First Christmas in Greece

Theologos, 1981

 

 

It may just be the deceptive haze of pleasant memory, but I don’t recall it raining at all in the first few months of my stay. Warm autumn days shortened and became chillier and I know I bought a new, thick jumper for the evenings but as November turned to December, the sky stayed the same sharp blue and the sun still shone brightly. So it was a surprise to realize that Christmas was upon us and even more so because there was no sign in the shops until around December 10th of anything in the way of decorations. None of that frantic shopping for presents, no urgent messages from the Post Office about last card-posting dates approaching, no huge tins of special biscuits for sale and no sign, as far as I could tell, of pudding or cake making. Pavlos put the tree up in his school around December the fifteenth and even then it was a straggly affair hung with a few baubles, some strands of cotton wool to give a snow effect and stuck in a corner of the corridor. Vasso was more enthusiastic about decorations but she had eschewed a traditional fir tree in favour of some painted branches strung with red ribbons. She told me it was much more modern and, importantly for her, artistic. I think Despina might have had a small pine and candle table decoration on her desk, but really she was far too preoccupied with her husband’s misdeeds and her growing belly to think about the festive season. 

Although we complain about the run-up to Christmas becoming too commercial in Britain, it does serve a purpose, doesn’t it? It cheers you up during the damp dark winter afternoons and the foggy evenings to plan what you’re going to eat and drink in two months’ time, make list of intended gifts and buy fuchsia tinsel garlands. Here it just didn’t seem so necessary; there was no climatic misery to be cheered out of.

Christmas Day 1981 dawned as bright and blue as a May morning in England. Pavlos, Vasso and Despina had all individually invited me to spend the day with them and their respective families, but there was no way that Thanasis was going to let me spend Christmas with anyone other than him.

Actually, there was a sign that this was a special day; Thanasis walked somewhere. Then, as now, he was almost inseparable from his beloved car. But on Christmas Day he surprised me by walking with me to the central telephone bureau so that I could make a call to my parents in Croydon. I was feeling homesick, despite the blue skies and the prospect of two weeks rest from the teaching that I was making such heavy weather of. It wasn’t easy to call home in those days. You had to go to this central bureau place, stand in line to get a number and then wait until your numbered booth was free. Your call would be timed and then you would have to go back and stand in a queue again to pay for the minutes you had spoken. Getting a connection was less than simple too. The phones were all analogue, with large dials; this was years before we even knew the word digital in connection with technology and you were lucky if you got beyond dialling the first zero before being cut off and having to start again. On Christmas Day the lines were busier than ever and I couldn’t get through so, eventually, we gave up and Thanasis said I could try again later from his parents’ house. We walked down through the deserted town and out to the small suburb where they lived. Thinking about it now, the most likely explanation for all this walking on Thanasis’ part was that he had lent his car to his brother so that Laki could impress a new girlfriend. But still, it was nice to wander together through the empty streets and out of town towards the mountains.

 

We had roast pigeon for lunch that day. That was a first for me and I don’t remember actually eating it. I had, through necessity, become adept at looking as if I was eating and drinking a lot while managing to avoid things I didn’t want, like full glasses of warm evaporated milk for example. I heaped salad, potatoes and spinach pie onto my plate and ate that whilst appearing to eat pigeon. I can’t remember what I did with it, but I guess I hid it beneath the cabbage salad whilst distracting everyone with my broken Greek. That still makes people laugh.

Nikos and Penelope, Laki and Marianthi and Thanasis of course were all so kind but I still couldn’t help feeling homesick. It was the first Christmas I had ever spent apart from my mum and dad and knowing that they would be missing me too made it even worse. I took Thanasis up on his offer to phone home from there and when I got through to my parents I had to turn away from everyone as I could feel tears welling up. When I had finished my call I straightened up, gathered myself as quickly as possible and turned back, ready to put a brave face on things to see the whole family crying, empathizing with my sadness. 

Anyway, I think that was the last time that I saw Thanasis walk anywhere as on Boxing Day we packed up a few clothes and whizzed off in his car to go to and stay with his friend in Theologos, about an hour’s drive along the so-called National Road (actually just a road that was a little bit wider than the others in those days).

Theologos then was just a fishing village. You turned off the main road and approached, as you do now, through hills of pine and olive trees and, at the top of a hill, you catch a glimpse of a glimmering bay. By the way, it might interest you to know that my very first memory is of such a sight. I must have been about two and a half when we holidayed in Tenby in South Wales and I can still recall crowning a hill while sitting on the top deck of a bus and seeing a shining sea. They say your first memory reflects you or do they say it shapes you? Well, whatever it is that they say, I feel I can hold my head up high.

Thanasis’ friend is also called Thanasis. This could get confusing, couldn’t it? Since a few years later he was to baptize our first-born son, shall we just call him The Godfather?

We bumped over the stony path outside his house on the edge of a field, Thanasis sounded his horn to announce our arrival and out came a bald man who was almost completely circular, hailing us by waving a long pronged fork. Kiria Asimoula, also short and circular (but not bald) was at the door of the low, whitewashed cottage, wiping her hands on her apron, the glow of an open fire behind her. The Godfather’s father was known to everyone, including his son, as Uncle Mitsos and his mother was Kiria Asimoula. Kiria Asimoula managed to stay looking almost the same as she did then for the next thirty years. So that either means that she kept very young looking or that she looked older than her years then. You choose because I can’t decide.

I’d like to insert a little note here on the use of the title Kiria. It means Mrs but it’s used as a term of respect, along with the woman’s first name. If you’re addressing an older woman it would sound a little naked and rude to use just their first name. 

