Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 8

We were totally amateurish, totally one hundred per cent amateurish, and it couldn’t have been otherwise.

—BASIL DAVIDSON, one of Churchill’s original “dirty tricksters”

WAIT. George is still alive?

Chris White hung up the phone, stunned. It was the summer of 2004, and Chris had just gotten a call from a friend whose son was a journalist in Greece. Her son had gone to Crete in search of World War II survivors, Chris’s friend said, and there, among the backcountry villages, he came across the old Resistance runner himself, still roaming the high mountain ranges.

Good Lord. How was that even possible? The odds of survival in the dirty tricks squad was appalling. Half of the recruits were captured or killed in the first year alone, and of all their assignments, none was riskier than George Psychoundakis’s. Other Resistance fighters spent a good deal of their time in hiding, but runners lived in the red zone, zigzagging through enemy patrols while carrying documents that guaranteed a death sentence if discovered. Runners were an especially high-value target for the Gestapo, who knew they rarely carried weapons and could lead them directly to nearly every guerrilla hideout. Two other shepherds from George’s valley became runners along with him; they were soon captured, tortured, and shot. “The job of a war-time runner in the Resistance Movement was the most exhausting and one of the most consistently dangerous,” observed Patrick Leigh Fermor, who relied on them during his own tour of duty on Crete as a dirty trickster.

So George somehow made it through not just one bloodbath but two, first enduring four years of relentless manhunts and then the vicious civil war that engulfed Greece immediately after the German occupation. Every decade since then, some fresh killer had swept across the island—famine, drought, epidemic disease—yet George survived them all, not to mention the constant Cretan peril of vendetta attacks. (Even Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose wartime derring-do made him one of Crete’s most beloved adopted sons, was startled to discover he’d barely escaped the crosshairs of a sniper rifle after a friend’s nephew swore a blood oath of vengeance against him for an accidental death.)

For Chris White, the news of George’s survival couldn’t have come at a better time. Because the more he learned about George’s life, Chris had discovered, the better he felt about his own.

Chris lived in Oxford, and although the city, with its ancient university and cozy cottages, looked utterly tranquil, it attracted an unusual number of homeless. Chris worked with the unstable and depressed, and the despair he dealt with every day had begun to infect him. “The backdrop of any Monday or end of holiday would be hearing that someone you’d been working with was dead,” Chris says. “I’d say ‘Hi’ to my secretary and she’d say ‘Hi, Chris!’ and then tell me about what we call ‘incidents’—someone killed themselves or tried to kill one of your staff.”

By the time he turned fifty-six, Chris had been managing mental-health services in Oxford for eight years. He lived in a charming farmhouse just outside town with his wife and their eight-year-old twins. He had a gang of pals he joined for sailing expeditions and a great friendship with his twenty-two-year-old son from a previous relationship and a little log cabin he’d built out back for his books and sailing charts and music. Chris was easygoing and fun-loving, and utterly baffled when he began going through something of a dark period. He needed to make a change, and took time off work to consider what that could be.

During the time at home, Chris focused on a peculiar story he’d first heard years before. An elderly friend had asked him to trim some of her overgrown trees, and as a thank-you she’d given Chris a book about the strange adventures of Patrick Leigh Fermor, known to everyone as Paddy. Paddy was Chris’s kind of adventurer—gallant, literary, madcap, merry. Chris dug around for more and soon learned about Paddy’s daffy scheme to kidnap a German general.

“I’ve always been a man who’s had projects, always tunneling into something,” Chris says. Paddy’s saga was just the thing to get him drilling. The extreme adventure was intriguing, but what really hooked him was the surreal gentleness.

“It was the kindest, most bloodless scheme you’d ever encounter in military history,” Chris marveled. In the midst of carnage and cruelty, “everyone in this operation was trying to be brave, kind, diplomatic.” Chris couldn’t help feeling a pang of kinship. The cheery hopelessness of Paddy’s plot reminded him of his own job, of the challenge of helping people he knew were headed for ruin. When you’re doomed to fail, how do you avoid living in doubt and despair? By living, not doubting.

