'House in Gastouri for rent for 2 mths. Occupant travelling. Reasonable rent.'

 

Read the book online

 

I should never have been in Greece at all, that's the point. I was actually on my way home. Greece, as we know, is full of foreigners who were once on their way home from somewhere and got stranded there. They wash up on the beach while floating idly past, disappointed by something or other - the lack of a new beginning, perhaps, wherever they've just been. They get snared amongst the driftwood and then can't move on."

The book's blurb which read, "In a village on the island of Corfu, alone in the cottage of a man he's never met, an Australian actor [see P.P.S. below] gradually pieces together the strange life story of the writer whose house he is living in. As he explores his surroundings and makes new friends in Corfu, his own life begins to appear to him like an illuminating shadow-play of his absent host's", got me interested, but it was the first few pages and those few lines "I should never have been in Greece at all ...", which really got me hooked.

I should never have been in Greece either, as I was actually on my way home to Australia on completion of a contract assignment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, when my Saudi boss suggested that I should continue my work from his office in Piraeus. And so I, too, got stranded in Greece for another eighteen months during which time I stayed on more than one occasion in my boss's villa on Messonghi Beach in Corfu.

Of course, I should have stayed longer, but I knew that if I had stayed much longer, I might've never left, and so I did. Non, je ne regrette rien! - well, maybe un peu. Still, I now have Robert Dessaix's novel to colour in the faint smudges of the golden memories I left behind.

'Farewell, my friend! And when you are at home, home in your own land, remember me at times. Mainly to me you owe the gift of life.'
                                     (Nausicaa to Odysseus)

 

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P.S. Robert Dessaix is an Australian novelist, essayist and journalist whom I first encountered as presenter of the ABC program "Books and Writing". He has written three novels, including "Corfu", three auto-biographies, and half-a-dozen non-fiction books, of which "(And so forth)" and "As I was saying - a collection of musings" are my favourites.

P.P.S. The Australian actor was Kester Berwick, whose book "Head of Orpheus Singing" I am trying to find at a reasonable price to add to my library. Like Robert Dessaix, Kester Berwick was gay, which I try to overlook so as not to spoil the enjoyment of reading this evocative book. It's a book about loss and the kind of inner grace you need to bear it. It's about contentment, even though life's most precious gift – friendship - slowly seeps away. But most of all it's about the Greece I loved.

Berwick spend his last thirty years in Greece, firstly on the island of Lesbos (the subject of his novel "Head of Orpheus Singing") and later on Corfu where he lived on a meagre pension in a shabby house in the middle of the village of Gastouri. As Mirabel Osler recalls in her memoir "The Rain Tree": “With no bathroom, (Berwick’s) shower was a cold trickle through holes punched in the bottom of a plastic bleach bottle ...He was always welcoming and warm and the villagers loved him”.

 

Stilleben

 

 

It's been another long and active day outdoors: slashing, mowing, chopping, cutting, pruning, raking, burning ... you own seven acres, you are busy seven days! I used to have a list of things to do; now I have a list of lists of things to do.

The best part of the day is when the work is done and I can rest those weary bones on a seat by the river. I drink to that!

 

 

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"If I live to be very old, all my memories of the glory days will grow vague and confused, till I won't be certain any of it really happened. But the books will be there, on the shelves and in my head - the only enduring reality I can be certain of till the day I die."

 

To read the book "84 Charing Cross Road", click here
To read its sequel "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street", click here

 

I could've written the above quote, except I didn't - Helene Hanff did! Of course, you know her: she of the book "84 Charing Cross Road" which was also made into a charming film starring Anthony Hopkins as Frank Doel, chief buyer of Marks & Co, antiquarian booksellers, located at the eponymous address in London.

It's an epistolary novel and perhaps not to your liking , so why not go straight to its sequel "The Duchess of Bloomsbury", after which, I am sure, you will be hooked and continue with "Q's Legacy", in which Helene Hanff recalls her serendipitous discovery of a volume of lectures by a Cambridge don, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. She devoured Q’s book, and, wanting to read all the books he recommended, began to order them from a small store in London, at 84 Charing Cross Road.