Uncle Mitsos had slaughtered a pig for Christmas and the long pronged fork was what he was using to turn over grilled pork steaks on the grill on his indoor fireplace. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much meat. Kiria Asimoula was squeezing lemons over a vast platter of chops and Uncle Mitsos, having greeted us warmly, had turned his attention to the ten or twelve steaks now cooking over the charcoal in the grate. What was unusual about this feast is that the meat was all there was. No salads, no pie, no yogurt and garlic dips. Just fresh grilled pork; salted, peppered, softened while warm with lemon juice and eaten off white china plates on a low table by the fire. 

Thanasis, the Godfather, various other friends and I all hit the nearby town of Atalanti that evening. My ideas of Christmas had already been turned upside down what with the pigeons, the pork and the lack of decorations but when we arrived at the ‘bouzoukadiko’ I really felt I was in a foreign land. Bouzoukadikos, named after the main instrument played there, are nightclubs where you go to drink and have your ears finished off by extremely loud Greek ballads and dance songs performed (at least in small provincial towns) very badly by a live band. This one was housed in what seemed to be an old soundproofed warehouse, done up with dark red carpets, flock wallpaper and peeling-off polystyrene ceiling tiles. There was no entry fee but the only thing you could order to drink was spirits by the bottle and these were extortionately priced. But that was apparently part of the whole thing; these were places where you went to show off how much money you could spend in one evening. You could order wildly expensive plates of rose petals to be chucked over the singers, you could order champagne for the singers or for your friends as they danced. The champagne is not expensive because of its quality, mind you. No-one actually drinks it as it’s the kind of stuff you win at a fair by chucking a wooden hoop over the bottle. The singers take a ceremonious sip from a glass proffered from the bottle, which has been popped open with much panache by a black-trousered, white-shirted waiter, nod a thanks to the paying customer, return the almost full glass to the tray and then carry on yelling their ballad. You could also order, for a vast sum of money, towers of plaster of Paris plates to be dramatically smashed as a gesture of appreciation for the emotive singing. The guest performers were a man and woman who seemed to me to have stepped from another planet; one where tight spangled shirts, long green satin dresses, make up plastered from baubled earring to baubled earring and very big hair for both were considered good taste. Everything about that evening wailed; the singers into their massive hand held mikes, the orchestra of drums, guitars, clarinets and bouzoukis behind them and me inside, thinking ‘Where am I? What am I doing here? I want to go down the pub in Croydon for a pint of beer, a packet of cheese and onion crisps and possibly a quiz.’

I don’t think I covered up my feelings very well. I seem to remember just sitting there and sulking and although I very rarely find myself in such nightclubs nowadays, if I do, I still sulk until it’s time to go home. But don’t take my word for it, go along if you’re ever in Greece. Other people love them. Just don’t ask me to join you. 

We stayed at Uncle Mitsos and Kiria Asimoula’s village cottage for several days, the nights spent sleeping in a bed covered, not with a blanket or a quilt, but with a vast, lead-weight, hand-threaded, bright orange, woollen rug. I’m surprised we made it through the night really, especially after the whisky/ bouzouki/ sulking night when we both just conked out. We could have been smothered by the rug and I, for one, wouldn’t have had the strength, or come to think of it, after hearing that singing, the will to push myself free of its weight. But we survived. I also survived my first experience of hole in the ground, outside loos. It wasn’t what you wanted to find when you stumbled out of bed feeling grim at five in the morning for a wee. You had to cross the yard and go to the outhouse and then hunt around for the paper in the dark, only to find it was balanced on a tiny nail banged into the wall. Yes, I did feel a long way from home that first Christmas.

Food, glorious food!

Me and my dad in my little Hackney flat, prior to departure for Greece. 1981.

 

 

Luckily, before I came to Greece I had embarked on a strict diet. I had a job as a dresser in the gloriously named Puddle Dock at the newly re-opened Mermaid Theatre, working on a musical production of a Ben Johnson play, Eastward Ho! Being in contact with a cast of disciplined and fit actors had rubbed off on me. I left the gin out and changed to straight, slimline tonic. I turned my head the other way every time I walked back to my Hackney flat past the take-away curry house and, while I was waiting in the wings to hand Mark Rylance a cloak or to adjust the puff on the sleeves of Anita Dobson’s dress, I would exercise. You can do anything in the theatre; no one thinks it’s strange to be doing fifty touch toes and twenty waist swivels in the dressing room. In fact they think you’re strange if you’re not. So I had shed loads of university, too many halves of lager and not enough exercise weight and started off here really slim. 

Good job too as the other British English teachers and I soon discovered the delights of the ouzeri. Not tavernas as such, these are places where you go to drink small glasses of ouzo, tsipouro (the local firewater, almost pure alcohol; beware!) or lager and every time you order a drink, a small saucer of food is also set before you. First they would bring sizzling, tawny, grilled prawns in their whiskery shells followed by small chunks of succulent battered cod with a dollop of garlic and bread sauce. Then slices of spicy sausage with thick green pepper, onion and tomato sauce or tiny round meatballs, flavoured with mint and parsley and served with thin wedges of lemon. And at the end of such an evening, when we had, sad people that we were, ended up singing Eleanor Rigby or Ten Green Bottles, we would get a bill for some miniscule amount which would make us even happier than the beer and the food (and certainly a lot happier than the songs). 

Almost as soon as I had met him, Thanasis wanted to take me home to meet his parents. We’d arranged that we would go to their house in the evening. Meanwhile, on the same day, Pavlos had invited me to one of his many brother and sisters’ houses for lunch as they were celebrating a Name Day. Many people are named after saints and when that particular Saint’s Day comes around everyone in Greece with that name celebrates, usually with a huge family meal.

