Mermaid Singing & Peel Me a Lotus

  Angus&Robertson

  Twenty-seven-year-old Scotsman David Mackenzie Angus stepped ashore in Australia in 1882, hoping that the climate would improve his health. While working for a Sydney bookseller, he managed to save the grand sum of £50 – enough to open his very own second-hand bookshop. He hired fellow-Scot George Robertson and in 1886 Angus & Robertson was born.

  They ventured into publishing in 1888 with a collection of poetry by H. Peden Steele, and by 1895 had a bestseller on their hands with A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses. A&R confirmed the existence of Australian talent – and an audience hungry for Australian content. The company went on to add some of the most famous names in Australian literature to its list, including Henry Lawson, Norman Lindsay, C.J. Dennis and May Gibbs. Throughout the twentieth century, authors such as Xavier Herbert, Ruth Park, George Johnston and Peter Goldsworthy continued this tradition.

  The A&R Australian Classics series is a celebration of the many authors who have contributed to this rich catalogue of Australian literature and to the cultural identity of a nation.

  These classics are our indispensable voices. At a time when our culture was still noisy with foreign chatter and clouded by foreign visions, these writers told us our own stories and allowed us to examine and evaluate both our homeplace and our place in the world. – GERALDINE BROOKS

  Contents

  Publisher’s Note

  MERMAID SINGING

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  PEEL ME A LOTUS

  Dedication

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  About the Author

  Also by Charmian Clift

  Copyright

  Publisher’s note

  Long before Peter Mayle went to Provence or Frances Mayes went to Tuscany, in 1954 Charmian Clift and her family — husband George Johnston and children Martin and Shane — chose to leave the rat-race behind to live a simpler life. Their choice was not Italy or France, but the Greek islands, where they sought ‘to be reassured in our humanity’, as Charmian put it, and to make their living as writers. Intending when they arrived to last ‘a year or so’, they ended up staying for nearly ten years, living first on the primitive sponge-diving island of Kalymnos, and later buying a house on the more cosmopolitan island of Hydra.

  Mermaid Singing (first published in 1956) and Peel Me a Lotus (1959) are Charmian’s accounts of the family’s life during this time. Both works exude the warmth, vitality and intelligence that would affect readers so strongly in the weekly newspaper columns she was to write on her return to Australia in the 1960s.

  Clift’s biographer, Nadia Wheatley, describes Mermaid Singing as representing in some ways ‘the finest work that Charmian Clift would ever publish’, work that ‘speaks now with a very contemporary voice.’

  MERMAID SINGING

  Dedication

  For my mother

  Amy Lila Clift

  1

  We came to the island of Kalymnos in the small grey caique Angellico, belting in around Point Cali with a sirocco screaming in from the south-west, a black patched triangle of sail thrumming over our heads, and a cargo of turkeys, tangerines, earthenware water jars, market baskets, and the inevitable old black-shawled women who form part of the furnishings of all Aegean caiques.

  It seemed to be a fine brave way of making an arrival. ‘Mother of God!’ gasped an old lady between vomits. ‘The little ones! Look at them! They do not understand!’

  ‘Bah, old grandmother!’ The curly-headed deck hand flung the contents of a bucket into a mountainous green wall of water rearing over us. ‘They are sailors, the children. Sailors! Anyone can see.’

  The wave hit. The benches went crashing from one side of the deckhouse to the other.

  ‘Grrrp!’ said the old lady in a strange strangled way and clutched at air. The curly-headed boy steadied himself nonchalantly against the splintered door frame and obligingly hauled in the bucket at the end of its rope. The ‘little ones,’ who belong to me, emerged dripping from a convulsed heap of turkeys, benches, cardboard suitcases, broken pottery, market baskets, and upended old ladies, with their small fists full of tangerines and their small faces crimson with ecstasy.

  Obviously this was beating the Battersea Pleasure Gardens hands down.

  ‘Mum! Why does it come up all yellow and lumpy?’ (Martin is seven and has a scientific turn of mind.)

  ‘Because she didn’t chew her breakfast nicely nor swaller.’ (Shane is fourteen months younger, and female.)

  The deck hand dragged the old woman across to the door as if she were a wet bundle of rags and pushed her head into the bucket. ‘You see, old grandmother,’ he said contemptuously, holding her poor bedraggled old head down, ‘sailors!’

  Our lean friend and self-appointed guide, Manolis, who had been shot across the deck in a crouching attitude, now rose from all-fours with a dignity I greatly admired, and, turning to George and me, said with the air of a patriarch who had brought his tribe to the promised land: ‘My brother and my sister, we come now to Kalymnos.’

  And so, indeed, we did.

  There, heaving ponderously above the peaking wave-crests, were gaunt grey mountains, slashed and scarred with sulphurous fissures and streaming ragged clouds. And at the foot of the mountains was a town, an improbable town that from across the wild sea had the appearance of carefully arranged coloured matchboxes — a doll’s town to amuse a child on a wet afternoon. Beyond the little cubes of white and blue and yellow ochre a hill rose out of a valley with a ruined wall and three round towers; and below the houses a forest of matchstick masts tossed on what would ultimately prove, no doubt, to be a nursery bowl filled with water from the bathroom tap.