 

 

She first contacted the shop in 1949 and it fell to Frank Doel to fulfil her requests. In time, a long-distance friendship developed between the two and between Helene Hanff and other staff members as well, with an exchange of Christmas packages, birthday gifts and food parcels to help with the post-World War II food shortages in Britain. Their letters included discussions about topics as diverse as the sermons of John Donne, how to make Yorkshire Pudding, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the coronation of Elizabeth II. Helene Hanff postponed visiting her English friends until too late; Frank Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed in December 1970. Helene Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street".

 

 

Having already dedicated her first book "84 Charing Cross Road" to "F.P.D. In Memoriam" (in which F.P.D., of course, stands for Frank Percy Doel), Helene Hanff wrote "Q's Legacy" "In grateful memory of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch - Not to pay a debt but to acknowledge it".

While I don't necessarily share Helene Hanff's antiquarian taste in books - of the many books she ordered from Marks & Co, I only read "The Wind in the Willows" - I do share her passion for books. They are the only enduring reality I can be certain of till the day I die.

 

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P.S. Regular readers of this blog will by now have joined the Internet Archive which stores some 28 million books and texts, 14 million audio recordings, and 6 million videos. If you haven't done so yet, do it now! It's easy, and it's FREE! Click here.

 

“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.”

 

Read Richard Dawkins' book "Unweaving the Rainbow" online at www.archive.org

 

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?" (click here)

 

 

I am trying to pique your appetite for wonder with these words written by the visionary and often controversial (which is the social fate of every visionary) British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Hate him or love him, he's got a strong point of view and is not afraid to voice it.

 

 

It's not an easy read but nothing important ever is. Try and stay with it for the first dozen pages. If you're not totally hooked by then, you can always go back to your favourite comic book. WOW! OH! ... BAM!

 

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My family tree is more like a bonzai

 

My parents in Berlin in 1948

 

I blame two wars - the World War from 1939 to 1945, and the domestic family war which led to my parents' divorce in 1952 - for not having much of a family tree; in fact, the only "branch" there ever was and which I climbed were my grandfather's knees shortly before he died in the early 50s.

 

Moi in der Augustastraße in Berlin in 1948

 

I was a less-than-welcome "Peter-come-lately", born at the end of the war - after my "big brother" (1932), and three sisters (1934, 1940, and 1942) - in what was then the Russian-occupied "Ostzone" which in 1949 became the "German Democratic Republic". We had already escaped the "Workers' Paradise" the year before, during the Berlin Blockade, and joined the long queue of destitute refugees in West Germany waiting for anything, including housing. Back in the East, my father had been a "Volkswirt" (economist) with his own large entry in the telephone book; in the West we didn't even have a house, let alone a telephone.

 

 

For the first two years we lived "on the edge" in an unheated metal shack without toilet, kitchen, electricity, or running water, literally on the edge of town, that town being Braunschweig in the more benignly British-occupied Lower Saxony from where I eventually emigrated.

That was still fifteen years away. In the meantime, it was an ongoing battle for adequate housing, enough food, and warm clothing. Nothing like today's claimed "poverty" sitting in front of a flatscreen television; that was real hunger and cold nights and shoes with cardboard soles.

 

My first day at school in 1952

 

If this photo is anything to go by, things must've got a bit better by the time I entered school in 1952. Not that schooling ever interfered with my education: all I ever did were the compulsorary eight years of "Volksschule" (primary school), after which even the few Deutschmarks I earnt as an articled clerk helped to keep our bodies and souls together.

 

"Mein erster Schulgang" - My first day at school / Wouldn't it be fascinating to
know what happened to those forty-one eager faces in the past seventy years?

 

Ask me about geometree, symmetree, and treegonometree, but not about my family tree which is more like a bonzai which is like Chinese foot-binding except it's applied to a tree. Like foot-binding, my family tree kept me hobbling along for nineteen years until I hit my stride in my adopted new home Australia.

 

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