Mermaid Singing E-Book

Charmian Clift

• Herausgeber: Muswell Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

In 1951 the Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston left grey, post-war London for Greece. Settling first on the tiny island of Kalymnos, then Hydra, their plan was to live simply and focus on their writing The result is Charmian Clift's best known and most loved books, Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus. Mermaid Singing relays the culture shock and the sheer delight of their first year on the tiny sponge-fishing island of Kalymnos. Clift paints an evocative picture of the characters and sun-drenched rhythms of traditional life, long before backpackers and mass tourism descended. On Hydra, featured in the companion volume, Peel Me a Lotus, Clift and Johnston became the centre of an informal community of artists and writers including the then unknown Leonard Cohen who lodged with them, and his future girlfriend Marianne Ihlen.

Leseprobe

Mermaid Singing

Charmian Clift

Introduction by Polly Samson

For my mother Amy Lila Clift

Contents

Title PageDedicationMermaid Singing by Charmian CliftEpigraph 12345678910111213141516171819 About the AuthorsAlso by Charmian CliftCopyright

Mermaid Singing by Charmian Clift

In the winter of 1954 writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston left London, with their children, to live by their wits and their typewriters on a Greek island. Kalymnos, one of the Dodecanese – the dozen dry islands scattered along the coast of Turkey, like the fragments of a Greek plate smashed in an international domestic – would not have been their first choice. Stony and rough though it was, the couple needed a story and Kalymnos offered an extraordinary and tragic one. It was an island almost entirely dependent on its sponge fishing fleets. A population of fourteen thousand people relied on just a few brave men, divers who risked their lives fishing for sponges off the coast of Africa for seven months of each year. There was little other industry (mass tourism hadn’t yet been invented) and the popularity of synthetic sponges was killing the market for real ones and impoverishing the island.

Already celebrated back home in Australia (where their first collaborative novel had won the prestigious Sydney Morning Herald prize), Clift and Johnston had been in London for four years, part of a diaspora of Australasian talent that enriched the cultural life of the fifties and sixties. They had published a couple of collaborative novels to good reviews, taken tea at Faber’s offices with T.S. Eliot. They lived in a flat provided by George Johnston’s employers, in a red brick mansion opposite the viii Russian Embassy in Bayswater. Their London friends numbered many artists, Sidney Nolan, Colin Colahan and Cedric Flowers among them. They drank cocktails with Peter Finch, Laurence Olivier and Joe Orton and bashed away at their typewriters late into the night.

George Johnston had become dispirited working on Fleet Street. One of Australia’s star war reporters, he had trotted the globe, walked with Ghandi beside the Ganges, met the Dalai Lama, witnessed the Japanese surrender ceremony from a ship and was one of the first to visit Hiroshima in the aftermath of the atom bomb. The work he was being asked to write and wire back to Australia was increasingly tittle-tattle about the royal family or the size of filmstars’ breasts. Clift was frustrated too: it was a period in which she later described herself as feeling she was losing her identity. There wasn’t a scrap of time for her own writing. She was backstopping with the children and researching at the British Museum Reading Room, dashing down notes for the books that she and George wrote together once he got home. Late at night, if she glanced out of the tall window, across the dark shadows she’d see the outlines of all the trees in Kensington Gardens that her children were not allowed to climb. She writes of George Johnston needing Benzedrine to stay awake, barbiturates to sleep, and ‘the inexorably circling fingers of a thousand clocks spinning our lives away’. Princess Margaret was on the front pages, smog hung around. Charmian Clift was a year past thirty to her husband’s forty-two when they threw it all in for their Greek island. Their children Martin and Shane were seven and five.

The yearned-for catalyst to escape was a BBC documentary about a scheme to take the island’s unemployed sponge divers to Darwin to revive the ailing pearl industry there. Their families would join them later. For a novel that would feature bravery and macho divers – and set on the yearned-for Mediterranean island – it would also be a story of emigration.

