Painting Paddy's Greece

Katyuli Lloyd was 20 when she met her hero Patrick Leigh Fermor. What a joy then to illustrate new editions of his books.

On a drizzly, windy day in January 2005, my sister and I drove to have lunch with Patrick Leigh Fermor in Dumbleton, Gloucestershire, his family’s English home. I was 20 and he was just about to turn 90. We were led through to the drawing room where Paddy and Mougouch Fielding (the widow of Xan Fielding, Paddy’s fellow Cretan war hero) were waiting.

‘Ah, these are the Champagne girls,’ said Paddy, introducing us to Mougouch. He was referring to our grandfather, Christian Heidsieck (of the eponymous Champagne house), a good friend of his in Greece after the war.

Lunch was intimate, being just the four of us, but elegant and formal. The housekeeper served us a beautiful, three-course meal. Paddy was wearing neatly pressed trousers and a gamboge V-neck jumper, and he seemed very relaxed. But his eyes were alert and aware, and he was keen to chat more about Homer with my sister, a classicist, who’d been to stay with him in his Greek house in Kardamyli, a few years previously. After lunch, we moved through to the drawing room.

‘How’s your Russian?’ Paddy asked. I was studying Modern Languages at

Cambridge, and had spent a few months at the Moscow Conservatoire.

‘It’s fine,’ I answered. I had never thought there could be

anything that I could hold over the great traveller, but he said, ‘It’s one of my big regrets that I never learnt a Slavic language.’ I’d brought all his books for him to sign. And – as I think he did for most copies he signed – he made a little illustration of clouds and birds around his name. ‘I realised when I was quite young that, if I needed, I could earn a living from my drawing.’