not believe any of it. Neither did I sleep under a fig tree.
Chapter 18
I Taught the Children of Gythion a New Game
That morning I emerged from my hut like a bear coming out of hibernation. It had been the worst winter in Sparta, I had it on good authority, since Leonidas ruled the country and died at Thermopylae.
But what made it really seem like an end to hibernation was not the warm sun but hundreds of sudden swallows filling the near sky at eye-level â my eye-level there being a couple of hundred feet above the sea over which the swallows were circling and diving.
There were the real harbingers of spring, and as I broke the thin ice on the top of the rainwater butt that had been my water supply since the river rose, and stayed, in flood six weeks before, I accepted the instinctive knowledge of those birds, which had brought them across 300 miles of sea from the nearest bit of Africa. They had got the message that there was a land in which winter had come to an end. It was time to go north. Not that there was overmuch around there to encourage less perceptive humans to share the swallowsâ prescience or optimism.
True, the sun was warm enough to enable me to write with nothing on but a pair of khaki shorts, but the wind was still honed by the ice of Taygetus pyramiding above my back, and the world at my feet was still full of water that had carved new courses in the good earth â and washed thousands of tons of it into the sea. Sitting there, feeling the bronzed palm of the sun caressing my skin, watching the green of bud and sprout responding visibly to the same caress, that other morning when I had stepped onto my terrace knee-deep in snow seemed part of another existence. Yet it was only ten days before.
They had told me in Gythion that the last snowfall on the town was in 1928, and as I watched the children from the Gymnasium, all the way up from kindergarten to senior prefects, gathering great armfuls of the stuff, I realised that none of the inhabitants under forty had ever seen snow fall on their town.
So I taught the children a new game during their eleven oâclock break.
Snowball fighting. Will it, I wondered, be another forty years before the schoolboys and schoolgirls of Gythion can throw snowballs at each other? Most Greeks were fervently hoping so. They had emerged to count the cost of winter. And it was high.
From my elevated perch I could see the acres of tomato houses with their polythene covering stripped and tattered by thundering gales that had come roaring down the mountains and through the many-boned skeletons of fig trees with a noise like Tube trains. Nights of frost had withered the exposed seedlings, so that all had to be started again with a double outlay of money.
I could see that the fields that were so laboriously planted with winter wheat for the yearâs bread had turned into scoured swamps, and the brown ground of the orange groves gone golden with fallen and decaying fruit.
In Gythion that month a big German cargo boat, its Plimsoll line ten feet out of the water, had waited for two weeks for the oranges from Sparta that never came, and finally sailed back to Hamburg with its propeller churning more air than water.
I could see the centuries-old river-beds that hadproved inadequate to contain those late twentieth-century flood waters, so that they had duplicated and triplicated themselves in torrents that had taken them to places where no generation had expected them to go.
As a result, the beach below me was now littered with the flotsam and jetsam of the land, not of the sea. Fig, mulberry and olive trees had been uprooted and rolled down, and on one day of the previous week I had been picking olives up to the knees in surf. One new river had gone clean through a house that had been a summer residence for its owners for four generations. Now its walls, with their stucco decorations, stared up from the mud.
Against these very real subsistence tragedies for
Chapter 18
I Taught the Children of Gythion a New Game
That morning I emerged from my hut like a bear coming out of hibernation. It had been the worst winter in Sparta, I had it on good authority, since Leonidas ruled the country and died at Thermopylae.
But what made it really seem like an end to hibernation was not the warm sun but hundreds of sudden swallows filling the near sky at eye-level â my eye-level there being a couple of hundred feet above the sea over which the swallows were circling and diving.
There were the real harbingers of spring, and as I broke the thin ice on the top of the rainwater butt that had been my water supply since the river rose, and stayed, in flood six weeks before, I accepted the instinctive knowledge of those birds, which had brought them across 300 miles of sea from the nearest bit of Africa. They had got the message that there was a land in which winter had come to an end. It was time to go north. Not that there was overmuch around there to encourage less perceptive humans to share the swallowsâ prescience or optimism.
True, the sun was warm enough to enable me to write with nothing on but a pair of khaki shorts, but the wind was still honed by the ice of Taygetus pyramiding above my back, and the world at my feet was still full of water that had carved new courses in the good earth â and washed thousands of tons of it into the sea. Sitting there, feeling the bronzed palm of the sun caressing my skin, watching the green of bud and sprout responding visibly to the same caress, that other morning when I had stepped onto my terrace knee-deep in snow seemed part of another existence. Yet it was only ten days before.
They had told me in Gythion that the last snowfall on the town was in 1928, and as I watched the children from the Gymnasium, all the way up from kindergarten to senior prefects, gathering great armfuls of the stuff, I realised that none of the inhabitants under forty had ever seen snow fall on their town.
So I taught the children a new game during their eleven oâclock break.
Snowball fighting. Will it, I wondered, be another forty years before the schoolboys and schoolgirls of Gythion can throw snowballs at each other? Most Greeks were fervently hoping so. They had emerged to count the cost of winter. And it was high.
From my elevated perch I could see the acres of tomato houses with their polythene covering stripped and tattered by thundering gales that had come roaring down the mountains and through the many-boned skeletons of fig trees with a noise like Tube trains. Nights of frost had withered the exposed seedlings, so that all had to be started again with a double outlay of money.
I could see that the fields that were so laboriously planted with winter wheat for the yearâs bread had turned into scoured swamps, and the brown ground of the orange groves gone golden with fallen and decaying fruit.
In Gythion that month a big German cargo boat, its Plimsoll line ten feet out of the water, had waited for two weeks for the oranges from Sparta that never came, and finally sailed back to Hamburg with its propeller churning more air than water.
I could see the centuries-old river-beds that hadproved inadequate to contain those late twentieth-century flood waters, so that they had duplicated and triplicated themselves in torrents that had taken them to places where no generation had expected them to go.
As a result, the beach below me was now littered with the flotsam and jetsam of the land, not of the sea. Fig, mulberry and olive trees had been uprooted and rolled down, and on one day of the previous week I had been picking olives up to the knees in surf. One new river had gone clean through a house that had been a summer residence for its owners for four generations. Now its walls, with their stucco decorations, stared up from the mud.
Against these very real subsistence tragedies for
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