Pavlos came and picked me up, looking dapper in his best suit. Anthoula was not with him as she was still ‘fortying’, that is, she was still at home resting after birth for forty days, nursing their baby daughter. It was the first time I had met the rest of his extremely large family and they were all more than welcoming. I was given a small cup of sweet dark coffee and a cold glass of water on arrival and everyone tried out the little English that had been transferred to them by a linguistic osmosis from the teacher and school owner in the family, of whom they were all very proud. Pavlos introduced me to this brother and that brother and then another brother and a sister but then it all started to get slightly confusing as there were also brothers in law, cousins, children of brothers and wives of brothers and a couple of neighbours plus of course parents. So there were a lot of us gathered around a vast polished-wood table in a fairly small house. I do remember being quite startled at my first sight of a Greek Orthodox priest, who was either one of the brothers or a husband of a sister. It wasn’t so much his height or his long beard or even the voluminous black skirt but it was the vest and braces above the skirt which surprised me and made me spill coffee into my saucer. I have never since seen a priest in a state of partial undress so in retrospect I am glad I had that opportunity. 

Since I was a guest and a foreign one at that, philotimia and philoxenia would not allow anyone to let me do anything other than sit down and be waited on. So I just sat and admired while starched white tablecloths were brought from drawers, snapped open and flung over tables, gleaming glasses, porcelain plates and silver cutlery were set out, wads of white paper napkins and shiny salt and pepper pots were added and carafes of iced water and pink village wine were placed in the middle. 

Then the food started arriving. Dishes of thick white yoghurt, flavoured with garlic and crunchy with cucumber, squares of spinach, leek and feta cheese pie, tomato and cucumber salad glistening with dark green oil and sprinkled with oregano, slabs of pastitsio; spicy minced beef layered with pasta and topped with wobbling béchamel sauce, soft roast potatoes, and bowls of vinegary shredded cabbage. That would have been enough, but this was a traditional Lamian celebratory feast and you can’t have one of them, I now know, without roast lamb. And not just a leg or a shoulder, but a whole lamb. That was why the priest wasn’t wearing his black top; he had been out in the yard since early morning roasting a whole lamb on a spit. So huge platters loaded with chunks of juicy brown meat had to be made room for on the already crowded table. Lemons from the tree outside were picked, halved and crushed over the lamb, prayers were said, glasses were raised, thanks were given and then we had to eat all of that. I mean really get down to serious eating. You couldn’t just have a bit of salad and a slice of lamb and get away with it. Especially not if you didn’t have enough language to politely refuse food, it was your first time with the family and, to top it all, you were an honoured foreign guest. By the end of the afternoon when the women were clearing the table for plates of sliced apples and oranges lightly powdered with cinnamon to finish off the meal, you can imagine that I was completely stuffed. So, I went back to my flat, lay on the bed groaning for a bit then showered and changed into my best white shirtwaister dress with the big blue polka dots and the flirty skirt (another excellent Brighton second-hand clothes shop find), ready for Thanasis to pick me up and take me to meet his parents. 

Thanasis had told me that his parents were both very beautiful. I am ashamed to say that I was expecting to meet very good-looking people, but of course, what I found were two beautiful people in the sense that he had meant, as warm, accepting, open-minded human beings. They were probably a little flummoxed by their eldest son suddenly bringing this strange foreign girl to their small house but they had gone all out to make me feel welcome in traditional Greek style. With food.

They lived in a small house on the outskirts of Lamia. Thanasis parked the car under a fig tree and as we walked towards the house, I could smell roasting meat. Nikos, in a white vest and brown trousers, was grilling pork chops on a barbecue and Penelope, in a long button through blue and white flowery dress, was carrying plates of cheese pies and salads to a table in the garden. My Greek language abilities were still at a stage where I could hardly say anything to them other than Good evening and Thank you. I couldn’t explain to them that I had just spent almost the entire day eating and even if I’d had more language at my disposal, it would still have been unthinkable to reject their hospitality. So, regretting my choice of tight-waisted dress, I ate. I remember vividly trying to leave a little bit of my pork chop and both Nikos and Penelope looking at me with such concern and dismay that I ate that last bit too. 

So, I never went hungry when I was invited out and, admittedly, that was most of the time. But occasionally I had to buy my own food and that was less straightforward. Supermarkets then were really glorified grocer’s stores and it wasn’t always easy to see what one could actually buy to eat. The cardboard boxes of heavily salted cod didn’t appeal, and even if they had, I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do with them. There were cans of food and they were a pretty safe bet as they had little photos on the labels, but aubergines with chunks of an unidentified meat didn’t appeal much then. Only two types of chocolate were available nationwide. The almond milk chocolate was delicious and a bar of that could see me through a day. Most foods were still sold in specific shops; milk, cheese and yoghurt in the dairies, meat in the butchers but chicken, (confusingly, I thought then) in the chicken and egg shops. Cecilia was in the same pioneering position re discovering food and every so often she would come round and excitedly tell me that she had found a place that sold baked beans. We’d go hotfooting off, only to be faced with empty shelves because Alan or Nick had got there before us. Then I remembered eggs and bacon and that was it; I learnt how to ask for eggs in the chicken shops and point to bacon in the supermarkets and that was all I cooked for myself the entire first year. 

Luckily it was easy to find ways of exercising to counteract the effect of all that food. Every day I would get up early and walk up and out of town passing small white roadside shrines lit from within with round candles floating in glasses of oil, go over the hills and through pine forests. I never saw many other people on these fresh morning walks. In those days people thought walking as an activity was strange and if anyone I knew did happen to pass by me in their car they would ask me if I was all right and would I like a lift. ‘No, thanks,’ I’d say, ‘just having a walk.’ You could see they thought I’d got my Greek in a muddle again and really meant, ‘No thanks, I've got no friends and am wandering off like a mad woman.’

Learning the lingo

If you want to learn a foreign language, come to Greece. Not because it is easy, quite the opposite, as any taxi driver will quickly tell you. But because every time you stumble over a ‘Thank you’ or a ‘Two beers, please’, you will practically get a standing ovation from the amazed crowd. Greeks are full of admiration for anyone who masters their language because they themselves think it is very difficult. 

‘How many words do the English have for a stone?’ the taxi driver will ask, swivelling around in his seat so that he can look at you while he’s talking.

