20 - A Year in the Cold Trough: A Misfortune Before our Farewell

Our life in the Cold Trough culminated with an impressive experience, ingrained in memory, which for the soul of a five-year-old child had the hallmark of a tragic incident. It happened one dusk in the paved square of the village, in the eve of St John's Day, close to the summer solstice. Later in life, each time I was listening to a song from one of Greece’s popular singers, Hari Alexiou's, saying: ‘And fires were lit by the kids in the back streets // It was St John’s Day, I think’, my mind was brought back to that evening. Schools closed for summer a few days ago and our stay in the Cold Trough was nearing its end. Children from the village, mostly schoolmates, gathered in the square and started a fire with papers, dry tree branches and, also, plastic objects. I don't remember how I found myself amongst them, being relatively young for that sort of extravaganza. Along with them I was enjoying the freedom from the shackles of the school routine, longing for a summer vacation by the sea and, in that evening, I was attracted by the adventure the moments offered and the pleasure of the company of other children, left in their own world, to improvise games out of nothing. Kids are fascinated by fires and so was I -throughout my childhood, for that matter.

I was next in the queue to jump over that makeshift fire from garbage, but I naturally hesitated from fear and the awe from the unprecedented and daring undertaking. An older boy behind me, fearless and with the experience of a few jumps already under his belt pushed me, out of malice or, more likely, impatience and his eagerness to repeat an exciting feat before the fire went out. With the push I fell into it. ‘A tramp! A bully!’, were the first thoughts of the culprit, although unspoken. I got up from the fire terrified and realising that ‘bad’ boy had disappeared, out of fear himself and cowardice. I was wearing shorts and both of legs and arms were bare and after landing onto the fire my upper and lower left leg was covered in black soot and ashes. Worse, pieces of a melted plastic materials were stuck on the skin. I cried; the kind of refuge or line of defence for every child in physical pain and a mental impasse -in despair, without knowing what to do and fearing the worst. I began to run instinctively towards Mrs. Meli’s house and our room, a little further down from the corner of the square, seeking the protection and consolation of Mother. I was running crying: ‘I got burned! Mom, got burned!’ The owner of the kiosk owner in the corner of the square stood bewildered outside, and asked foolishly and rather jokingly: ‘What’s happened, boy? Have they given you onions to eat and got burnt?’ A cruel and non-sensical joke that was, hardly comforting for my physical and mental pain.

At an older age the mind would pause and ponder for a few moments after the shock, before externalizing any sensations and feelings. But when pain abruptly hits a child's nervous system, it instinctively and vividly expressed with what we consider a natural reaction: crying and, then, uncontrolled sobbing. A rational mature mind would have moderated consequent feelings and emotions, no matter how an innate impulse forced a reaction, before their intensity reached a peak; it would consider the circumstances, pay heed to the surroundings. Containment mechanisms within would have tamed the effects and outwards expressions of the shock, that is loud crying in public; composure would have restrained from running in panic to some harbour for solace. The reaction would not have been the instinctive of the spontaneous child of that moment. Equanimity, however, presupposes the hardening of the soul and a maturity of the spirit. And these, in turn, presuppose accumulation of knowledge and the experiences life sows on our path. Aging and the years weaken extreme tensions caused by sensations and emotions born out from impressions of life events. Bravery and courage are not innate traits, but are cultivated. However, that and other similar experiences were still unprecedented for a still immature spirit and shook his world of emotions at that time, as triggered by that fall in the fire on St. John’s Day.

The crying stopped when I got home and the stinging from the burns, admittedly of relatively low degree, was soothed thanks to Mother’s tender care who washed them with cold water, and then the junior doctor of the village who removed the pieces of plastic with tweezers, before smearing my skin with ointments. The pain subsided to give way to anger, a tide of rage more like. A mood of vengeance flared up inside and a desire for retribution against the ‘bully’ who pushed me into the fire. Even this rage weakened with time, until a catharsis was provided from our visit to the perpetrator's home. He wasn't there or, more likely, he was hiding and didn't want to confront his victim and his mother. He was probably harbouring his own fears, stemming from a subconscious guilt, but more from the fear of punishment: at worst, a father’s hiding or a house detention in days that his mates enjoyed playing in the open. The mothers exchanged a few words, apologies were offered, and forgiveness was granted. As they say, the incident was considered over and done with.

After the gathering of the teachers and their families, at the customary farewell dinner at the end of the school year in the village hall, paid for by parents’ donations as a token of appreciation, we bade farewell and left the Cold Trough for good. A fellow villager known to Mother drove us with our two suitcases, for the last time through the road with the melancholy poplars on either side, forming like farewell arches, and dropped us at the plane tree and the coach stop, outside the junction canteen. The village and its winter were printed on the very first pages of the very first chapter of the book of conscious life: the reading and writing I learned, the first kick-abouts, the first TV program I watched at Mrs. Meli’s and Mr. George’s living room, Mrs. Lola, the kind teacher with the genuine love and interest in my learning she showed, the older girl who became my partner in the gymnastics demonstrations, the melancholic evenings in Mrs. Meli’s cold room and Mother’s tearful songs before going to bed, the bookstore of Mr. Avramides, the slaughterhouse, the tall tobacco warehouses; all these were stored in the mind and have been with me to the present day, along with the faded scars on the burnt skin. Several other faces and events from that time were lost deep in the subconscious and might have unknowingly resurfaced in night dreams.

In the Cold Trough I began developing consciousness and, ultimately, forming a personality. It was there that some of the first building stones of my ‘being-in-itself’ were laid from very first memory imprints. Early foundations, I have later discovered, obtain great significance in shaping one’s future, whatever walks of life he pursues. A slight change in the initial conditions of a chaotic process, like life in our world appears to be, can later lead to dramatically different behaviours and journeys.

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.

x