Living and not doubting had always been Chris’s navigational star. Back when he was a first-year student at Durham University in the seventies, Chris wrote a story about psychiatry for the school paper. It earned him a spot on the features staff and just enough credibility, Chris felt, to make a ridiculous request: he contacted Harold Evans, editor of Britain’s prestigious Sunday Times, and asked if maybe Evans had any unused stories lying around? Something Chris could print in the Durham University Palatinate?

“And by return post we got an enormous article, ready to print,” Chris told me. “The Times was investigating thalidomide”—a drug prescribed for morning sickness, later linked to horrific birth defects—“but the manufacturers had slapped Evans with another injunction. He had this massive article he couldn’t publish in the Times, so he just gave it to our little university paper.” It was a brilliant coup, and Chris’s golden ticket; that article guaranteed he’d be appointed the Palatinate’s next editor and likely find a juicy journalism job right after graduation. Naturally, for Chris that meant it was time to quit. He couldn’t imagine spending the rest of his life behind a typewriter; he’d always seen himself on the move, bopping about as some kind of roving mental-health healer. So he turned his back on writing and got his master’s in psychology instead. When he was close to his Ph.D., he jumped ship again: this time, his dissertation research had taken him to Miami Beach, where he found such a bizarre buffet of mental disorders on the streets that he decided to stop studying and start helping.

For the rest of Chris’s life, that was his pattern: if the easy road led toward a desk, Chris backed up and found another one. He liked being in the field, traveling from home to home each day to work with elderly and not-quite-stable outpatients. On vacation, he’d take his then girlfriend to a beach resort but persuade her to forget the sea and head inland with him, turning it into a weeklong ramble. Boating buddies could count on Chris whenever a last-minute mate was needed for anywhere, even a freezing sail to Scandinavia. When I first went to meet him in Oxford, I got off the train expecting lunch first, maps second, beers last; instead I found myself trotting behind him on a spontaneous, double-time, four-hour walking tour that included bell towers, underground pubs, and a muddy stretch of his neighbor’s backyard. That’s what happens if you tell him it’s your first time in town.

Chris’s natural inclination to move, all the time and for any reason, has made him something of a natural-movement savant. You’ll never catch him working out (Repetitions? Routine? Forget it), yet he’s never not working out. His ever-bubbling brain won’t let him sit, so Chris just flows along behind it; his distractions lead the way, and his body figures out how to keep up. Like Paddy, Chris’s intelligence and curiosity have made motion his natural state, his way to both push hard and rest easy. When he finally came inside as a manager, the promotion came with unexpected and not always welcome changes.

Luckily, Crete was waiting.

When Chris’s friend called with the update that George was still alive, Chris’s thinking abruptly changed. Until that moment he’d been dealing with history; now, suddenly, it was a story, alive and ongoing. How many other survivors were back in those hills? What did they know that Paddy never revealed?

Because when it came to the kidnap scheme, Paddy remained strangely quiet. He’d come close to perfectly executing one of the most daring heists of the war, but even when it was safe to talk, the show-off who could tell stories all night was reluctant to share this one. Maybe it was because of the man he killed. Maybe it was because of the other he couldn’t save. Something was silencing him; even after others told their version, Paddy went to the grave with his.

But as long as Crete was alive with eyewitnesses and evidence, Chris could do more than just try to get inside Paddy’s head: he could get inside his boots. By tracking Paddy’s movements, he might still have a chance to track down people who’d seen everything. First he got in touch with Tim Todd, a former Oxford police detective who’d become the Mycroft Holmes of amateur Cretan espionage enthusiasts. Like Sherlock’s smarter, less mobile brother, Tim’s brain reached further than his legs; he knew elderly escaped POWs in New Zealand and dead soldiers’ daughters in Australia. He got copies of military documents as soon as they were declassified and photos of others that weren’t supposed to leave the archives. He became friendly with Stelios Jackson, the Greek book hound who can find anything in or out of print, and the husband-and-wife historians Artemis Cooper and Antony Beevor, who between them know more than anyone alive about the Cretan Resistance. Tim Todd is a hearty and resourceful investigator, but unfortunately his health isn’t great. He can’t really get out there in the field.