‘Umm…I don’t know,’ you will say, partly because you’ve never considered it but mostly because you want him to notice the oncoming lorry.

‘We have eight’, he will say triumphantly, veering sharply away from a tractor and almost into a ditch. ‘Stone, rock, rubble, pebble, gravel, shingle, boulder and flint,’ he’ll say, listing the words in Greek. The only word you will recognize is stone so it will sound pretty impressive.

‘We have a very rich vocabulary!’ he will continue ‘and very difficult grammar. Greek grammar is the most difficult in the world!’ he will end proudly, narrowly missing a pick-up truck full of farm labourers.

He’s right of course. The language is rich and the grammar is very complicated with all the endings of the verbs which have to suit the pronouns and then the adjectives have to change to match the nouns and the nouns have to change to match the prepositions. The way to learn is to blithely ignore all of that, learn a load of words and try to put them together according to what you hear. Greek friends who know how appalling my grammar is now might not agree with this method, but the alternative is to be like a friend of mine, who, having had an intensive and expensive course of instruction was, after a month, still only able to ask for a packet of cigarettes in a Greek accent; ‘Seelk Katt, please.’ 

I had some Greek lessons in the first few months along with the other native English teachers who had also come to Lamia to work in private schools; thin, bearded Alan, who Vasso said looked a bit like the biblical Lazarus, arising from the dead (she had a sharp tongue, didn’t she?), sweet Cecilia, named for a Catholic saint, Nick, permanently smiling and scribbling stories and Andy, who met and married a dark eyed, dark haired Greek girl and is still one of our dearest friends. We got together and persuaded Anna, for a small fee, to give us what we thought would be conversation classes in one of Vasso’s empty classrooms in the mornings. 

We had a book. I think it was the only book with Greek lessons for foreigners available on the market at that time. I wish I’d kept it. It was a gem. A thick paperback in shades of blue and black type with poorly drawn pen and ink drawings, it followed a system along the lines of the lesson plans as prescribed by Vasso and Despina. First we would read a passage aloud. Then we would answer comprehension questions, learn useful words and have a spelling test the following lesson.

Have you ever been back to a classroom for a lesson since you were a child? If you have, you might relate to us then. We became kids again, giggling in the back desks, all wanting to read at the same time, sulking if we weren’t chosen, sticking chewing gum under our chairs and finding imaginative excuses as to why we hadn’t done our homework. 

I can’t say that our lessons really reflected our needs. We wanted to know how to ask for a loaf of bread, where a train was going or to make polite conversation with friendly strangers. What we learnt was how to say ‘The young lady is wearing a fur coat’ and ‘The fisherman has a big net.’ After a few lessons we ganged up on well-meaning Anna and demanded to be taught a few more verbs and useful phrases. She said it was too soon for verbs and the classes collapsed soon after that. 

But with the encouragement of Thanasis and my trusty phrase book, I started to make myself understood. Of course there was the usual confusion over similar sounding words; asking for a shutter salad and closing the beetroots for example or swatting a cauliflower and ordering boiled mosquito. I won’t go into detail because you would have to know the Greek and you’d get bored, but if you are familiar with the language, you can probably work out the worrying occasion when I thought Thanasis had rung his sister demanding a hairdryer to be brought to him at eight promptly when in fact he was saying ‘Tell Laki (his brother) to come at eight o’clock this evening.’

The kids at school loved it when I came out with anything in Greek. There I would be, trying to get these nine year olds to produce convoluted third conditional sentences along the lines of ‘If it hadn’t rained, we wouldn’t have gone to the cinema’ then they would hand me a drawing, I would come out with my F Harry Stowe and they would clap and cheer and praise me. 

Of course it’s not just the language that you have to learn, it’s all the gestures too. My dad once went miles in the wrong direction on a bus because he mistook the driver’s ‘no’ shrug in response to his question ‘Does this bus go to Saint Luke’s church?’ for a yes. A curt no is an upwards nod, so you can see where he went wrong. He ended up at the power station. 

I think my favourite gesture is the one that accompanies the expression of mild dismay; ‘Po po po po’. Hold your arms out and wave both your hands around in circles and you’ll more or less have it. I’ve found that one to be particularly popular with nurses in state-run hospitals. They flail around over you like that while they are examining, for example, post-birth haemorrhoids. You’re saying, ‘So do you think they’re clearing up a bit, nurse?’ and they’re po po po-ing and windmilling away. Not very reassuring and you realize you’re in for a lot of ointment, but fun to watch. 

Then there are all the greeting and wishes. What do we have in English? We have an all-purpose Congratulations and we have Good Luck. We borrow Bon Voyage and Bon Appetit from the French and that’s about it, isn’t it? We don’t say Good Digestion to people after lunch, or ‘Go with the good and return with the good’ as they set off on journeys. We don’t wish pregnant women ‘ A good freeing’ as they come up to birth or say ‘May he/ she live for you’ to parents of new born children or newly married couples. People wishing me ‘Well may you forty’ came as a bit of a surprise to me after I had had my first child but it made sense when I realized that, traditionally, Greek women stay at home after birth nursing the baby for forty days. ‘With health’ is an all-purpose wish for clothes, shoes, hair cuts, school bags, anything new in fact. ‘May it be well-rooted’ is used for anything major such as a house or a business and ‘May it travel well’ for cars. We wish people Good night and Sweet dreams but the Greeks add a ‘Good Daybreak’. One of my favourites is ‘May you be of iron’, used to wish one strength. And there are other occasion-specific wishes; ‘Good studies’ for a student starting college, ‘Good career’ for one finishing and ‘Good service’ for a young man embarking on his obligatory military service. 

