors – both, of course”.

He immediately embarked on his own translation of the letter, and tried to contact Dr. Beutin, only to discover that he had died some years before.

Among Dr. Beutin’s observations are these:

“General Kreipe arrived in Crete at the beginning of March 1944… Within a few days he became highly unpopular among the men because of his pettiness and rudeness, to officers as well…and he introduced a tone to which the men of the Division were not accustomed and which they perceived as undeserved… He always grew impatient at traffic points… where the rule was that every driver had to produce a movement-order for every journey… no exceptions to this rule were allowed, even for generals; but Kreipe deemed this unnecessary or unbecoming in his own case, and was very rude if his car was ever stopped… everyone took care not to examine his car too closely… so Kreipe was a victim of his own disobedience to orders… The soldiers were surprised but not upset that he had been abducted… in some quarters, it was maintained as a joke that the General had abducted himself. It was much discussed in officers’ messes, and many rakis were drunk to your health.”

Paddy’s response to these comments was, “I think your father was a better judge of Kreipe’s character than I was”. Let me explain.

My father was relieved that Kreipe wasn’t the raving Nazi he might well have been, and gave him credit for coping with arduous marches and hardships, especially in the early part of their trek. They did obtain a mule for him, but he had at least one nasty fall. However, my father found Kreipe increasingly difficult to please, and one day, as he perceived it, he saw an ugly side to Kreipe: throughout the afternoon, there had been the sound of explosions – it was Germans blowing up villages with dynamite, as a reprisal for a different agent’s actions. The General, with a grin, remarked that it was so easy to kill Cretans as reprisals for anything the British did. My father was appalled and could never warm to him after that incident, although two days later the General apologised and things carried on as before.

But Paddy wasn’t with them that day, and never saw that side; he saw a different side. There is a famous story – and it bears repeating. Two days after the abduction, as dawn broke over snow-covered Mount Ida (or Psiloritis, to give it its Greek name), the General quietly recited

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte “You see how Mt Soracte stands white with deep snow”

– the opening line of a Horatian ode. It was one that Paddy knew. He responded with the next line, and carried on to the end. I quote:

“The general’s blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain top to mine – and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

Paddy loved to tell this story, and the wonder of it struck all who heard it, and the power of it only grew with time – so that it came to define his entire war, like a distillation, a jewel, that he treasured. And not surprisingly, it coloured his view of the General. Indeed, in 1972 (several years after my father’s death) there was a reunion in Athens for a sort of Greek version of This is your Life, featuring Paddy and General Kreipe and the core Cretan team – and a very jolly reunion it seemed. Kreipe was complimentary about the courteous treatment he had received as a prisoner on Crete, but he could never bring himself to say a nice word about my father, and I think I know another reason.

Some fifteen years ago, when my family was in the process of reclaiming the publishing rights to my father’s work, my husband made an interesting discovery: that when Ill Met by Moonlight was published Kreipe successfully took out an injunction against its publication in Germany, on the grounds that it falsely states that he gave his parole to Paddy that he would not try to escape. For such a senior officer to give his parole would have been highly shameful and dishonourable military conduct, and he denied it. But with the release in 2012 of classified wartime records in the National Archive, we were able to read Paddy’s report to HQ: it clearly states that parole was asked for and given. Ill Met by Moonlight has never been out of print, and it has been published in Greek, French, Spanish and Italian – but to this day, not in German.

It had been an ever-present wish of mine to go to Crete… and finally in 2010, with my husband Hugh, I made the journey. We didn’t tell Paddy or anyone else that we were going, wanting no proscribed introductions of any kind, but simply to make a private visit to see the places my father had written about. We were armed only with Ill Met by Moonlight and his other wartime memoir, A War of Shadows, and a few photographs.

In the mountain village of Kastamonitsa we got talking to a charming old man who kept a shop, and asked him for directions to the house where Billy and Paddy had stayed when making preparations for the kidnap. The old man made a phone call, and soon the street outside his little shop started to fill – news of my being there spread like wildfire – we could not believe it – shepherds with mobile phones appeared from the mountains, scions of those who had sheltered the kidnap party – we were invited into homes, feasts were prepared, glasses were raised… It was so extraordinary and so unexpected.

