Extracts from

PEEL ME A LOTUS

by Charmian Clift (1923-1969)

• With full-page drawings by Nancy Dignan

NB. All of the following references/text are from a relatively recent edition of Charmian Clift's Peel Me A Lotus: Imprint/Angus and Robinson, Sydney, 1989. (Originally published by Hutchinson, London, 1959).

the town
 

In appearance, the town today must be almost exactly what it was in the days of its merchant princes, for practically no houses have been built in the last one hundred and twenty years. It rises in tiers around the small, brilliant, horseshoe-shaped harbour - old stone mansions harmoniously apricot-coloured against the gold and bronze cliffs, or washed pure white and shuttered in palest grey: houses austere but exquisitely proportioned, whose great walls and heavy arched doors enclose tiled courtyards and terraced gardens. The irregular tiers are broken everywhere by steep, crooked flights of stone steps, and above the tiled roof-tops of uniform red tiles rise the octagonal domes of the churches and the pierced and fretted verticals of marble spires that might have been designed by Wren. Above the town the mountains shoot up sheer, their gaunt surfaces unbroken except for and odd white mill or two, a field of grain standing on end, a dark patch of fir-trees, and three monasteries, the highest of them so close to heaven that at night its lights are looped among the stars ('February', p.25-26).

Through the doorway of the office I could see the heavenly cerulean blue of the balcony ceiling, three thin marble columns, and a tree of hibiscus blazing away in the courtyard beside the ornate tomb of one of the island's innumerable naval heroes ('February', p.10).

Beyond the table, seen surrealistically through bundles of garden rakes and an organ-pipe arrangement of ecclesiastical wax candles, there was a donkey-train jingling along, two crimson caiques unloading vegetables onto straw mats spread along the quay, a coloured kite tugging the sky above the old cannons on the headland. On the other side of the smooth spread of the water that lies between our island and the mainland, a thick crust of snow swept down through the dark pine forests to the sea ('February' p. 20-21).

Past the small shop, now open and busy with workmen...Past the gnarled, grey fingers of wisteria vine, already pricked with purple, that clutch and curl around the narrow door of Chloe's house...Past the dark cooper's shop that i love for the smell of the oak shavings and the great pale curves of barrels caught in burnished bands. Past the rusty tracery of high iron gates that open on to a noble court and a graceful, arched building that was once the town market and now houses the town's temperamental electricity plant and ice factory. past the shoemaker's window hung all about with good rough shepheards' shoes soled solidly with motor tyres, and nasty plastic sandals from Piraeus. Past the carpenters, the oil store, the hot, odorous cavern of the bakery where the women were just emerging with round tin dishes of potatoes and marrows brown from the oven and already congealing in the cooking-fat. Past the delicately fanned windows of the long, low church of St Constantine ('February' p.28-29).

Dazzled a little by the beauty of the town, one does not realize at first that half the houses are uninhabited. Behind beautiful facades are only desolate weed-choked courts and fallen rafters; and what at first appear to be gaps of virgin mountain rock among the terraces usually reveal themselves - by a piece of carved marble, a Turkish inscription, a tarnished bronze door-knocker lying among the stones - as the foundations of great houses, tiers of houses, terraces of houses, hundreds of houses, long since sunk back to their elements.
    On winter nights when the wind whines I find myself listening for the last wild scream of the wrenched shutter, the last sad groan of the subsiding wall, as another house returns, stone to stone and dust to dust, from which it was first so proudly made ('February', p.26-27).

The wind howls at gale force for days on end, or comes in furious gusts or volleys that create havoc among loose tiles and shutters. The almond-trees are stripped of their blossom, the gardens hammered flat. The last of the old Turkish bridges is smashed down, and torrential rains have washed away half the mountain soil down the cobbled streets and into the harbour. The Street of the Heroes that leads from the waterfront all the way to the Sweet Wells is feet deep under silt. It is sometimes only possible to get to the agora by taking off one's shoes and socks and wading knee deep, and the agora itself is usually deserted. All the fruit and vegetable stalls have been taken inside the shops. One swoops along leaning on the wind, and all the way across the gulf the sea peaks and hummocks with wrathful wave-caps. March, in Greece, is the month that put the old women in the pot ('March', p.38).

At night, I don't sleep much any more. Perhaps it is that the wind has dropped at last, and after the electricity pant has shuddered to a standstill at midnight every noise of the night falls separately into a huge black sounding-box of silence.
    The weird, agonized cry of a wakeful donkey booms and reverberates, quite close another donkey answers, and the sounding-box is filed with a terrible honking and gasping that wheezes into silence just as a rooster begins to crow. The roosters are all mad here, nervous, nocturnal birds of splendid plumage and no time sense. And then, while the roosters are tossing their boasts up and down the sleeping terraces, the night is torn by fiendish howls of rage and lust and terror, and those are the island cats who are already so large, so numerous, and so utterly evil that it seems likely they will eventually force the human population to abandon the island to them. Lying in the dark one might be in a jungle.
    The house where we are staying has a little terrace tucked under the tall bronze mountain that curls over the town like a static wave. I sit up here wrapped in a blanket, listening to the dialogue of donkeys, seeing shadowed wall, roof-top, tile, alley aswarm with huge slinking shapes of cats, like an emanation of the secret soul of the place.
    Athena's little owl drops two liquid notes from the mountain, and again two notes, very pure and chill. Some restless stirring in a high sheepfold is signaled by a little drift of bells. All pale and quiet the lovely houses sleep, tier upon tier folding down from the black bulk of the mountains to the black silk spread of the water. Across the water the dark hills of Troezen are pricked all over with the fires of the charcoal burners like a scattering of rubies ('March', p.51-52).