We have another lack in English. What do we use when we want to attract a stranger’s attention? I think we only have ‘Excuse me’ or possibly ‘Yoo hoo!’ at our disposal. Or ‘Oy!’ I suppose. I realized this omission when I was behind a man in an airport queue who dropped his wallet. He went marching off into the crowds and I was left trotting after him, waving his wallet and, because I had just got off a plane from Athens and was still in Greek mode, yelling ‘Sir! Sir!’ It sounds fine in Greek. I sounded like an idiot in English. Perhaps that’s why so many people think they’ve had personal belongings stolen in London. No-one knows how to call them back. 

People embrace each other a lot more here too. My dad always reeled a bit when Thanasis plonked a big kiss on both his cheeks. Thanasis always said that when he met my glamorous and pretty mum, that was when he was certain he wanted to marry me, thinking that I would turn out like that too. When I saw how his father hugged his mother I too was sure that I was on to a good thing. When I first met Penelope she was about fifty, short and round but Nikos, God rest his soul, was obviously still seeing her as if she was eighteen, short and curvy. 

The physical contact between people doesn’t stop at embraces. It extends to not wanting anyone to do anything by themselves. Wherever you go, whatever you do in Greece, you are seen as very odd indeed if you do it alone. When I left England it was still ever so slightly unusual to, say, go out for lunch by yourself. But you could certainly go shopping unaccompanied. You couldn’t here, not then, even if you tried. Thanasis would tell me that he had to be away that day for work and he would be back in the evening. I would say, ‘No problem, I’ll wander around the town a bit, do some shopping, go back to the flat and read a book.’ That would not happen. He would arrange for his sister to come to the shops with me, his mum to provide lunch and I would be welcome at the family home for a little rest in the afternoon. If I did take them up on their kind offers (and it was very hard to refuse) I would be surprised to find that nineteen year old Marianthi would give up her bed for my siesta and she would snuggle up with her mum on a slim divan.

I think many ‘mixed’ marriages (‘All marriages are mixed…’ said my caustic friend, Fiona, ‘…men and women,’) fail because the caring seems like smothering to the independent, foreign women. It was unusual for me, this amount of attention to my every need but it wasn’t oppressive. It was one of the ways people showed kindness and interest. But the main way that welcome was shown was through food.

Out with Thanasis

Our children used to roar with laughter when we told them what Thanasis was wearing that evening, but believe me, although it might sound a bit odd now, he looked gorgeous. He had on a powder blue linen suit. We never got much further than that with the kids as they were already on the floor, helpless with mirth. Anyway, he was wearing this lovely jacket and trousers and a white t-shirt, he was tanned and strong, his fair curls were quite long and he had very persuasive green eyes. 

The kids didn’t object so much to what I was wearing; a khaki green mini skirt and cropped jacket from Tottenham Court Road Top Shop. To be honest, I might never have mentioned to them that under the jacket I had on a frilly, daffodil yellow shirt, but I can assure them now that it was the height of fashion at the time and looked very nice. Thanasis locked his green eyes on me, didn’t take them off and, all these years later, he still hasn’t. 

I was introduced to him as Tom. Greeks do everything they possibly can to make guests to their country feel at home and that includes happily anglicizing their own names. Anna, whose friend he was, told me he was called Tom. It didn’t seem to suit him so I quickly persuaded him to tell me his real name, but nevertheless, on our first date he was Tom to me and, of course, that was another thing that could send our children flying off the sofas with laughter. 

Thanasis wasn’t the kind of man who would hang around hoping his luck might be in. He whisked me away from the café and the square that night in his cool, souped-up sports car and off to the small coastal town of Kamena Vourla (which translates, in case you’re interested, as Burnt Rushes) for charcoal grilled fish and cold white wine. And we sat at a table on the beach, where small shoals of fish, silvery in the moonlight, flew out of the water and skimmed Homer’s wine-dark sea. 

He continued to whisk me off to tavernas, bars, beaches, mountains, forests and villages all year and the fact that I only passed my driving test when I was nearly fifty was only partly due to the fact that I was terrified of being on the road with a load of mad Greek drivers but also that he never tired of whisking me here and there, even though the places changed to supermarkets, banks, hospitals and airports. 

Going out with Thanasis was nothing like going out with any of the lads I had dated in England. For a start, when you go out with a Greek, you can leave your purse at home. I have to say, in case you think that I am over romanticizing our relationship, that this is something that has definitely changed over the years. Now Thanasis leaves his wallet at home. But then, there was never a question of going Dutch, splitting bills or me paying for anything at all, not even a pack of cigarettes. Thanasis always had a wad of drachma notes in his pocket and was generous in the extreme. Recently I read a wise article saying that men who are very free with their cash in their youth would never have healthy bank balances in later life as they were unlikely to change and start saving. Oh well, I read it too late. 

Of course verbal communication was a bit limited because my Greek was virtually non-existent and his English was pretty basic. He knew enough to flirt and pay me lavish compliments. Where do Greek men learn all that? Certainly not in the schools I was working in. Those poor students I taught in that first year are probably trying to chat up foreign women by going ‘I am, you are, he she or it is’ and then running around like mad things waving flash cards in the air. Do you think that’s why the birth rate is dropping? 

I had a phrase book and that helped. I have this theory that life in Greece can be a Garden of Eden, but you are only allowed into this potential paradise if you can hack your way through the thorny bush of the alphabet. Luckily my book had transliterations with each syllable separated by a dash. So, for instance, when I needed the loo I would be able to say things like, ‘ Poo ee-nay ee too-a-let-a?’ You can see why Vasso thought I sounded ill. And ill with a Surrey accent too. Accent wise I have hardly improved. I only have to say ‘Yass-oo’ on the phone for everyone to immediately click that’s it me. 