Over the next days we were taken up to Mount Ida – Psiloritis – along tracks and into caves where my father had trodden and slept. And then escorted to Anogia – I was so nervous about Anogia – after all, the reprisals… how dare I go there, and what would I be confronting there?

Anogia had risen phoenix-like from its ashes, the biggest village in all of Crete. The reprisals and the history were not brushed under the carpet for me – instead, wonderful guides showed us all, explained all, and then led us to meet well-known families of the Resistance… there was overwhelming hospitality, gunshots as a salute, more welcomes, more feasts, there and everywhere we went. We were taken to hideouts, to family chapels … Much later we learned more about Anogia in particular, and the dark complexities that these families had faced since helping the British – but I can only say that in our dozen or so visits to Crete since that first visit, I have on rare occasions met with reserve, but never once with hostility.

Mostly I have been deluged with goodwill, and astonished by the enthusiasm that my visit was generating. Now, as in war, it seemed that it meant a huge amount to be – how can I put it? remembered by the outside world. For their story not to be forgotten. For me this reception has been astonishing, and truly humbling. We met so many amazing people, who over these last years have become dear friends, like second families. Widows, children, even grandchildren. Even some very old but still vigorous men who remembered my father, and were with him in 1944 … they have all died now, but that was so precious!

I could tell you so many stories… I will tell you about Iorgis, from the tiny eyrie-like village of Patsos. Small and strong and wiry, he was close to ninety and almost completely blind when we met him. Much later, his daughter told us what a harsh and tragic life he’d had – we would never have guessed. He took us up to the large overhanging cave where my father was sheltered for many days – he was as sure-footed as a mountain goat and so quick we could barely keep up. He spoke no English, and we spoke no Greek. Luckily others translated for us – because as we sat down to an extraordinary instant feast, the stories were gushing out of him, and it was wonderful to see him chuckling away and so clearly enjoying his memories. He had been younger than my father, probably about 20, and he recounted how one day the two of them were out on the mountain when a German spotter plane appeared. They dived into a hollow, and my father pulled some vegetation over them, and there they stayed hidden while the plane circled and circled overhead, and my father sang It’s a long way to Tipperary. After nearly 70 years, how he laughed – this amazing man, who spoke not a single word of English – as he sang it to us!

Also in Patsos, we met Vassily who had been in the Greek Special Forces. Younger than us, and fiercely proud of his village’s history, his first words to me were “Congratulations on your father”. He told us that, to this day, the Army uses the kidnap route to train its Special Forces. And indeed people come from all over the world for expeditions along the route – have even written books about it. It is legend, and really tough. As my father wrote in his diary, “Crete appeared to be one big rock – only more so”.

After my family had successfully reclaimed the rights to Ill Met by Moonlight and my father’s other works, which happened to coincide with when we first started visiting Crete, my husband and I came to a decision. At the University of Crete we set up two annual prizes in my father’s name, funded mostly by the royalties from his books and other work. It is a world-class university which, as a result of Greece’s financial crisis, had had its budget cut by 50%.

I was very nervous at the inaugural prize-giving ceremony, that my father would be falsely presented as a sort of pure white hero for my benefit. But I need not have worried: the Dean gave an unforgettably philosophical speech, about war and atonement and redemption, and the time-honoured use, since Classical times, of acts of atonement or commemoration. The prizes are now in their eleventh year – and we feel we have acquired another, academic, family! Every year in my speech, lest they forget, I repeat that the prizes exist to honour the Cretans in my father’s name. They are the only means I have to salute them, to give something back on his behalf, and to express my gratitude and admiration. The very first prize-winner in 2014 was a young woman who grew up listening to her grandfather’s stories – he had been involved in the kidnap operation; she entered the competition in his memory. Last year, one of the winners told me that he had entered the year before, but had not won. This time he had won, and he was so pleased. He said that the prize was a real motivation to produce excellent work. This was lovely to hear – hopefully it is truly a legacy.

