19 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': Last Days

 Mother’s appointment to the primary school of the Cold Trough was announced by the ‘Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs’ a year after the establishment in power of what was labelled in European media circles as the Colonel’s dictatorship (or junta). Greece’s parliamentary democracy, according to the 1967 coup d’etat leader Col. Georgios Papadopoulos needed to be ‘plastered’ and then placed on the ‘operating table’ to be treated from infestations by anti-national, anti-patriotic elements and pro-communist tendencies in political life; in short, to ‘save Greece from anarchy and chaos’. No one in the school, the streets and cafes of the village, and even in closed family circles referred to the regime as a dictatorship. Life carried on was as if it had not happened. Nothing was mentioned in a context that could pique a child’s curiosity and lead to uncomfortable questions, even if what was said and happened at that time within the sphere of politics was beyond my comprehension. To the ordinary folk the political situation looked exactly as it was propagated by official or brutally censored media: a kind of ‘revolution’ led by the army and a group of enlightened officers, supposedly dutybound to undertake the salvation of the country from its enemies, internal and external, and the sceptre of anarchy and communism. Anyway, within a year from the pre-coup political anomaly and tumult, and the trepidations from the weeks of military rule the followed, life was seemingly back to normal and climbing steadily the uphill path (demanding, as always, sacrifices from common people) to progress and prosperity.

Of course, I could not have grasped what was all about, even though in schools the anniversary of the military coup was commemorated via stimulating and fostering a sterile nationalism, mandated by history and compulsorily imposed. Thus, the ‘Revolution for National Salvation’ of April 21st was celebrated each year with lengthy solemn patriotic speeches, but devoid of essence and coherence, military marches, church liturgies, portraits of heroes of the war of independence hanging alongside Jesus Christ and Virgin Mary on school walls, omnipresent artistic versions of junta’s emblem, which featured a soldier in front of a phoenix rising from the flames, and flags- a lot of flags, banners with incomprehensible propagandistic slogans (such as ‘Hellas of Christian Hellenes’ or ‘Fatherland, Orthodoxy, Family!’); that is, fabricated non-sensical bunch of odds and ends without ideological foundations, and no more than reactionary fantasies, in short a political aberration devoid of substance -fascism in a word. Nonetheless, state propaganda, children education, and nationalistic paroxysms in national and religious holidays, the latter (at least!) persisting not much altered even today, have managed to inflate the souls and minds of many compatriots with an own idea of a gifted nation to whom humanity owes the lights of civilisation.

After the first anniversary of the ‘Revolution’ on the 21^st of April of 1968, a week after the Greek Easter, we were counting the remaining days leading to the end of the school year. The lessons became lighter, the days and school breaks were extended, the May light spread abundantly over the school and the village. The dull, cold winter was behind us, day-trips to the countryside, our want and joy, multiplied. In the schoolyard, older children set up kick-abouts with whatever ball or kickable object they could find. The strict rules of conduct loosened and the discipline relaxed. In one of those sweaty and dusty football matches, in the heat of early June, to my excitement, I was promoted, for a little while, from spectator to participant, despite being too young.

The very last day of the school year before the summer break, was marked, as it was then customary, by the ritual of gymnastics demonstrations, showcasing to the village president, the policeman and the priest of the village, and, foremost, the beaming parents, the work teachers had done towards the spiritual and physical development of their pupils and achievements in that respect. Boys and girls, dressed in all-white uniforms and sneakers, gathered in the courtyard, recited poems and sang, then lined up in different group formations and paraded and performed, holding balloons and sticks and little flags synchronized exercises, whatever they had painstakingly rehearsed in the previous weeks. A professional photographer was hired to take commemorative photos of each class with their teacher. As the child of one of the school teachers, I was afforded personalised snapshots. One showed me paired with an older brunette girl for some sketchily choreographed movements as part of the demonstration. In the other I was standing next to the same girl in front of a eucalyptus tree by the fence of the school yard, looking awkward and tired, but certainly happy -most definitely inside me, like most: ‘The school was out for summer!’

For Mother another school term was concluded with everything was completed according to the plan prescribed from the onset. Smiles of satisfaction and pride were painted on the sweaty, sun-drenched faces all teachers and parents, especially Mother, for the extra reason of our impending return home and to family and the sea. The children were naturally more tired than anyone from their gymnastics in the heat of the late June morning, but two whole months without school beckoned, an elixir of joy for everyone, barring perhaps the hard-working housewives and mothers of the village and their husbands working in their crops.

18 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': Comings and Goings

Thessaloniki was always in our minds: it was our city, our home. The comings and goings to Cold Trough, Mother’s workplace, from a contemporary perspective and the means available to modern society was a hassle, especially arduous for the body and soul of a five-year-old child and his young working mother. In a word, a struggle -for a monthly salary of no more than a thousand drachmas ($300), for a six days long week; and that would be so for a few more year to come. The only consolation being that life circumstances would hopefully improve at the end of school year and the expiration of her appointment there.