Unfortunately the pearl-diving scheme was abandoned shortly before the family were due to leave London. ‘But I’ve already cancelled the winter coal so we’ll have to go!’ Charmian Clift insisted they go through with it. ix

She tells us she thinks of her children as ‘hostages’ as the plane takes flight from London’s ‘guernsey cow coloured’ skies to Athens. Her voice is immediately engaging, the guilty word ‘hostages’ arresting. Caught bang in the middle of the awkward hinterland between Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer, her thoughts about children and the role of their mothers remain at once strange and relatable.

Ovid describes how it was while flying over the honey-rich island of Kalymnos that Icarus found confidence in his wings, and ‘began to rejoice in his bold flight.’ For Charmian Clift too, as noted by her insightful biographer, Nadia Wheatley, it was on Kalymnos that her writing took off. Once the novel about the sponge divers was out of the way, written mainly by George Johnston, and with gusto – ‘Roll over Hemingway!’ she wrote to friends Pat and Cedric Flower at the start of the year, she was able to find a portion of time. Unshackled from collaboration, her own words found their form. It was a tricky metamorphosis, according to Cedric Flower, who was staying with them for part of the year (and whose drawings grace each chapter head) who claimed that George Johnston rankled when she fought off his suggestions to make her writing more colourful or catchy.

Life on the island is tough. It’s honey-days are done. Outside her window the rhythms and traditions seem almost medieval. The sight of a crippled young diver, his legs twisted from the pressure of the deep, makes her weep and wish to leave. The island’s children are starving and the onus for survival falls heavily on God. Her style is immersive, she brings us with her into glimmering rooms, to orthodox ceremonies and rituals that are rooted in paganism. She’s writing events as they happen, with fresh, thrilled eyes that take in the important small details and are not blind to darkness. She is fascinated by the position of the island women, and women generally, notes at a Kalymnian wedding that the bride is ‘still padded around the cheeks with puppy fat,’ and compares marriage to human sacrifice.

Her thoughts about her own children always strike a reverberating note. One night, for instance, a macabre youth runs along the waterfront ‘wearing only a lace curtain topped by a German x helmet’, and afterwards she worries, as she watches them play and fly kites, that they are ‘only pretending to be normal.’

There’s ecstasy later as she glories in the children’s freedom, and her own. She wears trousers to the Tavernas and drinks with the men despite that it’s an island where even lipstick or sitting in a café exposes a girl to ‘moral danger’; best of all she insists on writing her own book.

She often deploys acid wit. She compares the swaggering divers and their kombouli to the patriarchy she’s left behind and the Old Etonians flicking their keychains. Charmian Clift was a bold feminist, years ahead of her time, and reading her two memoirs, and the volumes of her weekly newspaper essays from the sixties, it is often astonishing to remember that she was writing before the birth of the women’s liberation movement. In Mermaid Singing she says of her own marriage: ‘all embracing cooperation is the only workable arrangement. But I have the faint gnawing suspicion that there will come a time when I will somehow find myself several paces in the rear, watching the flick of his keychain and quite unable to catch up because of the weight of the baggage I am carrying.’

Her imagery is indelible: the slaughterhouse blood with its ruby gleam, the slaughtered pet lambs curled whole into earthenware pots, Irini’s entire set of stainless-steel teeth ‘giving the impression that the silver icon above the bedpost had made a pronouncement’, the baby being raised from the font dripping with wine and oil, Sevasti with a face by Donatello, scampering about the mountainside, miraculous in her red petticoat.

The voice is warm and intimate, testament to the fact that at times the book seemed to be writing itself in the form of letters to friends or in the pages of her journals.