Next month will be the 80th anniversary of the abduction. The exact spot at the junction with the road to Knossos is marked by a memorial, and every year wreaths are laid. A ceremony will certainly be held this year. As for me, – I remember Paddy telling how they looked up at the stars – and it is whenever I look up at night and see the stars, especially Orion’s Belt, that I think of Paddy and Billy looking up at them and finding their way by them, all those years ago.

All text copyright Gabriella Bullock. Photos copyright Estate of William Stanley Moss

Union Jack 1

The kidnap is reported in a morale boosting news item in ‘Union Jack’, the newspaper produced for Allied Forces in the Second World War.

This is the edition for Allied forces fighting in Italy.

Union Jack front page

Union Jack 2

Kreipe headlines 2

19th May 1944

And finally the full story becomes major, even front page, news in Britain. Mirror, Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Express all report the kidnap – often alongside the major battles happening in Italy…

Kreipe headlines 1

Kreipe headlines 3

Kreipe headlines 4

Kreipe headlines 5

Kreipe headlines 6

Mirror Kreipe headline 1

The General is now in captivity in Cairo…..and the Daily Mirror has the news.

Mirror Kreipe headline 2

Kreipe Cairo arrival 1

16th May: On the motor launch’s arrival in Mersa Matruh the General and the rest of the kidnap group were officially welcomed by Brigadier Barker-Benfield and the General spent his first night of captivity sharing a room with the Brigadier in the Officers Mess.

Kreipe Cairo arrival 2

Kreipe headline 17 May

Kreipe Cairo arrival 3

RN Motor launch rescue Fermor Kreipe

The final hours…..they have gathered in the rocks behind Peristeres beach, just below the village of Rodakino…..different andarte bands have joined them from the surrounding villages…and they are waiting for the motor launch to arrive…….

Paddy writes:

‘…..we all lay up till nightfall on a ledge in a deep hollow of the cliffs where an icy spring trickled down the rocks……Then we crossed the short distance to the little cove we hoped to leave from. It seemed to us all, with its walls of rock on either side and the sand and the pebbles, the lapping of the water and the stars, a quiet place for our adventure to end. As we stood about, talking in whispers at first, though there was no one to be afraid of, Andartes climbed down the rocks in two and threes to join us. There were the Rodakino Kapitans Khombitis and Manoli Yanna and Andrea Kotsiphis, and there too, suddenly, with the great fair moustache that had made us christen him Beowulf, was Petraka, the kapitan of the Asi Gonia band and one of our oldest friends on the island. He had brought a contingent of Goniots to join the other Andartes in guarding our departure and also to say goodbye. The place was filling up like a drawing room: groups were lounging about in the rocks or strolling with slung guns quietly conversing’

‘There was a slight coil of mist over the sea so it was not till she was quite close that we saw the ship. We could hear the rattle of the anchor going down; then two boats were lowered…….
The moment had come….We all pulled off our boots to leave behind; this was always done; even in rags they came in useful. Soon we were saying goodbye to Petraka and the Rodakino Kapitans and Yanni Katsias and the guerrillas and lastly to Antoni Zoidakis. We all embraced like grizzly bears. I tried to persuade Antoni to come with us; he wavered a moment and then decided against it. I wish he had. A sailor said “Excuse me Sir, but we ought to get a move on.”

As we neared the ship, the figures waving along the shore had begun to grow indistinct among the shadows and, very fast, it was hard to single out the cove from the tremendous mountain mass that soared from the sea to the Milky Way. The ship grew larger, her pom-poms and Bofors A.A. guns shining in the starlight. When we drew alongside sailors in spotless white were reaching down into the bulwarks to guide the General up the rope ladder (“That’s right Sir! Easy does it!”) while we – Billy, Manoli and George and I – helped from below. A moment later we were on the deck in our bare feet and it was all over.’

Peristeres beach 1

Peristeres beach 2

Peristeres beach 3

Peristeres beach 4

Peristeres beach 5

Peristeres beach 6

May 13th 1944

Nearly there…waiting in the rocky fissure outside Alones….

Paddy writes:
“Well, Herr Major, how are the plans for our departure progressing?” By now the General had become as solicitous for the success of our departure as we were.

