Four decades before Frances Mayes' bestselling "Under the Tuscan Sun" established a new publishing market, the Australian writer Charmian Clift had written an intimate memoir of a western woman exchanging 'civilization' for the riches of life on a Greek island.
In 1951 the Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston left grey, post-war London for Greece. Settling first on the tiny island of Kalymnos, then Hydra, their plan was to live simply and focus on their writing. The result is Charmian Clift's best known and most loved books, "Mermaid Singing" and "Peel Me a Lotus". "Peel Me a Lotus", the companion volume to "Mermaid Singing", relates their move to Hydra where they bought a house and grappled with the chaos of domestic life whilst becoming the centre of an informal bohemian community of artists and writers. That group included Leonard Cohen, who became their lodger, and his girlfriend Marianne Ihlen. Clift paints an evocative picture of the characters and sun-drenched rhythms of traditional life, long before backpackers and mass tourism descended.
Thanks to www.archive.org, "Mermaid Singing" is available for online reading - click here - but there isn't even a preview of "Peel me a Lotus" anywhere to be found. To whet readers' appetite, I have typed out, labouriously and using only two fingers, the first two pages of the book:
Today we bought the house by the well.
This purchase, which has been hanging fire for anxious weeks while we have been trying to organize our impossible finances, was finally completed in the office of the notary public, who is also the magistrate of this small Greek island, the municipal valuer, and the husband of my son Martin's favourite teacher at the village school called the Down School to distinguish it from the Up School on the mountain ridge.
The notary public is a small, courteous, asthmatic man. Like all the other town officials he conducts his business in one of the cells of the old monastery that lies behind the gay facade of waterfront shops, and here in the monastery cell we gathered formally as the great bronze bell was crashing noon over our heads.
Behind the desk the notary public, very affable and important, and ranged in a row before him on five spidery black chairs of the old island pattern the five interested parties to this affair: Socrates the carpenter and occasional real-estate agent; Demosthenes the shifty-eyed barber, acting on behalf of the former owner of the house; old Creon Stavris, there to guide us through the final intricacies of the purchase; and my husband George and I, both smoking rather nervously and conscious that we looked a ragged and scruffy pair.
The notary public, old Creon, Demosthenes the barber, and even Socrates, had apparently put on their best clothes for the occasion, and the barber twirled between his fat fingers a crisp white spike of hyacinth.
Still, scruffy or not, we were the purchasers, and it was with some ceremony that we were bowed to the table to sign and swear a large number of incomprehensible documents in Greek, which the notary public read through at a furious wheezing pace and Creon approved by a series of curt nods directed at George. Through the door of the office I could see the heavenly cerulean blue of the balcony ceiling, three thin marble columns, and a tree of hibiscus blazing away in the courtyard behind the ornate tomb of one of the island's innumerable naval heroes.
It seemed a fine thing to be buying a house here.
The price of the house was one hundred and twenty gold pounds, as had been agreed earlier during the lengthy and mysterious negotiations between Socrates and the barber. Rather to my surprise there was no last-minute attempt by either of them to raise it ten pounds or so. Perhaps experience is deceitful after all, and one has become unnecessarily devious in business dealings with the Greeks. All the same, it would have been too much to expect that we should catch fortune's tide at the full: the rate of exchange on the gold pound was higher this morning than it has been for months, so that the house actually cost four hundred and ninety-three pounds ten shillings in English paper money, or six hundred and twenty Australian pounds, or about thirteen hundred dollars.
We had to work it out in a variety of currencies because our income derives from slender royalty cheques in several countries, and it was necessary to be quite sure we could really afford to buy a house. In fact, it seemed fairly clear that the purchase was lunacy in any currency, but one hundred and twenty pounds doesn't sound much when you say it fast and leave out the rich chink of that word 'gold'.
It was only when I saw it translated into high stiff stacks of new drachma notes, which George fished out in handfuls from an old battered brief-case of kangaroo hide that I had given him one birthday long ago in Australia, that my heart lurched slightly.
There it went! Our last little bit of capital, our going-back-to-civilization money, our reserve against children's illnesses, tonsils or appendix operations, dental disasters - or that never-mentioned contingency that might arise if all does not go well at the birth of this new baby of mine within the next few weeks and I have to be carted off dramatically to Athens in a caique.
Now go out and buy the other 190 pages. I know you will enjoy them!