This is a time when the mountains of Troezen are crumpled plush, and the sea rings the island in separate strands of blue like embroidery skeins, when the caiques bring fresh vegetables every day, lettuce and spring onions, the first of the cucumbers, the first of the tomatoes, when johnny Lulu puts out a blue and white awning, when the coffee-tables are all moved out from inside the shops on to the cobbles, when socrates skitters up and down the town trailing a string of coloured flags and shouting a delirious Ya! Ya! to everyone in passing; when old brown men come out from their fusty rooms to blink away mornings on sunny doorsteps, and old grey women tie fresh head-scarves over skimpy pigtails and whisk up steaming piles of donkey-droppings to nurture spring gardens ('April', p.63-64).

As the sun strengthens and rides higher the whitewashed walls begin to take on a dazzle at noontime. The terraced houses shimmer among the prickly pears and aloes. At morning and evening the harbour front seems to slip and slide in a moving green-gold mesh of water reflections. All bare and innocent the island lies under the sun, or faintly, distractingly, luminous under the moon. The world smells of sea salt, herbs, springing flowers. Something is imminent, something wonderful, something lucky, I don't know what - perhaps the Death and Resurrection of Easter, for which the town is preparing joyfully.
    Housewives are busy with whitewash pails and brushes tied to long poles, the donkeys all have nice new canvas bags tied under their back-sides, on Saturday mornings the municipal cleaning hose shoots white jets across the pink cobbles of the quay, and in front of the Hotel Poseidon the marble admiral and his attendant lion ride triumphantly on leaping rainbow columns of water ('April', p.69-70).

(The studio) hangs among the tiled roof-tops, soft now with orange moss and random grasses; among weed-grown lanes that appear, improbably, above the roofs, curling narrowly between high white garden walls; among the grilled windows and bright brass hands quiescent on grey grates and doors, old balustraded balconies that hang crooked above tiled courtyards, high flat terraces; among lines of washing blowing, stiff moving bunches of citrus leaves sparked with minute scented blossoms, leaping vines scratching against crumbling walls, cascades of wistaria ('May', p.79).

The highest houses are leaping in a sudden vehemence of white, but on the lower slopes they are still pearly, soft, all heaped together like big blocks of marshmallow not quite set. The lane below me is running opalescence ('June', p.101-102).

In the evening how pleasant it is to stroll down to the waterfront through narrow lanes where the scent of summer flowers hangs so sweet and heavy as to be almost visible: the sweet, white, heavy summer flowers, jasmine and gardenias and fooli and think white stocks that breathe their sweetness into the night from courtyards hidden behind high white garden walls. Even the tables on the waterfront have jam-jars filled with stock and gardenias, and the scent of the flowers breathes and blends with the smell of hot rocks and salt and herbs and fish frying in olive-oil ('June', p.121).

There was a bird in the garden, nagging away about something or other, and at least a dozen women gaggling and gossiping about the well. morning sounds. Children, donkeys, roosters, bells - goat-bells, sheep-bells, donkey-bells, church bells, even...yes, the handbell of...the dustman...all the air swinging with bells.One realised suddenly why each separate bell sounded so distinctly. The roar of water had stopped at last.
    Spirals of water vapour steamed up from the pink courtyard, from the lane, from the square. All the lower town steamed, the flat sea steamed, but higher, the mountains, the cliffs, the white houses were caught pure and hard and sparkling in crystal. crystal the sky too - glittering blue crystal chipped around the edges of the mountains ('October', p.189).

the island
 

(People who come here have an) immediate passion for the high, harsh beauty of the mountains soaring up from the jeweled crescent of the port - truly Greek mountains these, stark and noble, with the violets and golds seeping over them at sunset, and little white droppings of monasteries perched dizzily high on their scarred and pitted slopes...('February', p.18). I feel that (Hydra) has always been as it is now, a long bare rock shaped rather like a set of well-curved moustachios and cruelly fanged with sharp mountains: an island completely lacking in fertile soil, and, except for a few springs and wells, waterless ('February', p.24).

As we came over the last rise, through the ruined tiers of houses built like forts or palaces, this house on the mountainside seemed indeed very beautiful. Within the great protecting walls pink vapour puffs of almond blossom wafted down over five stepped terraces to the very doors of the square, white dwelling whose foundations rise sheer from the mountain gorge...(observing) three conical bronze hills crowned each with a single tree, and two white oxen plodding among the silver olives. But I must turn again to the sweep of the blue gulf below, the jagged peaks of the islands breaking the foam, and the far dim dream of the mountains of Arcady ('March', p.42).

If the island is no longer 'our' island, it is very lovely nonetheless. A summer island, a painter's paradise, just enough off the beaten track to be an authentic 'discovery', simple still, and strong with its own personality. 'Quite unspoilt,' people are heard to say. 'The essence of Greekness. An absolute gem' ('May', p.85).

Summer is in. Every day the sky seems higher, flatter, paler. The mountains have already lost their soft fuzz of spring green and at noon they glitter as if plated with bronze. On the cliffs the stone houses melt back into the rock and the white houses shimmer with an intolerable white brightness. The flowers are seared off the hills; the only vegetation now is spikes and thorns ('June', p.101).

The island is wearing its holiday face. The gulf is like milk. There are little motor-boats ferrying tourists down the coast to further coves and beaches, there are fishing caiques sliding through their own reflections, market boast skittering across to the mainland to the rhumba rhythm of their exhausts, and all the little varkas that rested in lanes and sheds for the winter are sprinkled down through the islets like coloured scraps of confetti, or walnut shells painted crimson and cinnamon and lime and yellow and pink; in each an old man standing, rocking dreamily at the oars, and a boy bent over a glass-bottomed tin looking for octopi ('July', p.130).

The mountains simmer and melt and harden again at evening. That curling bronze crest never breaks quite, and at night the white houses sleep under it in seeming peace, but strange, Oriental, a Tibetian monastery perhaps, peaceful about the navel of navels, the mystery of mysteries. The cats howl, the donkeys hoot and honk, the owl's liquid notes are lost in a rasp of music from a near taverna where the dispossessed in blue jeans are dancing out their secret sorrows ('July', p.143).

