"Eppur si muove"

There was a time in the last century when people who were displaced, detribalised, detached from the old certainties of village and family were regarded as a new kind of lost soul (as in this poignant poem by Paul Chidyausiku). Things have changed. Now the 'lost' are those whose ideas are still fixed in the lucid amber of their parent's rituals. Identity must be found by leaving that darkness - including the lurking folklore of nation, class and race - by learning, through constant enquiry, using the tools of exploration (open mind, fascination with endless mystery, method, discipline), the blinding light of generous curious reason. Did I learn this for myself? Hardly. All my parents and grandparents 'left the village' a century ago. Between them they experienced the displacements of the industrial revolution. My great great grandfather left Kelso to be an academic at Cambridge serving on the Council for India in the 1870s. My great grandmother eloped at the turn of the 19th century from an Oldham mill-owner's household to marry a Scottish journalist - George Roland Halkett - with the capital he had in his head. My grandmother died in Madras Chennai - her son, my dad, was born in India. He like so many others of his generation saw action in WW2 while my imperturbable grandfather who served in WW1 was uncomfortable when there was thunder. All travelled and served across the world. Two of my relatives - Dad and grandfather were real spooks whose work I'll never know - one was at Bletchley Park in WW2 and the other, after my mum and he divorced, married my Athenian step-mother and helped me have three half-sisters and a half-brother and an enduring connection with Greece, serving in Athens, Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Brussels and Washington. My mother rather than be a postwar Foreign Office wife divorced to work in Fleet Street. My step-father, whom she chose to 'live with' left Huddersfield to be a pioneer of press, radio and then television journalism and entertainment after his war service. Another grandmother took to driving in the 1920s, smoked cheroots, and left her debutante set to become 'red Barbara' leaving London and its circuits to start her own farm - where I was born in 1942. My eldest sister married a self-made New Yorker from the other side of the tracks. I went to private school where they tried to scare us with threats of 'ending up in a grammar school' if we didn't study hard enough. Linda who made it to Cannock Grammar school grew up in a council house on Bevan Lee Road; her father serving as a miner in the war; her mother in a munitions factory and later in the leather trade in Walsall. My life has been uneventful compared to the lives of the previous generation. * * * * "I bought", said our history teacher,"the bed whereon I was conceived." That was our history teacher, Charles Keeley (1920-1998), in the Ashburnham Room, gazing out at Little Dean's Yard one morning. The phrase, especially that preposition, joined the pool of his deliberate faux non sequiturs - too odd to be dissolved in the compost of most things past. In 1991 it was activated. I was finding out about my mum and dad's wartime union that ended in 1949. War years mainly. She and he. Enchanted evenings. What was that she'd said about air raids in London? "Oh your father and I didn't go to the shelter at The Savoy. We were having too much fun." That figured. Soldiers who'd seen action didn't take such chances. On leave in town when the sirens sounded they went underground - swiftly. But Dad's regiment - Ist Bt Coldstream Guards - part of the newly formed Guards Armoured Division (XXX Corp at Market Garden and before that Goodwood, Caen, Falaise and the dash through France, Belgium to the start line at the Meuse-Escaut canal, below the Dutch bridges, to his blighty wounds near Nijmegen) wouldn't see action until 1944. Mum worked for Vogue. Such people often felt a duty to take risks. The worst of the bombing of London - the Blitz - started in September 1940 and tailed off after May 1941. Following enquiries, I had a letter suggesting I contact Rosemary Ashby, archivist for The Savoy and Ritz. We met in a foyer off the Strand on a Friday in November - 17 years ago. She took me to her small office. She'd brought a file of room registrations from 1940 to 1944; let me copy the pages I sought - furloughs around 40 weeks before my birthday on Sunday 29 March 1942; Room 526 and 581 between Wednesday evening 25th June and Saturday morning 28th June 1941.Rosemary told me about picking hops in Kent in those years; how she and fellow land girls had once taken inadequate cover when a botfly strafed at random. I pocketed my copies of the evidence of the bedrooms - one wherein.... I could have gone upstairs, had a word with a chambermaid, peered through doors, touched walls and sat on furniture, on beds even, but Rosemary had given me enough. I had no wish for better souvenirs of the happiness that made me and I doubt our history teacher really bought that bed. It was an idea he enjoyed. In fact, now I think on it, I'm sure he said "I could have bought..." The Savoy Hotel is closed between December 2007 and May 2009 for a major make-over. * * * *
Nora Gregoriades died the other day - Maria, my Greek step-mother's sister who was so kind to me when I first visited Greece in 1957. I remember my first Greek Easter lamb roast in the Gregoriades garden in Kifissia. In 1962, after I'd sailed to Greece from England and we'd been moored to refit in Tourkolimano in sweltering August it'd been sweet relief to take the train out to cooler Kifissia, to be served as many glasses of iced lemonade as I could drink at her home with her family. On our last day in Athens, Danica back in the water, well stocked for the long voyage home, Norah took us to the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, to see John Stride and Judi Dench in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. "With patient ears attend...the two hours' traffic of our stage "? I needed no prompting in that humid setting below the Acropolis that hot Athenian night before we sailed for England. I was rapt, stunned, laughing and crying Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life; Whole misadventured piteous overthrows Do with their death bury their parents' strife.

