The house on the cliff

teach. He had a Classics degree from Cambridge and was one of the small group of mostly British expatriate writers and artists who lived permanently on the island. He rented a tiny two-room cottage in the village of Maskouládes and lived quite a solitary life, spending many long hours hiking in daylight, and long hours writing and drinking the cheap local wine at night, or when it rained, working on an unreadable novel in imitation of The Black Book by his friend and idol Lawrence Durrell. He was our first teacher, and a godsend to my father in the years of his exile by Metaxás, since my English nanny had refused to accompany us to Corfu. It was Loxándra of course who looked after me, but without Rafe it would have been impossible to raise me in the family tradition of deep Anglophilia and bilingual fluency. As a bonus, I was steeped from toddlerhood in a form of English that was contemporary and unpretentious on the one hand, but learned and lyrical on the other. I’m grateful to Rafe and wish him well, wherever he may be, if he be anywhere. At least, when, at the age of 11, I was forcibly handed over to Mrs. Sargent, I was well-fortified against the twee banality of her speech. In dramatic contrast to my English, my father, and Aunt Eléni, raised, like their mother, by Morgy, never recovered from her eccentric and singular usage, somewhere between posh and rural Northern England. Eléni, for one, suffered from a fantastically creative form of dyslexia (as I diagnose it in absentia) that rendered her incapable of speaking any language without improvising extravagant, inventive, almost poetic flourishes of her own. As for my father, never will I forget my shock on realising that the idiomatic and fluent English that he spoke without a trace of a Greek accent was riddled with malapropisms and grammatical errors. I should mention perhaps that my family’s Anglophile tendency - a product, no doubt, of Sior Márkos close business associations with that country - was not limited to language and tailoring but included an abiding reverence for such concepts as “gentlemanliness”, “fair play”, “a stiff upper lip”, and “privacy”, which could not be translated to Greek. In me, the result was a deep divide between my Greek and English-speaking selves. This document is being written by the Greek-speaking (and slightly illiterate) Anthoúla of Corfu. AUGUST 1949 Coming up the path from the cave in the twilight, I found the verandah, where we usually sat in the evenings, dark and deserted. That’s when I remembered it was the night of Dóra’s weekly bridge game at the Club. If I was lucky, she might have left already for town. Alas, the light from her room dispelled any such hope.