The Cretan Runner
Home Up The Cretan Runner Kidnap Vasili Goniani andartes British characters Sgt Corbould

 

George's Obituary
The story of George Psychoundakis who acted as a runner in the Cretan Resistance.

Site Map
There were many brave local people from Crete who played a part in the Resistance movement against the Germans.  Not many of them made a record of their experience.  One exception was George Psychoundakis who wrote a book called The Cretan Runner to describe his time as a runner for the British intelligence officers who were put on to Crete to help to run the resistance.  Psychoundakis died in January 2006, I have added his obituary from the Daily Telegraph.  George's book was translated by one of these officers, Patrick Leigh Fermor, some years after the war, he also helped George to get the book published.  Leigh Fermor described his first meeting with George.
"He wore a black Cretan shirt, his clothing was in tatters and his patched boots - the semi-detached sole of one of which was secured to its upper with a thick strand of wire - were coming to bits on his feet.  When he took off his fringed head kerchief to untwist one of his messages, his forehead was shaded by a raven black shock.  A small, carefully tended moustache ran along his upper lip.  He was small in stature and as fine-boned as an Indian, looking little older than sixteen, though he was actually twenty-one.  He was lithe and agile and full of nervous energy.  His eyes were large and dark, and his face, in repose, thoughtful and stamped by a rather melancholy expression which vanished at once in fits of helpless and infectious laughter that almost anything seemed to provoke." The Cretan Runner

At the time that Leigh Fermor took over George as his runner, from Xan Fielding, it was mainly to work Western Crete.  That was the area George knew, and his little village of Asi Gonia was in the hill country of that region.  He had never left Crete and had rarely visited the main towns of Hania and Rethymnon.  In this area where he had grown up, and where he shepherded the family sheep flock, he ran messages between villages, resistance groups and Allied Officers.  It was a dangerous existence with the Germans always on the lookout for any helping the Allies.

George came from an extremely poor family, and in spite of the help he gave to the Allies, he had a bad time after the war as well.  His files had been lost, and when the war ended the Greeks imprisoned him as a deserter!  After this had all been sorted out and he returned to his village he found that he had to work as a navvy on road building.  They were hard times for someone who had done so much to help.  George's involvement really started when Commander Pool (Pool would later assist Lew Lind to escape from the island) came ashore on Crete from a submarine a few months after the Allied evacuation.  The British wanted to take off those troops who had not been evacuated and were now wandering the Cretan mountains.  They were to be taken off by submarine from the area of Preveli monastery, in a number of submarine trips.  George's village of Asi Gonia lay en-route for many of these men passing to Preveli from Hania and Rethymnon, George would act as their guide to other villages on the route.  This evacuation route finally came to the ears of the Germans, who subsequently plundered the monastery and set up a strong point at Limni to spot submarines coming in on these trips.  At one point in his book George describes a journey of some 20-25 miles over the mountains with a sick Major, taking him to a doctor in one of the villages.  It is humbling to see the self-sacrifice of many of these poor people, doing all they can to assist their Allied "friends".

In October 1941 George started to come more into contact with the espionage side of the resistance.  His "Uncle" Petrakas took him to meet a Cretan resistance leader, Colonel Papadakis (with whom George would have a great deal of contact and some arguments in the coming years).  Here he met Jack Smith-Hughes (Yanni), and would become his runner.  He had previously met Yanni in August when he had guided him to Preveli to leave by submarine for Egypt.  As a runner George had to carry important messages around the mountains and if you have been on holiday to Crete and seen the rugged terrain you get some appreciation of the effort it took to act as a runner.  While the Cretans stayed, many of the British Officers came and went, returning to Cairo for orders, new assignments etc., and George would find himself acting as runner for a variety of different "chiefs".  When Smith-Hughes left he became runner for Xan Fielding.

Re-supply for the groups on the would either be via the submarine runs bringing in radios, batteries etc, or by air drop to designated points in the mountains, hopefully undetected by the Germans.  George describes one of these drops which took place soon after Fielding arrived, they were desperately short of supplies and in February '42 called for one to take place near Manika in the mountains behind Sfakia.  In George's description of the drop he describes the tension and the slight farce that took place.  Although the single aircraft arrived as expected, the noise in the mountains made the people on the ground believe there was more than one.  Two and two made five, and they became convinced that it was the Germans.  Also, not used to hearing parachutes descending they convinced themselves that what they heard were paratroops coming from the more than one aircraft they thought they had heard.  They convinced themselves they were in a trap and moved off.  Well, after a while they realised it was a re-supply drop and not a German trap and the supplies were collected up.

