The house on the cliff

additional baggage of fossilised ancestral myth. I am the eldest daughter (indeed, the only one) and that means I was burdened, perforce, with my paternal grandmother’s name. The obligatory complaint now made, I must confess that I have further encumbered myself, for clearly pragmatic reasons (the subconscious mind has rules of its own) with Voriás (a family name derived from Boreas, the north wind), as a last name, because I thought it easy to pronounce, even in English. In the early 1950s, when I began my career as a journalist in New York, foreign-sounding names did not have the resonance they carry today, and were thought inappropriate, almost vulgar. Unusual surnames, especially those which were at all difficult to pronounce, were simply unacceptable to the media. Most of my colleagues who found themselves in this position acquiesced, without commenting on the racist impetus of this discrimination, simply following Hollywood’s example, taking on the Anglo-Saxon (or occasionally Celtic) surnames of the boy or girl next door, such as Williams, Cooper, Wayne, or Miller. So, for example, The Observer’s Washington correspondent, Philip Deane, famous for, among other books, his memoir of his time as a prisoner of war in Korea, was in fact Yerásimos Gigántes, nicknamed Mémas, son of the famous General. Velissáris, my own last name, was rejected out of hand. Too difficult, I was told, as well as too long, though it is pronounced exactly the way it’s spelled. Most English-speakers baulk at unfamiliar names, and don’t even attempt to pronounce them, especially if they have more than two syllables. Voriás, a name from the Chíos side of the family a couple of generations back, was deemed marginally acceptable. It grieved my father, of course, even though, in his usual fashion, he never let it show. If only he knew how close I’d come to being saddled with Taylor or Brown. As for me, I considered my holding on to Voriás a heroic act of resistance; my first editor had insisted on a byline of Anne Gregory. Here I have confess that throughout the fifties and sixties everyone outside Greece called me “Anne” rather than Anthí. It had started when I was a boarder at school, after my flight from Greece in 1949, and I told myself it was just a shortened form, effectively a nickname. Now that past events are starting to come clear, I have begun writing the text that follows, not for publication, but in the hope it will help me make sense of it all. So I begin with my own story, based on what I can remember, but I will fill in with borrowed stories, that reached me at second or third or even fourth hand, and were then subjected to my own unwitting (or sometimes deliberate), reinterpretation and presentation. The further back in time they go, the more suspect their authenticity is. I will make an honest effort to note my sources, where that doesn’t interfere with the interpretation I’ve distilled (if distilled, and not distorted, is the correct word) but I’m not sure it will make much difference. When I am on solid, factual ground, where I have done the research, I say so. What will remain is a composite of myths… some more detailed, polished, refined, and sophisticated, shaped