I have been reading old faxes I sent home from the island of Rhodes to my parents. Certain memories leap off the page. I have tried to place each one in context. Together, they feel like snapshots from our ten years there.
We experienced a 5.7 magnitude earthquake on Rhodes, and it truly shook me. I had never known anything so powerful. In the UK one feels blissfully distant from such events. However, even there, shale gas hydraulic fracturing — fracking — has triggered small earthquakes. Fluid injections into fault zones at Lancashire sites in 2011, 2018 and 2019 caused several minor seismic events, including a 2.9 magnitude tremor in 2019, which ultimately led to a moratorium on fracking in England. To put it in perspective: a 5.7 magnitude quake produces roughly 630 times more shaking than a 2.9. No wonder I was rattled.
One of my faxes reads:
“I am eating like there’s no tomorrow. I suppose if there is another earthquake tomorrow, at least I’ll have no regrets that I didn’t have that last packet of crisps or bar of chocolate!”
Humour, even slightly hysterical humour, was clearly my coping mechanism.
An unexpected gift arrived one day.
“Our friends from the village arrived today with a gift — a live chicken in a box. We are meant to kill it, but at present this ridiculously large, healthy brown hen is on our flat’s balcony, clucking happily! What on earth shall we do with it? I think we will find it hard to do away with this beautiful bird.”
We kept her on the balcony and fed her until we could find someone with land where she could roam freely. In the meantime, I constructed elaborate, almost Fort Knox–like enclosures to protect her from the neighbourhood cats.
Years later, I confessed this to the villagers. They laughed and told me no cat would dare tackle one of their birds. Village hens roam wild and would be more than a match for any feline. Who knew?
Birthday parties provided their own cultural education.
“I took Lewis to another birthday party yesterday. This little boy was the one who once got Lewis a sandwich and, after placing it in front of him, told him not to eat it. Talk about torture — obviously a real bad egg! Lewis wasn’t keen on going but didn’t want to miss out on any goodies. I told him to make sure he ate more than the price of the present we’d bought. I meant it as a joke, but when he returned he proudly informed me he’d eaten at least 3,000 drachmas’ worth — and the present had only cost 1,000! I didn’t think he’d take me quite so seriously.”
Another memorable party took place in a vast mansion where the eight-year-old birthday boy had an enormous suite to himself. The food was exquisite, but my Greek friend Mary complained bitterly that the child’s suite was larger than her entire home.
Not all memories are light-hearted.
“One of my students — he’s nineteen — lost his father to a heart attack a year ago. But no one has told his grandmother, who lives in northern Greece. So this poor woman carries on unaware that her son is dead. They think the news would kill her. Imagine the effort required to sustain that illusion, and the strain it must place on every relationship involved. What people will do in the name of love, they would never contemplate doing to their worst enemies.”
That story stayed with me for a long time.
Our children entered Greek primary school without a single word of the language, straight from a village school in Northern Ireland. The adjustment was difficult. One child took two years to feel truly fluent. Yet they all eventually mastered the language and were blessed with many excellent teachers and loyal friends.
Though not all teachers were quite so admirable.
“Daniel’s class was so naughty today that the teacher declared she would have nothing more to do with them! She refused to speak to or teach any of them. Daniel says Spiros, one of the cleverest boys, proceeded to teach the lesson himself, covering both language and mathematics. My friend’s son Niko was almost in tears when he left, as the teacher had been so very angry. But Daniel reported that Spiros had done an excellent job — and assigned far less homework than the teacher would have. Certainly not the worrier our Daniel!”
Looking back, these faxes capture the texture of those years: fear and resilience, generosity and misunderstanding, humour and cultural surprises. They are small windows into a decade that shaped us all.