She’s open to every experience, delights in the language, the food, the people, nature, the sea. She becomes exuberant in the sun, mesmerising, her descriptions take flight. This, on the ancient village of Chorio, is hypnotic. ‘Everything is painted blue from the merest brightening of stark white, like a blue-rinsed sheet, to a thick, rich ultramarine. Stairs melt into walls, corners curve, pavements swell into domed ovens. Sometimes there is no line xi of demarcation between house and sky and walls soar up and thin out into purest atmosphere or the sky sweeps down to your feet, solidified, with two pink windows and a pot of red carnations drawn on. The black-clad women are exclamation points against the blue … Every scrap of colour sings – a boy’s red jersey, an orange cat, a tray of poison-coloured sweets, a flower dropped on a twisted stair.’

We all know what happened to Icarus and it’s hard not to let his shadow fall on these pages or to dwell on Charmian Clift’s tragic death just fourteen years after they were written. Better to think of her here on Kalymnos, sitting at her typewriter in the window of the tall, narrow yellow house that still stands on the waterfront. The year is 1955 and she’s writing to the Flowers:

‘Building ivory castles like mad. Very, very happy. Even if it all fails will never be sorry we got away from it all for a bit, anyway. Love, Charm.’

Polly Samson 2021

Mermaid Singing

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

T S Eliot, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

1

We came to the island of Kalymnos in the small grey caique Angellico, belting in around Point Cali with a sirocco screaming in from the south-west, a black patched triangle of sail thrumming over our heads, and a cargo of turkeys, tangerines, earthenware water jars, market baskets, and the inevitable old black-shawled women who form part of the furnishings of all Aegean caiques.

It seemed to be a fine brave way of making an arrival.

‘Mother of God!’ gasped an old lady between vomits. ‘The little ones! Look at them! They do not understand!’

‘Bah, old grandmother!’ The curly-headed deck hand flung the contents of a bucket into a mountainous green wall of water rearing over us. ‘They are sailors, the children. Sailors! Anyone can see.’

The wave hit. The benches went crashing from one side of the deckhouse to the other.

‘Grrrp!’ said the old lady in a strange strangled way and clutched at air. The curly-headed boy steadied himself nonchalantly against the splintered door frame and obligingly hauled in the bucket at the end of its rope. The ‘little ones,’ who belong to me, emerged dripping from a convulsed heap of turkeys, benches, cardboard suitcases, broken pottery, market baskets, and upended old ladies, with their small fists full of tangerines and their small faces crimson with ecstasy. 6

Obviously this was beating the Battersea Pleasure Gardens hands down.

‘Mum! Why does it come up all yellow and lumpy?’ (Martin is seven and has a scientific turn of mind.)

‘Because she didn’t chew her breakfast nicely nor swaller.’ (Shane is fourteen months younger, and female.)

The deck hand dragged the old woman across to the door as if she were a wet bundle of rags and pushed her head into the bucket. ‘You see, old grandmother,’ he said contemptuously, holding her poor bedraggled old head down, ‘sailors!’

Our lean friend and self-appointed guide, Manolis, who had been shot across the deck in a crouching attitude, now rose from all-fours with a dignity I greatly admired, and, turning to George and me, said with the air of a patriarch who had brought his tribe to the promised land: ‘My brother and my sister, we come now to Kalymnos.’

And so, indeed, we did.

There, heaving ponderously above the peaking wave-crests, were gaunt grey mountains, slashed and scarred with sulphurous fissures and streaming ragged clouds. And at the foot of the mountains was a town, an improbable town that from across the wild sea had the appearance of carefully arranged coloured matchboxes — a doll’s town to amuse a child on a wet afternoon. Beyond the little cubes of white and blue and yellow ochre a hill rose out of a valley with a ruined wall and three round towers; and below the houses a forest of matchstick masts tossed on what would ultimately prove, no doubt, to be a nursery bowl filled with water from the bathroom tap.

The Angellico kicked and shuddered and bounded forward with a final sickening lurch down into the swirling sea. Then, unbelievably, it was sliding in around the breakwater on an even keel, and the sodden old women crossed themselves and began to sort out their bundles with good-natured equanimity. We slid in to a little wharf alongside an ugly customs building and three houses that had been stolen from a Christopher Wood painting.