Besides the half-term holidays of a couple of weeks duration around Christmas and Easter, in the few weekends the allure of home and family would draws us back to our city, we had to walk the straight, mile long road with a row of tall poplar trees on either side into the sunset, towards the nearest coach stop. We started our walk early in the Saturday afternoon, just after the school was closed, with the rays of the low winter sun glowing onto our faces, with the longing for the home we were missing in our hearts and minds, and a small bag of clothes, to head towards the sad café of the junction at the end of the road, behind a commanding plane tree in its front yard. It had a wide fridge that café, with soft drinks, beers and some dodgy mortadella and cheese sandwiches wrapped in cellophane on display, which we avoided despite feeling peckish, and sold coffee and comfort items, like sweets and chocolate and chewing gum. The few coffee tables for passengers waiting for the coach at that corner of Greece or the random local passer-by, were usually empty and the café deserter on early Saturday afternoons. The green-gray coach operated by the so-called ‘Joint Venture of Coach Owners’ made a brief stop, always on time, after countless and mostly unnecessary stops at several villages along the way, to pick us up and deliver us to the end of our route behind the old Byzantine Church of Panagia Chalkeon in Thessaloniki. It must have been an unprofitable coach route surely subsidised by the government, as a measure to arrest the decline of the countryside.

At dawn on Monday, we followed the reverse route. The first coach was too early in the day to attract many passengers and, always Mother and I found seats in the privileged front row just behind the driver. One such early morning, in the absence of the driver who was enjoying his coffee and a fag at the station café, the child's curiosity began to fiddle with the gear lever. I was intrigued by that strange long stick the coach driver with such dexterity and spontaneity was shifting in during our journeys. A slight pull caused the lever to be displaced to what I later understood was its ‘neutral’ position and I felt the bus rolling backwards downhill the Panagia Chalkeon street. The heart bounced, and started beating fast in panic, as it happens in unexpected and unwanted situations with an unknown and possibly disastrous outcome. Or, after potentially harmful mischiefs from children, who furtively try something forbidden to satisfy their curiosity, and the impending punishment expected by them to be severe: at best, a savage rebuke in public view, at worst the bogeyman from the police that would box the ear and drag them to the reformatory. The coach, after rolling a meter or so, came to a relatively smooth halt, apparently without having caused damage to people or cars. Relief prevailed and my heartbeat eased.

The driver, after his morning coffee and fag, climbed up swiftly to his sear to take over the reins of the coach, without having noticed a potentially calamitous event -thankfully. ‘But did he really secure the coach with the hand-break, as a professional should?’ I was wondering when I remembered the incident years later. In the small but ever-expanding world of a child, a realm of inquisitive naivety and innocent ignorance, of the spontaneous, adventurous and reckless explorations into the unknown, such trivial and insignificant incidents are perceived and magnified in pristine and sensitive soul. For the rest of the journey, having already overcome that momentary attack of panic, which shook the sleepy child in that Monday morning, I became an avid observer of every gear shift by the driver, of his hands steering dexterously the wheel, of his feet pressing and releasing the accelerator, the brake and the clutch, and an alert listener to the modulation of the engine sound, when slowing down, breaking or striving to accelerate. The driving was performed by the driver effortlessly, with admirable technique, with his thinking focused less on driving than chatting with the ticket inspector, who jumped in the coach later and sat next to him. Managing a huge vehicle was something fascinating, close to miraculous; a feat inexplicable by a child's mind

17 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': The Magic Box

One of those listless evenings, a Saturday evening it was when, after a morning at school, Mother decided against us taking the early afternoon coach back to Thessaloniki, I had my very first experience with a major technological achievement of the last century. It would be destined to dominate our lives, as a causality of evolution, and occupy and subjugate a big chunk of the leisure time of the masses: television. It appeared with the time lag typical of major inventions reaching the so-called ‘developing countries’ (euphemistically as they never seem to progress from this stage), in the margins of the advanced western world; a time lag that is usually proportional to the geographical distance and the technological from the metropoles of the ‘know-how’, but inversely proportional to the pace of globalization, which in 1968 had not gathered the speed of today.

Television broadcasting began in Greece not long before the establishment in power of the Colonel’s junta, and had been gradually adopted as the main source of information and means of entertainment by the wealthier strata of Greek society initially, before later becoming broader affordable by the populace. It was a technology that offered low-cost entertainment and continuous stream of news (then methodically filtered by the regime from any dissenting messages), and obtained rapidly a universal audience, of young and old, of poor and rich, with sometimes dilapidating effects on other established forms of information and entertainment and even of traditional social interaction. It was duly exploited by the ruling political and economic classes and faced only a few obstacles in establishing its pervasive influence, and those were weak ones. Initial hurdles imposed by the low average national income would soon be overcome by the imperative of capitalist expansion and a rapidly increasing productivity, and TV broadcasting was set on course to dominate the political, information, cultural and entertainment fields – everywhere! Until other technological revolutions swept it aside a few decades later.

