only two universities, were academically of a far higher standard than Mitford had suggested, and in themselves the boys were no better and no worse than boys the world over. But they were ruthlessly pragmatic about English. They cared nothing for literature, and everything for science. If I tried to read the school eponym’s poetry with them, they yawned; if I taught the English names for the parts of a car, I had trouble getting them out of the class at lesson’s end; and often they would bring me American scientific textbooks full of terms that were just as much Greek to me as the expectant faces waiting for a simple paraphrase.
Both boys and masters loathed the island, and regarded it as a sort of self-imposed penal settlement where one came to work, work, work. I had imagined something far sleepier than an English school, and instead it was far tougher. The crowning irony was that this obsessive industry, this mole-like blindness to their natural environment, was what was considered to be so typically English about the system. Perhaps to Greeks, made blase by living among the most beautiful landscapes in the world, there was nothing discordant in being cooped up in such a termitary; but it drove me mad with irritation.
One or two of the masters spoke some English, and several French, but I found little in common with them. The only one I could tolerate was Demetriades, the other teacher of English, and that was solely because he spoke and understood the language so much more fluently than anyone else. With him I could rise out of Basic.
He took me round the village kapheneia and tavernas, and I got a taste for Greek food and Greek folk music. But there was always something mournful about the place in daylight. There were so many villas boarded up; there were so few people in the alley-streets; one had always to go to the same two better-class tavernas for a meal, and one met the same old faces, a stale Levantine provincial society that belonged more to the world of the Ottoman Empire, Balzac in a fez, than to the 1950s. I had to agree with Mitford: it was desperately dull. I tried one or two of the fishermen’s wineshops. They were jollier, but I felt they felt I was slumming; and my Greek never rose to the island dialect they spoke.
I made inquiries about the man Mitford had had a row with, but no one seemed to have heard of either him or it; or, for that matter, of the ‘waiting-room’. Mitford had evidently spent a lot of time in the village, and made himself unpopular with other masters besides Demetriades. There was also a heavy aftermath of anglophobia, aggravated by the political situation at that time, to be endured.
Soon I took to the hills. None of the other masters ever stirred an inch farther than they needed to, and the boys were not allowed beyond the chevaux defrise of the high-walled school grounds except on Sundays, and then only for the half-mile along the coast road to the village. The hills were always intoxicatingly clean and light and remote. With no company but my own boredom, I began for the first time in my life to look at nature, and to regret that I knew its language as little as I knew Greek. I became aware of stones, birds, flowers, land, in a new way, and the walking, the swimming, the magnificent climate, the absence of all traffic, ground or air – for there wasn’t a single car on the island, there being no roads outside the village, and aeroplanes passed over not once a month – these things made me feel healthier than I had ever felt before. I began to get some sort of harmony between body and mind; or so it seemed. It was an illusion.
There had been a letter from Alison waiting for me when I arrived at the school. It was very brief. She must have written it at work the day I left London.
I love you, you can’t understand what that means because you’ve never loved anyone yourself. It’s what I’ve been trying to make you see this last week. All I want to say is that
Both boys and masters loathed the island, and regarded it as a sort of self-imposed penal settlement where one came to work, work, work. I had imagined something far sleepier than an English school, and instead it was far tougher. The crowning irony was that this obsessive industry, this mole-like blindness to their natural environment, was what was considered to be so typically English about the system. Perhaps to Greeks, made blase by living among the most beautiful landscapes in the world, there was nothing discordant in being cooped up in such a termitary; but it drove me mad with irritation.
One or two of the masters spoke some English, and several French, but I found little in common with them. The only one I could tolerate was Demetriades, the other teacher of English, and that was solely because he spoke and understood the language so much more fluently than anyone else. With him I could rise out of Basic.
He took me round the village kapheneia and tavernas, and I got a taste for Greek food and Greek folk music. But there was always something mournful about the place in daylight. There were so many villas boarded up; there were so few people in the alley-streets; one had always to go to the same two better-class tavernas for a meal, and one met the same old faces, a stale Levantine provincial society that belonged more to the world of the Ottoman Empire, Balzac in a fez, than to the 1950s. I had to agree with Mitford: it was desperately dull. I tried one or two of the fishermen’s wineshops. They were jollier, but I felt they felt I was slumming; and my Greek never rose to the island dialect they spoke.
I made inquiries about the man Mitford had had a row with, but no one seemed to have heard of either him or it; or, for that matter, of the ‘waiting-room’. Mitford had evidently spent a lot of time in the village, and made himself unpopular with other masters besides Demetriades. There was also a heavy aftermath of anglophobia, aggravated by the political situation at that time, to be endured.
Soon I took to the hills. None of the other masters ever stirred an inch farther than they needed to, and the boys were not allowed beyond the chevaux defrise of the high-walled school grounds except on Sundays, and then only for the half-mile along the coast road to the village. The hills were always intoxicatingly clean and light and remote. With no company but my own boredom, I began for the first time in my life to look at nature, and to regret that I knew its language as little as I knew Greek. I became aware of stones, birds, flowers, land, in a new way, and the walking, the swimming, the magnificent climate, the absence of all traffic, ground or air – for there wasn’t a single car on the island, there being no roads outside the village, and aeroplanes passed over not once a month – these things made me feel healthier than I had ever felt before. I began to get some sort of harmony between body and mind; or so it seemed. It was an illusion.
There had been a letter from Alison waiting for me when I arrived at the school. It was very brief. She must have written it at work the day I left London.
I love you, you can’t understand what that means because you’ve never loved anyone yourself. It’s what I’ve been trying to make you see this last week. All I want to say is that
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