“Wunderbar, Herr General! We’re leaving!”

It was true, the order of release or the promise of it, had come through. The German drive through the Asi Gonia mountains had driven Dennis to earth and put his set momentarily off the air. But messages from Cairo were beamed now to all stations and when the great news came through, Dick himself, hearing of our local troubles, and making a dash clean across the Nome of Retimo, reached our cheerless grotto long after dark. The boat would put in at a beach near Rodakino at 22 hours on the night of the 14th /15th May. – “10 o’clock tomorrow night!” It was in exactly a day from now. We would only just be able to manage it.

The thing was to get the main party to the coast under cover of darkness. I sent Billy off with George and the others and Yanni Katsias and his two wild boys by a short route which would bring them by daybreak to a place where they could wait for us. The General, Manoli and I would go by a much longer and safer way, where the mountains were so steep and deserted that, with a cloud of scouts out, we could move by day without much danger. Unfortunately it was too steep and uneven for a mule so the General would have to go on foot. But the sky was clear and there would be a bright moon and starlight.

The Krioneritis mountains which we were to cross are not one of the highest ranges of Crete, but they are among the steepest and are certainly the worst going. They are bare and, except for an occasional thistle or thornbush or sea squill, as empty of vegetation as a bone yard; the place is ringed with craters and fractured into a jig-saw of deep crevasses; worst of all there is not a path or even a flat square foot in the whole of this wilderness. The region is a never-ending upside-down harrow armed with millions of limestone sickles and daggers and yataghans.
Sustained perhaps by the thought of an end to his ordeal, the General tackled this Via Crucis with scarcely a groan. Helped by Manoli and me when he stumbled and then by the guerrillas that shimmered like ghosts out of the vacancy, he moved across the landscape in a sort of trance.”

On the 28th April 1944, the code breakers at Bletchley Park deciphered possibly one of the most surprising stories of the Second World War. It was an intercept of a German signal stating that General Kreipe, commander of the Nazi Garrison in Crete, had been kidnapped.

By Nicholas Mellor

The code breaking huts worked in pairs. The tapes would come in from Hut 6, where Colossus churned away breaking the code. This resulted in a series of five letter groupings of words that would go to Hut 3 from Hut 6 by a connecting chute. Hut 3 was where there was an attempt to put these decoded messages into context where they could be translated, analysed and dispatched. That was where my mother came into the picture. On a watch there were normally 5 or so academics and intelligence experts responsible for reading them, translating them into English and deciding to whom they would be sent – the War Office, or the Air Ministry for example. It was my mother’s role to see they got to the right person as fast as possible. Sometimes she worked at the teleprinter sending them to London or would be asked to ring up the Cabinet office.

Bletchley Park for all its allure today was a shabby place near a railway junction with poor billeting, no clear picture of what they were actually doing or the impact they were having, and full of rather odd people. It was a very lonely time for my mother who had only just left school and found herself doing her shifts in a hut 3 at Bletchley and then trudging back to her billet next to one of the railway sidings. After the war she became a founding member with friends from SOE, or what is now the Special Forces Club. The staircase of the Club has portraits of its members or those who have been eligible if they had survived the war. The latter have ebony frames. The mix of pale pine and ebony is half in half.

One can only begin to imagine the incredulity of decrypting and then interpreting of such a message in the blizzard of messages being received at Bletchley Park, some only partially intercepted or decoded or translated or half understood. Eighty years ago it would have created a frisson in Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, but for the protagonists whether they were going to escape for Crete with both the General and their lives, were still in the balance.

On that very day the message arrived in Bletchley according to Billy Moss’s diary, PLF and the kidnap team had spent the day at Petrodolakkia with Xylouris and his Andartes (members of the Greek resistance), where they took many photos. Tom Dunbabin sent 3 members of his team from the Amari to the hideout, including Reg Everson and a wireless.

Their plan was to send a message to Cairo so that an evacuation date and beach can be identified, but their radio had broken. PLF sent off various messages, including one to Dick Barnes who has a radio station near Rethymno.

