It was great reading about what life was like in Greece in the 50s. I enjoyed reading this book. I became that engrossed that I read it all in one sitting. I liked all the interesting facts. I thought that the book was very well written. I definitely recommend reading this book if you have an interest in Greece, especially the small islands. Many thanks to the author and publishers for creating such an interesting book.

I read this and Mermaid Singing one after another. The covers of these new editions are beautiful and I had never come across these travel classics before. It was so interesting reading about this unspoilt island before it was descended on by hoards of tourists. It was far from idyllic though and I found it really interesting reading about the locals reaction to the newcomers. A sad conclusion to this families story the years after these books were published however

I apprecitate the publisher allowing me to read this book. I found this a really interesting read and the characters are quite engaging. it kept me reading until the end. I highly recommend.

Pleased to include this wonderful book in Hidden Gems, the re-discovered and re-issued themed list of my holiday gift books guides for Zoomer magazine. It appeared in the Books section in December. (The listicle feature is online at related link.)

I watched a great documentary with my father the last week, called 'Marianne and Leonard', tracing Leonard Cohen's relationship with Marianne Ihlen. A large part of the documentary focused on Cohen's time at Hydra in the late 1950s, a Greek island where he formed a part of the expat community of writers, artists, poets who had all moved there, tempted by the beauty of the place and most importantly, the exchange rate of the drachma against stronger currencies. Among the celebrities mentioned was Charmian Clift, and this book sounded interesting-a memoir of her time at Hydra. After reading this book, I'm horrified that Clift isn't more famous-this is one of the best books I've read about the realities of La Vie Boheme. Clift and her husband moved to Hydra with their children, from their comfortable yuppie suburban lives in Australia, to make a go of living a life that they felt was truer to their literary pursuits, and of course, the sunshine, glorious seas and great food of Hydra certainly helped! The book's chapters are divided by month, and Clift chronicles their daily lives in Hydra, that have to adapt and change in sync with the seasons, when you're living in a place that's governed by the vagaries of weather. The changes wrought to the island by each passing season are described so evocatively, the book is worth buying just for those descriptions. The book is so much more than a travel book peopled with descriptions of gorgeous beaches and quirky locals, though-Clift has the self-awareness and perspicacity to write about the dark side of the Bohemian dream-the ones who didn't quite make it, the discomfiture of the locals at some of their ways, the many rejection slips, the uncertain political situation with the Cypriot enosis/independence movements. She doesn't elide the difficulties of living a life that's ostensibly simpler-a lot of modern conveniences make life much easier and not harder, and it's excellent that for once, we get a woman's perspective of the drudgery of the burden of constant housework. Throwing up a corporate job and devoting your time to writing is all very well, but there still have to be meals on the table, clean clothes to wear, children to look after. This burden seems to have fallen exclusively on Clift and the women of Hydra, who all had artistic talents in their own right. This book is unique in that sense, as she doesn't romanticize the experience of throwing it all up for an authentic life-she's far too clear-sighted and self-aware for that, and she skewers the artistic pretensions of some of the other expats in their community, some of whom didn't need art to sustain their lifestyle, as they were bankrolled by wealthy families! I don't know why these books aren't as famous as Peter Mayle's books about his life in throwing it all up to live in Provence-possibly because unlike those, this book ( and the preceding book, 'Mermaid singing') don't hesitate to mention the grueling economic difficulties of supporting a lifestyle through art alone, so there's an underlying tone of melancholy that creeps in, like she knows that this period of Lotus-eating in their life couldn't last forever, and was difficult enough to sustain.
Each chapter is preceded by beautiful illustrations of Hydra, done by Nancy Dignan, one of their friends and one of the main characters of the book, and they make the book an aesthetic delight, apart from a literary one. It's amazing that a re-issue was done of these books this year, I hope they find a whole new set of fans.

In 1954 Charmian Clift and her husband George Johnston decided to exchange their stable careers in journalism and active social life in Sydney for the Greek islands where they planned to spend all their time on their own novels. Clift’s two autobiographical books of travel writing, Mermaid Singing and Peel me a lotus cover this bohemian, colourful and challenging time in the couples lives and presents a snapshot of the islands they inhabited during that time.

