We took the steep, zigzag road up to Dodona, greenest, most ancient and most remote of Greek oracles. Shepherds huddled under shaggy fleeces – some dyed saffron, some blanched – knees to chin to keep the warmth in. Long white crooks posted question marks in the cold air. Dodona’s ancient priests were said never to wash their feet. Greek versifying may well have begun with oracular pronouncements; not, however, with those at Dodona. The rustling leaves of its sacred oak tree, duly interpreted by those chthonic priests, yielded divine responses to pilgrims’ questions. One inquiry that survives, inscribed on a lead tablet, asked whether a man’s current wife would give him children; another whether it was a good idea to keep sheep. Dodona was still a numinous site, but it offered no rustling hint as to which of the isles of Greece we should visit.
We drove south, via the paramount oracular site, at rug-draped Delphi, to Athens. We walked down Stadiou Street and tried to decipher what was on at the cinema on the façade of which was advertised, in capital letters, NTONALNT PTAK. The image of Donald Duck, on a billboard lower down, supplied a crib.
A travel agent called Thalia Taga had been recommended, in a recent Sunday Times article by Dilys Powell, the film critic and Hellenophile. Playing the petty impostor, I allowed Thalia to believe that Dilys was known to me personally. As it turned out, eighteen months later I was Ms Powell’s junior colleague on the Sunday Times, when I became a fortnightly fiction reviewer under the distant aegis of Dilys’s husband, Leonard Russell, and the immediate tutelage of Jack Lambert, whose handwriting and editorial tact equalled Guy Ramsey’s.
Thalia Taga sent out for coffee for us and sweets for the children. She was advising us to go to Skiathos, when the telephone rang. The man at the other end was an ex-Minister of Marine, Artemis Denaxas. He owned most of a remote Cycladic island called Ios. Like Ali Pasha, Denaxas had a soft spot for the English. He wanted us to discover Ios before the French and the Germans. It was, Thalia promised, ‘a sign’. If we sailed to Ios, Denaxas would come soon and, meanwhile, she would ensure that he sent word that we were to be well received. As guileless as Croesus, when he took Delphi’s word for it that, by crossing the Ilissus, he would ‘destroy a great empire’ and never considered the grammatical duplicity which allowed that it might be his own, we relied on the benign patronage of the unseen Denaxas.
Viewed at a distance, Greece had seemed to be a small, jagged adjunct to the Balkans. Once there, it stretched in all directions. Lacking more specific or alluring advice, we honoured Thalia’s oracle. On the following day, we went down to Piraeus, garaged the Vanguard and, with most of our belongings, boarded an obsolete English Channel ferry, built on the Clyde, now renamed the Despina. A fourteen-hour trip would deposit us, between three and four in the morning, at Ios. Before we had left the placid waters of Piraeus, the shrilling of the hooter cued old ladies in black to be neatly sick into grey cardboard boxes.
As we sailed under the lee of Poseidon’s temple at Sounion, where Byron felt entitled to carve his name, in big letters, two bearded priests, in their tall black hats, were standing by the rail in soft conspiracy with two army officers. Five years later, the army – backed by the church – would send young King Paul and his hated German mother Frederika, into exile and impose an officious tyranny on the country. We were uneasily asleep in our tight, brown, airless prote thesis cabin when the cry came, ‘Ios, Ios!’
We took our possessions up on deck and stared into the lapping darkness. Despina’s lights glistened on toothy rocks. A red-eyed beacon blinked on a metal tripod. Despina turned and slid into the black goal of Ios bay. Below us, the breathing glow of cigarettes spotted the purple night. Invisible oarsmen were pulling out to meet the vapore as her anchor was unravelled into the Guinness-dark sea. The oarsmen scrambled up the rope ladder and grabbed our things, like helpful pirates. We were the only foreigners to disembark. Beetle carried Sarah down to the bobbing boat; and I carried Paul. Hands reached up and took us and our things into the boat. On shore, no one had heard of us. We put up in the only hotel in the harbour, the xenodocheio Denaxas, which was named in honour of ‘ho plousios’, the rich man, perhaps because he or one his ancestors had fathered the hostelry’s founder.