By May of 1942 the network around George's village and across to the Amari area was growing larger, George was runner for Captain Woodhouse (Monty), Tom Dunbabin as well as Xan Fielding.  He also led two leading local figures from the coast to the mountain interior, two Greeks known as Manoli and Vengeli.  While guiding these two together with their "wireless stores, the codes, the new crystals the orders...." they were at great risk if they were caught.  All through George's book he writes without exaggeration or drama, but they were brave men and women.
I started this section with Leigh Fermor's description George, the first time he met him.  In his book George describes L.F. or Michali as he was known to them.

"Mr. Michali was a tall man, full of life, with a beautiful moustache and curly brown hair.  He wore Cretan breeches and boots, a black shirt and a fringed turban, and he had dyed his whickers and hair in such a way that he seemed the image of a true Cretan"
George gives good descriptions in his book of the caves and places that he and the others operated from.  They were forever moving about the mountains, sometimes because of German movements, sometimes because of the change of climate from summer to winter.  Those of us who take holidays there tend to see Crete in the warm summer weather, but in winter the high central mountains are often covered in snow, and it can be very cold.  At the end of October '42 they got a second radio operator, somewhat by accident.  An RAF aircraft had been shot down over Heraklion.  While three of the crew were burnt to death in the aircraft, three baled out.  One of these three was the wireless operator and he was passed on the Leigh Fermor's group, he was Flight Sergeant Jo Bradley.  Some time after this George talks of one of his high points.  Following an air drop of supplies on Mount Ida George got a Smith & Wesson revolver "this was the granting of my fondest wish."
After operating for some 13 months, constantly moving to evade the Germans, they had a major setback in November '42.  Their radio operator, Manoli, was captured by the Germans while his colleague Vangeli managed to escape.  George describes how Vangeli's sister bravely hid the wireless from the Germans until her brother returned a few days later.  This was a brave thing to do, she could have been shot if discovered with the wireless.  It was especially brave as she had witnessed Manoli and 37 of the villagers taken off to jail.  They had been betrayed by a Cretan, called Komninas.  Later the Germans released all those captured except Manoli and two others.  On the 20th December, 1942, they were executed by firing squad in Ayia jail.
To survive as a member of the resistance it helps to have some good luck.  A little after Christmas '42 (as best I can estimate, George does not put too many dates in his book) George's house was raided by some German soldiers while he was asleep.  The whole family was led away, but George managed to escape and although the Germans interrogated family and friends, he stayed free.  Luckily none of the family were imprisoned or executed.  He felt that he had been betrayed by a Cretan, but did not discover who it was who tried to deliver him up to the Germans.
In January '43 George asked Xan Fielding (Mr. Aleko) if he would get him a trip to Cairo as he was totally exhausted.  In early February George and a group of others set off across the mountains, reaching the south coast at Treis Ekklesies (Three Churches) on the night of 14/15 February '43.  Sea sick on his first ever boat trip, George and the others reached Mersah Matruh on the north coast of Africa.  They were welcomed by Major Smith-Hughes (Yanni) who George had previously led to Preveli in August '41 to be taken off by submarine.
Once in Egypt George was able to act the sightseer for the first time, he went to the pyramids, to a museum (first time in his life) and also learnt to ride a bicycle for the first time.  In amongst the sight-seeing he was also enrolled into the Greek forces, although he did not join the group he was allotted to.  He was "seconded to Force 133, the espionage service of our Allies in Greece."  As George's return to Crete was still some way off, he managed in June to get leave to visit Palestine to see the Holy Places.  It is obvious from George's description of all that he saw around Jerusalem that he must have been very moved by it all, as well as by the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.  As he says at the end of his trip " I went to bed early in the Olympus Hotel [in Jerusalem], filled with enthusiasm for my presence in that sacred city, the centre of worship of the whole of Christendom."  For George this had been something of a pilgrimage.  He had been in Palestine some 10 days, and on the 24th June '43 he started back to Cairo.