Chris can. He turned his backyard cabin into a command room, and it was there—amid the black-and-white photos, stacks of World War II memoirs, and blown-up copies of Wehrmacht maps—that we met in the winter of 2011. There is no official history of exactly what the British agents got up to on Crete, but there is Chris White. Chris had turned himself into a formidable amateur detective, and to solve the lingering mysteries of Paddy’s plot, he knew exactly what we had to do next:

Go to the scene of the crime.

A few months later, Chris and his brother, Pete, were waiting for me on a notch of pebbly beach on Crete’s southern coast.

“Welcome to bandit country,” Chris said, as I shucked my sweat-soaked backpack and looked back at the snarl of hills I’d just hiked over. Chris and Pete had arrived a week earlier because, frankly, they weren’t sure they could trust me. They hated the idea of accidentally turning the Resistance’s secret hideouts into tourist attractions, so until they sized me up they’d be cautious about what they’d share. They wanted to search for some sites in private, so I gave them a week’s head-start before I flew to Crete and set off to catch up.

From Heraklion I rattled over the mountains by bus to the end of the line and got a room for the night above a village taverna. At daybreak I set off on foot, the sun on my back as I headed due west along the coastline. A shepherds’ trail climbed the cliffs high above the shore, occasionally wandering into stone gullies before veering again toward the water. By late afternoon, I was dead-legged and wondering if I’d find my way out before dark when I suddenly found myself a step away from empty air: far below at the bottom of a long drop was a small cove, invisible until I was right overhead. A jagged switchback led down to a solitary guest house, where Chris and Pete were bunking after hiking in the night before.

“You’re seeing something Paddy never did,” Chris greeted me after I’d scrambled on down. “He could only come here by dark, guided by shepherds.” It was a good place for British subs to surface without being spotted, and for British agents to disappear once they made it to shore.

Outlaws and rebels have been hiding in these parts as long as there’s been anyone to hide from, bursting from the trees in hit-and-run rebellions against centuries of seagoing bullies who tried to make the Sliver their own. Thorny tangles and abrupt cliffs make pockets of the southern coast labyrinthine enough to stash a Minotaur, especially when the usual blanket of sea mist creeps in. Even George got himself into trouble around here in a fast-rolling fog, thinking he was walking down a familiar hill before discovering he was a few feet from disaster. “I wore myself out all night trying to get away from that accursed precipice,” George would grumble.

Chris never got a chance to meet George; shortly before Chris’ first trip to the island, the Cretan runner had died in 2006 at age eighty-five. But Chris and Pete had paid their respects by visiting George’s lifelong home, the tiny and notoriously defiant village a few miles north of us called Asi Gonia. The name means “unconquerable” in Arabic and was bestowed by the Turks as an honor of sorts, during their two-century occupation of Crete. The only natural way into Asi Gonia is through a narrow gorge, and George’s forefathers defended it so stubbornly that the great Ottoman Empire decided the little hornet’s nest wasn’t worth the trouble and mostly just left the Asi Gonians be.

“Some of the old Turkish bridges are still standing,” Chris told me. “You know about the one that saved George?”

“Sure.” It was one of George’s most nerve-wracking adventures. A traitor had given up George’s name to the Gestapo, so before dawn one morning, they came looking for him. Ordinarily George slept in a cave, never indoors, but he’d wrenched his ankle and decided just that once to rest for the night in his parents’ house. The Gestapo grabbed George before he could get out the door. But because the clan had various George Psychoundakises, everyone in the village was marched to the church, where the informant—muffled in a raincoat, his face covered—was waiting to finger the elusive Cretan runner.

