"The path was fringed with the purple and golden flowers of early heat, stone crop, broom, clematis, cistus......thistles held out ribbon petaled flat blossoms, blossom like yellow and green starts ...the path took me downwards, out of sight of the sea and across a plain through olives and fields of ripe corn"
As I write this paragraph, this description of a hillside in Greece, it is a grey November day. The sunshine of the last week has departed, the wind has blown the leaves off the trees and they now lie scattered all round, and it is a miserable afternoon. The Indian summer has gone and we are left in no doubt that, mild though it may be, winter is now upon us. So to read the above is not to make one feel miserable and fed up at the thought of the winter and the dark nights ahead, but rather to think what there is to look forward to when the sunshine comes back in the spring. At the moment, after reading this simply fascinating book, Greece is high on the agenda - I have not visited for a while.
I only knew Dilys Powell as a film critic, who I used to read years ago in the papers and see occasionally on television. Acerbic, razor sharp and rather daunting I thought as well as being supremely elegant, I had no idea that she had written any books other than those connected with films, until Souvenir Press very kindly sent me this title, An Affair of the Heart, when I spotted it in their catalogue. This is not one of those How I Renovated a Greek wreck in Corinth and turned myself into an Olive Oil Producer and Very annoying Person style books which still jostle for space in the travel sections of the book chains. I always found them acutely irritating and thought yeh well, if I had money I would swan off to Tuscany or Ithaca or somewhere and live with the peasants and become a native and then write patronisingly about it too.
This is different. Dilys Powell spent many years in Greece before the Second World War, when her husband was director of the British School of Archeology in Athens. He died, tragically young, and she came back to Britain. At the start of the book we hear of the 'dig' in the small, isolated village of Perachora, in Corinth where nobody visits and poverty is rife. All the findings at this dig were sent to a museum in Athens but the villagers were told that if they built a Museum of their own, some of the artifacts would be sent to them to display. When it came to nothing "we could not hide a shade of English censoriousness...the simple truth is that there was no money, all there had been was spent on that naked plot of ground....once, trudging up the path to the village 'Is that the museum?' I asked pointing to a waste lot where the goats were tethered 'yes yes the museum' came the reply. Soon we accepted defeat'.
An Affair of the Heart is Dilys Powell's personal odyssey, her attempt to renew her love affair with Greece and the people she had known. At first she is saddened and disillusioned by the changes and left, vowing never to return. However, her love of the country keeps drawing her back and 'although Greece, like an absent lover, had grown and moved on, its spirit was immortal and still the country of my heart"
This book was originally published in 1955 so the descriptions of Dily's Powell's travels by bus around Greece and her return to Perachora are suitably hair raising and ramshackle. I am always a huge admirer of indomitable travellers who get off and on buses with their rucksacks, a bottle of water and little else, and who then tramp miles over hillsides in search of a lighthouse or a church. Not my sort of travel at all, I am afraid. Any bus I get on has to be air conditioned with comfortable seats, and the knowledge that at the end of my journey I have a nice hotel room waiting for me and a cool drink to hand. So my admiration for Dilys as she makes her perilous way back to Perachora is boundless. On each return trip she meets the same villagers, the same friendliness, stoicism and dignity of the Greek people and I found it very moving in places. I wondered what this village was like now some 50 years after this book was originally written so I resorted to Google and this is what I came up with:
Just look at that sea and the whiteness of the little church in the top photograph. I remember when I was in Crete many moons ago, marvelling at the whiteness of the buildings against the bluest sky I had ever seen. Nothing has changed it seems.
Dilys Powell's first husband, Humfry, died in Greece and was buried in Mycenae. On her last visit she returns to his grave: "The wind had dropped, the cypress behind the headstone stood like a statue. Far away in the plain on whose rim I stood, a train went by with caterpillar-crawl on its way to Argos. In the last brightness, the landscape wore the look of immortality. Space, solitude, silence and looking at the grave at my feet, I asked myself once again after all these years whether I had been right to choose Mycenae. And once again I thought that once could not have wished for a nobler grave"
Beautiful.