On the 1st of July he started the journey back to Crete, initially by train through the North African desert, through the battle landscape of El Alamein the ruined town of Tobruk and on to the port at Derna.  Getting away from Derna to Crete was eventful, and took a number of tries as they were turned back both by weather and German fighters.  Eventually they got away in the third ship that tried, this one also happened to be the same one that had taken him from Crete in February.  As they approached Crete in the dark they saw the signal flashes from Xan Fielding (Mr. Aleko).  Fielding was in command of Western Crete with Patrick Leigh Fermor (Mr. Michali) in command of Eastern Crete.  One of those who went ashore with George was a New Zealand Sergeant Major who was Fielding's 2nd in command, he was D.C. Perkins (Vasili) who would become something of a legend but would later be killed in an ambush.  It was now the 29th July '43.
George's life as a runner continued much as before, but got a little more exciting in October.  In the mountains, expecting a group from his village, George and the others he was with ended up in a gun fight with a small detachment of Germans and Italians.  As an adjunct to all this, George's group also had a Greek traitor they were holding who was interrogated by them and then executed by pistol shots to the head.  Justice was rough on both sides.  The Germans who had been in the firefight were only a small detachment, the larger force came after them and took their own retribution on the locals.  George says it was Shubert's battalion and they "burnt Kali-Sykia"; "Alones they looted from top to bottom"; "in the next couple of days they shot thirty of the villagers who had handed over arms."  Interestingly George says that some of the battalion were Greeks from villages in Crete.
The months rolled on into 1944 with the groups having occasional near brushes with the Germans, worrying about the Germans learning of their whereabouts and constant movement from one hiding place to another.  George describes one success for his group when they learnt of the planned movement of a cargo ship from Suda.  They passed the information to Cairo and had the satisfaction of seeing, from their mountain vantage point, the sinking of the ship by a submarine soon after it sailed.  By the end of April George was somewhat put out by the antics of one of the British contingent and was requesting to go back to Cairo and join the Greek unit from which he was seconded.  He was unhappy with some of the comments of Harry Brooke, the radio operator, who he felt had been bad mouthing Cretans, many of whom had helped and sheltered him.  This conversation between George and Pavlo (Capt. Dick Barnes) took place while they were waiting for a boat to arrive near Rhodakino on the south coast to take some people off the island.  They were almost caught in a trap.  George had been given the task of signaling out to sea for the expected boat.  George became suspicious when the approaching boat did not seem to have the engine note he would have expected.  When it got in close the boat began machine gunning the shore.  Luckily all escaped.
In June 1944, a new British Officer arrived, Hugh Fraser who had brought gold coins to help fund the operations.  Fraser was known as "Levtheri", and was guided by George on a journey to Prine.
One of the well known exploits of the Cretan resistance and their British Officer helpers was the kidnap of Major-General Kreipe in April 1944 by Leigh Fermor and his group.  The kidnap was the subject of the book and film "Ill met by Moonlight".  Although George was not a party to the kidnap itself, he was involved in running messages for Leigh Fermor associated with the removal of the General from the island to Cairo.  [I hope to have a page on this exploit later].  In August the Germans destroyed many villages in the Kedos region claiming this was a reprisal for help given by villagers in the kidnap of General Kreipe.  George, who had seen the burning from Mount Ida believed it was their way of terrorizing the people of Crete in their last months on the island.
The German occupation of Crete was by now drawing to a close.  George and all the resistance groups were as a active as ever, as were other more political groups (E.O.K and E.L.A) who were surfacing in these last months.  George referred to this period as "the time passed quietly and we had no more serious misadventures: nothing but endless journeys to Alones, to Asi-Gonia, to Rhodakino, to Argyroupolis to Prine."  He was constantly criss-crossing the mountains in the centre of the island.
In the beginning of October the Germans started to pull back from their many positions on the island, to concentrate around Hania.  The situation in Europe was causing them to withdraw from "peripheral" theatres into mainland Europe and the defense of Germany.  George and his associates signaled these movements to Cairo.  On the 14th October their group heard that the Germans were leaving Rethymnon, George was unhappy that he could not be in the city the day that the Cretans moved back in.  He had been guarding their equipment in the cave.  "We were sick at heart at the thought of having missed that first free day of explosive joy and enthusiasm; the precious moment we had been awaiting for three and a half years!"
