Childhood 10 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': Mother's Assignment

I did not take the first steps on the path of school education in my hometown. I had just turned five years-old and legally too young for the first year of elementary school. I don't know with how much enthusiasm, if any, Father had begun his own new professional career in the state telecom monopoly (a productive and fast-growing state run company at the time, despite the oxymoron scheme in the phrase). There he worked henceforth and for the next thirty years, until his retirement. Grandmother Eudoxia, as she was entering old age and many burdens of home and family care were lifted, could not and probably would not sacrifice the minimal freedom she gained and valuable time left in this world with pre-occupations of looking after a child. Her duties as a wife and a mother of three awkward and demanding men in the household had been fulfilled and, in fact, without much either moral and practical support or gratitude from husband and sons. She was understandably tired of looking after men. It was said that she categorically declined, in her honest and straightforward Asia Minor manners, to nanny a grandchild of a demanding age, despite the unequivocal love she had nurtured towards her first grandchild, since his birth. She also knew firsthand that Father’s help and support in the practical matters of child care and its growing demands would be negligible; as always, his attitude towards and might compromise his well-being, towards trivial household concerns, was like a wet towel. 

It was likely that neither mother wanted to have left me with grandmother just for the sake of her profession, but she realised that she had to work for better long-term family stability and well-being, but also to put in good use, maybe under pressure from her own family and peers, her teaching degree and qualifications. Graduate teachers, then and up to the present day, began their careers with a series of deployments to places ‘away from their home base’, normally in under-developed and under-privileged rural towns and villages, away from major metropolitan areas where most had found home and started a family. Such deployments, however, were deemed necessary by the Ministry that was paying her wages, despite and against the tide of urbanization that was tearing the flesh of the Greek countryside. Therefore, I had to join Mother, with two suitcases full of clothes, to her pre-ordained assignment away from home, in a village in the northern Macedonia plains, for an entire school year and a heavy winter in its course.  

Shortly after my birth, she was reappointed as teacher in the public school system, determined to endure again what was in store for the first years of a young teacher’s career. She had been assigned to wretched parts of northern Greece, to nondescript villages, before and after her maternity leave. Elementary education had long ago become a non-negotiable right and compulsory for all Greek children, but there were still some backward regions that had accepted this legal imperative with reluctance or indifference, and rather as an unwanted obligation imposed by an impersonal state to their progeny, simply incomprehensible for many peasants, who were either illiterate or functionally so, having obtained a hotchpotch education. Deep in rural Greece and the provinces outside its major metropolitan centres, the economy was based on small-scale, traditional farming, which, at that time, did not incentivise education. Persistent drives by post governments to modernize the agricultural practices and processes had not borne many fruits yet.

In the 1968-69 school year, an invisible hand from the Ministry of National Education (and, certainly, of Religious Affairs) ordained Mother to take up teaching duties in a village named ‘Cold Trough’ within the border of the Prefecture of Pella, not far from the birthplace of Alexander the Great. In the slang of young teachers, like Mother, such villages were branded as ‘lame’. The Ministry appointed young teachers to vacant positions within the public ecosystem, here and there, many of them to undesirable destinations. For members of the lower strata of the civil servant class, whether they could micro-manage and shape their lives around preconceived notions and plans or, perhaps, desires and even dreams, relied more on acquaintances in the state bureaucracy and access to its higher echelons, and less on an apparently objective, but complex “points” based, appraisal system- a system incomprehensible to many, arbitrary and pliable, that was supposedly taking into account individual and family welfare and concerns, in addition to qualifications, skills and experience. Perhaps out of prejudice, but most likely based on experience passed in the teachers’ trade by word of mouth, some of the village or small-town destinations of deployment were qualitatively classified as ‘lame’. In short, those were places, which, a new teacher from one of the two major metropolitan centres in Greece, of Athens and Thessaloniki, would likely never have heard of.

At best, it would have been a dull village or a small provincial town with some amenities and the basics life then could offer, such as a telephone at a neighbour’s home or a nearby shop. The qualitative classification of destinations was based, first and foremost, on the ease of access and transport between the place of work and the family home in the far away city. Secondarily, on the outlets that place of employment could have offered to young, relatively educated people in their limited yet valuable leisure time during difficult (then six-day) term weeks. Other, rather more objective attributes, such as the ethnic and cultural profile of the local population, its materialistic wealth and average education level, were normally ignored in the assessments and projections, although it was recognized that all these factors were intertwined.

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