Blue Thirst by Lawrence Durrell

A n invitation to reminisce is always rather terrifying. One inevitably thinks of those old after-dinner speakers, rosy with fatuity, who somehow can’t break off. So when I received an invitation to reminisce I was a little bit tormented by doubts because I remembered also another cautionary tale—the curate, the shy curate in Leacock, a wonderful short story, where he found that every time he said, “Well, I think I ought to …,” they said “Won’t you have another cup of tea?” And he was too weak to leave. He sank back into his chair finally lingered until dinner time and they said “Do you really have to go home? We could easily give you dinner.” And he was too weak, he stayed for dinner. Finally, they had to make—they were naturally furious—they had to make up a bed in the spare room. And he stayed there for weeks in a strange delirium, sometimes rising up from his pillow he would cry, “I really think I must …” and then sink back hopelessly with a cracked laugh. Finally as you may remember, the angels came for him. I didn’t want them to come for me.
    Nevertheless I did feel that perhaps there might be some point in trying to recollect and perhaps recreate a little bit of a Greece which is not finished now and gone for good, but which has changed very much and doesn’t resemble the Greece that I knew at the age of 21 when I was a young aggressive poet. It was in Greece that I first hit the Mediterranean proper. And thinking it over I thought I might perhaps accept and have a try at repainting this not forgotten but not so terribly distant Greece in time.
    The land I went to then was not the popular one it is today—Italy was the in thing. Everybody great had given a cachet to Italy, from the Romantic poet onwards. Byron was the only person who went to Greece, but he did it for a special reason. But the Greece I met presented enormous practical day-to-day problems. It was the era before DDT. I have to remind you how recently the medicaments which make Mediterranean travel easy and pleasant are—DDT was discovered only during the last war. Greece was one large flea before then. One enormous hairy gnashing flea. And several kinds of bedbug as well, mostly elephant-size. And walking across it in the heat, the primitiveness of the country was really intimidating. It was in some ways almost as primitive as Africa. If it hadn’t been so beautiful and washed always by this marvelous blue sea, it would have really daunted even me, and I was tough and in very good health. But our Greece we learnt the hard way and we learnt it without penicillin and any of the amenities which are available now. The big miracle drugs, for example, that breakthrough was also at the end of the war: The sulphanilamides—a whole range of science that wasn’t available to us in 1934. One was deep in the Middle Ages in a remote Greek village. The actual medical arrangements were in the hands of a few kind pharmacists and women called “good women” who were kind of medieval bone-setters and also masseurs with a marvelous sense of anatomy. They really did perform wonders. I have seen miracles performed with them—and also nobody quite knows how they got their special knowledge because they have enough sense to leave a tubercular bone alone. But they were great manipulators of limbs and even today they are still there and perform astonishing cures. They are also specialists in herbal cures. In those days I elected to live in a Greek village the life of a fisherman. The house that I took is on the north end of the island of Corfu which is extremely beautiful and which I found by accident. Later on it was literally a question of putting a pin in a map and saying to my mother “You’ve got to stop spending money and start economizing.” In those days Greece was unbelievably cheap and she managed to live very satisfactorily with her family in a