In January 1945 the differences between the rival political groupings came to a head in a fire fight around Rethymnon.  As so often happens when the object of a resistance movement is overcome, the groupings turn to internal rivalry.  The E.O.K. was Liberal, anti-communist and pro Western Allies.  The E.A.M. was communist and not as strong on Crete as the E.O.K.
Also in January George moved his "operational area" from the centre to the west of the island, working between Paleochora on the south coast and Kastelli in the north (scene of the German reprisals in the first days of the occupation).  Times were easier now.  The Germans, still on the island, were around Hania, but George was able to move about pretty freely.  "It was February now and carnival time was coming on."  In Rethymnon, after a boat trip from Kastelli he says "..it was Carnival Sunday, and we went to a cinema that night which was all in carnival array."  Somewhat different to his three years hiding in caves in the mountains.
The situation was now drawing to a conclusion.  Prisoner exchanges were arranged with the Germans, and on the 31st March '45 George was asked by Dennis Ciclitira (Dionysos) to be present at Georgioupolis when 30 Germans were exchanged for 10 Cretans.  The Germans in Hania, fearing reprisals for what they had done to the islanders during the occupation, would not surrender to the Greeks, only to the English.  On the 23rd May, 1945, after 4 years, "freedom returned to the town of Cania."  George finishes his account of his part in the resistance on Crete with the following sentence.  "I reached the market-place, when all at once I heard shouts and music and cheers, and realizing the entry had begun [into Cania], I ran towards the shouting as fast as my legs would carry me."
On my last holiday in Crete (1999) I heard from a holiday guide that George was still alive, and that he was one of the Cretans who sometimes helped with the upkeep of the German war cemetery.
 
In June 1998 the following article was printed in the Telegraph newspaper.  It is a record of a meeting between George and Patrick Leigh Fermor.
The friendship forged in wartime Crete between Patrick Leigh Fermor and shepherd George Psychoundakis was commemorated in George's memoir about the Resistance, The Cretan Runner. With the book republished, it was time to meet again. Story by Allison Pearson
TWO old men sitting at a table talking about the war. A Cretan and an Englishman. A voluble eye-popping tenor and a growly teddy-bear bass. "Remember the sick doctor we disguised as an old woman and carried for miles to get help?" "Yes, and remember when you dressed up as a general and kidnapped a real one!"
They interrupt each other. They sigh for the dead. They laugh for dear life, knowing exactly how much it can cost. Although one of the men speaks only Greek, I think I can detect a rhythm to their reminiscing: the Cretan talks everything up and the Englishman plays it right back down again. The sudden memory of one "bad Greek" acts on the Cretan's weathered face like a drawstring, pulling it taut to a scowling walnut. But the Englishman, all silky diplomacy, jumps in and offers a more optimistic assessment of the fiend in question: "I think he just lost his head a bit."
Later, when the Cretan mentions the Englishman's name in the course of what sounds like a pretty fulsome tribute, his friend stops translating for me altogether. What did he say? "He was more than kind about me." Yes, but what did he say? "Oh, I couldn't possibly repeat it."
The bashful Briton is Patrick "Paddy" Leigh Fermor, traveller, scholar-gypsy, war hero and writer of genius. His fiery friend is George Psychoundakis, author of The Cretan Runner, an extraordinary account of the anti-Nazi Resistance on the island, which was translated by Leigh Fermor and is now republished.
There have been other memoirs of wartime Crete, such as Xan Fielding's Hide and Seek and Ill Met by Moonlight, W Stanley Moss's record of the kidnapping of General Kreipe (later made into a movie, with Dirk Bogarde assigned to fill Leigh Fermor's dashing boots). But those were visitors' books. George's story, as Leigh Fermor points out in the introduction, is unique. It is no longer the locals who are colourful aliens, but the Allied officers and their wireless operators - good sorts and good sports in the main but, none the less, foreigners with some very dodgy customs. "A most peculiar man," George says of one buffer. "He had pyjamas and a washbasin."
Even more baffling for the Cretans, who think Nature is a place where you go and shoot things, the buffer turned out to be an amateur botanist and geologist: "He was not only in love with different kinds of weeds but with stones as well."
