large house. My brother has described all this inimitably and powerfully in a wonderful book. And I think here I should say that I feel extremely pleased that I am responsible in part for two of the best books about modern Greece. One is Henry Millerâs book which is partly due to the fact that I took him there and he fell in love with it and wrote probably his best book there. And then my brotherâs own book is marvelous because he literally wasnât aware that there was an ancient Greece. It was extraordinary how he felt his way back into his 12-year-old skin to write it. Naturally in it his older brother figures as a sort of horrible Faustian figure. I was 22 and writing the Black Book at that time. And he paid off all his youthful grudges in the book, quite rightly. The book is really a masterpiece as a picture of Corfu simply because there is not a single classical reference in it. The seductionâyou smile, but in fact it is perfectly trueâthe seduction about Greece is such that one tends towards purple prose all the time and itâs very difficult to see a Greek landscape or a Greek village without thinking of Aphrodite or a modern Greek situation which doesnât immediately echo something Homeric. So naturally, if you have an Aphrodite in your pocket you tend to plaster it into your prose and consequently itâs just not as good as somebody treating Greece as if it was entirely new, pristine, fresh and born yesterdayâa new-laid egg. And Miller deliberately ignored the classical stuff he knew and my brother didnât know any. So between them they produced wonderful books of which I am rather proud because I took both of them there.
Itâs funny, Iâve often thought, and philosophers have frequently said, that one remembers the hard beds better than the soft ones. And those winters in Greece were extraordinarily hard, particularly living in unheated houses with no chimneys and no wood in the north of this island. The rainfall in Corfu is almost tropical in densityâthat is why it is so green. But sometimes one heard it for weeks on endâthat and the sea pounding on the rocks below the house we lived in.
My brother very skillfully gave the impression that I lived with the family, but that wouldnât have been possible. You donât know how awful they are. I always lived apart from them but I used to visit them at Christmas just to observe them. And make a few notes. But I always lived with my wife alone on the north point of the island in a very lonely and rather beautiful house. And as I say, our life was one of the utmost primitivenessâin terms of food I donât remember what it was possible to findâapart from the few fish we caughtâto eat, because the roads were washed out in the winter and apart from a few tins of macaroni I think we literally had nothing. Occasionally they killed a lamb, Greek lamb isnât bad, itâsâwell, I suppose it was horrible, our diet, but when youâre young and in good health it didnât seem to matter very much.
There were other factors about ordinary living which I mustnât forget to mention, just to draw the picture of this rather primitive way of life. In this hot country, indeed in most of the Mediterranean at this time there was no refrigeration; just a few ice factories where one bought blocks of ice and crammed them into wooden ice boxes. In Corfu there was no butter and the milk was goatâs milk; the beef was non existent, there was only lamb for people with small incomes but good lamb and sometimes pork. Chickens were thin and scrawny.
The best refrigerator I know is a deep well; and for most of my island life we lowered our bottles and tinned butter down the well in a basket with a long length of line. Or shoved it into a sea cave. Sometimes it was so hot that we carried our dinner table out into the bay and set it down in the water. It was cool enough if you sat with water up
Itâs funny, Iâve often thought, and philosophers have frequently said, that one remembers the hard beds better than the soft ones. And those winters in Greece were extraordinarily hard, particularly living in unheated houses with no chimneys and no wood in the north of this island. The rainfall in Corfu is almost tropical in densityâthat is why it is so green. But sometimes one heard it for weeks on endâthat and the sea pounding on the rocks below the house we lived in.
My brother very skillfully gave the impression that I lived with the family, but that wouldnât have been possible. You donât know how awful they are. I always lived apart from them but I used to visit them at Christmas just to observe them. And make a few notes. But I always lived with my wife alone on the north point of the island in a very lonely and rather beautiful house. And as I say, our life was one of the utmost primitivenessâin terms of food I donât remember what it was possible to findâapart from the few fish we caughtâto eat, because the roads were washed out in the winter and apart from a few tins of macaroni I think we literally had nothing. Occasionally they killed a lamb, Greek lamb isnât bad, itâsâwell, I suppose it was horrible, our diet, but when youâre young and in good health it didnât seem to matter very much.
There were other factors about ordinary living which I mustnât forget to mention, just to draw the picture of this rather primitive way of life. In this hot country, indeed in most of the Mediterranean at this time there was no refrigeration; just a few ice factories where one bought blocks of ice and crammed them into wooden ice boxes. In Corfu there was no butter and the milk was goatâs milk; the beef was non existent, there was only lamb for people with small incomes but good lamb and sometimes pork. Chickens were thin and scrawny.
The best refrigerator I know is a deep well; and for most of my island life we lowered our bottles and tinned butter down the well in a basket with a long length of line. Or shoved it into a sea cave. Sometimes it was so hot that we carried our dinner table out into the bay and set it down in the water. It was cool enough if you sat with water up
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