'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.

Keeping prints happy

When I prepared stuff for my exhibition of prints and cards in February, I thought this lot would look nice as plain black on white canvases. But in fact they ended up looking sparse and rather forlorn. 

So I decided to add backgrounds and colour. I've been lucky enough to go to India several times and on one trip I stayed at the  Neemrana , which is beyond spectacular. There monkeys scamper around the terraces and peacocks nestle in trees so I decided to give my peacock an Indian border. As usual, all you need to do is Google and you have a wealth of amazing designs to choose from and adapt. (Obviously you have to be a bit specific when you Google. If you type in 'Indian borders' you just get loads of flag waving and guards.) I added a tree background and then inked in an ultramarine sky with my lovely Windsor and Newton inks which were a present from my friend Elaine.

Having got into Indian borders, I wanted to do more and decided to embellish the dove with an Indian sky and one of the whales with an Indian ocean. 

I had one more whale to do-same design but this one had a digitally printed background, taken from the body of the whale. I wanted him to look different to his fellow whale so I coloured him in, loosely coloured the background and added some silver as he was becoming quite demanding and a bit of a diva :) 

The biggest diva though was the owl.  Owl has wonky wings but of course we don't discriminate so I gave him the full treatment. I was still into Indian designs so I gave him an Indian style star and moon and they cried out to be silver and gold.Then I inked in a wavy blue background and finally dotted in silver spots to give him a final sheen. Owl has ended up looking like a strange flag but at least he is finished :)

Silhouettes

I've always liked doing black and white drawings but recently I have got into doing silhouettes. They're easy once you've done the outline-you just colour everything black! Our friend and erstwhile neighbour, Alicia is getting married in the (not very) near future. But because she is an organized Shirley girl (like me) she asked if I could work on a design for a wedding invitation and I did this bride for her. Later I also added a groom!

For this one I started with a simple cat and then added a (rather wonky) window and then the vase of flowers and the butterflies and then the cobweb tablecloth.

Having done the cobwebs I then graduated to fairies. Fairies and elves and toadstools are made for silhouettes. 

These little gnomes  and the snail look as if they have just arrived at a friendly toadstool inn for the night. Could be the beginning of a story...who knows!

Colour works well in combination with black silhouettes. Jan Pienkowski has done wonderful work with this and I have bought his book First Christmas and stowed it away to read to the girlies in December. http://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Christmas-Jan-Pienkowski

And then my old school friend, Janet Braund Few, sent out a plea for someone to help with a logo for her new venture, Swords and Spindles. https://swordsandspindles.wordpress.com/ I was happy to be able to help. I tried to introduce a row of lace on a petticoat but Janet said her alter ego, Mistress Agnes couldn't be doing with that  so I blacked it out :) 

Mad March

Much of March was taken up with travelling around promoting Learning Stars, the three-level course for very young learners of English, which Jill Leighton and I have written for Macmillan. First stop was Dubai for the TESOL Arabia conference at the very plush and v large Hyatt Regency Hotel. My only previous experience of Dubai was of stop-overs at the airport, which screams BUY SOMETHING NOW! So I was expecting a glorified mall and there is obviously a lot of money around-all the cars are big, new, clean and shiny. But there are also colourful old wooden dhows in the harbour, kids playing cricket in car parks, men haggling at shabby stalls and so on.Plus the trip got off to an excellent start when I arrived at the hotel just before midnight and found that not only were the Macmillan team still up, they were all in the bar drinking wine.

Conference was v well attended and TESOL Arabia gave us all v snazzy delegate bags, filled with goodies :) The only downside was that we all had very short slots for our talks-30 minutes each so you had to cut things down to the bare minimum. 

From Dubai to Cairo. Cairo is pretty chaotic to say the very least-the traffic is crazy and I don't think I've ever seen a car without a dent or a scratch-most are completely bashed about. It's the kind of place where you think, 'Yes! Let's meet at the air-conditoned mall! That sounds perfect!' 

And here is a pic of me and Amany having a delicious bun in the huge mall next to the Holiday Inn. The choice was limited; you could have tea and a bun, coffee and a bun or hot chocolate and bun. But in fact the bun was great :) 

This was my fourth time in Egypt and so it was v nice to meet up with the Macmillan Egypt team again. How do they stay sane in the midst of such muddle? Well, they do and, as usual, arranged amazing events at three luxury hotels in Cairo, Giza and Alexandria. 

The trip ended in Alexandria with a meal at a Bedouin restaurant with the Macmillan Egypt team. No wine at this meal of course, but plenty of tea!