Full review of both Mermaid Singing and Peel me a lotus available here: https://westwordsreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/29/mermaid-singing-peel-me-a-lotus-charmian-clift/

In this second book of Charmian Clift's memoirs, the family moves to another Greek island, Hydra, and they buy an old house. On top of these changes, a new family member is on the way and there is only one midwife on the island. These are the times many westerners come to the island, some to live, others to stay for some time. Clift and Johnston, now experienced expatriates have close relationships with them. These are not just families or writers, among newcomers are island-hoppers, small tourist groups of young women and men, artists and eccentrics.
Being heavily pregnant, taking care of the household and dealing with a new (old) house are getting too much for the writer. When the baby comes, things seem to be getting tougher, even with the help from the locals, and never-ending house repairs push the couple's limits. They take a breath from all these when they go for a swim in a cave close to their house, which is the most refreshing activity of their days. With keen eyes, she writes all about these and many more with some irony and wit.
In this book, every chapter is named after a month. Drawings are added as a nice touch. I found it easier to read than the first book, possibly because of a lot of colourful characters and a livelier setting. These two books can be read together or separately as they are both independent stories and a serial.
This is a memoir of following your dreams, living the consequences and witnessing the changing times. It was written decades ago and it tells about a specific time in the past, but it is still relevant and it speaks volumes to the reader who have their own ideas about escaping from big city lives.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this opportunity.

'In appearance, the town today must be almost exactly what it was in the days of its merchant princes...It rises in tiers around the small, brilliant, horseshoe-shaped harbour - old stone mansions harmoniously apricot-coloured against the gold and bronze cliffs, or washed pure white and shuttered in palest grey: houses austere but exquisitely proportioned, whose great walls and heavy arched doors enclose tiled courtyards and terraced gardens. The irregular tiers are broken everywhere by steep, crooked flights of stone steps, and above the tilted rooftops of uniform red tiles rise the octagonal domes of the churches and the pierced and fretted verticles of marble spires that might have been designed by Wren.'

The companion volume to 'Mermaid Singing' is set on the island of Hydra, where writer Charmian Clift and husband George Johnston have purchased a house. Clift is pregnant with her third child. The writing mainly concerns itself with the various characters, including other writers and artists that come within the couple's compass. Some are more likeable than others.

The writing is still descriptive and paints a picture of an idyllic if chaotic way of life. One wonders what it is like today and what has changed. Towards the end of the book, a film crew arrives to disrupt the equilibrium of the island, and Clift - one senses - does not approve of their intrusion.

The couple did not remain on the island, eventually returning to Australia, where Clift died in 1969. One senses that their island was a happy place, a retreat from the modern world with its pressures and demands on one's time.

'Ask nothing of it and the soul retires, the flame of life flickers, burns lower, expires for want of air. Here, in the midst of all our difficulties, life burns high. Though it seems sometimes that we make no progress towards the ideal, yet the ideal exists, and our energies are directed towards it...Living simply, living in the sun, we are at least in touch again with reality; we have bridged that chasm that separates modern life from life's beginnings and come back to the magic and wonder of such sensible mysteries as fire, water, earth, and air. And, more than this, we have no masters but ourselves.'

The commentary seems spikier in places, perhaps because of the intrusion of modern life and the shifting moral values encountered in the behaviour of some of those described; however, there is still freshness and vitality to be found if one is prepared to look for them.

These delightful books, with their window on life in a bygone era, should be better known and I heartily recommend both.

I was sent an advance review copy of this book by Muswell Press, in return for an honest appraisal.

Having loved Polly Samson's "A theatre for Dreamers" I couldn't wait to read about real life Charmian Clift's life on a tiny Greek island with her husband George Johnson and their children in the early 50s. It's a richly drawn tale which had me dreaming of Greece and actually feeling like I was there with them. Gorgeous!

Gorgeously. Intimate. Moving.

This book tells the true-life story of Charmian Clift and George Johnston, a married couple, both of them novelists, with two young children. Having had some modest success with several published novels under their belt, and experiencing a growing distaste for the grim predictability of their middle-class existence in Australia, the couple decide to uproot their family and move to the small and incredibly beautiful Greek island of Hydra in the year 1955.