But Thanasis didn’t mind this haltering speech and we managed to establish that he had a stationery shop and went skiing at the weekends. Both wildly untrue of course. The first was due to phrase book confusion and the second was down to him lying. I had asked him what the bars on top of his car were for, he had said skis and then just agreed with my suggestions about why they were there. He’s never been in his life. Greeks do that; they lie to keep the conversation going and you happy. My mum believed that Athens buses came apart in the middle and could be made bigger or smaller according to passenger requirements. Just because of the way she phrased her question to Thanasis’ sister. Had she asked, ‘What are those concertina type things in the middle of buses for?” she might have got an honest ‘I don’t know’ for an answer. But because she said ‘Do those concertina type things in the middle of buses mean that they can be taken apart?’ Marianthi answered ‘Yes’ and that was it.

So, communicating with Thanasis was not a problem. We were smitten, tolerant and keen to get on whatever the obstacles and, anyway, through the all-important, international body language, Thanasis made it clear that he wanted to be the man in my life. Understanding other people was another matter.

Greek hospitality

The Greeks have two words to describe the state of hospitality. One is philoxenia, which translates as being a friend to strangers. The other, philotimia, means a friend of honour. As anyone familiar with Homer knows, Odysseus’ son and wife, Telemachus and Penelope, found their home overrun by hungry demanding strangers due to their philoxenia but their philotimia would not let them turn these guests away unfed. 

My honourable employers would never have considered leaving me alone to fend for myself in the first few weeks and I was certainly not left unfed. At weekends Pavlos took me to his house in the countryside where his kind wife, Anthoula, plied with me creamy minced beef and aubergine moussaka and dishes of grape must pudding. When classes had finished for the day we would go for bowls of candied ice cream and glasses of cognac in a local pastry shop and philosophize about Life. 

Vasso would take me to a hillside taverna for breezy lunches beneath silver green trees. Passionate about art and living life to the full, she would hammer out her dreams and frustrations over pork chops, grilled with garlic and oregano and shiny with freshly squeezed lemon, sharp carrot and cabbage salad and chilled glasses of pale, resinated wine. 

Despina, pleased I think to have an excuse to leave the house and school after work, treated me to rolls of warm pitta bread wrapped around roast meat, yoghurt, raw onion and mustard, washed down with cold lager and eaten at rickety tables in Freedom Square. Half her mind would be on chatting to me, the other half would be on outside whose flat her cheating husband had parked his car that night. If we had spotted it as we wandered down the hill towards the square, she would bite aggressively into her pitta and warn me not to get married without a lot of serious consideration and preferably not at all. The amazing thing was that she could do that and still not get mustard all down her front. Some people are like that, aren’t they? 

And then there were the other teachers at the schools, the young Greek women who knew a lot more about what they were doing than I did, would keep to the lesson plans and the homework rules and have quiet, ordered classes. They would include me in their plans for the evening and invite me along with their friends to cafes, tavernas and discos. 

Lamia was a wonderfully accessible place to socialize in. On every side of Freedom Square were cafes. Plush inside with sofas, armchairs and coffee tables they were almost as smart outside with tubs of flowers and tables and chairs sprawling over the pavements and into the marble paved square. As night fell over the town, the square would light up with people taking their evening ‘volta’. Volta translates as a walk or a stroll, but the meaning of it stretches to include going out, meeting friends, chatting, having fun. And the Greeks are really good at this.

All these years later, I still have never learnt how to stroll as slowly as a Greek on a volta. A combination of having grown up in relatively cold and positively drizzly England, years of my dad praising me for being able to keep up with his stride and my long legs mean that I always, however hard I try to put my brakes on, end up charging along pavements and then having to stop while everyone dawdles along to join me. I do try and I did try very hard in that first year as I realized that I looked like a maniac compared to everyone else sauntering along, taking their time and enjoying gazing in shop windows and meeting friends on the way. 

So, Anna or Katerina or another of the Greek teachers would come by my little flat after work and we would set off for the evening’s volta, me hurtling off and them politely trying to rush along with me until they would get puffed out and call me to heel. We’d start off with a stroll around the square and then decide, after long conversations with everyone in the group of friends they would have collected, to go to one of the cafes. The cafes were places to see and be seen. And on one evening, I saw Thanasis and he saw me.

'We are a bunch of rotters.'

 

 

Vasso had found me a one-bedroom rooftop flat just off Park Square. It was in a small newly built block, had a white and blue tiled bathroom with a shower, a beige tiled kitchen with cupboards, a stainless steel sink and a couple of electric rings, and a parquet wooden floor in the bed-sitting room. I had a small fold up bed, a table and a few chairs. It was a little bare so I made it more colourful by sticking all the children’s drawings on the clean white walls. But it didn’t really need much cheering up as its crowning glory was the vast veranda leading off the bedroom, twice as big as the flat itself and with views which stretched over the town, down to the cotton fields and on towards the mountains and a thin glimmer of sea.

Vasso was always trying to get me to buy curtains for the place ‘to make it look more like a home.’ Who buys curtains when they’re living an adventure and intending to stay only for nine months? No-one could see in; the flat was too high up for that and there were sliding white shutters to block the strong afternoon sunlight when it became too wearing. At night I would leave them open and lie on my little bed, watching the darkness deepen and the stars glow.

I paid a fifth of my pay for it; 5,000 drachmas a month which would just about buy you a small round of drinks and a packet of peanuts now. The landlord owned a cake shop in the same street and I would take the rent along to him on the first of every month. As a young man he had spent some time travelling around Europe and was always pleased to be able to inform me that I had come to the wrong place to work.

‘Why you come ‘ere, Mizz Zan? England is ver ver beautiful town. The people there they are not like us. ‘Ere we are all scoundrels. Everyone wants to deceive you ‘ere. We are a bunch of rotters. Sit down, Mizz Zan. ‘Ave a cake and glass of water.’

‘Oh, thank you, Mr George,’ I would begin, ‘well, no, I’m sure you can’t say everyone here is a rotter…’

‘Believe me, is true!’ he insisted, placing before me a plate of custard filled pastries and a small fork rolled in a paper napkin. ‘The men is bad ‘ere. You must be ver careful of the men in Greece. In England the men is lords, they is gentlemen. ‘Ere they are all rotters,’ And he slammed his fist on the table to emphasize his point, making the custard tarts wobble.

