The house on the cliff

By the end of 1940 when the benefits of all these improvements were beginning to be felt, the land had a new master. The national dictator had been transformed, with one resounding NO, into a national hero, and Greece was at war. My father, exculpated and pardoned overnight, was called in, despite his forty-one years, as a reserve officer, and was at the front. The island’s Italian occupiers reaped the fruit of our land. Our idyllic existence at the Villa had been interrupted. Before my father left for the war, he had arranged for me and Loxándra to lodge in town, with the doctor. Loxándra would cook and help around the house, and I was to start primary school. On our first night there, the town was bombarded by the Italian Air Force. The years of the war, the second Occupation by the Germans and the second bombardment, the incendiary one, I will discuss later. IN ATHENS When Greece was liberated, we returned to the Athens apartment, and soon enough, locked ourselves in to wait out the civil riots and street fighting of the Dekemvrianá. Afterwards, I proudly showed my friends the bullet holes in the outer walls of our building. The violence itself doesn’t seem to have made much impression on me, as my memories of the events are few. I had no complaints about my life, particularly once things calmed down and my father started to smile again. I felt safe and perfectly happy with Loxándra keeping me fed and looked after, and my father treating me as something between an indulged baby and an apprentice boy. By today’s criteria - Doctor Spock with a few dashes of Freud - no doubt Loxándra got everything wrong. Even after we returned to Athens, she let me run wild to roam the neighbourhood without terrorising me with warnings of danger. The only dangers from which, in her opinion, I needed protection, were draughts, which could cause any number of ills. To eat, she only offered me the foods I liked: bread, olive oil, apricot jam, feta cheese, fried potatoes, eggs, spaghetti, and cabbage salad. Oh, and tomatoes and cucumbers in the summer. In Corfu during the occupation we ate what little we could get our hands on, but even then she never forced me to eat anything I was disgusted by. When I hurt myself she told me it was nothing, just a little iodine, and by the time I got married it would have healed. When I had nightmares she sheltered me in the warmth of her bed. Her variety of stories, folktales, incidents and incidents ranged from her childhood in Asia Minor, earthquakes, floods, tales of doomed love or brave princes who won true hearts - such as the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson - to the adventures of my Uncle Víctor as a boy on Corsica, the island home of his hero Napoleon.