María José Solano

First published in The Times

The British war hero and writer Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor charmed everybody he met, from strangers hiking on mountain paths to the German general he kidnapped on Crete.

His appeal to women became the stuff of legend. His amorous entanglements led Somerset Maugham — who was not captivated by him — to dub him “a middle-class gigolo for upper-class women”.

Over a decade after his death, Leigh Fermor is winning hearts in an unexpected quarter: Spain. The recent publication of two Spanish books about his life, both impassioned homages written by women, has highlighted a fanatical following amongst the country’s social and literary elite.

“There is a sect of Leigh Fermorphiles that is really surprising given Spain has no great tradition of reading travel books,” said Santiago de Mora-Figueroa y Williams, the Marquis of Tamarón, who became friends with the author while serving as ambassador to London from 1999 to 2004. “Also he never wrote a book about Spain. But as a romantic figure, full of courage and wit, he is irresistible to certain Spaniards.”

Known to all as “Paddy”, Leigh Fermor, who died aged 96 in 2011, led a spirited life. Expelled from the King’s School, Canterbury, for — to use his euphemism — holding hands with a greengrocer’s daughter, his solitary trek as an 18-year-old across 1930s Europe formed the basis of his most famous work, A Time of Gifts. Serving with the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War on Crete, he kidnapped General Kreipe, the island’s German commander, with whom he struck up a friendship over a shared fondness for Horace’s Odes.

His derring-do, literary panache and good looks have prompted a posthumous flowering of aficionados in Spain, said María José Solano, whose account of her travels in Leigh Fermor’s footsteps was published this month. To Spanish minds, she added, his postwar, lifelong residence in Greece, where he built a home in the village of Kardamyli in Mani, made him a fellow Mediterranean.

“He belongs to the lineage of mythological heroes. And was a seducer. And a rogue,” said Solano. “My book is one of absolute admiration and I did not feel like hiding it.” Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the bestselling novelist, said: “Leigh Fermor was until now only appreciated by a very select minority of readers in Spain but Solano’s book has popularised him.”

Her unabashed love letter, Una Aventura Griega (A Greek Adventure), follows another written by Dolores Payás, Leigh Fermor’s Spanish translator, detailing their friendship and daily life at his house in his last years. Its title, Drink Time, refers to his routine of announcing at 1.30pm and again at 8pm that it was the hour for a strong tipple.

Calling her work an “homage without any complexes to a proud, invincible and adorable elderly gentleman”, Payas said: “My memories of working with him — we spent most of the time chatting and drinking wine — consist of a succession of glorious, radiant and golden days”.

The passion for Leigh Fermor has led to a group of Spaniards, known as “le club Paddy”, travelling in his footsteps to Crete to visit the scene of the famous kidnap (the subject of the film Ill Met by Moonlight) and Cairo, where the author and his comrades partied during the war.

Others have made the pilgrimage to his Greek house, which impressed Sir John Betjeman, hosted friends such as Nancy Mitford and “Debo” — the Duchess of Devonshire, and is now open to guests. Amongst those intending to make the journey to Leigh Fermor’s lair is Ramón Pérez-Maura, an aristocrat and journalist. “My love for Paddy’s books and Payas’s “Drink time!” have made me look forward to a visit to Kardamyli in the near future,” he said.

The Marquis of Tamarón, the former ambassador, said the adulation was because “he epitomises the idea of the best king of Englishman, whose virtues are the sort we would like to possess”. He recalled giving a lift in his ambassadorial car to Leigh Fermor from Chatsworth, the Duke of Devonshire’s Derbyshire seat, to London after a party. “Before we set off he shot back into the house and re-emerged with a bottle of whisky for the journey,” he said. “We have a Spanish expression ‘tiene buen vino’, which literally means ‘has good wine’, but signifies he was an entertaining, convivial drinker.”

It is a love that was not unrequited. Artemis Cooper, his biographer, said that although Leigh Fermor did not write a book about Spain, his letters and recollections of his travels in the country were tinged with fascination. “He adored Seville and went there to see the Fiesta de Nuestra Señora del Rocio,” she said. “He told me how magnificent the caballeros looked as they rode in, with their wives or girlfriends in fabulous flounced skirts behind them.” A letter written by him about a trip in 1975 begins: “Spain. This was all glory.”

Solano’s book is available on Amazon but only in Spanish