Through the burning early afternoon heat they make excursions...by mule to the monastery of the Prophet Elias, by motor-launch to the further bays and hamlets, by foot to the great houses ('August', p.151).

And day by day the heat increases. It is hot when we get up at five in the morning. In the midday hours it is quite impossible to move outside. The light leaps back from reflecting white planes in searing sheets. Your eyes wince and blink and fill with water to even look up at the mountains. At midnight the cobbles are still warm. The white house walls that look so cool and pale in the moonlight have a dry, hot, plastery feel which is curiously unpleasant. The sun is sealed into stone and street and wall and rock. In the dark the whole town shimmers on the parched black mountains like a scattered pile of bleached bones ('August', p.154-155).

After the Panaygia and the pilgrims comes the meltemi. Now the wind begins to howl and shriek as burning blasts of wind gust and rip through the smelly lanes, churning old newspaper, ice-cream wrappings, dried donkey-droppings, tourists' litter, and clouds of powdered white plaster that has been flaked from parched walls. Loose shutters and heat-warped doors bang and crash, tiles lift, whole panes of glass blow out from windows. In the garden the leaves curl and shrivel on the citrus-trees, plants droop limply, and there is no water to spare for them ('August', p.157).

The sun, huge and squishy crimson, was deflating slowly on the mountains of Arcady, and all the air was flushed with a last extravagant squandering of light. Salmon-pink the sea and rose-pink the mountains, and all the little islands taking on their evening colours of violet and pink and gold. A pink caique passed, laden with browny-pink goats. Level after level, tier upon tier, the white houses flushed rosy and a thousand panes of window glass dazzled suddenly gold ('September', p.170).

Even the sea is strange. There is a thick, fatty skin on it, and beneath the skin millions of yellow jelly-fish pulse slowly and horribly, like huge, fleshy sunflowers opening and closing. The atmosphere is stifling. There is no wind at all, and yet the sea humps and heaves sluggishly, as though it is trying to rouse itself from inertia...All growing things droop and die, even the hardy spikes of asphodel - turned purplish and black in earth baked as hard as stone and cracked like sunburnt skin. The ceiling of sky has descended - a grey, viscous film that obliterated the mountains of the mainland and intensifies all colour to a somber glowing brilliance...('September', p.182-183).

The caiques are all leaping into the air, panes of glass are flying out of windows, even the ground seems to be slipping and sliding under one's feet. One is running before one knows one is running. Everyone is running with open panting mouths and staring eyes. The bells are all ringing, but discordantly, and in the second that one realizes why the bells are ringing, the marble spire of the monastery comes bouncing down in huge carved chunks about one's feet. Earthquake, earthquake...Such a very minor earthquake it was, after all. Officially they rated it no more than a 'severe tremor' ('October', p.186, 190).

the house
 

Today we bought the house by the well...The price of the house was one hundred and twenty gold pounds...or six hundred and twenty Australian pounds, or about thirteen hundred (US) dollars. We had to work it out in a variety of currencies because our income derives from slender royalty cheques in several countries... ('February', p.9-10). It does seem to be a reckless romantic thing that the first piece of earth one has ever owned in all the world should be Greek earth...('February', p.11).

(The house has) nine sunny rooms (eight when we have knocked down the wall between the two top-floor rooms and made one big studio) and a long flagged kitchen with an arched stove and a beamed ceiling...There is a terrace on the third floor, too, that looks clear across the blue gulf to the mountains of Troezen. And the house has a little walled garden with two grapevines and eight fruit-trees. The two big children will share a nursery the size of a ballroom, and on the second floor, opening off the room that will be our bedroom, there is a small, sunny space, reached conveniently by a ladder and trap-door from the kitchen, that will make a night nursery for this unborn one... ('February', p.11-12). (The Greeks cry), 'Kalo riziko!' - 'Welcome home at last' ('February', p.13-15).

Ours is in the second category of island houses; that is to say, not the house of a merchant-prince or renowned admiral, but of a prosperous sea-captain. It lies in the village behind the waterfront, beyond the (delicate fanned windows of the long, low) little church of St Constantine and below the craig where the Down School is perched so impossibly Up ('February', p.27, 29). (The house is) a square, white block with a heavy peeling door flanked by two small, barred windows, and above them the three tall shuttered windows of the second floor. The third floor, invisible from the front, sits low back behind the roof terrace where once the captain's wife fired off two small cannons on sighting his ship entering port. The key is a huge mediaeval instrument that weighs two pounds nine ounces. It fits the side entrance, a double wooden gate with a rather nice knocker...('February', p.30).

The side gate opens on to a small courtyard paved with the pink stone that is quarried on a small satellite island in the gulf, and a flight of broad pink stone stairs that leads to the first floor... (You could then walk) through a door so small that it could have been built only for a dwarf... The ground floor is, in fact, a semi-basement, cut down deeply into the island rock to make a great storage cistern for rain water collected on the upper terrace. Above the cistern there are three rooms, all on different levels and connected by low, wide arches. The floors are grey stone flags, worn silk smooth, the ceilings huge rough beams. Double doors like those of a fortress open out on to the garden, as yet a wilderness of nettles and fallen vines ('February', p.30-31).

'Pump. What pump?' George asked blankly.
'You must have a pump, mustn't you? Do you intend to carry buckets of water by hand to the bathroom?'
'But there isn't a bathroom,' said George.
'You will construct one...' ('February', p.32).