The team were joined by Andantes Grigori Chnarakis, Nikos Komis and Andoni Papaleonidas, who had walked up from the kidnap point. They were meant to bring the General’s driver, Alfred Fenske, but he has been killed on the journey.

PLF records the following incident:

‘A curious moment, dawn, streaming in the cave’s mouth, which framed the white crease of Mount Ida. We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the General, half to himself, slowly said:
“Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte”

The opening line and a bit of one of the few odes of Horace I knew by heart. I was in luck. It was one of the few odes of Horace I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off:

‘… Nec iam sustineant onus
Silvae laboreantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto’

… The General’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine … after a long silence, he said:

‘Ach so, Herr Major!”

It was very strange.

‘Ja, Herr General.’ As though for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We both had drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

Paddy Leigh Fermor recounts this story in his book ‘Abducting a General’.

William Stanley Moss recorded in his own book ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’, this mutual love of the Classics of the General and his captor.

‘Paddy discovered that the General is a fair Greek scholar, and much to the amusement of our Cretan colleagues, the two of them entertained each other by exchanging verses from Sophocles.’

The Horatian scholar, Harry Eyres, might argue that the Odes of Horace have been working their magic for the last two thousand years, encouraging a more humble and human view of the world and extolling the virtues of fellowship.

Was it the sunlight on the frozen peak of Mount Ida that had inspired the General to think of that ode in its literal description of a snow-clad summit or was it about the whole Ode.

‘Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte’ can be translated as ‘See how Soracte stands white with deep snow’

This is Harry’s translation.

Do you see the depth of snowfall,
On Soracte standing bright? This frost
Has stopped the rivers in their tracks;
The trees are bowed with their white, heavy pall.

In here we’re warm. Keep piling logs, Hugh,
On the blazing fire – and let’s uncork
A mellow four-year-old riserva,
Just the Sabine vino, not a fancy cru.

Give up trying to control the weather ; some god
Will calm the raging storm at sea.
The tall fame-cypresses and ancient ash
Won’t always shake and bend and madly nod.

Had the General realised that his best hope of escaping with his life was to set aside the grievances of him and his captors and recognise from now on they would be sharing the same food and drink?

The ode is underpinned by Horace’s Stoicism and Epicureanism. In the ode he is advising his friend Thaliarchus to seize the day (carpe diem) and enjoy the pleasures of the moment rather than worrying about a precarious future, living in the present, enjoying life’s simple pleasures, and remaining unfazed by the uncertainty of tomorrow.

Horace himself had fought against the Triumvirate, had escaped with his life and eventually set aside his own grievances to return to Rome, under the Augustan regime. Horace had sided with the forces of Brutus and Cassius after their assassination of Julius Caesar, but they were defeated by Mark Antony and Octavian (who would later be known as Augustus) at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BCE, he had to set aside his grievances and get on with the very people he had fought against.

General Kreipe might have realised that Horace’s own experience was the best he could hope for and Ode 1.9, the best advice he could have received.

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s ‘fountain’ has often been seen as representative of culture and conviviality, but perhaps the fountain was more specific, and he was thinking of Horace, his insight, his poetry and that Ode in particular.

May 11th 1944

Things are looking up! Dennis Ciclitira has joined them and has a working radio set up the valley in Asi Gonia. And they hear from Ianni Katsias that the closest beaches – at Rodakino – has potential as a pick up point.
They spend the day and evening resting and recovering. They are all very tired and the General is clearly suffering. Billy Moss recorded, after the General fell off the mule the day before:

“General in great pain, saying: ‘I’ve had enough. Why don’t you shoot me and get done with it’.”