I don't know if it says anything about the relative prosperity of Mr. George's and Mrs. Meli's household and maybe a few others in the Cold Trough, but their spacious living room featured a ‘magic box’ or a ‘devil’s box’, as grandmother used to called it, a couple of years before it also became a permanent accessory of our own petty-bourgeois flat in the big city. Black and white images pulsated every evening in different shades of gray, and could be seen through their living-room windows. The lights of the room were deliberately turned off behind the drawn-out curtains to increase the contrast, darkness was succeeded by a faint light, sometimes of prolonged duration, before the room, along with the outlines of the statuesque members of the family seated on semicircle around the ad hoc, central to the room, majestic television stand, plunged again into darkness. The enchanted family was experiencing the allure of a kinetic succession of black and white pictures. It was the attraction of the novel and the unknown, the spectacular and the unexpected, the lure of the transmission of real-time like images from a distant, dramatic reality (fictitious or not did not really matter) and the witnessing of adventures of virtual heroes from far aways, yet seeming close by, in the peaceful realm of one’s room.

And, yes! At last, I was invited that Saturday evening by these well-meaning landlords of ours to their living room to be initiated into and awed by the enchantment of television broadcasting: the mysterious motions of beings and matter behind a luminescent screen, through the projection of black and white images before our eyes. An unfortunate man (or it might have been a woman) had been chained up by some thugs across the tracks of a railway line, amid a Far-West desert, and abandoned there, his clothes torn to pieces and his body bruised from desperate attempts to free himself from his bondage. Agony and terror contorted his face, because of an approaching horrible death as the increasingly louder train honk foretold. It was the only image, perhaps distorted by later dreams or fantasies of childhood, that survived decades in the depths of memory from that ‘box’.

The unfortunate man eventually managed to free himself with the help of an unexpected hero who appeared in the scene out of nowhere, seconds before the train could have torn his body to pieces. Happy ending after the climax of suspense was the inviolable norm in Hollywood films of the time, but none of us could have foreseen or guessed it, as an ending like that would have defied the odds of a rescue, which the director, with skilfully projected tricks, made them appear negligible. The impression of horror that the prolonged, agonizing and seemingly inevitable onslaught of Death behind the screen, as enhanced with sound and visual effects, coming to seize the sympathetic sufferer, without eventually revealing Himself, always provokes and upsets and it was imprinted in childhood imagination more intensely than the peripheral plot of that film. The happy ending brought that night a relief, contentment, and lead to a sweet slumber.

x

16 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': Winter Evenings & Early Mornings

I was bringing homework regularly back to our little room. Homework that was tailored and personally assigned to me by Mrs. Lola, likely at Mother’s urging. It kept me busy throughout the long winter evenings in the absence of any sort of external distractions; and it helped me grown into the disciplined, studious and industrious individual, as have been recognized by myself and others -colleagues and bosses. Those strengths, if we may call so those attributes, along with several associated weaknesses and flaws, are built early in life with similar learning techniques in insular environments and with limited social interaction. To Mrs. Lola in school days, and to Mother, always by my side in the evenings, I owe a substantial part of the early knowledge I obtained and fundamental skills, like writing down neatly my first sentences or achieving a reading pace and comprehension above the average for my age. The schoolwork in the winter evenings of the Cold Trough added distinctly small but invaluable assets to the person I eventually became. It also set objectives to aim at ahead, which, in retrospect, I would not have had possibly the will, nor would I have taken the initiative to alter: I was wheeled into a prescribed and trodden path, so to speak.

After the meticulous completion of my homework, we would have our evening meal. The child I was never wondered or cared about how, where, and by whom those meals were prepared. What I remember is that it almost always ended with a fruit salad of peeled apple slices, often sprinkled with cinnamon, sometimes with honey, and oranges and tangerines from the local produce, in accordance to Mother's advanced for her time dietary habits. Before going to bed, which would draw the curtain to our daily routine, Mother would read me a fairy tale or sing me songs from the repertoire of the singing lessons she taught her class, with her beautiful, albeit contrivedly choral voice. Her singing classes, within the framework of a national curriculum, as dictated by the military junta in power after the ‘Revolution of April 21^st’ (as the military coup of 1967 was branded), unfortunately included arduous rehearsals of many ethno-fascist and marching songs. And only a handful of melodic themes with politically innocuous lyrics, performed in Mother's calliphony, matched the solitude and tranquility of our room in those long winter evenings. Amongst them, a sorrowful one stood out that I still remember. It told the story of a swallows' nest. A heroic mother of a family of songbirds, left her nest, as she did every morning, in search of food for her nestlings. One evening she did not return, as it had been caught in a net that some hunters had set. The sad tweets of the hungry nestlings went unanswered in the darkness of the night. The song hinted at the unjust end of a tragic mother and, for an emotionally virgin and, perhaps, congenitally hypersensitive soul like mine, the song always filled my eyes with tears and gave way to sad dreams.

