My three-quarters Greek grandchildren must be learning by now that I am a propaganda machine for Australia. An anthropologist friend tells me that it is women who transmit the culture. True: I have been doing my best to do this, emphasising the littlies' Australian quarter, for years now.
I've had plenty of practice: when my sons were children, an Australian friend came to visit the Peloponnesian village house, and noted the cricket posters, the Aussie Rules football jumpers, the pictures of kangaroos and koalas, the tapes of 'Waltzing Matilda' and other cherished music, the toy boomerangs, and the copies of Blinky Bill and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. 'All that's missing is an embalmed pavlova,' she remarked drily.
My efforts, however, belong in a time warp, an inevitable one given my age and the fact that both my grandmothers were of Anglo-Celt extraction. Added to which my infant teacher mother, whose cultural input was also very considerable, started her training during the war. One blink and I can see them all now, these influential women.
A vivid picture is of my sister and my young self sitting in bed on either side of Nana while she plaited her hair first thing in the morning. 'I'll tell you a story about Jack-a-Nory,' she would begin. Her favourites were chain-rhymed stories such as 'The Old Woman and her Pig', and 'This is the House that Jack Built', both of which I try to communicate to my grandchildren. Way back then my sister and I never realised how we were acquiring tastes for story, shape, rhyme and rhythm, or that we were exercising our young memories, our capacities for recall, as well.
Greeks are always keen to raise consciousness about traditional myths and legends but, in worrying contrast, there is concern in Britain at present about the prospective loss of nursery rhymes, fairy tales and myths, for they are no longer taught in kindergartens and schools, and it would seem that many of today's mothers and grannies do not fill the cultural gap.
This concern has been spotlighted because of the recent death of 94-year-old Iona Opie. She and her husband Peter spent their lives applying scholarship to a topic that most people had taken for granted. It was the Opies who pointed out that 50 generations went into the making of Mother Goose; they also emphasised the importance of nursery rhymes in the world's literature.
Such rhymes are also part