The next morning, Beetle’s birthday, we looked up through the clear air at the starch-white village, high-shelved cubes topped by the church tower, 150 metres up the zigzag path with its up-and-down traffic of doleful, neatrumped donkeys. There were no wheeled vehicles, no paved roads. Beetle was tired and wanted somewhere, anywhere, to unpack, get food for the children, set up Sarah’s portable cot and be immune to the inquisitive stares of the islanders. More than anything, I wanted to resume work on Lindmann.
At breakfast (coffee, bread, vitam and honey), we were approached by a French-speaking Romanian who promised to find us a house. If it was a trap, I was glad to fall into it. He led us to a three-roomed spiti – the modern Greek for house comes from the Latin word hospitium – in the campo, the wide valley behind a long sandy beach adjacent to the harbour. There may have been other houses available. Some may even have had a bed more comfortable than a cotton palliasse, stuffed with straw, laid on five pliable planks on a rusty metal frame. Niko’s cottage had a kitchen, with table and chairs, and a single deck chair. There was a terrace in front of the spiti, with a concrete table under the metal frame for the summer’s vine. Too dispirited to care to traipse any further in the heat, we settled, as we often do, for the first plausible thing we came to. The rent was £2 a week. Judging from the Romanian’s expression when we agreed to it, we were being overcharged.
I walked back to the hotel where we had dumped our possessions. Donkeys stood, like vacant taxis, under a rusting placard which announced, in festering white capitals, that Ios was the site of HOMER’S TUMB (scholarship somewhat confirms the claim). As I came out with our heavy blue suitcases, one of the donkeymen limped over and took them from me. Before I could argue or ask the price, he was roping them onto Phryne, one of his two neat, blue-beaded donkeys. Yorgios Galatsios appointed himself our island cicerone and was not to be denied. He already knew where we intended to live. When we got there and I asked him how much he wanted for his welcome attention, he said, ‘Oti thelete seis’, whatever you want; a form of demanding generosity to which I became accustomed. The speed with which it was pouched suggested that five drachmae was too much; if so, it was not a great deal. The last thing I wanted was what the Greeks call fassaries, complications; they are a national sport, not infrequently a bloody one.
The islanders had their quarrels (loud voices cataracted down the jagged hill from the village), but their paucity and their isolation insured civility. If anything was lost, or dropped, it was always returned almost before anyone had time to look for it. The illusion that we were living in an idyll was sustained, by contrast, when we listened to the news broadcast, in very slow Special English, from the American airbase at Akrotiri in Cyprus. The announcer’s educational tone was at cruel odds with the stories that he measured out of assassinations, bombings and massacres. The last phase of the war in Algeria was reaching its bloody climax in the savage activities of the French ultras’ OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète). Its self-righteous thugs committed conspicuous atrocities, such as murdering victims, French ‘traitors’ and Algerian wounded, as they lay in hospital beds.
Niko’s cottage sat below a round, terraced hillock where, three decades later, the ancient city of Ios would be excavated. There was no electricity and no plumbing; the roof consisted of strips of bamboo, laced tightly together and laid across wooden beams, with a foot of rammed earth on top; our toilet was an earth-closet across a field. That one deckchair, reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s in his rooms in Whewell’s Court, was our only luxury, apart from the German radio, which we had detached before abandoning the car. One night, there was a thunder storm. The piercing rain drilled straight through the roof and into the middle of our three rooms, where Paul and Sarah slept. In the morning, the earth floor was badged with black pudd
les. Only the corners in which the children were sleeping remained dry. Local gods, whimsy might claim, are kinder than the almighty.
We drew water from the well next to the terrace. Simplicity was not as simple as all that: it required an acquired knack, a timely twitch of the rope, to tilt the tin bucket so that it took on its first gulp of water and then sank down to be filled. We had to be careful always to replace the plank lid on the well. I worked at Lindmann in the mornings, sitting under the empty grape vine. If the sun was very bright, I opened and dangled our big black British umbrella from the trellis. The work went well. Our landlord, Nikos, would come by and watch me typing. He had never seen a typewriter before. Paul and Sarah improvised toys from the roots and stones on the island’s floor. The beach was littered with fist-sized lumps of pumice, small change from the great explosion of the volcanic island of Santorini three or more millennia before. During our afternoons on the sand, we looked up from castling at the Kolynos-white church of Aghia Eirene, Saint Irene.