The children were handed ashore like heroes, engulfed in admiration. It was as well, on the whole, that neither George 7 nor I had enough Greek to explain that they had been heavily laced with drammamine before leaving Kos. I have a theory that sailors are made, not born, and the products of the biochemical laboratories are a better insurance policy than bunches of herbs or tangerine peel, or even, I suspect, the desperate supplications of St Nicholas which are the background accompaniment to Aegean travel. I was not to know until some days later that two passengers on the caique from Vathy had been washed overboard that morning and all the deck cargo lost, although at the time it surprised me a little that Manolis should cross himself so fervently the minute his feet were on dry land again.

‘Brav!’ he said admiringly to the children, and to us. ‘That damn Angellico! It’ll turn over next trip. You see!’

Only two hours before, at Kos, with the sea fretting and fuming outside the harbour all the way across to Turkey and the fishing boats scudding in to land under taut orange sails, it had been this same Manolis who had urged us aboard the Angellico, which was rolling and dipping even then inside the sheltering wall of the castle.

‘Po-po-po-po po! Nothing! Nothing!’ he had said, indicating the sea, the shredding sky, the orange specks of sails fanning out urgently from Bodrum. ‘You come to Kalymnos now. Very good island. Very good people.’ And he had helped us aboard the Angellico as if it had been the Semiramis leaving Piraeus for a summer cruise. ‘You see now,’ he had said, as he skilfully dislodged two old women from their seats to make room for us.

‘Today at Kalymnos I find you one good house. You don’t come back no more to Kos.’

I suppose it is indicative only of his complete amiability that a Greek will always tell you what you want to believe. Now Manolis had crossed from Kos to Kalymnos a hundred times and was perfectly well aware that it was a dangerous day and certainly no day to put to sea with two small children in tow. His nonchalant minimising of the risks was activated entirely by his knowledge that we wanted desperately to get to Kalymnos and we hoped for a calm crossing. I am sure he would have been deeply wounded had anyone suggested he might have shown 8 greater concern for our welfare by advising us against sailing. ‘But this was the day they wanted to go.’

His behaviour has continued consistent. Manolis is pliable. We have found ourselves picnicking in a hailstorm on his assurance that it was bound to turn out a beautiful day. We have wasted many expectant hours waiting for events and people and information that have never materialised. The bus has left the station. The ship, alas, weighed anchor two hours ago. The party is not tonight, it was held last week. If either of us expresses a wish (often, indeed, we have no need to express it; Manolis merely assumes that we will) he instantly assures us of its imminent gratification, not from any conviction but from a sincere desire that things may turn out as we hope. He sees nothing illogical in this. It is his expression of friendship.

Looking back on it now I think it was probably only the greatest stroke of good luck that we did find a house in Kalymnos, and that within half an hour of our arrival, exactly as Manolis had predicted in Kos.

It was a spindly yellow house on the waterfront, with a little cast-iron balcony overhanging the plateia and four staring windows that looked down the broad harbour road with its row of coffee-houses under the ragged casuarina trees and across to the small coloured cubes piled higgledy-piggledy at the base of the mountain. We inspected it with the owner, a stout, effusive woman who wore a blue coat and skirt and the sunglasses that here are a symbol of class distinction and accordingly are worn also at night or when the sun is heavily overcast.

Our inspecting entourage consisted of Manolis, two slim shy young men in working clothes whom he introduced as his nephews, a gnome-faced engineer named Mike who had worked in the United States and spoke English, the wife of the proprietor of the adjoining coffee-house, and about a score of ragged snotnosed children, part of the shrill horde of hundreds who had followed us along the waterfront and were now crowded into the room, choked up the tunnel of the stairs, or waited in the plateia below for further developments. 9

There were four bare rooms with pale, streaky, limewashed walls and an improbable number of double doors carved with tricky lozenges and painted white. There was a large white kitchen with a red stone floor and two tiny open grates of whitewashed brick behind a flowered curtain drawn across the gigantic chimney. There was, as I had been warned, no bathroom, and the lavatory was as noisome as I had expected, but at least it was separate from the kitchen and there was a cistern above it, lacking a chain.

