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.