Heidelberg is, was, and hopefully always will be, a lovely city. And into Heidelberg, between St Stephen's Day and New Year of 1933 trudged a young Englishman (part Irish, he tells us), eighteen years of age, on a walking trip from Rotterdam to Constantinople, his cheeks freezing and hair caked with snow. He made for the welcoming sign of the Red Ox. He loved the interior, a haven of oak beams and carving and alcoves, a jungle of bottles, glasses, antlers, "the innocent accumulation of years, not stage props of conviviality." It is said to be still like that.
He sat down with his notebooks, with wine, bread and cheese at a big table and before he had told the proprietor's wife and the proprietor half of his story, they had said "You must be our guest." and "You can't be wandering in the snow on New Year's Eve (Sylvesterabend)." The good people of the inn - Spengel by name - took the young man under their warm wing, and their son Fritz showed him around that haunting city. At one time Heidelberg, he tells us, was a stronghold of the Reformation. Now on a Sunday "Gregorian plainsong escapes through the doors of one church and the Lutheran strains of Ein' feste Burg from the next.
He is shown around the city and finds the English Gate named after The Winter Queen, daughter of James I of England. But he is so much taken by the tradition of the fencing bouts of the students, and the scars that they bore as badges of honour all their lives, from their duelling days. It wasn't duelling, of course, writes the traveller, Patrick Leigh Fermor, "but tribal scarification. Those dashing scars were school ties that could never be taken off, the emblem and seal of a ten-year's cult of the humanities."
Fritz demonstrated the stance and grip and described how the participants were "gauntleted, gorgeted and goggled until every exposed vein and artery, and every inch of irreplaceable tissue, were unholstered from harm .. . only the wrists moved; to flinch spelled disaster and the blades clashed by numbers until the razorsharp tips sliced gashes deep enough, tended with rubbed salt, to last a lifetime." The writer had noticed "these academic stigmate" on the faces of doctors and lawyers; "brow, cheek and chin and sometimes all three were ripped up by this haphazard surgery in puckered or gleaming lines, strangely at odds with the wrinkles that middle-age had inscribed there".
Hitler suppressed all this, our author tells us. As rival cliques, perhaps. But overall, this book "A Time of Gifts" (Penguin) and its sequel Between the Woods and the Water are wonderful travel and sympathetic experiences. Y