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.’