Paddy and I have been sitting in the front room of George's small vine-clad house, outside Khania in western Crete, for more than two hours now. At least one of us is reeling under the bombardment of Cretan hospitality. Celestial cheese tarts made by Sofia, George's wife, have given way to nuts, glistening sweetmeats and, as if that weren't enough, shots of tsikoudia, a spirit so lethal it feels less like drinking a liquid than sipping scalded air. After three of these, I am not entirely sure whether the spools on my tape recorder are going round: after four, I don't care.
George - one eye sleepy, the other coal black with embers of mischief - is joking about whether he should have given lessons in sheep stealing (a local speciality) to one of the wireless operators. "So when he got back to Scotland he could have organised sheep rustling." Paddy pretends, unconvincingly, to be shocked.
Through the window behind them, you can see the White Mountains - a range so towering and snowy, even on this May day, that it is hard to tell where rock stops and cloud begins. More than half a century ago, those slopes were Paddy and George's stamping-ground. "George's life was dangerous and absolutely exhausting," explains Paddy. But George is having none of it: "I felt as if I were flying. Running all the way from the top of the White Mountains to Mount Ida. So light and easy - just like drinking a cup of coffee."
George has difficulty walking now - at 78 he leans on a stick as gnarled as himself - but his mind can leap from memory to memory, as if he were still flying. I ask George what he thought the British had learnt from the Cretans and vice versa. "What they learnt, because there was very little to eat, was to drink a lot and to dance and to shoot for joy in the air. We saw how much they loved our country and it made us love it still more. The fact that they loved Crete so much gave us even greater courage."
The first time George Psychoundakis met Patrick Leigh Fermor he thought he was very tall. The young Cretan had just crawled on all fours through thick bushes into the heap of boulders where the officer was hiding. In fact, the Englishman was not especially lofty (a touch over 5ft 9in, according to his passport). It was the Greek who was tiny. "As fine-boned as an Indian," recalls Leigh Fermor. "Lithe and agile and full of nervous energy."
Anyway, height didn't matter much back then. It was the July of 1942 in occupied Crete and the stature of men was not measured in inches, rather in a bewildering range of abilities. These included: keeping cool when a member of the Gestapo approaches your mule while it is carrying a combustible load of wheat and wireless; keeping warm in a cave-bed with a canopy of stalactites; and finding the courage to tuck into a dinner of local produce - grass cooked with snails. "We took the grass blade by blade, picked off the broken shells and ate it with much laughter," recalls George.
Psychoundakis was a runner for the Resistance - a vertical postman, he delivered messages and equipment at barely credible speed. On a map, Crete doesn't look too daunting - a sirloin steak beaten to a succulent sliver by a butcher. But it rises so sharply into such broken-toothed cragginess that it is pointless to measure it in miles: the islanders calculate distances in the time taken to smoke cigarettes. George's wartime business was mainly conducted at eagle-height, or as he felt his way down the vertebrae of his homeland towards some hiding place where even goats didn't dare.
He was 21 years old when he first met the 27-year-old Leigh Fermor. George addressed Paddy as Michali (all the Allied soldiers had Greek nicknames) or sometimes Mr Michali in half-amused respect (irreverence being the key to the Psychoundakis psyche). Paddy, meanwhile, code-named George either the Clown or the Changeling, for his cockeyed wit, his impish insubordination and a magical ability to spirit himself out of trouble.
The two men were not just worlds apart: a glance at their biographies suggests you would need to hire a time machine to bring them together. Born in Asi Gonia, a village with a long history of giving invaders a hard time (asi is Arabic for uncommandable), George lived the kind of peasant life that had not changed for centuries. His family slept together in a single room with a beaten earth floor. After a scratchy education at the local primary school, he followed his father on to the mountains as a shepherd. By the time German parachutes blotted out the sky in May 1941, he had visited only two of Crete's towns and had never seen the capital, Heraklion.
By contrast, Leigh Fermor was born into a smart Anglo-Irish family and educated at prep school and King's, Canterbury. By 1939, he had walked across every country between London and Constantinople - a stroll commemorated in his two dazzling volumes, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water - and also appeared to have drunk in most of their national literatures.