We have allowed Creon to order from Athens a square porcelain shower tray and wash-hand-basin with a wonderful swiveling tap, and a gleaming white toilet bowl whose tank is labeled 'The Best Niagara'.
    Unfortunately, there seems to have been a mishearing somewhere of the instructions that George, in his not-very-good Greek, gave to Dinos - with the result that we have not one flush toilet, which would be rare enough in this part of the world, but two. One is inside the house and one is outside, and both have been tiled with imported German tiles costing four drachmas apiece. We dare not count them. And as they are firmly cemented into the walls we cannot very well ask Dinos to remove them.
    The team of workmen under Dinos - the youngest of whom is aged about seven - have also been engaged in fixing a huge galvanized water-tank to the back wall of the tank about thirty feet above the level of the cistern; this is the key to the hydrocloacic system which is to make our house the envy of the island.
    George is a little nervous about this too, since he has discovered that the tank has a capacity of one cubic meter and that he, as the man of the house, will be expected to pump by hand one ton of water up those curling pipes every time the tank needs filling. The pump is a Heath Robinson device, most cheerfully blue ('March', p.45-46).

With books piled high on every window-ledge we are rich again, and there are other things in the crates too: forgotten nursery toys that the children greet with queer little grunts of wonder, unable quite to believe that this treasure is their own; a few good pieces of silver salvaged from the sale of our worldly goods; odd lengths of material apparently packed to fill in corners; concert programmes, documents, letters, photographs, newspaper clippings - what george calls the portable attic. Nostalgic stuff. And two stiff-collared city shirts with a selection of bow ties which we examine with awe ('April', p.63).

Even in its nakedness (the studio) is a lovely room, long and low-ceilinged, which because of its five arched windows seems to be mostly air...there is no sky in the five windows, but flights of neglected stone stairs leap up out of the lanes all about: from this strange room they might ascend to heaven. Mule-trains descend, bearing mountain brushwood, water-tanks, planks of pale new wood; two children climb up slowly, hand in hand, and tun on the stair to look into the room...you feel that you only have to blink your eyes once and the hooves of the mules will be lifting delicately over the window-sill, and the children beside you, touching your hand.
    The disadvantage of the room as a workroom is this very airiness. One had not realised - and I suppose one is deliberately blind to disadvantages when one wants something very much - that there were quite so many houses overlooking ours. Twenty windows round are private boxes filled with unabashed women and children, who jostle each other in their eagerness too see the spectacle of George seated at his typewriter. The terrace opening off the studio might as well be a public stage - and there go all my plans for nude sunbathing ('May', p.79-80).

(In the summer mornings) my own children are clattering about in the bathroom and the kitchen or finishing off neglected homework. Sitting by the window feeding the baby I can hear the rhythmic oiled thud-thud-thud of the pump handle and high above my head the heavy jets of water clanging into the tank. George pumps water every morning for fifteen minutes, stripped to the waist - I suspect so that he can better admire his developing shoulder muscles in the small mirror that hangs on the wall facing the pump ('June', p.101).

Outside in the garden the sun strikes sharp as a sword; it is only early in the morning that I can put the baby out under the splinted and bandaged lemon-tree, where he lies browning in his basket like a joint in the oven. The plums are lost to us, but the vines are hung with tight little bunches of grapes like tiny clusters of green beads, and I can cut basketsful of tender leaves to make dolmahdes. The mint and parsley are standing high and strong, the geraniums have burst into lolly-pink bouquets, very stiff and Victorian among the round green leaves, and the succulents that I planted before we moved house are beginning to creep over the wall.
    Inside the kitchen it is dark and cool; one is glad of thick stone walls, smooth stone floors that are glassy and cold to the touch of bare feet, the damp, ribbed water-jars where the ferns are beginning to twine ('June', p.120-121).

The nights are velvet. We have moved our mattresses and the children's up to the top-floor terrace, and there, under the great purple night al prodigal with stars, we sleep, or do not sleep, wish on each meteor trailing light across the sky, lean on the parapet watching the dark sea, the pale houses, smoke endless cigarettes, talk in whispers, listen to the snores and restless turnings and stirrings and murmurs from other terraces where other human beings are lying on their mattresses sleeping or not sleeping under the stars ('July', p.144).

One is becoming worried also about the level in the storage cistern under the floor. Perhaps it is not as capacious as socrates had indicated. And of what use our shower room and sanitary toilet arrangements if there is no water to pump into the tank? Cassandra still refuses to use water from the well outside for domestic purposes on the grounds that it is brackish, full of minerals, and too heavy. Uncharitably I suspect she is enchanted with water running from a tap and feels she might loose caste by going out with a bucket and rope like the other women.
    For the time being we are continuing to take showers everyday - a luxury that consoles us for other shortcomings  - and the toilets still whoosh away in a grand crescendo. It must be the queerest sound in an island night. All the lanes of the town are pervaded by a stench that rises above the jasmine and gardenias. Obviously everybody else is feeling the want of water too ('August', p.156).

the square
 

(The house) occupies one side of a small cobbled square, in the centre of which is a well of rather brackish water reputed never to run dry. The square is typical. The side opposite the house is composed of a high stone wall in a bad state of repair, behind which lies the partly cultivated garden where the donkeys of Dionyssos the dustman are stabled. On the right is a low building of a charming hexagonal shape that may have once been a tavern or store. Now it is unoccupied, and rather melancholy with its paintless shutters closed and its splotched and peeling walls sprouting long trails of caper flowers among the scrawled legends of village children's play. The left side of the square is occupied by the abandoned lower floor of a house whose tops stories evidently fell-in many years ago: it is used as a chicken-run, garbage-dump, and wash-line area for its neighboring house, a pretty place where tubs of flowers line the courtyard and bunches of oranges hang over the wall ('February', p.27-28).

Outside our windows the women come early to the well; often I hear them chattering before Booli (Jason) lets go with his first hungry wail of the day. Shrill, shrill the morning voices of the women above the lovely hollow clank and gurgle that is well music. Already they are agitated, querulous, quick to give way to exasperation - menless women who come to the well in their think nightgowns and slippers and with their hair upbraided, for there is no one to see them. The howls and shrieks of their children, bird-early risers also, punctuate the gabble of gossip, the spurts of laughter, the quarrels ('June', p.101).