“I was in front,” George would recall, “and I whispered to my parents and brothers and sisters, ‘Fall into line, and the ones at the back, dawdle.’” The line bunched, allowing George to casually move about forty yards ahead. As soon as the path curved, he jumped into a brook and took off, counting on the brush to cover his escape and the water to mask his scent. The other Psychoundakises were interrogated and eventually released while George ran for his life, dodging up and down the mountain on his aching ankle as he tried to find a way through the German cordon. After three days without food or sleep, he nearly walked into a dead end: just as he was about to cross a stone bridge, he heard a search party approaching on the other side. Instead of bolting for cover, George slid under his end of the bridge, then silently waded in the opposite direction as German boots stomped past overhead. On the far side, he scrambled out and escaped into the woods.

“We found it,” Chris said.

They found what—George’s bridge? I felt twin stabs of envy and admiration. George had never specified where the bridge was or what it was called; to him it was just another handy hideout in a pinch. So Pete and Chris plotted the reference points in George’s account, and then trekked village to village, café by café, asking around for anyone who could help them locate landmarks. Gradually, they connected the dots in George’s twisting escape route until they finally found themselves on the bank of a stream, staring at a span of ancient stone. “We had a fantastic celebration,” Chris said. “We jumped in.”

It was a triumph of sleuthing, all the more impressive because neither of them speaks Greek. Pete is head gardener at Furzey Gardens, in the south of England, where learning-disabled adults help care for fairy houses and miniature donkeys and artisanal beehives. He is fifty-four and has the graying good looks of an aging folk singer, which is handy, since he plays as a ukulele strummer and ceilidh guitarist. Between them, the brothers White had mastered nearly every humanist talent except foreign languages, so they’d pretty much pinned their hopes of communication on an introductory letter that Chris drafted and got a Greek buddy in Oxford to translate:

We are historians researching the Resistance, the letter begins. We are hoping to find caves in this area used by freedom fighters….

“Historians”? The truth was, we were totally amateurish, one hundred percent—and to follow in George and Paddy’s footsteps, it couldn’t have been otherwise.

. . .

The next morning, I caught Chris eyeing my feet. He looked worried, and I knew why.

We were at the spot where it all began, the beachhead where Paddy and his fellow agents of mayhem first sloshed ashore. They could smell the island before they saw it, the musky scent of wild thyme carrying far out past the breakers. Paddy hopped out of the raft before it beached, and by the time he hit land he was in trouble. The Sliver’s terrain is among the harshest in Europe, and not just because of the vicious climbs; beneath a dusting of sand and soil lurk strips of razory rock that can shred leather like piranha teeth. Just walking those few yards through the surf tore Paddy’s boots to tatters, so he had to spend his first week on Crete hiding in a cave until sturdier footwear could be found. He wore those out in a few weeks, and continued tearing through boots at a rate of a pair every month.

“Are you okay with those?” Chris asked, his tone making it clear I shouldn’t be.

“There’s this idea—” I began, but decided I’d better shut up. Chris and Pete had rugged mountaineering boots, but mine were super-lights with a thin sole designed for desert sand. Ever since I found out how often Paddy’s boots were destroyed by the rocks, I’d wondered why the Cretans’ held up so much better. Maybe the difference wasn’t the footwear; maybe it was the feet. Instead of depending on leather, the Cretans relied on skill.