There they complete the purchase of a house, and settle in, - their new lives rapidly becoming unrecognizable as they deal with massive culture shock and acclimatize to the ‘simpler” and more physical world they both have been longing for - ostensibly the ideal backdrop for the life of a writer.

Welcomed by the island natives but finding themselves connecting more viscerally with a sub-community of expats - most of them American or other European artists, novelists, and other creatives - Charmian chronicles the first 3 seasons in Hydra, with a moving depiction of her joys, fears, hopes, identity issues, struggles with motherhood and the ongoing crippling poverty that come to plague her family’s existence on the island.

The writing is evocative, haunting. For anyone who has ever visited, or dreamed of visiting Greece, I can’t imagine a more fitting read. Charmian’s descriptive prose of the Island’s delights is ecstatic and luminous, including some of the most beautiful and poetic passages I have ever read, and I found myself transcribing phrase after phrase that I want to remember.

There are no spoilers here. You will need to read this wonderful book (and there’s lots of supplemental information available online) to learn more about the life and work of this incredibly talented woman.

A great big thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for a review copy of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.

A book where the introduction does the reader better service than the would-be reviewer by covering most of the important points. Polly Samson, who has recently published her own book set in this milieu, notes that this is a far darker book than its predecessor Mermaid Singing, excerpts Clift's evocative description of Hydra as "rather like a set of well-curved mustachios and cruelly fanged with sharp mountains", mentions the Leonard Cohen collection which was what first attracted me to these books. She also offers further information - that Clift's early death was suicide; the real identity of some of the pseudonymous expats. And here, far more than in the first book, you can see why the names might have been changed; if they poked fun, still few of the portraits painted there were ultimately unflattering ones, whereas here, if I were almost any of these players, I might well be taken aback. Are the locals' names changed too? A pity if so, for the idea of Creon, Demosthenes and Socrates traipsing around is wonderful. Clift talks about Hydra as Greece's Devon, a metaphor I'm not sure many Britons would have come up with, and even more surprising from an Australian, but it works: once the bulwark of the nation's maritime power, but its strength now spent. Hence the crumbling palaces from the island's time of merchant princes – one, in an ominous foreshadowing of that darkening mood, known as the House of Usher.

Some of the reasons for that darker turn are obvious and large-scale; the attitude to Anglos in Greece has soured thanks to Cyprus, EOKA and Archbishop Makarios, though by Clift's account, her own family are exempted from all the worst manifestations of this. Still, it helps set the mood, and there's more of an expat community here for it to filter through. Some are posers, but even for the ones who have heft as artists, that comes with its own price: "If Ursula has grown somewhat Gothic and malevolent lately, one feels that it is excusable on grounds other than the common one of island boredom. She is worn out, poor Ursula, and no damn' wonder. Henry would pour pitch over her and set her alight too, if he needed a torch to paint by!" Then there's Toby and Katharine, ignoring the mod cons in their home, determined to abide by some invented, old-fashioned ideal of living 'Greekly' even as the actual Greeks think they're idiots for it. There's a definite narcissism of small differences here, as Clift is at least partly aware, even while she rails against "The poste-restante, interchangeable, culture-addicted, Europe-sick boys, with grey sprinkled through their crewcuts and little pads of drink-fat around their middles, who yearn for the Europe of Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald and the 'lost generation' of a generation who were losing themselves while they were being born." Little suspecting that, thanks in part to Cohen (who does not himself appear here, or at least not unless he's disguised heavily enough for me to miss), she would herself one day become a similarly romanticised avatar of an equally lost and golden age: "They had a larger than life, a mythical quality. They drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more and they blessed more and they helped a great deal more." Of course, before long the bohemians, whatever their scepticism of each other, must pull together in the face of fresh interlopers, such as Katharine's mother, Mrs Knip, so much the caricature of conventionality that one can't help believing that yes, she was exactly like this. She keeps patiently, deadeningly asking all the self-proclaimed artists what it is they actually do. "Mrs Knip delves to expose every shabby little secret. Of no use now for him to quote Racine. Mrs Knip has never heard of Racine."