Now one winces if a piece of plaster falls, and speaks in a very tight controlled voice to the children playing in the square outside. Since we have come to live here the square has become the favourite playing area for a mile around. For games of chase our front door is 'home': the fresh paint is already scored and scratched, the whitewash is kicked off in patches, and there are many legends written in chalk and pencil to the height of small stretched arms - the names and arrows and accusations and stick-men which form the incomprehensible graffiti of the very young ('June', p.108).

lifestyle
 

In the rooms where we live while we get our own house in order we have no other heating than a three-legged tin filled with charcoal embers - very Greek. We huddle over it, planning ceramic stoves and Turkish copper braziers for next winter, when we shall be settled, oh so comfortably, with our own house and good warm cloths for everyone and a reassuring sum of money in the bank. Thank God the delights of anticipation never pall on us: some of the very pleasantest hours I can ever remember have been spent crouching over the charcoal tin, planning courtyards, sailing-boats, making summer trips to islands yet unseen, even while I am engaged on unpicking the children's four-year-old coats and making them up again on the other side of the material so that they, at least, might look reasonably respectable ('March', p.39).

Here, in the house by the well, we launch ourselves into each day with the discipline and determination of a well-trained gun-crew who mean to blaze away as long as there is any ammunition left.
    Day begins at dawn, when the baby wakes, and from dawn until the time when the bigger children are finally buttoned into their smocks and pelting off towards the precipitous flight of stone steps that soars up to the Down school, duties are strictly divided. By the time the school bell has clanged the first warning I am already galloping off past St Constantine's with my market basket, while a tentative clicking is issuing from the studio where George has set up the workbench and typewriter.
    The studio is his action-post for all the morning ('May', p.79).

    'George, how the hell do you manage to work every day?'
    George grins. 'Three children to support' ('June', p.114-115).

There is no lifting of the heart when all you are asked to fight are bed-bugs and garbage cans and stinking drains. Even to keep even a semblance of order in such a big house is an all-day job. Upstairs and downstairs, to sweep, to pick up children's litter, to tidy, to ferret out dust...marketing making meals, cleaning up after them...the baby needs attention, the pot is boiling over, the kerosene stove has blown up in your face again, Shane can't find her clean socks, your hands are covered with charcoal and no water in the tap...
    A housewife is a housewife wherever she is - in the biggest city in the world or on a small Greek island. There is no escape. She must move always to the dreary recurring decimal of her rites ('June', p.110-111).

The whole domestic mechanism seems to run more easily in these long blue days. Marketing is a joy, meals are easy to prepare, clothes no problem, the children are happy and absorbed in their own rich, fantastic world of growing and learning and playing and living, the baby has settled into a model routine in spite of the neighbours, and there is always time from swimming in the afternoon - the daily never-failing magic of the gulf and the islets; and the clear green sea ('June', p.121).

It is too hot. From noon until four o'clock all life withdraws and the town shimmers in hot, white silence. We work through siesta because me must, stripped to shorts  and streaming rivulets of sweat. The children have finished school until September and live some life of their own: they run more wild than I like but I haven't the time for supervision. I have a theory with I dare not examine too closely, that if I neglect everything just a little I will manage to get most things almost done. The answer to the problem is to ask Cassandra (ie. Zoe) to come every day to look after the house and baby, but we can't really afford full-time help ('July', p.131).

We thirst all the time for grapes and melons and peaches, for handfuls of ice, for water in frosted glasses, and live on little else but fruits and salads. Cooked food is revolting, the very sight and smell of olive-oil is enough to turn the stomach. The dog lies panting on the stone floor of the kitchen, covered with clusters of ticks like squelchy bunches of grapes; George does all he can to remove them but the animal has become an obscenity. There is a plague of wasps. From the garden comes a constant low-pitched humming; there are wasps crawling in the sugar bowl, wasps drowned in glasses of water, wasps caught in the sweaty strands of one's hair. They have stripped all the grapes from the vine, which is now hung with festoons of flaccid, juiceless skins. I am only glad we bought the ice-box before the royalty statements came in. Cold food and cold showers keep us alive.
    George has to go for ice the moment he is out of bed. The ice factory is as inadequate as the town's electricity plant, and every morning the crowd gathers ar dawn, three hundred people who know full well that there will be no more than a hundred half-blocks of ice for distribution ('August', p.155).

And all the time in the frenzied daily round of cooking and cleaning and trying to maintain order, while the typewriter chatters along and the stove explodes or George staggers backwards and forwards from the well outside with buckets of water for the dying trees...('August', p.164).

They are real pomegranates, I tell myself. And you are real too, and so is George, and the children are real and the baby is real, and you all live in a real house on a real island where you lead a real life, which is uncomfortable sometimes but never dull ('September', p.184).

For how very different even our actual physical selves appear to be now. It is an aspect which one has not given much thought to - we looked shabby perhaps, but very fit and sun-tanned. Well, we are sun-tanned, but how scraggily thin we are, how nervous, and what an astonishing number of new lines there are, tension lines, worry lines, that are scored deeply and for all time.
    Our clothes, beaten for two years now on stones or rubbed to a pulp in flat tin tubs, have faded to anonymous colours, sun colours, pebble colours...and not a garment among us but has a variegated pattern of darns and patches or is held together by pins or bits of string. I am not complaining of this. One develops a curious snobbery about old clothes, and cassandra does launder them as beautifully as if they were fresh from the boxes and tissue-paper of Bond Street. But I had not realise how truly awful they are, nor how truly awful we must all look - George with his long, deeply scored face crowned by a semi-crewcut that has been done with the kitchen shears and looks it, me with my tattered shirts, ancient skirts, sandals that are reduced to one knotted strip of leather holding on a frayed sole, and my hair grown long, lank, and stiff with salt ('July', p.126-127).

