The matters of migration and exile haunt me continually. I’ve always had great sympathy for post-war displaced persons, and how people manage to survive detention in today’s Australia is simply beyond me. In my case six months’ holiday became a lifetime when my Greek husband, desperate to return to his home village, unexpectedly secured a job nearby.
I had it easy: no leaky boats, people smugglers, pirates, internment, court cases, piece work in factories or dire poverty for me; I also had certain civil rights, as well as being entitled to work and to reside permanently in Greece.
But even though I tried to count my blessings and to avoid my besetting sin of self-pity, migration was hard. And decades later I still think it was hard. Sometimes I wonder how I survived it. Migration, after all, is a premature kind of death: a rehearsal. You cross a border, the passport is stamped, and you eventually learn there is no turning back. Your old life has gone, and your essential self is sliced in two, divided into before and after.
In fact as a migrant you cross more than one border. I was 35 when I migrated: half the Biblically allotted span and all that. An immature, heedless woman, I gave little thought to culture shock. Still less did I consider misogyny and the subtleties of village society, with its complex web of in-groups and out-groups, with its reliance on and enjoyment of gossip. I had not bargained for my children rejecting me simply because I was foreign, a fact they learned with all due speed, and I had been over-confident about the state of my Greek. Nor had I realised that I was crossing the border dividing youth from maturity, but I soon learned that being in Greece was making me grow up. At last. And fast.
I had to adjust to an entirely new way of being, which, paradoxically, was really very old: nothing much had changed in rural Greek villages for hundreds of years. I also had to learn about a different past, and realise that Greece resembles places such as Scotland and Ireland, where to endure is all.
I crossed all sorts of other borders as well: the city-country divide, class barriers, and those involving religion and education. My inherited pioneer mentality of inventing each day did not sit easily with the peasant one of repeating a centuries-old pattern. Then