The islanders were poor; yet you never passed one without him giving you something, if only the flower from behind his ear. Panaiotis, the father of our landlord Nikos, came by each morning with a can of sheep’s milk. It had fresh hairs floating in it. Properly strained, it made delicious rice pudding. One day we met a handsome man holding a very young calf around his neck, a modern Moschophoros. He and his partner (perhaps his lover) were the island butchers. He promised to keep some sêkoti (liver) ya ta pethia, for the children. I hoped, like any squeamish humbug, that it would not be that of the calf he was carrying. Meanwhile, he offered a slab of cheddar cheese, the product of a dairy that ho plousios Denaxas had funded.
We did most of our shopping on the harbour. The kiosk in the centre of the quay sold ION chocolate and small plastic toys. Paul collected beer bottle tops. It was easy to be happy. A smiling, smelly lady ran the Shell concession, supplying fuel for the local caiques and the few yachts that put into Ios, and also sold more or less crisp Papadopoulos cream sandwich biscuits. Their name did not yet carry sinister overtones. The sea was full of fish, but Captain Adonis, who sat with his seldom empty glass on the quayside, was as deeply suspicious of Poseidon as any of his ancient ancestors. However calm the water, he could find good reason not to put to sea. The village postmaster, Michalis, who wore two pairs of glasses as improvised bifocals, doubled, in the late afternoon, as a more regularly daring fisherman.
Since no one spoke English, I matched my ancient Greek to what I was learning from my grammar and from the islanders. I had had the idea that we would spend some time in Greece and then go on to Israel. I bought a Hebrew textbook when we were in London, but I lacked the will to commit myself to its study. The alien script defeated me and the text, in translation, set no seed. I can envy those who master the mirror-reversed, vowel-free calligraphy, but Greece held and holds me captive; I have never felt any strong desire to escape. Greece became my Zion. In Athens once I had my hair cut and, since my demotic Greek was fairly good, the barber asked if I came from a Greek family. How else did I have so much black hair? I said, ‘Ebraios eimai’ (I am a Jew). He said, ‘Ellenes, Ebraoi, miadzouni’ (Greeks, Jews much the same thing). I said, ‘Isos’ (perhaps). Always proud, often debased, divided among themselves yet roped together by loyalties and antagonisms, ancient and modern, clever and foolish, Greeks and Jews are the enduring incarnation of Mediterranean duplicity, answering yes and no to the wide world’s invitation to abate their distinction.
Like Epirus, Ios bore traces of the centuries of the Tourkokratia; the Turkish occupation ended only in 1828. Many of the older men, like Niko’s father, wore Turkish-style baggy trousers. More than a few of them had called their fathers ‘effendi’. They smoked hookahs in the café under the eucalyptus trees in the village square, while their tethered donkeys nodded and nodded and never quite agreed. Life was hard and hardly different from the old days. The only fresh vegetable, apart from potatoes, was broad beans. When we asked the shopkeeper on the port whether he had any eggs, he almost always rolled his eyes to the heavens, the unspoken way of saying no. Yet when Easter came, everyone had celebratory red eggs to give us, ya ta pethia. In Greece, children are the best passport.
One of Heraclitus’s most frequently quoted apophthegms is ‘the road up and the road down are the same road’. The old Ephesian grouch can never have taken the steep path up to Ios village; it was nothing whatever like the same road down. The shops up there were better stocked than on the harbour. After we had been on the island for a few weeks, one of the shopkeepers asked us to his house for a meal. In his living room were the framed reproduction of two large paintings, of King Edward VII of England and Queen Alexandra. I tried to express to Yiorgos how touching it was to see such icons in a Greek house. He ducked his head forward and dropped his chin. The pictures had belonged to his parents. He had no idea who the ermined aliens were.
When we had eaten our dolmades, stuffed vine leaves, and our arnaki tou fournou, roast lamb, and thick lumps of yoghurt, Yiorgos disclosed the reason for our invitation. My Greek struggled with his, but I gathered that he wanted me to become his partner in the chicken business. It was common knowledge we had come to Ios because we were friends of ho plousios, the rich man, Artemis Denaxas whose absent presence lorded it over the island. Yorgios imagined that we too must be rich.
Exorbitantly grateful for lunch, I heard myself agree to lend him several thousand drachmae, but I declined to become a poultry farmer. Yiorgos proposed to repay me, siga, siga, bit by bit. The first bit was a large tin of island honey. When we poured some out to sweeten our daily rice pudding, it was thick and dark brown and appeared to contain a large number of plump raisins. Closer analysis revealed them to be candied bluebottles. Next day, we again took the road up. Yiorgos shrugged, took the tin back and gave us another. We retrieved the rest of my loan, siga, siga indeed, in tinned milk and corned beef.