Could the landlady, we asked, have a chain attached to the cistern?

Why, certainly, certainly! Nothing could be simpler. The matter would be attended to tomorrow. Anything we wanted! Anything!

The rent was set at six hundred drachmae a month, and this figure was discussed and debated by everybody in the room, including the ragged children, who carried the information to the crowded stairway, from which point it was borne to the patient crowd in the plateia. There, I gather, it was considered at length, as well it might have been for it was daylight robbery. However, we had no way of knowing this at the time, being fools with money generally and coming fresh from London rents.

‘Is that cheap enough, Manolis?’ asked George.

‘My dear brother!’ said Manolis, who had evidently observed from our slightly desperate expressions that we hoped the rent was set at a fair figure.

If we agreed to pay such a sum could the landlady provide the necessary sheets and blankets for the beds, cupboards for hanging clothes, cutlery and table linen, cooking utensils for the kitchen.

Everything! Everything! The best she owned would be at our disposal. It would be her first concern that we should be as comfortable as if we were in our own home and the little darlinks happy.

The little darlinks were by this time prancing up and down the blue tunnel that led from the street wearing their silliest expressions and shrieking abuse at each other to the wonderment 10 of their wide-eyed audience of Kalymnian children. For a moment, shamefully conscious as I was of the contrast between the plump, well-fed, warmly-dressed and odiously-behaved little darlinks and the grave wonder of the scantily clad and undernourished children who regarded them with such soft, shy glances, I would gladly have disowned my two. But as I grasped one small hand firmly in each of mine I realised that their hands were hot and damp, and the two pairs of blue eyes turned stubbornly away from mine were filled with strain and uncertainty.

Martin’s lower lip began to tremble. His fingers tightened convulsively. Shane, always alert for a cue, took the deep shuddering breath that always heralds a bellow.

‘Oh, it’s awful, Mum!’ Martin sobbed. ‘I haven’t had any peanut butter since London and I don’t know what anyone is saying.’

Obviously they had had about as much as they could bear. And who could blame them? For the last two weeks they, who had always lived a life as snug and safe and ordered as a comfortable income, a comfortable home, and loving parents could provide, had been hauled on and off aeroplanes, Aegean ships, smelly caiques, in and out of hotels and pensiones; they had been asked to eat lukewarm squid slithering in olive oil, cold macaroni, bread without butter, boiled goat’s milk which turned them up: instead of the paradise of sunshine, blue skies, and sweet little donkeys which they had been promised they had spent miserable hours perched tiredly on top of mounds of baggage in bleak terminals and on rainswept wharves. They were cold and unhappy and homesick. I felt for them with all my heart. For so, suddenly, was I.

‘Tell her we’ll take the house.’ It didn’t matter if the rent was too high or the house damp or the attic infested with rats. We had come to a point where we had to stop and sort ourselves out.

It was only then that I noticed that the tap above the kitchen sink was attached to a little tank of painted tin that had no sign of pipes leading into it.

‘But where does the water come from?’ I asked.

11 Not far. Nothing. A mere five minutes’ walk. I would find a public tap in the street behind the corner coffee-house, and of course there were the wells. I could get myself an old kerosene tin. If I did not care to fetch the water myself there was a very nice woman who would be glad of employment. She would carry the water, clean the floors, do our laundry very cheaply and cleanly. Would I care to interview her in the morning?

‘My dear sister!’ Manolis muttered fiercely, ‘don’t let yourself be cheated! The daughter of my sister, who sells very fine clean vegetables in the small shop at the corner, will fetch your water and clean your clothes for far less money. This woman is only trying to find employment for a relation!’