My heart has hardened since: from life itself ‘debased in too much association // with crowds, in too much wandering and talking’ as Cavafy wrote. The emotional reaction to human misery that I have encountered along the way, either factual or staged (through theater, cinema, artistic expression), may no longer sink in to the same depths and move the soul to the same degree, but it still touches the heart, often subtly, sometimes it brings tears -as it was with that evening song. Sadness, pity, compassion, and the like emotions, as I have matured and aged, do not reach depths in proportion to the magnitude of the human tragedies I encounter, directly or by association, closer or further away, real or manufactured. But the emotions from that simple, innocent school song, which for most of my peers would have felt no more than superficial and indifferent, perhaps even boring, pointed to me something about the endless labyrinthine path of self-knowledge that begins with birth and concludes with death. I later realized, for instance, that I was born or nurtured into a more sensitive soul than most life circumstances and the world itself demand; whether we become rich and privileged or destitute and unhappy, or follow undistinguished, undulating paths without extreme peaks and troughs. After all, a superfluous emotionalism, that excessive sensitivity of the introvert, and the constant worry and fears that often accompany it, torment the mind. That the ‘heart is often bled’, that our soul is occasionally ‘torn into fragments’ by impressions and stimuli are in themselves ineffective reactions to events. It does not alleviate the human pain that stimulates them, it has minor influence on the course of events and does not change anything of their essence. On the other hand, this hypersensitivity to human suffering, the emotional scales that it reached, was a small coveted privilege and blessing. Whether it was genetically inherited or acquired, or rooted in the soul in those winter evenings of my year in Cold Trough, or both, is irrelevant.

With Mother lying next to me, sometimes under a heavy blanket, pajamas made of a thick fabric, with woolen socks worn even in bed, we slept in the room with remnants of warmth from the turned off stove fading fast. On nights of great frosts, we covered ourselves under two blankets and we laid one underneath, instead of cold and dump white cover sheets, for better insulation from the cold emanating from under the bed and every corner of the room. These measured sufficed for a comfortable sleep in a bed warmed up by our bodies. The morning awakening, however, with the stove turned off, the windows blurred by frozen condensation, I remember myself shivering vigorously with short breaths and my heart pounding fast, whilst Mother trying tenderly to warm up my fingers and toes with her hands. The breakfast was cold, too: chunks of bread or biscuits soaked in milk or slices of bread with butter and honey along with a glass of milk, all went down with effort.

The road to school, a dirt road with potholes, often filled with ice, that took us across the main street and around the square towards the outskirts of the village, was deserted. But the first pale lights were already on behind the windows of many of the houses. The teachers had to present themselves at school before the first pupils starting to fill its schoolyard. My early awakening in the chill of the mornings was richly rewarded by the warmth of the stove and snugness in the Teachers' Room, before the janitor’s alerted the children to toe in line in the courtyard: for the prayer, the hoisting of the flag, the singing in unison of the national anthem, and the headmaster’s daily briefing. As a teacher’s child of not of school age yet, I enjoyed the micro-privilege I enjoyed then was that I did not have to stand in the schoolyard with the older children –something that, in the end, might have arrested the development of social skills. Nor did I have to endure the ordeal of the barren and incomprehensible morning ritual that lacked depth and significance for most of the children, and, I reckon, some of the teachers, but it was done because it had to, as mandated by a protocol, dictated from outside and above. A couple of times, however, I lined up in a queue with the other children in a dwelling at the corner of the schoolyard where breakfast was served —a cup of milk and a slice of bread spread with butter and jam. Something unprecedented and unique in the annals of the Greek educational system, it was one of junta’s populist initiatives. It was eventually abolished as soon as Greece’s backcountry emerged from the poverty of the post-civil- war era. Yet for a similar breakfast, in addition to a weak and lukewarm coffee, I joined after years similar queues as a conscript.

