40 - To a State-Run Resort with a Brother

Along the arc of life that connected the last years of childhood with the more challenging and turbulent ones of adolescence, our holiday venue Father changed our holiday venue: from the nondescript and forgettable hotel to a camping-cum-resort located a few kilometres north on the same stretch of coastline. The ambitious resort that caught Father’s eye from his inception was established near the village of Skotina at the foothills of Mount Olympus in the early 1970’s by the ambitious National Board of Tourism, still in its glory years. It was managed since and until its overthrow in 1974 by the military regime and, for a short period of time thereafter, by our more democratic state with the lack of discipline and slack that characterised such post-dictatorship governances –when state-run enterprises started declining due to maladministration, favouritism and incompetent management, until they sank into seas of losses and debts and were dissolved.

In the meantime, my one and only sibling, my brother was born. One could say that his presence, in that stage of my life at least, had a negligible effect with respect to my daily outdoors intercourse due to a gap of more than seven years in our age. But it was during that period of the first few summers in the camping of Skotina, when Brother, was growing from a toddler of two and three years old into a lively as well as mischievous and unruly child – that is, a child difficult to deal with especially for Mother. ‘The family rebel’ was he branded by Father and as such he was introduced to friends, and in the privacy of our home he used to sing with a noticeable pride a popular at the time song by Kilaidonis: ‘As things were turning out upside-down and bad // we brought a rebel into our family…’ Kiki, of our family friends, for her part, she renamed him with a bucolic version of his Christian name, which alluded to revolutionary Greece’s mountain guerrillas and bandits, because of the lively and free-spirited and charismatic child he was – distinguishing him thus from the plethora of Greeks with the same, most common name.

From early on, Father nurtured a distinct fondness for Brother for his intelligence and rebellious attitude. He always kept a soft-spot and harboured a weakness so to speak, even into the twilight of his life, and certainly for many years after Brother was transformed through life’s travails into a contrasting personality from the one that his infancy and childhood was indicating. And he expressed that weakness openly and unequivocally and in the presence of friends and family, and my presence. He clearly became his favourite son and not just in my eyes, despite a few exceptions of parental correctness and impartiality, maybe because of some penitence, whenever he mentioned: ‘I loved my two sons equally’, nevertheless sometimes not failing to add: ‘Y is our weakness, but L is our pride’. (The last compliment I was afforded was more due to the discipline and diligence I displayed, attributes that did not characterise Brother’s behaviour, as well due to my star performances at school as the result of those attributes.) Kiki advocated further in her judgements: ‘Y is a rebel with the maturity and bravado of an adult, a spirited child, who objects to instructions and directions from parents and teachers and frequently outsmarts them… and even does not hesitate to react angrily to attempts of untoward reprimands; on the other hand, L had ”a positive attitude”’ – as another way to say that I was slightly above the average, physically and intellectually, in my age bracket.  Natural it was that such distinctions affected my relationship with Father and our emotional closeness, whilst I was young and Father still in his prime, notwithstanding my self-confidence. They had inevitably affected my personality and attitude in my interactions with people, in adolescence and later in life. But the relationship with Fater as it evolved with time, a relationship that on occasions moved on a knife edge, other times it was a relationship of mere acknowledgement of the presence of each other and our opinions and differences, sometimes collapsed to a nadir of aloofness and emotional distance, especially after a barrage of scolding, aggression, even personal insults. But such family shenanigans amount for another long chapter in the book of life.

The two summer holidays we spent at the Platamon Beach Hotel were condemned to a dustbin of childhood memories. But the camping of Skotina, as it opened before my eyes on one spring Sunday before his very first year of operation proper, as we entered through its secure gate and barriers with Father's FIAT, still unspoiled and unblemished by holidaymakers, seemed like a paradise on earth and left me dazzled and dreaming and longing for the months of school holidays. It was then in the early 1970’s, it was its inaugural season, and Father, having heard praise from friend and colleagues, took me along for an on-site audit and to reserve one of the few bungalows in the remote corner of the camping. It was a grandiose (for Greek standards) and rather pioneering recreational undertaking by the National Board of Tourism at the time, built on a huge expanse of land between the highway and the rail tracks of the line that connected Athens and Thessaloniki, hidden from passengers and drivers behind rows of poplars, and the hitherto unspoiled, long and wide beach that stretched from Leptokarya to Platamonas, and overlooked by the then still snowy ridges of Mount Olympus.

With endless stretches of grass land, ideal for football (my imagination had already begun to gallop and dreamed of impromptu matches between the different nations of holidaymakers) and sports in the playgrounds, in the basketball and tennis courts, carefree cycling on the serpentine lanes meandering around the delimited spaces for tents and caravans. Not to the mention, the explorations it offered of plants and butterflies and their collections and classifications during the hours of the hot and laid-back afternoons, in the arbour around the small artificial lake with the water lilies plants, under the foliage of plane and pine trees, where the rustling of the leaves and the sound of the sea two steps further could only be perturbed by the croaking of frogs and the singing of cicadas. Just next to a complex of bungalows one of which would be our adobe for our summer vacation! The bungalows were yellow, red, blue freshly painted boxes, colours fancy from the rays of the spring sun, separated from the sea by another simple village of green. They had balconies shaded by straw canopies, and what I always wanted to sleep on: the top of a bunk bed. All this man-made paradise was waiting to welcome me. I could not wait for the school summer break!