No bank means that we must still go to the next island every time we need to draw money. It is a nuisance and, since one must stay there overnight, costly. This time it is my turn to go, and perhaps because I feel so low I buy a first-class ticket instead of a third-class one. Feeling pleasantly extravagant I climb up the ladder to the Sirina's deck and start up the broad flight of stairs that leads to the sun-deck and the luxurious first-class lounge. I have scarcely set my foot on the stairs before a white-jacketed steward blocks my way.
    'first-class up here,' he says curtly. At the same moment I catch a glimpse of myself in a long mirror. Without further protest, without showing him my ticket, I descend to the lower deck and the crates of hens and the old black-shawled women. Had I been the steward I doubt if i would have let me on the boat at all. I feel rather surprised in a detached sort of way, and at the same time quite pleased to have made clear to myself the reason for Chloe's gifts of face-creams and powders and cute little pots and jars marked 'Miracle-working', and  Dora's daily suggestions that I Do Something with my hair.
    Squashed on the deck between two old ladies and a trussed turkey i see again that strange, shaggy woman peering out furtively from the long mirror like a Thurber Animal surprised. It is a year since I have seen myself in a full-length mirror. I realise that another of life's milestones has been passed. I have Let Myself Go ('July', 140).

the waterfront agora
 

Just look down on the agora now. They haven't even heard of the invention of the wheel here yet ('April', p.66).

The morning gathering of villagers grouped behind the pickets gazed at me with their quick dark eyes, trying to suppress their interest and excitement, longing for drama. I felt a sudden wild elation and wanted to giggle. It was all so very gay and comic - the silly cannons, the oversize and too-gaudy flag, the bouzoukia band, the moustaches of the muleteers, the donkeys' decorated saddles and blue bead necklaces, the turkeys trussed for shipment somewhere...the rowing-boats approaching like walnut shells floating on lemonade, the cheerful derisive little toot of the Sirina's whistle...('April', p.57).

Around the pink arc of the port the pretty painted boats rode easily - a children's carousel - and the market stalls were heaped with plenty ('May', p.84).

The boats. In sheds and basements, in lanes and doorways, there are little boats lying upside down or on their sides in every state of repair. There are splintered oars, lengths of pine planking, peeled sticks, pots of paint, and the smell of hot pitch and petrol. A jet of blue flame illuminates the machine-shop where engines are being repaired, in each of the boat-building cellars a pale curved skeleton of ribs and templates is slowly taking shape, and under the cliff by the slaughter-house a gnome with an daze lovingly shapes a slim, straight tree-trunk into a mast. Even the small children are fashioning boats from bits of tin and pieces of wood. One can smell the long days coming, the long blue days to sail, to row, to drift, to fish, to make excursions along the cliffs and to the islands and to the gulf.
    On the way to the agora I come across George squatting beside an upturned hull and a can of hot tar. A wrinkled ancient stands by with a tolerant smile, watching George caulk seams. On George's face is an expression of infinitive love.
    'When the royalties come in,' he says, 'we'll buy a boat of our own.' But he spits three times carefully and crosses his fingers ('May', p. 94).

After supper, friday and her friends make a formal promenade around the arc of the port, from the museum, past the shops and stalls and restaurants, as far as the cannons above the cave and then back again. The girls walk in twos and threes and fours, tenderly linked with soft arms clasped around each flowery waist, and each cascade of shining hair caught with a white ribbon or a guilt butterfly. The gymnasium boys are out promenading too, but walking very slow and lordy, swinging their key-chains and kombollois, each with a cyprus badge in his lapel and his gold-braided cap set straight above his eyes: only occasionally do they goose each other or deftly hook a foot across so that the next one goes sprawling.
    All the more mature citizens are parading in groups, family groups almost as formal as the photographs on their walls. The matrons wear coats and skirts and high heels and carry patent leather purses which they clasp against their comfortable stomachs. The children are clean and well dressed and the little girls have huge starched bows perched on their heads. There is a purpose to this evening promenade, of course, apart from the pleasure of idly strolling through the mild and pleasant air in one's best clothes. The families with adult or maturing sons have their eyes on the girls. The mothers of daughters are watching the young men. This is the inspection paddock ('June', p.103-104).

The cafe tables are all ranked along the waterfront by the sea, blocks of white plastic tablecloths or checked gingham ones, arranged in rows under loops of naked electric light bulbs. The restaurants are gay in new paint, bright and open. From Johnny Lulu's comes the scritch and wail of a bouzouki record and in a cleared space between the tables some young men in blue jerseys are dancing the slow, controlled, balancing dance of the island, with their knees pressed tightly inwards and their trouser legs twitched together delicately with two fingers. Slow, slavish, monotonous the dance; the absorbed faces of the young men never look up; their protruding bottoms jerk spasmodically like nauch girls' to the spasmodic snapping of their outstretched fingers. Bottom, crutch, feet, moving to a slow, secret, private rhythm...
    Between the open resteraunts and the tables by the sea the evening promenade passes and repasses, formally respectable.
    Here on the waterfront there is always company. It is easy to join a group around a plastic tablecloth and a flask of wine, and sit for hours, gossiping, watching the evening promenade go by, conscious that one's skin is still salty and one's hair is still damp from swimming, that one's limbs are relaxed, that one is not really attentive at all. Chitter, chatter, chitter, the conversation spurts and falls and chitters on again, idle, derisive, malicious - summer talk...Chitter, chatter, chitter...and outside the brilliant circle of the electric globe, the dark water laps and laps with the soft swish of silk and the night presses down around the town, warm and close like a cloak, soft as velvet, heavy with salt and the scent of the white flowers ('June', p.121-122).

Warm, mad and wonderful the nights, wearing the soft bloom of purple grapes. The water lapping dark, and a huge mad moon extinguishing behind the sharp mountain edges like every dream one ever had ('July', p.128).

The waterfront is a sea of coffee-tables, bobbing gaily with young women in tight pants and young men in beards with tight pants, and interesting-looking people of uncertain age and sex who wear their hair smartly jagged and carry artists' portfolios. A babble of foreign tongues rises and explode in shrieks of laughter.
    In the little jewel-green scoop of harbour there are yachts at anchor now, sleek, beautiful, expensive toys with tall masts...('August', p.147).