Soldiers are trained to march, but George was free to tap into an older form of movement now known as Parkour, or freerunning. Freerunners don’t walk across the landscape; they bounce off it, ricocheting along in a steady, hip-hopping, acrobatic flow, treating planet Earth more like a launchpad than a landing point. Xan Fielding, one of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s comrades on Crete, encountered exactly that kind of antigravity gait as he struggled to keep up with an older, heavyset Cretan who “tripped daintily along from boulder to boulder, his body bouncing with every step like an inflated rubber beach toy.” Beefy old Stavros was so springy he seemed weightless and, Xan felt, a little sadistic. “I go much better uphill,” explained Stavros, who then found another gear as the slope got steeper and went even faster. Xan lasted thirty minutes. “After half an hour of crazy racing, tearing through scrub and stumbling over loose earth,” Xan grumbled, “I insisted on stopping for a cigarette.”

Stavros was using the same technique that a doctor from Boston had observed more than a hundred years earlier when he served as a volunteer during the Greek Revolution. Samuel Gridley Howe was used to watching American troops tromp along in rhythmic formation, but the Greeks were hopping all over the place. “A Greek soldier,” Howe commented, “will march, or rather skip, all day among the rocks, expecting no other food than a biscuit and a few olives, or a raw onion, and at night, lies down content upon the ground with a flat rock for a pillow.”

Wait. Skipping all day on olives and an onion—mathematically, how’s that even possible? The calories going in can’t equal the energy going out. George Psychoundakis would sometimes shuttle between the caves for twelve hours a day on a starvation diet, yet his mind stayed sharp, his muscles strong, and his endurance unshaken. During one escapade, his only meal was hay soup, made by boiling and reboiling scrounged-up animal fodder seven times to remove the toxins. Yet even on that zero-calorie concoction, he shot off the next day to summit a peak that would stagger an adventure racer.

The only explanation, I believed, was freerunning. The Greeks were getting free fuel and extra leg protection by relying on an ancient, elastic gait that looked playful but was deadly effective. I’d gotten my first look at freerunning back home in Pennsylvania, when I was in line at a drugstore and suddenly saw two bodies go sailing past the window. These guys had to be six feet in the air, flying by one after the other like they’d been slung out of a catapult. Moments later they reappeared outside the glass doors, this time swinging through the railings of the handicapped ramp. By the time I got to the cash register, I’d watched them hurdle, vault, tightrope-walk, and otherwise wring a crazy amount of movement out of those green bars. I hurried outside to catch them, but they weren’t leaving anytime soon.

“You start practicing Parkour,” one of them told me, “and whole nights disappear.”

That I could believe. From what I’d seen through the window, free-running was anything but free; it looked like a ton of fun, but way too showy. All those jumps and vaults seemed too complicated to allow any kind of flow, like skateboarders who kick-flip their decks over and over and never get the thing to land on its wheels. But that’s because I was making a rookie mistake, my new drugstore buddies explained. You can’t judge Parkour with your eyes; you have to judge it with your body. Once you learn Parkour’s basic moves, the world around you changes. You don’t see things anymore; you see movement. Take that alley across the street, one of them said. What’s in it?

Let’s see. A Dumpster; some busted bottles; two cars; a cement wall with a fence on top.

For you. For us, there’s a catpass precision, two Kongs, a running arm jump, and a step vault.

All I had to do was get some Parkour under my belt, they promised, and I’d see the world the same way. I’d look at a gnarly goat trail on a Mediterranean island, and the crashed trees and tumbled boulders would transform from stuff in the way into stuff to bounce off of. I’d handle the trail the way water handles a riverbed. I’d skip all day on olives and an onion.

That was the plan, at least. It seemed like a good one, so I threw myself into Parkour and followed it from that Pennsylvania parking lot back to a housing project in London, where an out-of-shape single mom was becoming one of the sport’s finest instructors. But now that I was on Crete, it seemed smarter to keep it to myself for a while. I didn’t want Chris and Pete worrying that I was about to walk into something I couldn’t walk out of—even though, as we squinted up at the snow packed into the high gorges, I was wondering about it myself. Theory, meet mountain.

We shouldered our packs and set off, following Chris across the slick stones above the black sand beach. “Harsh here,” Pete commented. “See the plants, all covered in thorns? That’s because goats eat everything. Only the prickliest survive.”