Paddy writes:

Rumours of a German descent on the region had prompted Stathi to conceal us in such a cramped and precarious eyrie the night before; next morning all seemed serene: we climbed up to a commodious and beautiful ledge of rock where the General was consoled for the agonies of the ascent by the coloured blankets and the cushions spread there under the leaves by my god-brother (Stathi) and Stavro (an old drinking companion of mine) and by the marvellous banquet of roast sucking pig and kalitsounias, – crescent shaped mizithracroquettes – and the wicker demi-john of magnificent old wine which was waiting. Stathi was a great bon viveur and a paragon of kindness and generosity as well as being Kapetanios of an armed band. His eager blue eyes kindled with delight to see us demolishing his feast. He hoped, (and so did we) that we could lie up here in luxury until we slipped off over the hill to the boat. There was a rushing stream hard by and sweet smelling herbs all round us and the trees were full of nightingales. We banqueted and slept and talked and sang. The sun set through the surrounding peaks and as we lolled exulting on the soft rugs under the moon and the stars, for ever plied with fresh marvels by the two brothers, who sped to and from the village like kindly djinns, this sudden change in our affairs seemed to all of us as magical as the sudden transportation to paradise for beggars in a Persian story.’

I know this is a bit of a spolier but we all know the story don’t we? We know how it ends. The evacuation events will come early next week as the tale of the kidnap of General Kreipe reaches it’s conclusion.

As it is the weekend, you might wish to settle down in front of your TV and watch the final movie from the famed Powell and Pressburger partnership starring Dirk Bogarde (as Paddy), Cyril Cusack (as Captain Sandy Rendel), David Oxley (as W. Stanley “Billy” Moss, M.C.) and the superb Marius Goring (as Major General Heinrich Kreipe).

If you have a Smart TV with the You Tube app, just search for Ill Met by Moonlight.

10th May 1944

After a day resting in Photeinou the party continue to travel westward. They are heading to the Kato Poros gorge outside the village of Vilandredo.

Paddy writes: ‘A mishap occurred on this long night’s march: the girth of the General’s mule broke and sent his rider tumbling down a steep precipice. We chased after him; we thought at first that one of his shoulder blades was damaged; we arranged a sling and after a while the pain seemed to go. But his right arm remained in a sling for the rest of the journey. It was an anxious moment.

Outside the little village of Vilandredo we were met by kind and enthusiastic Stathi Loukakis and his brother, yet another Stavro.

He led us all, dog-tired and woe-begone, to a built up cave that clung to the mountainside like a martin’s nest. It was only to be reached by the clambering ascent of a steep ladder of roots and rocks – up which our disabled captive could only be hoisted by many hands and slow stages.’

Michael Powell was led to the cave in !951, and we finally tracked it down in 2015.

Chris White (C) with Charidimos Alevizakis (L) the nephew of Ianni Tsangarakis, Paddy’s greatest friend and guide. Charidimos had been a messenger for Paddy – and told us most emphatically that he and Paddy ‘were brothers.’

After another day resting in Patsos the party head westward – reinforced by George Harokopos and George Pattakos, who supplies a mule for the General to ride on.

Paddy writes:

‘Our way westward over the plateau of Yious was our familiar east to west route over the narrowest part of western Crete. “Our sun is rising”, George had said as we set off at moonrise. It was a favourite saying in these nocturnal journeys. “Off we go,” Manoli said, “Anthropoi tou Skotous.” This phrase “men of Darkness!” was a cliché that often cropped up in German propaganda when referring to people like us, and we had eagerly adopted it. We were off, I hoped, on the last lap of our journey.’

‘Among the rocks and Arbutus clumps there was an ice-cold spring which was said to bestow the gift of immortality. We all lay on our faces and lapped up as much as we could hold. I told the General about the property of the water. He leant down from the saddle of his mule and asked urgently for a second mug.’
There destination for the night is the village of Fotinou – but they have to cross the main road from Rethymno to Spili without being spotted.

‘Men with guns whistled from the rocks and when we answered ran down to meet us and shepherd the party across the perilous highway. Others joined us out of the moonlight as we climbed into the conical hills where Fotinou is perched. Suddenly there was an alarm of a German patrol approaching directly ahead. Our party, by now quite large, fanned out along a ridge and lay waiting.’

‘Luckily it was only another contingent of our growing escort. There was relief and laughter. By the time we got to the grove of Scholari outside Fotinou, we were very numerous indeed. Most of the troop was composed of old Uncle Stavro Peros and his eighteen sons and their descendents with several members of the Tzangarakis and Alevizakis families as well. Andoni, the youngest of the Peros brothers had just contracted a dynastic match with the daughter of a family with whom the Peros tribe had been locked in discord for generations; so an atmosphere of concord and rejoicing reigned in the hills.’