Childhood 15 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': Good Friends for Life

Mrs. Lola and her husband Mr. Fotis G were, on the face of it, a good match. He was the ‘old school’ lawyer whose parents immigrated from Pontus, the shores of Black Sea in the aftermath of the Asia Minor Disaster. Of humble family origins, therefore, he nevertheless emerged from the ranks of his profession and exceled in some kind wheeling-dealings concerning land and property rights in the Chalkidiki peninsula, representing land-owners and their heirs in the region. A region of natural beauty, of course, where crystal clear sea waters, sandy beaches, pine forests descending to its shores, as well as its proximity to the city of Thessaloniki promised future wealth to its inhabitants given its huge potential for tourist development. Every square foot of land was worth thousands of drachmas, every acre millions. Through those ‘little Chalkidiki jobs’, as he used to call them, and via the ensuing marathon judicial processes, barely transparent to outsiders, for awarding property rights and settling claims, he was in position to commanded exorbitant fees. Additionally, he was presented with opportunities to purchase, in knock-down prices, premium plots with stunning beaches nearby, where the country's ‘heavy industry’ would duly exploit. He resold some of them with a handsome profit, in others he built his own villas.

"I will trample on the cunning and deceitful Chalkidiki men! I will squash them!", he would say with determination and contempt, on course of closing those lucrative business affairs, which, eventually, established him as a renowned and, most importantly, a wealthy lawyer. But, by definition, he was a parvenue -given his former humble origins. He possessed eloquence and rhetorical skills –useful tools in the persuasion of mostly illiterate clients and necessary conditions for success in his profession. His ways of speaking and tones of voice had eccentric and rather attractive to his listener feminine inflection, sufficient to create misconceptions and give rise to malicious gossip, amongst enemies and rivals. This aura of femininity from his mannerisms was conspicuous enough that auntie Litsa, a colleague who frequently pumped into him in court corridors, considered him gay and rather shamelessly branded him as ‘of that sort’ -without explicitly mentioning what this ‘sort’ meant and avoiding use the standard offensive slang word for that trait). Litsa’s derogatory remarks were often made in the presence of Mother, a close friend of Mrs. Lola’s husband, who made no effort to dismiss those claims. Mr. Fotis’ lawyer's skills and pomposity, perseverence and self-confidence, and an ego his professional success inflated, made his short stature inexplicably looked even shorter, but also diverted glances from his small bald head and his rather ugly face with a beaked nose.

The G’s occasionally invited our family and other guests to their main holiday home by the coast of the Sithonia peninsula. It was a huge villa complete with tennis and (yes!) basketball courts, neither of which, however, Mr. Fotis or Mrs. Lola, were physically capable or had the physique for making good use of. More frequently, it would be Mother and I who would be invited for afternoon coffee and cakes in their apartment on the top floor of a privately owned block, which Mr. Fotis, after another litigation bonanza, had built and owned in the ‘Forty Churches’ district, at a prominent position by the edge of a pine forest on the hills Seih Sou, which overlooks the city, its bay, and stunning sunsets behind the mountain range across. The two women, after a series of appointments in distant regions, eventually, in the twilight of their careers had been employed by schools in their home city. Their genuine friendship had been solidified, and Mother, who had volunteered to become godmother to several children of colleagues and relatives, had also presented the first child of the G’s, Nicos, to be christened. As both Nicos and I were shy by nature, we engaged timidly in unexciting games (compared with those with my close neighborhood friends) by the edge of the stream that separated the courtyard of their apartment building from the forest, and sometimes we ventured into the forest itself, under the watchful eyes of our mothers in the balcony where they used to drink their coffee. We never became close friends as our mothers would have wished.  

On the other hand, my sociable Mother reciprocated on a unique occasion (despite Father’s a priori negative dispositions against such home gatherings) by inviting the G’s to our humbler apartment, ‘for a pie with beer’ -her casual trademark treat. With great effort, and with the heart in her mouth, it must be said, because of Father’s unpredictability, his chronic reticence, objections and, on occasions, bad-tempered reactions, which often characterised his behaviour ahead of Mother’s friends visiting and disturbing his tranquillity. In the meantime, from the last meeting with the G’s, I had been transformed from the shy little boy, who was sitting at the very front row of the class under Mrs. Lola’s desk and nose, in that first year of primary school at the ‘Cold Trough’. In that ‘soiree’ of Mother's, I found myself rather by chance and unwittingly, as an awkward teenager and first-year university student, who was trying to cut off from the company of grown-ups.

Mrs. Lola sat next to Mr. Fotis, seemingly, as always, in awe of the great lawyer’s personality (as it was also the case with Mother next to Father’s presence at similar events). She remained silent for long periods of time, with a smile of acquiescence, in accord with everything that was said by him or others, barring a few banal soft-spoken comments.  She was characterised by an innate shyness, as I remembered her, in that first-year classroom. On the contrary, Mr. Fotis, was the usual talkative himself: sitting at the edge of the armchair with his waist straight, speaking with eloquence and grandiloquence, enunciating barrages of overemphasized words, stressing their importance with movements of hands and arms -as if he were speaking in court; reigning over the company, overshadowing even Father, and patronizing the party with his undeniable talent of captivating an audience. The quiet Mrs. Lola with her weak benevolent smile looked, as always, enchanted by his gravitas and listened silently, but attentively and with admiration, raising occasionally her eyebrows when he was stressing a point.