Scrape through what Leigh Fermor called his "Fauntleroy veneer", though, and you find a rougher grain. With his parents abroad for the first four years of his life, Paddy was entrusted to the family of a small farmer and, left uncultivated, he ran wild. The experience, he later wrote, "unfitted me for the faintest shadow of constraint". His behaviour at a flurry of schools led to his being sent to two psychiatrists, although it is unlikely that either rivaled Paddy's clinical diagnosis of himself as "a very naughty boy". He was finally expelled from King's for crimes that included "trying to be funny" and holding the hand of a greengrocer's daughter. His housemaster's report noted: "He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness, which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys."
Almost 70 years later, I find it hard to improve on that verdict, save to replace the word dangerous with delightful. As it turned out, his influence on other boys was all to the good, and the most remarkable boy of all was George Psychoundakis.
While Paddy was in Kent writing "bad and imitative verse" and lapping up ancient Greek because it was a passport to a world of heroes, George was scavenging books from the village priest and the doctor, and occupying the long woolly hours by the sheepfold composing patriotic poems and beady skits on local life. (An early effort entitled Ode to an Inkspot on a Schoolmistress's Skirt sounds distinctly Paddy-like in its high-flown cheekiness).
Although George's father, Nicolas, was illiterate, he could recite by heart the whole of the Erotocritos, the 17th-century Cretan epic poem that comprises 10,000 lines of rhyming couplets. And the rhythm lodged in the son's head and on his tongue: poetry to these people was not the object of solemn study but a spur to the spinning of legends and the cue for a bloody good song.
Which is to say that when the ragged and practically barefoot Cretan wriggled into the hiding-place of the Englishman in 1942, they had more in common than an enemy. George spoke only one perfect sentence of English - "I steal grapes every day" - but Paddy soon extended his repertoire. On long marches to the coast to meet supply vessels or during the dark hours awaiting a parachute drop, the Britons taught the Greeks folk-songs and the Greeks taught them mantinadas - waspish local couplets with a sting in the tail.
On their first trek together, Paddy recalls how George recited a poem he had written on the unambitious theme of The Second World War So Far. "It covered the invasion of Poland, the fall of France, the German invasion of Greece and Rommel's final advance. It lasted more than two hours and finished on a note of triumphant optimism and presage of vengeance, which he emphasized by borrowing my pistol and firing it into the sky with the remark that we would soon be eating the cuckolds alive."
Leigh Fermor, meanwhile, attempted to satisfy Psychoundakis's ravenous curiosity about the world. What was Churchill like? Why do the Scots wear kilts? How about astronomy, religion, trains? How many sheep does the average Englishman own?
The task of the British Special Operations Executive in Crete was to assist the local Resistance. Having spent centuries in revolt against the Venetians and the Turks, the islanders didn't actually need much encouragement. During the airborne invasion in 1941, when many young Cretans were away on active service, descending parachutists were met by old men, women and children - by anyone, in fact, who could point upwards and shoot. "Aim for the legs and you'll get them in the heart," ran the local wisdom. Four thousand Germans died. Those who survived took swift revenge. Reprisals, read one Wehrmacht memo, "must be carried through with exemplary terror". Between May and September of that year, 1,135 Cretans were executed.
The Cretan Runner begins with the invasion. "Out of the sky the winged devils of Hitler were falling everywhere... the aeroplanes came and went like bees in a bee-garden." One grounded plane is set upon by furious locals till it resembles "a bit of bread thrown on to an ant-hill". From the opening pages, you get a pungent impression of the Psychoundakis style - a vertiginous mix of the epic and the demotic, the Homeric and the homely. Of the enemy, George writes: "They reached to our very bowels and provoked a storm in the soul of the race like the hiss of a poisonous snake about to strike." No British account of the battle of Crete could contain a sentence like that. Too purple. Too embarrassing, frankly. But it feels utterly true to George and the hot-blooded rhetoric of his race.
Perhaps the greatest surprise of a book that documents the burning of villages, the casual slaughter of comrades and a life of mesmerizing danger is how often it makes you smile. No stranger to hardship anyway, George embraces discomfort as though it were a shy friend with a lot to offer. We see George at the end of a knackering three-day trek using pieces of wood to mime someone hobbling. We hear him enthusing over yet another dank hiding-place as though he were writing for some actionable travel brochure: "The cave was perfect. We collected our drinking and washing water from stalactites. We arranged luxurious couches for ourselves from the branches of various shrubs that were better than the softest mattress!"