In 1951 the film director Michael Powell, as part of his research for “Ill Met By Moonlight’, had visited the village, and photographed the Peros family.

In our early research trips we were able to meet Despina Peros, who had married Andoni Peros – the dynastic match – and whose olive grove they had stayed in. Despina was very proud of her association with the kidnap and that she had fed the group.

And on our first research trip in 2010 we met Charidimos Alevizakis, the nephew of Ianni Tsangarakis, Paddy’s greatest friend and guide. Charidimos had been a messenger for Paddy – and told us most emphatically that he and Paddy ‘were brothers.’

8th May 1944

Tha main party stay resting outside Patsos. Billy writes about having a bathe in the tumbling stream nearby.
In the evening Paddy and Giorgos arrive from Genna and the group are reunited again.

Paddy writes: ‘The party, when I found them, were star-scattered about a tumble-down stone hut shaded by a clump of tall plane trees and a beetling rock with a waterfall and a deep pool. George Harocopos and his old father and his pretty little sister were looking after them in this Daphnis and Chloe décor.’

‘”Good morning, General. How are you?”
“Ah, Good morning, Major. We missed you.”
We might have been in a drawing room.’

The party are joined by another villager from Patsos – Giorgos Pattakos – who we were privileged to meet several times on our early research trips

7th May 1944

Messages are beginning to bear fruit….and Paddy realises they will have to travel further westward. They still don’t have a plan on how to depart but they are now getting better links with Cairo via the radio set at Dryade and their brave messenger, George Psychoundakis. Paddy and George stay on in Genna a further night.

In the evening Manoli, Billy, the General and the main party travel further westward to the village of Patsos, where they stay in a sheepfold in a gorge by a tumbling stream.

Paddy writes: ‘On the night of the 7th, the party with the General moved by an easy night march to Patsos, which was only two or three hours away from me. They were being fed and guarded by George Harocopos and his family, (George, a thoughtful and well read boy, later to become a gifted journalist, was the son of a very poor, but very brave and kind family, all of whom had been great benefactors to the wandering British). All was going according to plan.’

6th May 1944

Paddy and Giorgos remain based in Genna – messengers coming and going as they desperately try to arrange a safe beach to be picked up from. Giorgos Psychoundakis returns with Dick Barnes – known as Pavlos.

Paddy writes: ‘This reunion with Dick – like many occasions in occupied Crete when one wasn’t actually dodging the enemy – became the excuse for a mild blind. ‘Mr Pavlo and I set off to Yeni,’ writes George Psychoundakis in ‘The Cretan Runner’, “where we found Mr Mihali (me) and Uncle Yanni Katsias. We sat there till the evening and the sun set. Yanni took us to the east side of the village where they brought us some food and first rate wine and our Keph (well-being) was great. The four of us were soon singing. Mr Mihali sang a sheep-stealing couplet to the tune of Pentezali, which went:

Ah, Godbrother, the night was dark
For lamb and goat and dam, Sir,
But when we saw the branding mark,
We only stole the ram, Sir.

The ram – the head of the flock – meant the General.’

Billy, Manoli, the General and the rest of the kidnap team remain in the sheepfold above Gerakari.

5th May 1944

Paddy and Giorgos remain in Genna, coordinating messengers. They are joined by Giorgos Harokopos and Giorgos Psychoundakis, who then heads back off to the wireless set run by Dick Barnes at Dryade with a message.

The main party in the evening leave Gomara and walk up the Amari valley via the village of Gourgouthi to their next hideout – a sheepfold above the village of Gerakari.

And in London Orme Sargent, the senior Foreign Office officer at Under Secretary level working to SOE, sends a memo to Harry Sporborg, deputy to Major-General Colin Gubbins, Head of SOE, expressing great approval of the coup. ’I have just heard of the success of an Allied Mission in Crete in capturing a high German officer. This is very satisfactory news and I hope it will be possible to get the German out to Cairo as I believe is intended.’