To my adolescent apprehension, at some instance I was awakened from my quiescence in the far corner of the living room I was sitting, and the boredom that usually overwhelms young people who found themselves reluctantly amongst a group of adults and their conversation, when Mr Fotis addressed and challenged me, as he would do a petrified witness in a court, to express my opinion on some political issues he was advocating. "Dear L, I would have liked you to participate in our interesting conversation... L, your opinions, please!", he exclaimed with a sobriety at odds with the intended laxity of Mother’s gathering for ‘a pie with beers’.

One of the main conversations that evening revolved around the the impressions the G’s had from a recent leisure trip to countries of the ‘existing socialism’. It goes without saying, given their acquired status at the top of the social ladder in Greece, their impressions from behind the Iron Curtain were negative and the overall picture he painted of life in those countries was bleak. As a student and an enthusiastic young communist, I had been involved in leftist activism from my early days in university, and was evolving into a respectable by comrades Marxist intellectual through intensive reading. And, when challenged by a personage adroit at debate, I proved adequate, if not equal to, with composure, solemnity and, in retrospect, undue self-admiration, to defend my ideological corner and views, which Mr. Fotis wanted for some reason to elicit. My bit was followed by a lively exchange of political arguments, for and against socialism, which, as is often the case, end inconclusively. All that was happening under an irrefutable smile of satisfaction, perhaps even pride, from Father. In hindsight, I later assumed, erroneously perhaps, that the unforeseen discussion with Mr. Fotis was pre-arranged under the guise of an interview, in the context of a possible match-making (I knew…) Mother and Mrs. Lola had been cooking for a while, between me and the G’s young daughter. A promising grand dowry, potentially on the table, was the main but, unfortunately, a sole attraction. Even that would have contradicted my socialist beliefs.  

The friendship between Mrs. Lola and Mother, which began in our time at the ‘Cold Trough’ survived for more than half a century, with mutual visits, outings and phone calls. Their contact became scarcer as their old age started getting the better of them and was eventually stopped by the aggravation of Mother's illness. Her best friend became a nebulous memory in her mind until she and their times together were completely erased, as did most of her past, whilst she was losing herself in the darkness of dementia. A few final lines were said at Mother's funeral, where her godchild Nikos with his sister, my would-be fiancé once upon a time, unexpectedly appeared to offer their condolences. It is one of Greek traditions, I learned afterwards, for a baptized child to attend the funeral of their godparent. Mrs. Lola could not make it. She still remembered Mother, her good friend, but the old legs could no longer hold her up. So many years had passed, since our ‘Cold Trough’ days, I came to realize, more than half a century, and all in a flash.

14 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': First Year in School

There wasn’t much to do in winter evenings under the melancholic light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, in a room devoid of anything that could have given laughter and joy to a boy, or at least would have drifted him out of boredom and listlessness.  We were living in an era of no internet or video games and only a few families in Greece still possessed a TV set. I was interacting solely with a methodical and pedantic and overscrupulous primary school teacher who was the daughter of a principal, and both were exponents of an entrenched and intellectually limited cognition. Thus, I was becoming embedded in a rather regressive system of learning. The incessant and monotonous and sterile homework that I brought onto my little desk every night and completed with stoicism and diligence and remarkable thoroughness was a solitary occupation, with questionable results over the long-term benefits in shaping my personality. It did not take long before a sweet drowsiness by the heat from the stove overwhelmed us both. In retrospect it seemed that I was ‘killing’ time rather uncreatively early in life, but the days were passing by slowly then.

I was not legally allowed to attend school proper for another year and, indeed, Mother following the letter of the law, had me attend the nursery in an annex off the main school, for a short period, where, I remember, sitting nonchalantly next to the young nursery teacher who read us tales and taught us the alphabet by displaying huge letters on a board. After an arrangement behind the scenes between Mother and the principal, I found myself being informally admitted in the first-year class: a whole year ahead of my time! Certainly not in a class that Mother was teaching, as this would trigger whispers of bias and special treatment and unwelcome gossip (and nothing less ingenuous than that) amongst children and parents, and even by one or two ill-disposed teachers. Arguably, it could bring classmates into awkward or contemptuous situations in their association with me, depending always on one’s goodwill... Not that displays of such prejudices were frequent or noticeable. Yet nothing would have prevented from being labelled or, as I would later say to myself, stigmatized as the aloof ‘son of our teacher’, a tag I subconsciously carried in my first year in ‘Cold Trough’ and beyond, since, in fact, as the child of a teacher I enjoyed some conspicuous privileges other pupils did not. For instance, time before the start and after the end of each school day, sometimes during breaks, I was invited and spent in the warmth and cleanliness of the teachers' room (where often naughty classmates were dragged in order to be reprimanded) or enjoy treats that were often brought in and offered by teachers and parents.