How good it was too see the waterfront normal again, with the market caiques warping in, and a late homing wine boat unloading blue casks. The fruit-stalls all out, heaped with black and green grapes, with pomegranates, with the first oranges and tangerines - small, acid, green globes that should be still on the trees. All the housewives shopping; all the coffee-houses with a table or two outside ('October', p.190).

katsikas' bar
 

Katsikas' Bar is six deal tables at the back of Antony and Nick Katsikas' grocery store at the end of the cobbled waterfront by the Poseidon Hotel, and it is here that we usually gather at midday among the flour-sacks and oil-jars and painted tin water-tanks and strings of onions and soft white festoons of cotton-waste: a sort of social club evolved from the necessity to relieve the boredom of an island winter ('February', p.15). Sitting among the bean-sacks in an island grocery store, we have become very fond of one another...('February', p.19). Today the group was confined to our four intimate friends, all drinking wine at the green scratched table in the corner by the kerosene drums, all of us surrounded by our own market baskets, oil flasks, and wicker jars filled either with wine from Attica or with kerosene for the cheap little explosive stoves we cook on...Beyond the table, seen surrealistically through bundles of garden rakes and an organ-pipe arrangement of ecclesiastical wax candles, there was a donkey-train jingling along, two crimson caiques unloading vegetables on to straw mats spread along the quay, a coloured kite tugging the sky above the old cannons on the headland. On the other side of the smooth spread of water that lies between our island and the mainland, a thick crust of snow swept down through the dark pine forests to the sea ('February', p.20-21).

But mostly we talk, individually, severally, and at last all together, hurling and snatching at creeds, doctrines, ideas, ranging through space and time like erratic meteorites rushing on in the full spate of our ignorance as to either our origins or destinations, until at last we come to the blazing point of exhaustion ('March', p.40).

Inevitably we all meet again, and yet again. We are endlessly meeting...the same people over and over again, endlessly meeting...Within the group there is fluctuation, but the plastic tablecloth is eternal, the cold stuffed tomatoes or the cold fish congealing on the plate, the scarred, evil, scrofulous cats scavenging around one's feet, the carafe of pale yellow wine replenished again and again, the eternal conversation. Always the same conversation, yesterday, today, tomorrow, the same smart verbal catch-ball with obscure poets and philosophers, the same freudian terms, the same 'frank' piggery, the same little shafts of malice and spite, the same derisive laughter ('July', p.128).

Our position among the other expatriate protestants who are also seeking to take their lives back into their own hands is a curious one. In a particular way, we are unique. By them we are regarded as being successful. We own a house, support a family, and have books actually published. But also, to them, we embody that very dull normaility from which they are all fleeing. We are respectable revolutionaries, often heavy with responsibilities, harassed by children, and apparently less concerned with the state of our psyches than with the state of our drains ('June', p.112).

It has become an obsession with both of us to try and avoid that tainted area of the waterfront with its traps of tables and wine flasks, where still the shafts of spite and envy and malice break and splinter, and still under the loops of naked bulbs the dislocated psyches creak and crack, the obscure philosophers are trotted out, the negligent poems never completed, the revolutionary paintings never begun, and the interminable verbal catch-ball with esoteric phrases about linear values and plastic form that inflame George to a white-heat of fury ('August', p.163).

acceptance
 

They seem to be genuinely pleased that we have brought a house on their island. Perhaps this matter of the house, and the fact that our children go to school with theirs, makes us closer to them, more understandable ('February', p.23).

Both (Martin) and Shane seem to be loved quite genuinely by the islanders: it occurred to me again that in Greece children are one's best insurance policy ('March', p.38).

The neighbours run in and out all day, chattering and laughing, bringing little bowls of soup and sticky sweets and bunches of flowers and ikons and amulets. Each of them spits three times as she crosses the threshold to ward off the Evil Eye from my room, but for the most part they do it rather furtively, with their heads turned away from me ('April', p.59).

'Why don't you tell the old faggots to mind their own bloody business!' George shouts down to me. He doesn't get any more sleep than I do - and he is trying desperately to meet a publication date.
    'It's no use telling them to mind their own business,' I yell back in exasperation. 'The baby is their business. He's the whole damn town's business! I'm trying to educate them!'
    'Well, do you think you could do it more quietly? Or even just give in?'
    I'm damned if I'll give in, even though the education programme seems to be working in reverse. I feed Shane with cunning propaganda to disseminate among the neighbouring houses. Shane returns with gruesome stories...('May', p.82).

Nor had one realised quite how Up the Down School is. It rears above our tiled oriental roof so close that you can almost follow the lessons in progress, and during breaks the entire two hundred children line the iron railings, urging a very important Martin and Shane to shout messages down to us. If the neighbours windows are the private boxes the school is the gallery, and the gallery is vociferous with enthusiasm...Perhaps they will all get used to us in time ('May', p.80).

swimming
 

A fig-tree marks the point where the cliff path turns and plummets down towards the sea. Then, at the bottom of the path, there are twenty descending stairs, three rock platforms cemented over to make sun-baking levels, an arching cave roof with a jagged hole where the green light slips and slides mysteriously in the sea-smelling purple, an iron ladder for the timorous, and a long, low rock crooked slightly, like a scaly finger around the deep-plunging shelf where we swim ('May', p.89).

The sun streamed heat over the shelf where we lay watching (the children), their arrow-straight naked bodies hurtling from the cave lip thirty feet down into the water. The sea was so much like glass that the explosive jets if their impacts were somehow surprising, as though one had expected the surface to shiver and splinter into fragments instead. Through the churn we could see them wavering down and down along the spink shelf and curving up again to the air and the sun - the thin scrawl of Martin's legs threshing, the slowly closing fan of Shane's glinting hair. They broke the surface pearled and gasping, and scrambled out on the rocks to climb up to the cave roof and leap again and again ('May', p.90).