Not that Mrs Knip is the only (wrong sort of) outsider. In the small shift of space and time since Mermaid Singing painted a picture of a Greek island as terminally declining, unable to conceive of what industry might possibly revive such a place, by 1956 on Hydra, tourism has become a thing. Already it is regarded with ambivalence – "Bums and perverts! There's not a moral nor a penny piece among the lot of them! The island is finished" And following the tourists, the film crews, here to shoot Girl On A Dolphin, briefly making the island over as a simulacrum of itself, locals and expats alike playing versions of themselves for the camera.

But there are the personal darknesses too. Most obviously, Clift is often wondering what possessed her to have another child; even after the midwife makes it back to the island in time, thwarting her worst imaginings, she can't altogether work out why she's consigned herself once again to the endless run of nappies and cleaning and fear. Reassured that "He might be a Shakespeare, or a Rembrandt, or a Beethoven", she replies "Well, I'll never know, because by that time I'll be dead" – as indeed she was (and as it happens, in any case it was the eldest and not the baby who achieved some moderate fame as a poet). She feels trapped, as who might not in the circumstances, but even before the baby arrives there's a real edge of horror here. The first book had its bad times, but when it flew highest and most free, the visions were of light and colour and air. Here they're nightmares of cruelty, deformity, death. The village cats are monsters – "the night is torn by fiendish howls of rage and lust and terror, and those are the island cats who are already so large, so numerous, and so utterly evil that it seems likely they will eventually force the human population to abandon the island to them." Attempts, whether casual or organised, to do anything about the cats, are nevertheless worse. And so on. As for the weather: "Mummified by heat, all the juices dried out of it, naked, hairless country." Even the respite of a favoured swimming spot is sullied by the arrival of a shark net, which as well as the restriction and the implied threat, collects obstreperous youths and the town's garbage. If I'm honest, I mainly read Mermaid Singing to get to this one, curious through the Cohen link. But while they're both good books, I'd be much readier to recommend the happier Mermaid Singing than this powerful but haunted read.

(Netgalley ARC)

A lovely companion to Clift’s first book about her family’s sojourn in Greece during the 1950s. It’s part memoir, part character study, part history of the island of Hydra, and a lyrical narrative that captures the spirit and sentiment of this poverty stricken and rugged Greece—not the Greece of postcards or idyllic tourist websites but the Greece of the sponge divers and sailors, the country rebuilding itself after world wars, occupation, and the aftermath of a civil war. The villagers and fellow expatriates come to life in Clift’s emotionally stark and descriptive prose. There is an undercurrent that is bleaker and darker here than in her previous book Mermaid Singing; numerous times passages had an uncanny resonance with the tragic later history of the author.
The imagery is lush, the words evocative, the setting fascinating. Once again Clift immerses the reader in the day to day of the Greek island life, no moment too mundane to be documented, but the sum of it all leaving one wistful for a simplicity and a serenity that is more elusive these days. Highly recommended.

A lovely companion to Clift’s first book about her family’s sojourn in Greece during the 1950s. It’s part memoir, part character study, part history of the island of Hydra, and a lyrical narrative that captures the spirit and sentiment of this poverty stricken and rugged Greece—not the Greece of postcards or idyllic tourist websites but the Greece of the sponge divers and sailors, the country rebuilding itself after world wars, occupation, and the aftermath of a civil war. The villagers and fellow expatriates come to life in Clift’s emotionally stark and descriptive prose. There is an undercurrent that is bleaker and darker here than in her previous book Mermaid Singing; numerous times passages had an uncanny resonance with the tragic later history of the author.
The imagery is lush, the words evocative, the setting fascinating. Once again Clift immerses the reader in the day to day of the Greek island life, no moment too mundane to be documented, but the sum of it all leaving one wistful for a simplicity and a serenity that is more elusive these days. Highly recommended.

Beautifully Descriptive....
The companion to ‘Mermaid Singing’ and a beautifully descriptive, sun soaked memoir of life in Hydra in the 1950’s. An engrossing and often often moving read with larger than life characters, wonderfully done.

