Charmian Clift - Mermaid Singing & Peel Me A Lotus

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 Charmians accounts of the familys 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.

Clifts 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.

For my mother
Amy Lila Clift

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 didnt 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 dolls 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! Itll turn over next trip. You see!

Only two hours before, at Kos, with the sea fretting 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 dont 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.