‘So, where did you go in England?’ I said, trying to lighten the mood, as he was clearly getting upset.

‘Edinburgh, Cardiff, Great Yarmouth, London. You know the Savoy? ’ he asked suddenly.

‘Yes, but I’ve never eaten there,’ I said, ‘too posh for me.’

‘I was ‘ead chef there for one year,’ he said.

‘Oh, that’s amazing. What a great job. You must be a really good cook,’ I said.

‘Yes, yes, I am,’ he agreed. ‘They liked me there because I was the only chef they ever ‘ad who didn’t open a can of peas. I always used fresh vegetable. No tinned food!’

‘What…all the other chefs used tinned foods?” I said thinking of all I had heard about the smart and seriously expensive Savoy Hotel.

‘Yes, yes, only me I use fresh food!’ he said proudly.

‘Hang on,’ I said, twigging. ‘Was this the Savoy in the West End of London?’

 

‘No! Great Yarmouth! Savoy Grill, Great Yarmouth. By the sea front. Ver good. Ver nice place.’

 

First lessons

I went slightly deaf while working in Pavlos’ school. The classrooms were, as I have said, echoing and the children were, as I have implied, enthusiastic. And I was, as you know, learning. That’s not a good combination for someone with sensitive ears. Once I had got the hang of the tenses (and their uses) I would make up Tense Games (that is quite a good name for them), which might involve students running to the board and marking something or groups of children waving collective hands or cards in the air. And, of course, despite instructions to the contrary and much to the annoyance of the teachers in the adjoining classrooms, everyone would also be calling out their answers.

My makeshift games were always well intentioned; I wanted the children to learn some grammar, as their parents expected, but I also wanted them to be able to use the grammar, to see it as a living, vital part of language. But when you have twenty five kids yelling out ‘Miss! Miss!’ followed by a medley of right and wrong answers, it’s easy to get confused, lose control of the class and damage your hearing into the bargain. My ears have never fully recovered and, if you ever run into me, please look at me while you’re speaking. 

I worked at Pavlos’ school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays and Wednesdays I was at Vasso’s neat school in a small suburb of Lamia. Vasso would pick me up in her car after lunch and we would kangaroo out of the town as she battled with the clutch, questioned me about my love life and put up with me trying out all my newly learnt Greek phrases. For a language teacher I have to say that she wasn’t very encouraging. ‘You remind me,’ she said as she stalled at yet another traffic light, ‘of my father.’

Sounds good, I thought, thinking that maybe she saw me as dependable.

 ‘Oh F Harry Stowe’ I said, meaning of course ‘Thank you’ in Greek.

‘No, no,’ said she, ‘I mean that you remind me of him when he had had a stroke. He spoke just like you when you’re speaking Greek.’

Vasso had a lot of equipment. She had chairs with swivelling, individual desk tops attached, a television, cassette players, headphones for each child, a roll down screen, a projector and reams of film. She had files for each child with marks and comments neatly penned in by her diligent secretary and detailed lesson plans.

‘The first five minutes is the dictation they were set for homework yesterday, then do the reading passage on page 17 followed by exercise one on page 18. Set exercises two and three for homework and revise spellings from page 16.’

Vasso wanted an ordered, disciplined lesson from me. Of course what she got was near chaos as the kids, sensing a floundering, amiable teacher would shower me with notes, drawings, tiny damp bunches of wild flowers and sticks of chewing gum and demand games, puzzles and quizzes; anything in fact which didn’t involve dictation, reading passages, exercises and spelling revision.

Every so often Vasso would come into my noisy classroom to ‘observe’. Then of course we would all be stricken with nerves. The children would sit in semi-paralysis at their green desk chairs, looking up at me seriously and I would attempt some sort of round the class drill of the verb To Be or something equally imaginative. Vasso would make notes, take me aside afterwards and tell me that I had been totally useless. She did have a point.

 

On Fridays I was up at Despina’s school on a hill leading out of the town. There I was to do composition writing with the children and Despina equipped me with all I apparently needed for this lesson; a slim volume of model compositions which we were to go through, one by one throughout the year. The essays had titles such as ‘A letter to my pen friend’, ‘An afternoon in the country,’ ‘My bedroom’ and ‘An invitation to a party.’ We were to read them aloud around the class, she explained, then go through the comprehension questions provided with each student taking a turn to answer starting with the girl in the first desk in the front row on the left and continuing around the class in a clockwise direction. I was to remember which student had been the last to answer at the end of each lesson so that the following Friday I could continue the answering circle. I was then to provide them with a short list of useful words which I would find supplied in the teacher’s notes; they would copy these, neatly please, into their notebooks and for homework they would write their own compositions on the same subject.

I could do that! We could all do that! And that is exactly what we did. Well, at least that is partly what we did. Despina had planned this perfectly apart from one thing; we would always finish reading, answering and copying neatly ten minutes earlier than the allotted 50-minute lesson time. And then I would be back on my own resources again with a class full of lively children. So there would be quizzes and games and calling out and singing and even occasionally dancing; everything in fact that was not what Despina had in mind.

And so I continued from October to May; trying to live up to my employers’ fairly reasonable expectations and failing most of the time while amassing a wall full of notes declaring adoration from the little girls and drawings of space ships, cars and footballers from the little boys.

Starting to teach

I came to Lamia to teach English to children in three separate, private language schools. I had seen a note advertising the job on the notice board of International House and having tossed up between that one and another in Portugal, I rang the number, was offered the job and here I was, a few miles from the coast in a small town in central Greece which was hardly mentioned in any guide books apart from apparently having roast meat restaurants and storks on the roof tops. That sounded okay to me. It was an adventure, a dare to myself. Having graduated with an English Literature degree I had no work plan, no career objectives, no idea about how I wanted to earn a living or spend my life from then on. All I knew was that I wanted to Do Something Interesting. I’d done the usual post-university working in pubs, restaurants, shops and temping in offices, I had friends and family who I loved, I had a small rented flat in east London, I had jobs which provided me with enough money to go out, have fun. But I wanted to enlarge my life, widen my boundaries and what better place, I thought, than Greece to spend a year discovering more about life. 