‘We can leave that until later,’ I said. ‘What interests me at the moment is this question of water. If there is no running water I take it the cistern doesn’t work?’

Manolis shrugged.

‘But what is the point of having a chain attached to an empty cistern?’

The landlady beamed and spread her arms wide. It was what I had asked for. Her one object in life was to oblige me and to make the little darlinks happy.

In the bare front room the sobbing was dying down, and through the hiccoughs I could hear George’s voice, ‘… and those big schooners over by the lighthouse are called depositos. You see, they carry all the food for the sponge divers to eat, because they are away from home each year for a long time, six or seven months …’

‘Would they carry peanut butter, do you think?’

2

‘Eh, Mister George, what you fellers goin’ to do here?’

‘Write a book, Mike, as we told you.’

‘Yeah, but …’ American Mike’s wizened little face was cocked sideways. He looked more than ever like a sceptical monkey. His crooked brown hands were busy with a tasselled kombolloi of big amber beads.

‘But what, Mike.’

‘Well, that’s what I tellum, Mister George. I say to them, these fellers is writin’ a book about Kalymnos. But plenty of people here say to me, Manolis says how you can write the permit for goin’ to Australia. Manolis says no trouble for you to fixum. Plenty fellers here think you and Mister Charmian is a committee, somethin’ like that.’

George, wearing the phrenetic expression that was becoming habitual, explained all over again that we were not a committee, that we didn’t know any committee, that we had no influence whatever with the powers who arranged migration or selected migrants.

A crippled old man who seemed to be the town-crier was at this moment hobbling past bawling an announcement of the imminent arrival of the Kyklades from Piraeus and the expected departure of the Andros next morning for Rhodes. 13

He left the shipping schedule in the air and came over to the table under the trees to listen. Three sponge-divers at the next table pulled their chairs closer. The inevitable circle of children closed in, though doubtless they, like the sponge-divers, the town-crier, and American Mike, had heard it all before. By this time the whole town had heard our explanation — and nobody believed a word of it.

I still found it a little difficult to believe myself. For many years George, like other journalists, had grizzled fairly constantly about the nature of his work and sworn in his cups, like other journalists, that one bloody day he would just go off and live on an island and write books. (For a journalist in his cups the alternative earthly paradise to an island is a pig farm. There is some mysterious affinity between a journalist and a Berkshire sow that to me is completely unfathomable, but then I married into the island persuasion of journalists. I heard once of a newspaperman who actually did give up a lucrative job for the fatal allure of Berkshire sows, but, alas, I could never find out what happened to him eventually. Remembering Mr Tasker’s Gods, I suspect the worst. I also know another journalist of neither pig nor island persuasion, a truly original fellow who rustled up fifty pounds from his friends and went into the real estate business. He became filthy rich in no time.)

Well then, about a month previously George had been despairing in the classic journalist vein about the treadmill of Fleet Street and the impossibility of writing anything worth while when your only time for creative writing was at night and then you were too drunk or too tired, and how when you reached forty your future was calculable and you felt that with every Princess Margaret Surprise and every Foreign Office Sensation you were hammering another bar into place around your cage, and now the bars had become so close and numerous that you couldn’t see out any longer or remember how the sky looked or whether there was anybody left in the world who walked free.

There was nothing unusual in all this. It was true, and we had long known it and long accepted it as the price to be paid for the nice flat and the car and the good schools for the children 14 and the first-class tickets for yearly holidays on the Continent, and the rounds of theatres and concerts and entertaining and the pleasures of good food and good wine. Perhaps the extraordinary real and horrible sensation of suffocation we had both felt that night was due to nothing more than the fog, which had crept through the long windows and was wreathed in the curtains and hanging like gauze about the candle flames. Outside in the Bayswater Road the night was the colour of a guernsey cow, and on the pavements the leaves lay in a sad yellow pulp, mulched by all those homeward-plodding boots. Why should it be, suddenly, a thing too infinitely depressing to be borne that the women were already wearing snowboots and those shapeless gruel-coloured overcoats that would fill the streets for the next six or seven months? Why should one weep because the salt was too damp to pour? Perhaps if at that moment I had refrained from the masochistic urge which compelled me to get out the box of colour slides we had taken on our springtime holiday in Greece … the little islands floating magically on an indigo sea, the cypresses stiff against early morning oyster skies, the pink domes, soaring saffron shafts of column, the three donkeys on a hill at noonday, wading through crimson flowers … Perhaps if that very day we had not met, by accident, a friend newly returned from Greece who had asked me to come into the B.B.C. to hear a radio feature he had made on the sponge-diving island of Kalymnos …