My thanks to Muswell Press and NetGalley for a review copy of this one.
This is the second volume of memoirs by Australian writer Charmian Clift of the time she and her family spent in Greece (they lived there 14 or more years). The first, Mermaid Singing, was of their time on the island of Kalymnos while this one is of a year in Hydra. I think it is may be a little less than a year—beginning in February and ending in October. Each section is about the events in a particular month.

As the volume opens, we learn the family is in Hydra and in the process of buying a house of their own (When they moved and why Hydra was their choice is not explained). This is expensive at 120 gold pounds (thus taking away nearly all of their savings), but still a large house at this price is something they would never have been able to afford in England. Charmian is at the time expecting her third child. The first part of the book focuses on how they go about buying a house and all the work that is needed to get it in shape before they can move in. By this time, her children Martin and Shane are used to life in Greece, attend school there and play with their new friends. Unlike Kalymnos where Clift and her family were the only foreigners, Hydra has a sizeable community of expats, mostly artists and writers, and a few intellectual hobos as well as drifters and tourists who keep coming in. And while they also have their Greek friends, here their interaction is more with this community. Of these their close friends are Sean (who has come to Hydra to write) and his wife Lola, and artist Henry and his wife Ursula (all pseudonyms). Once the house is ready and the baby is born (an adventure in itself), we move on to their experiences living there, things that go wrong with the house, their interactions with others, and incidents and adventures that befall them. Like in the first volume, there is also a lot of work, with Charmian having to cook, shop, and look after the baby (though she has help) and of course write and George having to write, at times books he does not wish to for that will put food on the table (besides other work like pumping water, and even paiting the house).

This was like the first volume quite an enjoyable read—I liked Clift’s writing a lot and as in the first volume, her descriptions are vivid and her observations keen. We have an assortment of characters in this one, each colourful in their own way—whether it is Henry who must go anywhere for the sake of his art while his wife Ursula wants some stability to Sean who persists in his writing despite many rejections or his portly wife Lola who is warm and welcoming. We have three Swedish young men who are on the island, Toby and Katherine an American couple who are trying to live the ‘Greek’ way, Katharine’s domineering mother, Mrs Knip who comes for a visit to set them straight, and even a film crew which comes to make a movie on the island (and many others). They are all interesting even if not all attractive, but Clift’s (and indeed Mrs Knip’s) observations do make us wonder about them and their motivations. (The movie crew we learn in the introduction by Polly Samson who has written a novel based on Johnston and Clift’s life in Greece were filming Boy on a Dolphin starring Sophia Loren who also came there).

In the introduction to this volume, Polly Samson mentions that this is much darker than Clift’s first set of memoirs, and this is something that does stand out almost all through. Clift does for the most part enjoy the simple joys of their life in Greece (swimming every day, picnics, and conversations) but there is also understandable frustration with things going wrong with the house often, money being tight, and their responsibilities with the children weighing on them especially in the face of the fact that many of the others there are not struggling just to live and do not have like responsibilities. But yes, her dissatisfactions come to the surface more often, and one can see some disillusionment creeping in and her questioning their choice even though she does enjoy life more or less. Even her observations of the people they interacted with, their friends as well as the drifters and intellectual hobos (who talk of Kierkegaard and Dali among others), sharp though they are, also feel rather cynical. This is very different from the first volume where you could see her amusement with everything and a decided light-heartedness.

But these were still a very interesting read—a peek into life in the artists’ colony of sorts that was on Hydra where there were not only intellectual conversations but also uncertainly, not only about money but even whether they would be allowed to remain in light of the Cyprus crisis. There are a range of experiences from the film crew literally changing the face of the island to an earthquake to daily troubles like drains going wrong, making life rich even if hard.

Once again we have illustrations, this time by Lola/Nancy Dignan but also the newer ones that appeared in the previous volume—these I always enjoy.

I was really pleased to read these volumes and do see myself visiting them again.