I had three sets of employers, all with their own schools in Lamia. Pavlos Mavrikas*, an intellectual with a goatee beard; Vasso Polyzos; short, flamboyant and expressive, and Despina Foustaneli, young, tall, organized, pregnant and about to get divorced. They were all, quite reasonably, expecting to get a native speaker teacher who knew, at least a little, what she was doing in the classroom. But, poor things, they got me. 

I had a little teaching experience. Years before I had helped out as a classroom assistant at the primary school my mother taught in. I’d picked up a lot from watching my mother help seven year olds to learn and, my dad also being a master at a huge all-boys inner London comprehensive school, I felt that teaching was a sphere that I could be comfortable in. And of course I’d done this one-month preparatory TEFL course at International House. But really all I had was a lot of theory, enthusiasm and trust and no experience at all of standing before a class of young Greek children with little or no English. 

I didn’t even look like a teacher to Greek eyes. Then, as now, teachers had a good standing in Greek society. If you thought of a teacher, you thought of someone slightly restrained, very respectable, serious and focused. You didn’t think of someone in bright pink pedal pushers and a skinny T-shirt with dark, wild long hair and one Brighton junk shop glittery leaf earring. So I think I was a bit of a surprise for my employers. But their schools were a surprise for me too.

 

Pavlos’ school was on the second floor of a large building in the centre of town. There were three echoing classrooms with narrow formica desks and benches, whiteboards and a few tatty posters on the wall, and a large study filled with cases of well–thumbed books, two huge desks for him and his secretary and a couple of ancient, thirsty rubber plants. Pavlos had a lot of theories about teaching and they were all excellent.

‘You need to build up communication with the children’, he would explain. ‘They do not need grammar rules; they need to get into the feel of the language and you need to recognize individual learning styles…’ Then there would be a kafuffle from the corridor as a bundle of boys tussled and he would whip outside to sort them out. Seconds later you would see him chasing the main offender down and out of the school, impressively simultaneously hopping, running and kicking butt and yelling; ‘Get out of here, you scoundrel and don’t come back until you’ve learnt some manners.’ Then he would realize that he had overshot the ten minutes allotted for break, pop his head round the study door, hand me an unfathomable text book and say, ‘Class C, page 23, revise all the tenses, would you?’

Well, I would of course try, but did I know what all the tenses were? I had Thomson and Martinet’s Grammar and thank god for that old book. I had come to Greece armed with several official pieces of paper which declared that I had A’s in O, A and S level English and a BA Honours degree in English Literature. But tenses? Had we done them at school or had I been away that day? Learners of English all over the world know that they have names and uses; Simple Present, Present Perfect, Past Continuous; these are terms which all students of English are familiar with apart from those who really should know them; native English speakers.

So, with one nanosecond of preparation, I would walk into a class of rowdy thirteen year-olds whose parents had paid for them to have this lesson, die quietly inside and have them read aloud while I flicked through my grammar book trying to find out what on earth I was supposed to be teaching them. What did they learn? Nothing much from me, I guess. What did I learn? A lot. No, not grammar. In the end the tenses and their uses were there in my head; all I had to do was learn their names. What I learnt was something far more profound; that young, Greek children are not trying to make your life difficult; they are not interested in making fun of you or trying to get the better of you. They want some order, they want some authority, they want to know what they are doing and to know you know what you are doing and, above all, they want some knowledge.

I think I let those children down. I didn’t know then what they needed to learn and I certainly didn’t know how to convey the little knowledge that I did have to share. But their kindness and patience with me, their struggling, inexperienced instructor, helped me to understand what being a teacher was all about.

 

* Names have been changed.

Arriving in Greece: 1981

 

It seems like only yesterday that I left Croydon with a suitcase, a certificate of good health signed by Doctor Brightwell, cards wishing me luck from my lively and loving Sussex University friends, a diploma from International House which supposedly equipped me to teach English as a foreign language, an adventurous spirit and a trusting heart. But in fact it was last century, October 1981.

I arrived in Greece after the sun had set, made my way in the darkness over 200 kilometres north of Athens by dimly lit bus and arrived at a dingy brown hotel in the middle of the night. It seemed like a miracle when I told the hotel receptionist my name and she not only found my name on the hotel register but told me that Mr Mavrikas was expecting me at his school at ten the following morning. I remember nothing of the hotel room but for its browness, stillness and strangeness. I slept with the confidence of a girl starting an adventure.

I awoke to Lamia and a morning flooded with light, people, welcome, new beginnings and loud speakers on every street corner, every car, every square, blaring out election campaigns and songs.

During those first confusing days, people were always telling me that ‘It’s not normally like this here.’ Andreas Papandreou, the socialist PASOK party candidate was standing for the first time as Prime Minister after centuries of foreign oppression, junta rule and conservative government, and emotions and hopes were running high. They meant, I suppose, that it wasn’t normally that noisy, that chaotic, that enthusiastic. Well, they were trying to be nice and save me from a little culture shock, I suppose. Because really, bar the loud speakers, Greece is like that every single day. People were cycling around the town, cars were hooting, the marble squares glared white in the early autumn light and I had an address on a scrap of paper where I was to meet one of my employers. Of course I couldn't read the street names and didn't have a town map. So naturally I ignored everything I had ever been taught and flagged down a passing truck. I showed the driver my scrap of paper and climbed into the front passenger seat next to him. Was I foolish? Was he trustworthy? Whatever. He took me to the school, wished me a good morning and left me. I was twenty five, wearing bright pink, tight jeans, foreign and vulnerable and I was safely delivered.