Heading back to England

Athens Venezelos Transit: Flew out of Corfu at 0625. On the plane someone next me noticed I was reading Kazantzakis' Christ Recrucified. 'Do you like Kazantzakis?' No! I said I 'much more than "like'''. She said people either loved or hated Kazantzakis. 'You?' I asked. 'I like him very much'. I asked what she thought of his views on women. 'His second wife said he was impotent. That might explain much'. 'Oh' I was bemused. I would have to think about that. Wasn't Job impotent? Why should she say such a thing publicly? I am reminded of my ignorance. I was intrigued by Kazantzakis' views on religion. She said 'He is quite accurate about the church'. Wasn't Kazantzakis, like Tolstoy, driven by man's inability do anything about the misery of human life? In this aren't they in the tradition of the stoics, of men like Zeno, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and every creative endeavour in art or politics by men or women to better - I mean 'better' as 'overcome - the human condition? I guess this was not the impotence to which his second wife referred. But in the matter of eloquent shouts against the darkness Kazantzakis forked the lightning and sang the sun in flight. I was in confessional mood, because reading Kazantzakis at the same time as I was leaving dear Greece, I was ready to show more emotion than an Englishman should. D had already commented a few days earlier, after I'd told him the plot of Zorba the Greek, that I liked the tension between the Greek and the Englishman - especially as it was played in the film. 'So you see yourself as Alan Bates?' said D. I said to C, on the plane from Corfu to Athens, that I had reservations when first kissed on both cheeks and embraced by the Greek side of my family '...because we didn't do that. Not when I was young.' I said I'd changed over the years, as had England, reverting to a pre-19th century expressiveness - even in the north. 'I love Greece. However bad things might be, I could never not!' 'Why?' she mouthed. I didn't hear her as we were leaving the plane, standing, reaching for luggage. 'Why?' she asked again. 'I was infected by my father a long time ago. I have no wish to be cured' 'How' she asked 'did your father come to Greece and learn Greek?' I mentioned I thought he might have been in Epirus in 1949, involved somehow in what was happening then. She listened almost too intently - a habit of discretion breached by my curiosity. Lin would say 'Your big mouth!' In-flight to Athens: From the plane window I can see the mountains of northern Peloponnese under dawn mist and a few white clouds. I’ve found a transmission on 102.5 FM3 which I like. A mixture of Greek voices of all kinds and music. Last night, as I drove between Kato and Ano Korakiana, to collect an Indian take-away treat from Brynn for my last evening, there was a talk on sacred choral music. A thoughtful voice commented on extracts from Saint-Saëns, Handel, Mozart and Monteverdi. This morning as I drove south in the dark on empty wet roads to catch my plane home I heard, on the same channel, the news and, amid dawn chaff, some Mendelssohn. I understand a phrase here and there. It's how I understand – or don’t understand – music, but music and uncomprehended Greek were more than agreeable. I want to understand the church here. I'm qualified by ignorance, respect and faithlessness. The ancient tension between Protestantism and Catholicism was still around when I was at school. The Spanish Armada, Bloody Mary, the Inquisition were alive in our histories, quite separate, then, from the troubles in N. Ireland. There were bombs in our cities until ten years ago. Somewhere in all the economic and ethnic interpretation lay the old division that began with Henry VIII’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon. But on the great Schism between the Latin and Byzantine Churches, between the two popes, between Rome and Constantinople, I have no unharboured prejudices to moderate and come innocent to the filioque debate

