When Patrick Leigh Fermor turned up at the gates of the monastery of Saint–Wandrille de Fontenelle in Normandy, he was trying to finish a book: a feeling with which he would become increasingly familiar. The years he had spent as an under-cover officer of the Special Operations Executive in Crete, the high point of which was the celebrated Anglo-Cretan capture of General Heinrich Kreipe in 1944, seemed like a lifetime away. After a brief spell in Greece after the war, he and his companion Joan Eyres–Monsell had undertaken a journey through the islands of the Antilles in 1947, with the photographer A Costa.