[1] National Archives HS 5/416

4th May 1944

The main party are still hiding in the valley of Gomara. Billy Moss records in ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’:
“It rained all night long , and, as was inevitable, we are soaked to the skin. Around me I see a picture of human misery, and I know that if my companions are feeling half as uncomfortable as I do they must be feeling terrible.”
Spirits are lifted in the afternoon when messengers arrive from Sandy Rendel and Dick Barnes.

Meanwhile in Fourfouras Paddy and Giorgos leave the comforts of Giorgos’ family home and travel 14kms further up the valley to Pantanassa…..searching for the whereabouts of a working radio set.

Paddy writes:

“Among the cypresses of Pantanasa George and I ran into a hitch. The Hieronymakis family, we knew, were in touch with at least one of our wireless stations. By ill luck it was about the only village in the region where neither of us had ever been. The Hieronymakis knew all about us, we knew all about them, but we had never met and there was no one to vouch for us. The old men were adamant: ‘You say you are Mihali, Mihali who? And who are Siphi (Ralph Stockbridge) and Pavlo (Dick Barnes)? Never heard of them. Tk. Tk. Tk! Englishmen? but, boys, all the English left Crete three years ago …?’ The white whiskered faces turned to each other for corroboration, beetling brows were raised in puzzlement, blank glances exchanged. They went on calmly fingering their amber beads, politely offering coffee. It was no good raging up and down, gesticulating under the onions and paprika pods dangling from the beams: every attempt to break through was met by identical backward tilts of head with closed eyelids and the placidly dismissive tongue click of the Greek negative. They wouldn’t give an inch until they knew (as they say) what tobacco we smoked. We could, after all, be agents provocateurs.”

“This impressive but exasperating wall of security was only broken at last, after two precious hours of deadlock, by the entry of Uncle Stavro Zourbakis from Karines – a friend of us all. Everything dissolved at once. In greetings, recognition, laughter, Raki, a crackle of thorns and sizzling in the hearth and the immediate summoning and despatch of runners to the two sets in the North West.”

Paddy and George move on for the evening back down the valley to the village of Genna, where they were to stay for several days:

“The goat-fold of Zourbovasili lay in rolling biblical hills. There was a round threshing floor nearby, where George and I could sleep on brushwood with a great circular sweep of vision. This place was to become, during the next three days, the centre of all going and coming of messengers as plans changed and options elapsed. But now, after the scrum of the last few days it seemed preternaturally quiet in the brilliant moonlight. Ida towered east of us now, Kedros due south: The White Mountains, which had come nearer to us during the day, loomed shining in the west. How empty and still after our huddled mountain life, was this empty silver plateau! A perfect place to watch the moon moving across the sky and chain smoke through the night pondering on the fix we were in and how to get out of it. There was not a sound except a little owl in a wood close by and an occasional clank from Vassilis’ flock.”

3rd May 1944

Another day spent in their hideout in the valley of Gomara. They are still stuck and have no contact with Cairo, and no idea of when, where or how they will get off the island.

But they have a plan….in the evening the party decide to separate.

Billy, Manoli Paterakis, the General and the main kidnap group will stay in Gomara.

Paddy and Giorgos Tyrakis will travel in the evening up the Amari to Fourfouras, Giorgos’ home village, in search of a working radio station.

They still remain in the news in the UK – the Telegraph reports ‘martial law’ being declared on Crete.

2nd May 1944

If only they knew!

Paddy, Billy, the rest of the kidnap team and the General spend another miserable day in the ditch, fearing capture…but it is getting quieter for them, as the German patrols are now searching further up the mountain.

Meanwhile in the UK ….they are front page news – in the Express, Telegraph, Guardian and Times!

In the evening they decide to move a kilometre or so westward – to the valley of Gomara.

Giorgos Pharangoulitakis describes it his memoir ‘Eagles of Mt Ida’: ‘We decided to shift towards the valley of Gomara, just west of Ayia Paraskevi, a part where they had searched every inch, and where we could take up a better defence posture. It was a steep rocky place with a hole like a sort of grotto under a cliff where we could hide for the night.’

In the end they spend the night and the following day under the branches of ‘a very large pear tree …it was like an eagles nest’.