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C H A R M E D L I F E I N G R E E C E 9 e touring exhibition Charmed Lives in Greece examines the bonds between John Craxton, Greek painter Niko Ghika and British writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. Having travelled from the AG Leventis Gallery in Nicosia and the Benaki Museum in Athens, the show is at the British Museum until 15 July. Meeting in London and Athens at the end of World War Two, the trio became life-long friends and colleagues - spending subsequent decades making marvellous books, pictures and houses and roaming around the Aegean. ey had enormous luck - and the wit and pluck to make the most of it. Ghika was the eldest in the group - an admiral's son, at home in cosmopolitan Athens, Paris and London; Craxton and Leigh Fermor were youthful misfits and permanently romantic adventurers. All three were bent on lives of fun and creative fulfillment. Patrick Leigh Fermor – better known as Paddy – was handsome and heroic. When the war began he was basking on Poros with a Romanian princess; then he joined the partisans and ended up kidnapping the Nazi commander of Crete. Dirk Bogarde played Paddy in the film of the thrilling saga – Ill Met By Moonlight. e real- life figure was even more daring and seductive, leading to claims that he was the model for Ian Fleming's James Bond. In fact, he wasn't. Although a friend of Fleming, the brilliant charmer talked in a golden torrent, even aer drinking everyone else under the table, and would have been a hopeless spy since unable to keep a secret. But Paddy became one of the greatest travel writers, with two tribute books and countless articles attesting to his love of Greece, and an unfinished trilogy of poetic memoirs charting his meandering walk when aged 18 from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (now Istanbul). His best-selling sagas bore glorious Craxton covers and now number among the most beautiful books of the 20 th century. Following in Paddy's footsteps to Poros, John Craxton spent the next 14 years exploring the Greek mainland and islands. roughout the 1950s the friends were oen together at Ghika's ancestral mansion on Hydra. e painters painted and the writer wrote amid a flow of remarkable visitors. Niko Ghika was well-off, but John and Paddy were usually broke – one key attraction of Greece back then was that it was blissfully cheap. Heiress Joan Leigh Fermor quietly underpinned the enterprise – without her financial and practical support, and her critical intelligence, Paddy would never have a written a word. She was John's best friend and oen bailed him out. But Joan was also a fascinating figure in her own right. As Paddy's travelling companion, she took thousands of photographs for him to use as visual notes. e scale of her artistic achievement emerged only aer her death in 2003. An introductory album – e Photographs of Joan Leigh Fermor: Artist and Lover (Haus Books) – is being published to coincide with the British Museum show. Her obituary by John Craxton provides a splendid foreword. ese charmed lives in Greece were not untroubled. When the Ghika mansion on Hydra burned down, in 1961, Niko and his charismatic wife Barbara were so devastated that they could never go back. By then John had been helped by Joan – and Barbara too – to move to a crumbling Venetian house on the Cretan harbour of Chania. On his first evening John had supper with Winston Churchill and Margot Fonteyn, who had just arrived on Aristotle Onassis's yacht. On countless future nights the artist was in rowdy sailors' tavernas with the company he enjoyed most. Paddy and Joan built a very sociable private paradise at Kardamyli in the Peloponnese. Among the most gorgeous houses in Greece, it is now in the care of the Benaki Museum in Athens. Niko and Barbara found a semi-derelict farmhouse with an old olive press on Corfu where they created a heavenly haven echoing the lost glories of Hydra. e miracle was that these friends did any work at all, since they were so readily distracted by Greek pleasures. But over the course of long and happy existences – Paddy died last, aged 96, in 2011 – they le a mass of life- affirming art. Via pictures, letters and personal possessions, the London show in their memory lets us all enter a world of charm. And the invitation is wonderfully extended through all the formerly unseen Craxton images in this Osborne Samuel catalogue and exhibition. Ian Collins

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