Eventually, without comprehending much of what was going on around me, I was transferred to the first-year class in the main stone building, in the class of Mrs. Lola, and predictably placed at the very front desk at arm’s length from my teacher. Mts. Lola was a short and plump but extremely benevolent colleague and, by virtue of their year together in ‘Cold Trough’, best friend of Mother's, who later became godmother to one of her children. Mrs. Lola had a monotonous and automatic way of teaching in class, and was shy in her interactions with others. But she was low-key and soft-spoken with a pleasant voice, which I don't recall her ever raising to children and adults alike. Perhaps, because of the gentle, timid and rather feeble character, along with her lack of experience, she had been assigned to teach in the not very demanding first-year.

It was that lonely and difficult year in ‘Cold Trough’ that solidified Mother's friendship with Mrs. Lola, as it often happens with people of compatible natures who face common adversities in a strange place away from home. Their friendship survived the many years after their appointment to the remote village, until retirement and old age, Mother's illness extinguished one of her best friends from memory. As far as I am concerned, the dictum "our first teacher is never forgotten" holds true, no matter how insignificant the influence of a first-year teacher can be on one’s life.

13 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': Mrs. Meli's Room

 For Mother and child from the big city, ‘Cold Trough’ seemed an alien and desolate place. Certainly quiet and peaceful for those seeking to escape from the bustling streets of Thessaloniki, but which we were about to miss. The winter mornings, from the autumn foliage until the blooming of the almond trees in February, are remembered for their darkness and cold. And that bitter cold of the plain away from the mild shores of the Aegean, was bone-piercing, as we walked to school at dawn. A sun with teeth, nevertheless welcome those early mornings, would eventually assert itself before the school opened its gates and the the pinkish-turning-blue sky above the vast plain drew our attention. Rays of brilliant, yellow light illuminated the halls of the old school building through the tall rectangular windows along its entire length and width, but the light was soon diffused by clouds of dust raised by the feet of children rushing in and out of their classrooms. The few streets of the village on either side of the main road disappeared into the fields -to ‘nowhere’ as it seemed. The empty streets, the closed kiosk at the intersection, the deserted, treeless square of white slabs, which we traversed at the beginning and end of each school-day, deepened the sense of isolation and the weariness in the unfortunate outsiders who have been dispatched to the village from a major city, and were patiently awaiting the expiry of their appointment to move back to where they came from. The provisional nature was a consolation. In the meantime, they had to endure the routine of an everyday life confined by the narrow horizons of the local farming community.

Mother rented a small studio room with a kitchenette at its entrance, hidden behind a door in the corner of a long balcony, overlooking a fenced courtyard, on the upper floor of the two-storey house, which belonged to the family of Mr. Giorgos, Mrs. Meli family and their two sons. The house was situated a minutes’ walk from the square and the corner with the main road that village in two halves. The ‘Avramidis & Son’ book and stationery shop, sole supplier of reading and writing material for school children (its primary and, perhaps, only clientele) stood at that corner. From the school year that Mother was appointed, and for many school years after our departure (at least twenty, as last time I saw it open was on a visit to the area a university student), the shop was rather inexplicably a magnet of attraction for me (and, I imagine, for other dedicated pupils), an almost compulsive stop the end of school weeks: For the innumerable, colourful accessories for writing, for the irresistible scents of paper, of markers and pencils, of notebooks of various shapes, with blue plastic or brown cardboard covers. It had fascinating toys and board games in stock, too!

I was later convinced, more by virtue of my association with the teachers around me (Mother, grandfather and their colleagues) that comprehensive reading and writing of notable quality in form and, perhaps, content, needed all those, inexhaustible in number, simple to use accessories that a stationery stores provides: from rulers to measure, or to underline and align, to pencils and pens of various colours for smooth and colourful writing and highlighting words and phrases or calligraphy, elegance and order in written text, to auxiliary but also necessary items like sharpeners and erasers. In short, all those little things technically contribute to optimising and polishing reports of school and other work. Emphasis on form is no small matter, as I would find out later, even at the expense of the content. At best, it enhances a piece of written or typed material, even if that lacks notable substance; at least, it draws the attention of the intended audience to an otherwise unremarkable and superficial work.