  The Angellico kicked and shuddered and bounded forward with a final sickening lurch down into the swirling sea. Then, unbelievably, it was sliding in around the breakwater on an even keel, and the sodden old women crossed themselves and began to sort out their bundles with good-natured equanimity. We slid in to a little wharf alongside an ugly customs building and three houses that had been stolen from a Christopher Wood painting.

  The children were handed ashore like heroes, engulfed in admiration. It was as well, on the whole, that neither George nor I had enough Greek to explain that they had been heavily laced with drammamine before leaving Kos. I have a theory that sailors are made, not born, and the products of the biochemical laboratories are a better insurance policy than bunches of herbs or tangerine peel, or even, I suspect, the desperate supplications of St Nicholas which are the background accompaniment to Aegean travel. I was not to know until some days later that two passengers on the caique from Vathy had been washed overboard that morning and all the deck cargo lost, although at the time it surprised me a little that Manolis should cross himself so fervently the minute his feet were on dry land again.

  ‘Brav!’ he said admiringly to the children, and to us. ‘That damn Angellico! It’ll turn over next trip. You see!’

  Only two hours before, at Kos, with the sea fre
tting and fuming outside the harbour all the way across to Turkey and the fishing boats scudding in to land under taut orange sails, it had been this same Manolis who had urged us aboard the Angellico, which was rolling and dipping even then inside the sheltering wall of the castle.

  ‘Po-po-po-po po! Nothing! Nothing!’ he had said, indicating the sea, the shredding sky, the orange specks of sails fanning out urgently from Bodrum. ‘You come to Kalymnos now. Very good island. Very good people.’ And he had helped us aboard the Angellico as if it had been the Semiramis leaving Piraeus for a summer cruise. ‘You see now,’ he had said, as he skilfully dislodged two old women from their seats to make room for us.

  ‘Today at Kalymnos I find you one good house. You don’t come back no more to Kos.’

  I suppose it is indicative only of his complete amiability that a Greek will always tell you what you want to believe. Now Manolis had crossed from Kos to Kalymnos a hundred times and was perfectly well aware that it was a dangerous day and certainly no day to put to sea with two small children in tow. His nonchalant minimising of the risks was activated entirely by his knowledge that we wanted desperately to get to Kalymnos and we hoped for a calm crossing. I am sure he would have been deeply wounded had anyone suggested he might have shown greater concern for our welfare by advising us against sailing. ‘But this was the day they wanted to go.’

  His behaviour has continued consistent. Manolis is pliable. We have found ourselves picnicking in a hailstorm on his assurance that it was bound to turn out a beautiful day. We have wasted many expectant hours waiting for events and people and information that have never materialised. The bus has left the station. The ship, alas, weighed anchor two hours ago. The party is not tonight, it was held last week. If either of us expresses a wish (often, indeed, we have no need to express it; Manolis merely assumes that we will) he instantly assures us of its imminent gratification, not from any conviction but from a sincere desire that things may turn out as we hope. He sees nothing illogical in this. It is his expression of friendship.

  Looking back on it now I think it was probably only the greatest stroke of good luck that we did find a house in Kalymnos, and that within half an hour of our arrival, exactly as Manolis had predicted in Kos.

  It was a spindly yellow house on the waterfront, with a little cast-iron balcony overhanging the plateia and four staring windows that looked down the broad harbour road with its row of coffee-houses under the ragged casuarina trees and across to the small coloured cubes piled higgledy-piggledy at the base of the mountain. We inspected it with the owner, a stout, effusive woman who wore a blue coat and skirt and the sunglasses that here are a symbol of class distinction and accordingly are worn also at night or when the sun is heavily overcast.

  Our inspecting entourage consisted of Manolis, two slim shy young men in working clothes whom he introduced as his nephews, a gnome-faced engineer named Mike who had worked in the United States and spoke English, the wife of the proprietor of the adjoining coffee-house, and about a score of ragged snot-nosed children, part of the shrill horde of hundreds who had followed us along the waterfront and were now crowded into the room, choked up the tunnel of the stairs, or waited in the plateia below for further developments.

  There were four bare rooms with pale, streaky, limewashed walls and an improbable number of double doors carved with tricky lozenges and painted white. There was a large white kitchen with a red stone floor and two tiny open grates of whitewashed brick behind a flowered curtain drawn across the gigantic chimney. There was, as I had been warned, no bathroom, and the lavatory was as noisome as I had expected, but at least it was separate from the kitchen and there was a cistern above it, lacking a chain.

  Could the landlady, we asked, have a chain attached to the cistern?

  Why, certainly, certainly! Nothing could be simpler. The matter would be attended to tomorrow. Anything we wanted! Anything!

  The rent was set at six hundred drachmae a month, and this figure was discussed and debated by everybody in the room, including the ragged children, who carried the information to the crowded stairway, from which point it was borne to the patient crowd in the plateia. There, I gather, it was considered at length, as well it might have been for it was daylight robbery. However, we had no way of knowing this at the time, being fools with money generally and coming fresh from London rents.