Best of all, there is George richly enjoying his British friends, not least their congenital inability to walk over the rocky landscape. (In one incident, Leigh Fermor threw himself pluckily at a high stone wall in emulation of local bravado, only to fall off backwards: the Cretans in the party walked around the side of the wall, shaking their heads and laughing.)
"It was plain that George was enraptured with the excitement of our secret life," says Paddy. The same could be said of all of them, I think. As a boy Leigh Fermor confessed to being guilty of "a bookish attempt to coerce life into a closer resemblance to literature". In this case, the literature was Greek. The Cretans, for their part, seemed all too willing to live up to the legends the Englishmen had imbibed at school. Most battles look romantic only in retrospect, if then: Crete was different. It seems to have struck its leading men as touched with an air of romance, even as the drama was unfolding. As they approached by boat on a moonless night, the first the soldiers knew of the island was perfume, the scent of wild thyme that wafts miles out to sea.
Once on shore, they changed into local costume - breeches, black bandanas, embroidered waistcoats and spiffy jackboots. There were lessons in how to curl their new moustaches. They were an extraordinary bunch - poets, archaeologists, free spirits thirsty for adventure. SOE chose them because they had some knowledge of ancient Greek. But, as Leigh Fermor explains, since Greek was no longer compulsory at school, those who opted for it had already marked themselves out as "a perverse and eccentric minority".
I cannot get enough of the photographs of the Resistance taken through those years in the mountains. Remember, these are snapshots captured at a time when to have a likeness of yourself in existence was itself a threat to that existence. There is the legendary Xan "Aleko" Fielding, looking uncannily like the young Hemingway. Gimlet-eyed and bare-chested, he regards the lens with Olympian amusement. And there is Yanni Tsangarakis, one of the bravest and most trusted guides, slightly woebegone behind a Zebedee moustache, and the redoubtable Manoli Paterakis, whose unforgettable profile suggests he may have been the love-child of Montgomery of Alamein and a peregrine falcon.
Looking at the smiley countenance of Tom Dunbabin - a fellow of All Souls in peacetime - you can see why he inspired such love; ditto the gaunt saintly faces of Aleko Kokonas, the schoolmaster of Yerakari, and his wife, Kyria Maria. And then, of course, there are Paddy and George: the first as debonair and unfeasibly handsome as Errol Flynn casting about for a galleon to capture; the second apparently auditioning for the role of Puck.
In Louis de Bernières's novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, set in wartime Cephalonia, there is a posh Englishman who lives in a cave and comes out declaiming ancient Greek. He is a bit of a joke. And, to be sure, there is something potentially laughable about the Boy's Own aspect of all this dressing up and blowing stuff up. What redeems it from absurdity, what transforms it into real rather than fantastical heroism, is the nagging presence of death, which circled above these lives like a hawk. There was nothing comic-book about Anton Zoidakis, captured by German soldiers, tied to their vehicle and dragged along the road until his face and his life were wiped away. And even George's account of merry scrapes is pulled up short when 20 Gestapo visit Asi Gonia: "They said I was wanted for interrogation and if didn't go to Retimo before January 17 they would set fire to the whole village."
Three of George's fellow runners were executed, two after what the Wehrmacht would probably have considered exemplary torture. In his superb book Crete: The Battle and the Resistance, Antony Beevor points out that the penalty for a shepherd caught whistling to warn of the approach of a German patrol was death.
War had transformed George Psychoundakis's life. In February 1943, it enabled the former shepherd boy to travel abroad for the first time. He was spirited off to SOE headquarters in Egypt, where he was knocked sideways by wonders, not least the grass in the Gezira gardens: "Fat, short grass like green velvet carpet." As for the zoo, "I could almost have deemed that I was in the middle of paradise". The most misguided character in the whole of The Cretan Runner is the soldier who advised George not to climb up the Pyramids because it was "very tiring and tricky". A short hop later, the Cretan runner got out his stiletto and "cut my name and fatherland" into a stone at the top.
On the day the war was over, a "high-spirited Mr Leigh Fermor" bought a dubious Mr Psychoundakis a lot of drinks. "If I drink all that I'll be drunk," protested George. "But my child, what is drink meant for? It's no use for anything else," replied Paddy.
Soon after, in a school where a whole village was gathered together, George recited a heart-stopping poem he had written on the lovely village of Yerakari, now destroyed, where once "white houses lay like doves asleep along the sill of heaven". He had survived, but for a while it was hard to see what for.