And then to Russia! I had a quick trip back home to change all the warm weather clothes to jumpers, jeans, Uggs and a warm coat and off to Moscow. Then immediately off to Samara . Well, not quite immediately-I had a six-hour wait in Domodedovo Airport which has, incidentally, been done up and is now v modern and spacious, free Wi-Fi  and nice restaurants everywhere and the awful queues at immigration and passport controls are much reduced. My colleague Sergey and I arrived in Samara around 23.00 and scooted off in a taxi to meet Irini, who had persuaded a local restaurant to stay open just for us, where we had meat and olives soup and tea. Then to the Hampton Hotel-which is a perfect exanple of a business hotel which has got it right-everyhing you need when you arrive late at night after a long trip, including a little tray thing for your laptop on the bed :) 

Event the following morning in Samara was in an old theatre and we had a full house of lovely teachers. 

. Then off to the airport again and back to Moscow for the evening, staying at the fabulous Garden Ring Hotel-more luxury! 

Moscow event the next morning was in a huge old Soviet cinema-packed to the rafters. Also talking was my dear friend and colleague, Malcolm Mann, He also lives in Greece but of course I never see him there-we have to meet in Moscow :) 

And then, straight after the event, off to Yekaterinburg in the Urals. My last trip there has passed into Macmillan Russia legend as the temperarature then was -30C and I had to be lent a fur coat :) This time it was milder-only about -6C but we arrived to steadily falling snow It was like arriving in Narnia-so beautiful. 

I was with another Macmillan colleague now-Natalia and we had a late dinner in the restaurant which, rather bizzarely, had those lightbulbs which give out a daytime glow. It was nearly midnight when we ate but it felt like ten o'clock in the morning. I had a cheese platter! 

Next morning the event was at the Urals University-dept of Humanities and also v well-attended. 

Many of the teachers remembered me from previous talks on Brilliant and had brought along copies of the book to be autographed, So that was v nice and very kind of them. 

And then for a quick car ride around Yekaterinburg in the bright, cold sunshine with Natalia and our other colleague, Natasha. We went to the site of the murder of the Romanovs-there is a church on the site and (rather weirdly if you ask me) they have been canonized now. There are statues of Nikolas Romanov and his family and people crossing themselves and bowing to them in the church. The church is mixture of piety and commercialism-stalls as you go in selling very expensive and not very nice souvenirs and, further back,  a priest telling you off if your head is uncovered (mine, for example! )I'd actually deliberately taken off my hat thinking that would be respectful but no-that would have been respectful if I had been a man. For a woman-no!  

Exhibition of prints and cards

The fabulous space which our friend Kostas Houpas has created in Lamia, Studio Project Photography, inspired me to arrange an exhibtion of prints and cards this February. That sounds like a  major undertaking but in fact it all happened really easily, surrounded as I am by proactive and creative people. The Vittas brothers undertook all the printing-everything on canvas and wrapped around light wooden frames with hanging wires,  Kostas H did the actual hanging and Grace made an amazing cake.

I decided not to display too many different prints but to repeat many of them in different sizes. The thinking behind that was mainly aesthetic but also because I thought it would be easier for people to visualize the works in their homes that way.

So, we had lots of Whirling Dervishes...

 A herd of colourful elephants...

four sea turtles...

a pod of whales...

lots of cards....

seahorses...

black and white pebbles, shells and seweed and an illuminated seahorse. 

The star of the show proved to be this little elephant....

He attracted lots of buyers-some wanted small prints and others ordered larger ones and one family asked for him to be made into a plexiglass light box, with just one Led lamp within it so that he can be useful as night light in a child's bedroom . Blue Elephant was very pleased with himself :) 

Above all, it was such a nice way to spend a week in chilly February-great excuse to dress up, get out be with old friends and make new ones. Huge thanks to everyone who helped and who came, including my friend Elaine, who popped over from the UK for the weekend :) 

How our house was built

Work on our house began in 1999. 

Here's the plot of land. 

First step: clearing the land. Very exciting day when the bloke with the digger came hurtling onto the plot, hair and beer belly flying in the wind.  

 Next came the foundations. We did the traditional Foundation Blessing Ceremony. Step away from the blog now if you are an ardent vegetarian or cockerel lover. 

It involved slaughtering a white cockerel and then pouring its blood onto the foundations. Then, at the four corners, we laid four coins. The priest said prayers and whisked incense around and we all went for a meal with friends and family. 

 First floor built. 

Now it starts to look like a house.  

 







The garden stayed as messy land for quite a while but here you can see work beginning to transform it. Laurence is sitting on the truck, enjoying watching the paving stones being unloaded.

The wooden pergola looks wonky here but that is my bad camera angle.  



We had a fountain built. It turned out rather larger than I had envisaged. The poor guy who built it has since passed away. He was so slight that I felt very sorry for him every time he hauled another rock into position. Maintaining the fountain turned out to be costly and difficult-everything kept breaking down so now I have turned it into a Flower Folly.  

Here the Pichas brothers are putting up the railings at the front of the house. Sadly Thanasis Pichas (wearing the cap) has also since passed away.  

Garden is shaping up.  

And here is the finished product-view from the back...

view from the side... 

And the garden in all its glory. 

We moved into the house in July 2000 so the whole thing took about 18 months. Garden obviously took somewhat longer for everything to grow. I think this garden pic was taken around 2006.