You don't HAVE to read Mermaid Singing, the first of Clift's memoirs about living on a Greek island in the 1950s, in order to understand what's going on here; not least because they've moved islands, so it's a whole new crowd of people. But I think it helps, because you come with a sense of what Clift and her husband George Johnston have already experienced, why they left London, and thus can better appreciate their experiences.

Like Mermaid Singing, this is a "domesticity in the exotic" story - Clift and her family living now on Hydra, a small, largely poor Greek island, on the cusp on becoming A Destination for the Artistic, the Beautiful, and the Hangers-On. Clift and her husband/collaborator have bought a house, which brings with it large dollops of angst: partly because of the never-ending requirement for repairs, on a budget that's basically nonexistent; and partly because now they are settled, they are halfway back to being bourgeois, and many of their fellow Artistic Types can't figure out if they're jealous or derisive. Both, it seems.

Unlike Mermaid Singing, Clift is much more ambivalent here about the whole experience: both her own experience, and what island life is like. While in the first she and George are actively writing a novel together about the sponge divers, here she seems to be entirely consumed with looking after the house and the children - indeed, she is hugely pregnant as the book opens, an experience which understandably consumes a significant part of her mind and time. George gets to clatter away at the typewriters, but Clift is busy buying food, making dinner, caring for the baby and the other two children, and so on. Sometimes she seems content with this, and at other times deeply frustrated, worried she is merging into that always-has-been, always-will-be experience of motherhood that she sees all around her. So... a fairly familiar experience, no doubt, for many women who find motherhood a time of personal conflict.

Island life bounces between the seeming idyllic - the beach swim every afternoon, cheap and bountiful food, glorious landscape, interesting if infuriating neighbours (usually it's the foreigners who are infuriating) - and its opposite. There's hardly any water to be had in summer. Many people's health is poor, there are huge prowling alley cats, rubbish is dumped directly into the harbour and no one knows where the sewers drain. Clift doesn't shy away from the negatives, and also makes little effort to reconcile the two extremes; it's the reality of life, after all.

A lot of time is spent talking about the other foreigners, for whom she uses pseudonyms, and it's probably a good thing she did. Having read the introduction, though, it seems their identities are - were? - no secret; Henry and Ursula are Sidney Nolan and his wife Cynthia. Clift presents the various non-Greeks as looking for inspiration or pretending to do so, living dissolutely because they can afford to; some of them are getting allowances from parents, for instance, so they barely even need to dabble in their art. Not so for Clift and Johnston, who are trying to eke out a living on royalties. I don't even want to look up Hydra today, for fear it's exactly as Clift prophesied - fancy tourist hotels for the Beautiful People - which may or may not have had positive benefits for the people whose ancestors initially colonised the place.

In some ways I can't believe this book is more than 60 years old. Parts of it show what feels like a very modern sensibility, while other bits are clearly products of the 1950s. It's gorgeously, evocatively, provocatively written and I hope lots of people get to read it.

"... there's that odd melancholy feeling, And a sense of guilt I can't deny..." If the Abba lyrics were a book, this would be it.

Charmian Clift writes beautiful prose. Hilarious things happen to crazy island dwellers and temporary visitors. Despite all its past glory the island of Hydra sounds fun and tempting and everything adventure. And Charmian captures everything with the right choice of words, the exact metaphors. You feel the wind, the heat, the desperate lack of money, you see the lack of teeth, and the dancers on the film set - it's literally like being there. Yet, there is this sad melancholy under everything she wrote.

Read as a companion to Mermaid Singing by the same author, this memoir is similar in style and content but slightly darker and more philosophical in tone. Focusing on the travellers and ex-pats who join the family on Hydra, there's a sense of melancholy and fore-shadowing of the authors ultimate suicide.
Despite this, I enjoyed the detailed descriptions of their Greek life, and the colourful cast of characters who joined them.

I was looking very forward to this book having read and loved “Mermaid Singing”. This book continues the adventure of two writers and their young children on the Greek island of Hydra.

A story of moving to the Greek island of Hydra in the 1950`s.

I love the Greek islands and read lots of books on moving there, but this book I found very difficult to get into as it doesn`t seem to flow well. I tried but never got to finish it as nothing seemed to happen for me to wonder what happened to them.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.