We are swimming every day. One's mouth has a permanent salty taste, one's skin is all prickles and goose-shivers as the first fiery coat of sunburn settles into a pale but authentic tan that defines the brief white triangles left by bathing suits ('May', p.94-95).

Here, spread starwise on the shining cliffs above the shining sea, these seem treasonable thoughts. The warm rock is actual, the long-legged ant exploring a drop of spilt suntan lotion, the gull wheeling a confidant white arc above the shimmering islets, the brown children tumbling in the water, the baby whiffling uncomprehendingly under its improvised awning ('May', p.96).

And after all we go on swimming at the cave. Even with the hideous (shark) net it is still the most beautiful place, and for us, who never have more than an hour or so free, it is the only place we can reach conveniently and still have time to swim ('June', p.117).

More and more often we swim very early in the morning or very late at night. before the sun is fairly up, and the world is clean and sparkling (and before Dionyssos has dumped his garbage), we take the children, the baby in his basket, a water-melon, a loaf of fresh bread, and we make breakfast at the cave. At this hour of the day nobody else is ever there. or at night with Sean and Lola we share crab sandwiches and a flask of red wine, all sprawled companionably in the dark on a sunbathing platform that still holds the day's heat...At night the water slides over your body warm and silk, a mysterious element, unresistant, flowing, yet incredibly buoyant. In the dark you slip through it, unquestionably accepting the night's mood of grace and silence, a little drugged with wine, a little spellbound with the night, your body mysterious and pale and silent in the mysterious water, and at your slowly moving feet and hands streaming trails of phodpheresence, like streaming trails of stars. Still streaming stars you climb the dark ladder to the dark rock, shaking showers of stars from your very finger-tips, most marvelously and mysteriously renewed and whole again ('July', p.132-133).

    'It's too hot to sleep,' says George. "let's go and swim.'
    together we tiptoe out of the dark house, through the lanes where the cats stalk, along the sleeping waterfront, and take the cliff path until we come to the fig-tree. Silently we descend to the dark water, silently leave our pale, crumpled heap of clothes, silently slip into the wet black silk where the briny stars wake at our movement and catch and cling and stream slow trails from our nakedness, from breast and foot and finger-tip that move again with wonder and delight, made marvelous by the night and the sea ('July', p. 144).

But how the sea changes and lives with a life of its own! The yachts are leaping at their anchorage. The milky gulf is turned capricious, mood indigo now with Poseidon's wild blue horses leaping and fretting and tossing their manes of streaming white. The cave is Cavern perilous. Here the water lifts in transparent viridian peaks that hurl right over the platform, here it rushes running and sucking down the spink shelf where the sea-urchins cling, here it churns into think yellow froth like whipped cream. There is a mad exhilaration in swimming in such wild water. You are flung high, buffeted, lifted, tossed. Now you are fighting up through foam, with bursting lungs and aching limbs: now above you a transparent peak hummocks and lifts a waving white body like a strange, soft starfish caught in the sun-mesh; now it is yourself hurled high...and now, now, for a delirious second, the power rears beneath you, your hair is streaming in the streaming mane, and gloriously you are riding the wild wild horse of Poseidon ('August', p. 157).

celebrations
 

Christ is risen. The little lambs have been slaughtered, the fireworks exploded, the red eggs eaten, the tall, white candles burnt out, the paper lanterns out away. The flowery biers that bore Christ's bleeding body through moonlit lanes and along cliff-paths by the sea are again relegated to upper church galleries to gather dust among cracked ikons and sacks containing very old skulls and thigh bones ('May', p.77).

For the Feast of the Virgin Mary, on the fifteenth of August, thousands of pilgrims come to the island. There is no accommodation left. They sleep the night in the courtyard of the monastery, under the patch of pines on the cliff above the cave, and even around the cave itself, with blankets and foodstuffs spread out on the ledges ('August', p.156).

The wine boats are going out. All the waterfront is ranked with oak barrels, washed and drying in the sun.
    The smell of the resin is overpowering. The outgoing caiques are laden to their marks with barrels, and each barrel carries a sprig of bay-leaves in its bung - it is curious and lovely, as though each caique had sprouted leaves from its planks.
    Each day there is a little ceremony as a priest blesses each boat in turn as the empty barrels are loaded aboard, bidding it bring back good wine. The ritual, with its ancient implications, is somehow oddly reassuring ('August', p.166).

From the village the clear, bright sound of a single bell. A passing bell again. In these last few weeks the passing bell has rung often. The old people die in the resurrection of the year, the old grey women and the old brown men who whiffled and snickered on their doorsteps waiting for the sun to come again; not a church doorway that has not revealed the black box, the sharp, aged profile pointed to the ceiling and clay-coloured against a formal frieze of grieving women.
    Here the dead are not hidden away, but carried through the lanes in open coffins for everyone to see...it is death, nothing more - an event in life...('May', p.90-91).

discovery
 

One should have guessed what was happening from the number of houses reconditioned or in the process of reconditioning, from the bright new paint on the waterfront shops and the cafe black-boards painted laboriously printed out in misspelt English and French as well as Greek, from the numbers of people - foreign as well as Athenian - who have been making inquiries about the possibility of purchasing houses.
    For now it is apparent that the yearly passage of the smart, penniless, immoral, clever young people - Creon's 'bums and perverts' - has had its inevitable effect. This beautiful port is to suffer the fate of so many little Mediterranean ports 'discovered' by the creative poor. here, where the merchant princes lived like feudal lords, where legends and heroes were bred, and where at last the great houses sank down into the stones, is happening the last renaissance, the last sad renaissance of all. After the artists come the people with the leisure and the money and the taste to be amused by artists, and the people with big yachts and big bank accounts who send the cost of living so high that the poor artists are forced to move on and discover another little port. We are watching the island in process of becoming chic ('August', p.148).