[8/01/08: This subject scores 116,000 hits on Google and over a thousand revisions in Wikipedia since 2001 - and that's just the English version. When I was studying anthropology at Cambridge - long ago - one of our lecturers told a story about a people in West Africa visited by missionaries from different Christian traditions. The Chief, detecting competition between his guests for new souls, invited them to debate their positions in front of a formal meeting of the elders. Recognising how unfortunate, even ridiculous, would be a public argument of the kind that had divided European Christians for centuries, the missionaries, recovering mutual respect and love, succeeded in solving a problem that still occupies theologians. Both knew the local language well and agreed that the words that described the concepts that divided them were insusceptible to local translation. 'For words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever, if but a man.' Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, ch. 4 (1651) I recognise the irony of my reliance on that quote. It was one I learned from my superb history teacher, Charles Keeley, at Westminster and it's been a good friend since, along with many other pearls he shared] [Filioque issue: The Churches were arguing about whether the Son played any part in the origin of the Spirit as one of the persons of the Trinity from the Father, who is the only ultimate source. The Latin word filioque, which means 'and from the son', was gradually inserted by Western churches into the Nicene Creed so that it stated that the Holy Spirit proceeds not from the God the Father alone, as the early Church Fathers believed, but from both God the Father and God the Son. The Eastern wing of the Church believed and believes that the Father alone had given rise to the Holy Spirit, and the idea that both Father and Son had done so was condemned as heretical.]

'When I said goodbye, with a small gift, to the Leftheris, I was invited into their dining room and treated to a skirto, and a tasty quince sweetmeat - kidoni gliko κιδονι - and some figs sweetened and mulled in ouzo. Ten of these were put in a jar, sealed with a ribbon and given me to take home with spiced bread from a name-day service at one of the Ano Korakiana's churches. Was there a church for every name? 'But of course, we have many churches in Korakiana. ' I thought Kiria L was saying this proudly, but checking herself to make it sound like a light apology, lest she create the risk of too many blessings. Or was it that so many churches means much labour? I didn't think it meant division. In Ano Korakiana there are 'many mansions'. As I sat making do with a mix of non-verbals, and sparse Greek and English, Leftheris smiled and said he'd seen his marrow on the internet. I was shown some photos of the grown-ups as children - Vassiliki, Themis (Themistocles) and Katherina. I said I was very happy they were our neighbours. We shook hands gravely and parted. On Saturday of my one week stay, I washed clothes and set out to cycle and walk to Spartillas on the slopes of Pantokrator. At the sixth hairpin bend on the narrow road to Sokraki above Ano Korakiana, there’s a narrower road running sharply off to the left by a house on the corner – the only one that far up the mountain. I cycled for a bit, but the inclines increased and the surfaces deteriorated - grooved by torrents. I went up and up. I passed the two masts with their generator motors rumbling. The vista grew and grew under a mildly cloudy sky, until the track levelled off, the road surface improved and I was cycling again through a plateau of small fenced allotments each with vines. I came, around mid-afternoon, into Spartillas and then enjoyed the longest of freewheels down to the sea through over twenty hairpin bends, stopping occasionally to gaze over the land to the south. After more work in the cyber cafe including sending a report home to Lin I cycled to From Ipsos, I cycled the twelve or so kilometres to Corfu town, gazing back at the distant heights I'd ascended and descended. In this picture there's a crack in the wall almost certainly caused by one of the earth tremors that occur here fairly regularly. Later I cycled back to Kontokali to meet D and T for a supper at George's - a delicious plate of pork off the grill with chips and a Greek salad, then onto the Navigator’s Bar where, to my quiet delight, the Saturday night karaoke equipment failed and a spatulate fingered bouzouki player, who happened to be there, entertained us instead. D drove me home, with the Brompton in the back.