The house on the cliff

busier with his politics). Our favourite game, Castle, was based on the siege and defence of a hilltop fortress. My father had taken us camping to Áï Mathiás to see the ruined fortifications there, and pointed out the outline of the octagonal Byzantine fortress among the tumbledown rocks - this was the inspiration for the game. Later, I was to learn from Aunt Eléni that their English cousins had introduced them to the game, which they had played rougher and far more dangerously with rocks, slingshots, and terrifying violence in the Kokkinarás ravine, when they spent summers together in Kifissiá as children. It’s ironic that they loved war games so much, those three boys who were to lose their lives so young fighting in pointless wars. I’ll tell you more about them later, if I get the chance, because they played an important part in the childhood of Konstantínos and Eléni. For now I’ll say only that they were the children of my grandmother’s half sister, who grew up near Manchester, and attended, to Sior Márkos’ proud delight, Harrow and then Oxford. Of the four, only Ambrose lived to adulthood. The two eldest, Michael, nicknamed Mikés, and Marcus, were killed in Flanders in 1915 and France in 1916 respectively. The youngest, John (Íon), was, like my father, a volunteer in Asia Minor, and died in the retreat through Anatolia in 1922. My dearest friend in the band of boys (I lived through the Occupation in his house in town after all) was named Donátos Vryónis, but everyone knew him as Tákis Kokínis, the doctor’s son. Actually, the doctor was his stepfather, having married his widowed mother and raised him since he was little. His real father, a childhood friend of Daddy’s, had died a political prisoner in the fortress of Náfplion in 1936. He had been locked up there after taking part in the failed Venizélist coup of 1935. Tákis spoke often of the father he barely remembered, always stressing that he was one of the few officers involved who had not fled to the Italian-occupied islands of the Dodecanese, but stayed in Greek territory and surrendered their arms. They endured the ritual humiliation of having the epaulettes publicly torn from their uniforms, and then a court martial. (According to my father the cashiering ceremony had to be delayed by a day so that the seamstresses could undo the close stitching that held the epaulettes on and tack them back on again loosely, so the cotton thread would rip easily in one scornful swipe by a commanding officer). The ceremony had ended badly, with an enraged mob of far-right thugs spitting on the mutineers, screeching insults at them and hurling garbage, bricks and stones. For some bizarre reason, the theatrical re-enactment of this horribly undignified scene was one of our favourite games when we were little, with Tákis always in the role of his father. Loxándra, with two stitches, would secure rags to the shoulders of our shirts in place of epaulettes and we took on roles suited to the political convictions of our families. Hopelessly outnumbered, Tákis and I formed a tiny liberal faction against the conservative majority of the sons of the island’s old royalist families. We