Mr. George was a lanky man, with a face creased by the deep wrinkles of toil under the sun, and a conventional for his milieu chevron moustache that color-matched his grey, rich and untidy hair. In short, he had an archetypal Greek farmer’s physiognomy. In a normal day, when not drinking coffee and chatting with fellow villagers in the café, he would have been busy getting on with his farming tasks. But we bumped into him now and then in early mornings on his tractor and trailer-in-tow, on his way to the fields, or for some business to the near-by town and the agricultural cooperative, or who knows where else. How was I burning to climb up onto the cabin of his tractor standing idle under a shelter in the courtyard amongst heaps of straw bundles! A tempting but yet prohibitive and never fulfilled urge: to play with the steering wheel and the gear handles, to pretend to be a driver.

His wife, Mrs. Meli, was a plumb woman, with rosy cheeks, with looks more youthful than her husband's. Her brown hair was loosely gathered in a bun on the back of her head. She was also the personification of a typical farmer’s housewife, invariably dressed in a kitchen apron or a robe usually over a floral cotton dress, busy from dawn to dusk with housework chores: brooming the balcony and the paving slabs, feeding the chickens and their only goat, washing and cooking for the family. In her afternoon or evening breaks, she used to invite neighbours and, occasionally amongst them, Mother or the second of her tenants, around a large table in her spacious kitchen on the ground floor: for the ordinary village gossip and coffee, the latter usually offered with spoon sweets. Their children were probably much older than me-that is how they seemed to a diminutive five-year-old child-and only reluctantly they would attempt to associate with my shy self, the stranger newcomer to their village. Sometimes, prompted I presume by their mother or, perhaps, out of sympathy or pure kindness, they invited me to participate in impromptu ball games in the courtyard, which in the absence of Mr. Giorgos and his tractor, offered ample space for a quick game of a-few-a-side football. It was then and there that my love for the game, which has grown ever since and been carried through into adulthood and old age, planted its first roots.

At the entrance of our apartment, behind a doorless opening in the wall of the main room, the insignificant windowless kitchenette of just a bench and a washbasin, was equipped with nothing more than a primitive electric and a mini gas stove -for Mother’s Turkish coffee and heating our milk for breakfast. The wall opening connected it to the only room, our bedroom-cum-living-room. There was no en-suite bathroom. Nature calls were answered by walking to a Turkish-style toilette behind another door at the end of the long-narrow corridor of the balcony, but such calls must have been of secondary importance under the circumstances to be remembered. The furnishing of the room was minimalistic and worn out. Mother and I shared a divan stuck against the wall, barely wide for an adult and a child to lie comfortably next to each other. We slept under a white, pleasantly fragrant sheet, but which, once I tucked myself underneath, it felt cold and damp. The one or two blankets we used to throw on top of provided some warmth and comfort in cold winter nights. There was a small table against the wall with two old chairs, a heating-oil stove on one side, under a small window that looked out into a neighbour's back yard and terrace. Last but not least, my wooden single-seater desk with a green board under which I arranged my books and stationery, that is, the few necessary means for a relatively intelligent to achieve the academic excellence his parents had dreamed of and invested in, from early on in life. As most families of the petty-bourgeoisie family in Greece would have done, then and today -a couple of generations later: such have been and remain the mundane dreams of this class, and its unimaginative vision.

At that desk, in the dark of the long and lonely winter evenings after school, under the discreet overseeing and tutelage of the teacher-Mother, in the pale light of a naked lamp hanging from the ceiling, learned and practiced, with eventually a remarkable degree of accomplishment, my skills in calligraphy and spelling, through incessant, tedious copying of passages from textbooks. I had already advanced to a competent for my age reader, thanks to Father coaxing me to spell labels, signs, names, headlines, everything around us that contained letters and words. I was also becoming, thus, a perfectionist of calligrapher, too, and a good speller of a burdensome, difficult to comprehend language. (Only few could foresee in Greece of 1968 that many of these hand-writing skills would prove unnecessary in the future, even counterproductive in one’s personality development!). That gruelling national language that has retained its complexity for millennia, despite periodic attempts, since the establishment of the modern Greek nation, to simplify and modernize its grammar, syntax and structure; a language that somehow lost its way along the path of human progress, having sprung from an ancient womb, and ended tired and poor and awkward in its use by Greeks and foreigners alike, in the midst of a dense forest of continually enriched foreign vocabularies capable of articulating the achievements of human civilisation and keeping pace with innovation and technological revolutions.

Anyway, under the exclusive tutoring and general influence of Mother, I was becoming a model protégé, the real deal of a pupil -so to speak, a worthy descendant of a family of teachers. But at the same time, I inherited unwittingly one of Mother’s defects, and most of her contemporary Greek school teachers’ for that matter, the majority of whom I retrospectively saw as mere sciolist pretenders: with unwarranted emphasis on form and appearance, at the expense of content, of critical thinking, and creativity; in addition to the unproductive pedantic concern for detail. Not sure if much has changed in that respect.