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.