Yellow daisies and black-eyed, blood-banded poppies were soon springing from the fertile roof of Niko’s cottage. A fig tree displayed green-nailed buds. The arthritic grapevine sprang to life and began to mount the trellis over the stone table where I was finishing my novel. On the long culminating day, I typed thirty pages in a frenzy of what I could believe was a gift from the local muse. Lindmann’s stream of consciousness seemed to converge and flood with my own. I have never been a practising believer in inspiration but, as I hammered out those climactic pages, I might have been taking dictation. At last, I was writing as a man should, with no thought of the market or of the charm of what was appearing on the page. I said what I felt had to be said. I had no rivals; I cared nothing for what any critic might think. The phantoms of Alan Maclean and Auntie Marge might shake their heads, like some bicephalic crone, but I was free of fettering discretion.
As Easter approached, Artemis Denaxas, ho plousios himself, arrived on the island. The yachting season was beginning and it pleased him to parade, with his dogs Dick and Rover, on the Ios dockside. He had a white carefully upturned moustache. His uniform as honorary admiral of Ios consisted of white trousers, a blue blazer with gilt buttons and a flat cap. He greeted us warmly and invited us to lunch at his residence, which stood on a green hill above the harbour. We had been eating fried eggs and koukia for many weeks and were happily seduced by a generous lunch, wine from Santorini (of which Kiria Denaxas was a native) and cushioned chairs.
When Sarah grew restive, Mrs Denaxas opened the doors to the stone-flagged terrace adjoining the dining room. It had a low wall, she said, so the children would be perfectly safe playing out there. As Denaxas was pouring glasses of Metaxa cognac, Sarah climbed onto the white wall and then, suddenly, she was not there any more. Mrs Denaxas said, ‘She’s gone!’ We ran out and looked over the wall. There was a drop of three or four metres. Sarah lay on top of the only green bush. There were large stones on either side of it. She was frightened but not badly hurt. Luck, it seemed, was on our side.
London was calling: my film was going to be shot; the di
rector who would take all the credit needed my help. There was a certain lure in the news, which came in a telegram from my mother, that The Graduate Wife had had very good reviews, especially from Jack Davenport in The Observer. The ranks of Tuscany were, it seemed, opening their arms to me. A few days later, we made an excursion to Mykonos to meet Tom Maschler and his latest lady. I saw that the woman ahead of us as we disembarked from the ferry had a copy of The Observer in her wicker basket. I asked if I might have a look at it and explained why. She handed it to me, saying ‘Don’t apologise. We know very well how it is.’ She was Elaine Steinbeck. The author of The Grapes of Wrath gave me a bleak smile, but had no appetite for writerly comradeship. Jack Davenport said that I wrote the best dialogue he had read in many years; I should try my hand at a play.
Tom’s companion, Martha Crewe, had left her two children in London and had no wish to talk to ours. Tom and she left the hotel into which he had booked us and we scarcely saw them again, except at a distance on a trip to the island of Delos, where the statue of a slave dealer stands in for Apollo. Mykonos was famous, in those days, for the ‘king of pantalonia’, a tailor who promised to cut, fit and complete women’s trousers, from a choice of bright materials, in twenty-four hours. On a secluded beach, we saw Soraya, the ex-empress of Iran, who had failed to give the Shah the son he needed as his successor. Soraya was with a female companion and seemed heavy with the child she had never had.
Several weeks before we were due to leave Ios, I asked Yiorgos Galatsios, whether any of the abandoned farmhouses was for sale. He came back with a list of properties. Nudging my heels against Phryne’s flanks, I went house-hunting. The island was much bigger than we knew and there were many abandoned, often seductive properties. There were many sellers, it seemed, and no buyers. When I asked for a price, it was often very little, at first. As soon as the owner knew of our interest, the price went up. If I winced and agreed the new one, it went up again. The dream of living in wonderland receded every time we approached it. On a visit to the post office, Michalis looked over his two pairs of glasses and handed us a letter which announced that a survey of the property at Marks Tey had shown structural defects that made it impossible for the bank to grant us a mortgage. It was a smaller disappointment to me than the prospect of leaving Ios without a small plot to call our own.
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