  ‘Is that cheap enough, Manolis?’ asked George.

  ‘My dear brother!’ said Manolis, who had evidently observed from our slightly desperate expressions that we hoped the rent was set at a fair figure.

  If we agreed to pay such a sum could the landlady provide the necessary sheets and blankets for the beds, cupboards for hanging clothes, cutlery and table linen, cooking utensils for the kitchen.

  Everything! Everything! The best she owned would be at our disposal. It would be her first concern that we should be as comfortable as if we were in our own home and the little darlinks happy.

  The little darlinks were by this time prancing up and down the blue tunnel that led from the street wearing their silliest expressions and shrieking abuse at each other to the wonderment of their wide-eyed audience of Kalymnian children. For a moment, shamefully conscious as I was of the contrast between the plump, well-fed, warmly-dressed and odiously-behaved little darlinks and the grave wonder of the scantily clad and undernourished children who regarded them with such soft, shy glances, I would gladly have disowned my two. But as I grasped one small hand firmly in each of mine I realised that their hands were hot and damp, and the two pairs of blue eyes turned stubbornly away from mine were filled with strain and uncertainty.

  Martin’s lower lip began to tremble. His fingers tightened convulsively. Shane, always alert for a cue, took the deep shuddering breath that always heralds a bellow.

  ‘Oh, it’s awful, Mum!’ Martin sobbed. ‘I haven’t had any peanut butter since London and I don’t know what anyone is saying.’

  Obviously they had had about as much as they could bear. And who could blame them? For the last two weeks they, who had always lived a life as snug and safe and ordered as a comfortable income, a comfortable home, and loving parents could provide, had been hauled on and off aeroplanes, Aegean ships, smelly caiques, in and out of hotels and pensiones; they had been asked to eat lukewarm squid slithering in olive oil, cold macaroni, bread without butter, boiled goat’s milk which turned them up: instead of the paradise of sunshine, blue skies, and sweet little donkeys which they had been promised they had spent miserable hours perched tiredly on top of mounds of baggage in bleak terminals and on rainswept wharves. They were cold and unhappy and homesick. I felt for them with all my heart. For so, suddenly, was I.

  ‘Tell her we’ll take the house.’ It didn’t matter if the rent was too high or the house damp or the attic infested with rats. We had come to a point where we had to stop and sort ourselves out.

  It was only then that I noticed that the tap above the kitchen sink was attached to a little tank of painted tin that had no sign of pipes leading into it.

  ‘But where does the water come from?’ I asked.

  Not far. Nothing. A mere five minutes’ walk. I would find a public tap in the street behind the corner coffee-house, and of course there were the wells. I could get myself an old kerosene tin. If I did not care to fetch the water myself there was a very nice woman who would be glad of employment. She would carry the water, clean the floors, do our laundry very cheaply and cleanly. Would I care to interview her in the morning?

  ‘My dear sister!’ Manolis muttered fiercely, ‘don’t let yourself be cheated! The daughter of my sister, who sells very fine clean vegetables in the small shop at the corner, will fetch your water and clean your clothes for far less money. This woman is only trying to find employment for a relation!’

  ‘We can leave that until later,’ I said. ‘What interests me at the moment is this question of water. If there is no running water I take it the cistern doesn’t work?’

  Manolis shrugged. r />
  ‘But what is the point of having a chain attached to an empty cistern?’

  The landlady beamed and spread her arms wide. It was what I had asked for. Her one object in life was to oblige me and to make the little darlinks happy.

  In the bare front room the sobbing was dying down, and through the hiccoughs I could hear George’s voice, ‘. . . and those big schooners over by the lighthouse are called depositos. You see, they carry all the food for the sponge divers to eat, because they are away from home each year for a long time, six or seven months . . .’

  ‘Would they carry peanut butter, do you think?’

  2

  ‘Eh, Mister George, what you fellers goin’ to do here?’

  ‘Write a book, Mike, as we told you.’

  ‘Yeah, but . . .’ American Mike’s wizened little face was cocked sideways. He looked more than ever like a sceptical monkey. His crooked brown hands were busy with a tasselled kombolloi of big amber beads.

  ‘But what, Mike.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I tellum, Mister George. I say to them, these fellers is writin’ a book about Kalymnos. But plenty of people here say to me, Manolis says how you can write the permit for goin’ to Australia. Manolis says no trouble for you to fixum. Plenty fellers here think you and Mister Charmian is a committee, somethin’ like that.’

  George, wearing the phrenetic expression that was becoming habitual, explained all over again that we were not a committee, that we didn’t know any committee, that we had no influence whatever with the powers who arranged migration or selected migrants.

  A crippled old man who seemed to be the town-crier was at this moment hobbling past bawling an announcement of the imminent arrival of the Kyklades from Piraeus and the expected departure of the Andros next morning for Rhodes.

  He left the shipping schedule in the air and came over to the table under the trees to listen. Three sponge-divers at the next table pulled their chairs closer. The inevitable circle of children closed in, though doubtless they, like the sponge-divers, the town-crier, and American Mike, had heard it all before. By this time the whole town had heard our explanation — and nobody believed a word of it.