It burst like a star, so simple and brilliant and beautiful that for the moment we could only stare at each other in wonder. Why the devil shouldn’t we just go?

So we did.

We had no means of communication other than sign language, and we had a bank account that didn’t bear thinking about. Still, we thought we might be able to last for a year if we managed very carefully and stayed healthy. We had for some years published a novel every year or so, not very successfully, but we thought that it might be just possible to live by our writing when our capital ran out.

Kalymnos seemed a good place to go because there was a story there that was interesting which we could get to work on 15 straight away as an insurance policy against the next year. If it didn’t work out …

But of course it would. Once the decision was made it was impossible, it was beyond the bounds of reason, that it should not work out.

‘You are a pair of romantic babies,’ said a friend of ours. ‘And of course you’ll live to regret this folly. On the other hand I believe that although the mermaids are mute it is necessary for everybody, once in his life, to go down to the sea and wait and listen.’

‘Hey, Mum! Mum!’ Martin whispered urgently in my ear, his blue eyes amazed with hope and on his mouth the little deprecating smile of the disenchanted. ‘Does he really mean mermaids? Or is it just grown-up talk? Are there mermaids in Greece too, besides the donkeys and the longest sausages in the world?’

‘Silly,’ Shane said sleepily, ‘there are mermaids everywhere.’

‘Oh, I know they’re not true,’ said Martin quickly, with the lordliness of disappointment. ‘Excepting perhaps for a rare one. Mum, might there still be a rare one?’

Ah, but how to say to American Mike under the casuarina tree that we were looking for a mermaid? How to explain that we were civilisation sick, asphalt and television sick, that we had lost our beginnings and felt a sort of hollow that we had not been able to fill up with material success. We had come to Kalymnos to seek a source, or a wonder, or a sign, to be reassured in our humanity.

‘Well, you see Mister George, it seems funny to these fellers here, all these fellers here don’t want nothin’ but to get away from Kalymnos. They all want to get to Australia. They don’t want for to have to go on divin’ for sponges. Ain’t nothin’ here but sponges, Mister George.’

We told Mike that we had both come from Australia originally.

‘Yeah, I know, Mister George. Manolis he tellum that. He tellum you can write the permit.’

We began all over again.

16 ‘Well, if you can’t write the permit, maybe you could let one of these fellers live in your house when he gets there.’

But we don’t have a house there.

Where is your house then? Is your house in England?

We don’t have a house. We have no house anywhere in the world. Our house is this yellow one we rented yesterday for as long as we can pay the rent.

And now I know that this is something a Greek will never understand. For we are the new nomads, the twentieth century, who wander the earth with trailing roots, our possessions portable, our dwellings temporary. Not for us the parish register, the crammed attic, great-grandmother’s furniture, the field planted out for the next generation, the family vault and the ancestral worms. We pay weekly for the space we take up in the world, from the moment we open our eyes in the hospital ward to the time we close them in the rented house.

American Mike was making intricate double flips with his kombolloi. The three divers were smiling at us encouragingly. A little barefooted girl had crept up behind me to touch the stuff of my skirt.

‘O.K., Mister George,’ Mike said finally, and grinned. ‘You just tell any feller here anything you want. He’ll fetch it.’

I had the feeling that we had scraped through an important test.