Fortune, who had smiled on George in a time of insane adversity, appeared to doze off once the shooting stopped. Because of missing documents and in spite of his British Empire Medal (awarded in 1945), he was arrested as a deserter and imprisoned for several months. One can scarcely imagine the wound inflicted on his pride. Over three days, that great shaggy helmet of hair all fell out. Subsequently, he had to do two more years of fighting in the civil war. Returning at last to Asi Gonia, George found all the sheep stolen and his family in gruesome poverty. The Changeling had run out of magic.
George took a job as a navvy working on a road. At night, he sheltered once more in a cave and by the light of an oil lamp began to fill notebook after notebook with a furious, cramped hand. "I think he undertook this task as a kind of exorcism of the gloom of his circumstances," says Paddy. When they met up again in 1951, George gave his friend the completed work: Pictures of Our Life During the Occupation. Better known as The Cretan Runner.
Leigh Fermor, now living on the Greek mainland, took the precious grime-covered manuscript home to translate. George, meanwhile, was working to help his old friend, too. In 1943, with a German patrol approaching, Paddy, who was checking what he thought was an empty rifle, accidentally shot Yanni Tzangarakis in the leg. He died soon afterwards, but not before absolving his friend of all blame. Paddy was devastated: imagine killing the proud son of a country for which you were willing to lay down your own life.
This wretchedness was deepened by foolish rumours that eventually led to a vendetta being declared by some of Yanni's relatives. This was only laid to rest after years of delicate negotiation by George, who found a very Cretan solution to the Englishman's impasse: Paddy Leigh Fermor became godfather to Yanni's great-niece. In Greek society, this bond is deeper than blood.
Two old men sitting at a table talking about the war. A Cretan and an Englishman. "We'd better censor that, George, it's libellous," says Paddy, trying to sound stern. As usual, he fails.
George goes off into the bedroom and comes back with a rifle. It is nearly as tall as he is, and its working parts are in similarly creaky order. As George poses with the gun, the photographer asks him to smile. George scowls and spits out a guttural retort. "Oh dear, oh dear," says Paddy, shaking his head and laughing. What did George just say? "He said he won't smile because he's killing Germans."
At the front of A Time of Gifts, Leigh Fermor quotes from Louis MacNeice's great poem:

For now the time of gifts is gone
O boys that grow,
O snows that melt,
O bathos that the years must fill.

Since the war, both men have found satisfactions. Leigh Fermor, though unfairly saddled with the label of travel writer, has become one of the greatest exponents of English prose.
Psychoundakis, meanwhile, has translated both the Odyssey and the Iliad into Cretan and been honoured by the Academy of Athens. Still, I can't help wondering whether the time since their great adventure had been an anti-climax.
"To some extent all our lives were in those years," admits Paddy. "Of course, one went on to do interesting things, but... " George has come up now and stretches out his fingertips to reach the shoulders of his friend, the tall Englishman. "Ah, George says to tell you that those years up in the mountains were the best years of his life. He'll never forget it. Never. And that's why he wanted to commemorate our days together."
Just as we are getting ready to leave, George gives Paddy a photograph. It is of George himself and Xan Fielding, taken somewhere in the mountains. You can just make them out. The emulsion is breaking up and great snowy specks of it are blizzarding them into oblivion. Yet looking back at the Cretan resisters, we see only a thrilling clarity. Their existence was both mortally serious and a great wheeze - perhaps a definition of the best kind of life you can hope to lead.
Years after the war ended, George Psychoundakis sang for his friend Patrick Leigh Fermor a mantinada. This is what it said:

With patience first and patience last, and doggedness all through,
A man can think the wildest thoughts and make them all come true.

I was contacted by Agapi Nix who wrote;
I read the comments of George Psychoundakis and I was wondering if he knew my grandfather, Vlachaki Spiridon was killed in 1941 in Suda.  He was from Kastelli and fought against the Germans for the resistance.  They had run into the mountains, but as I'm told, a Greek betrayed them and they were found by the Germans and captured, then taken to Suda and put in a row with others and executed.  My grandmother who was left behind a widow, with four little children had a very difficult life.  I, of course, never knew him, but if possible, I would like to know if anyone remembers him and could tell me more about him and what exactly happened.