I really enjoyed this memoir about an Australian journalist who moved with her husband and two children to a Greek island in the 1950s. Clift has a real talent for making the reader feel like they are standing right there with her, witnessing the sometimes crazy culture shock of the island. I immediately identified with her descriptions of wanting to leave behind the cold chaos of city life (in their case London), and wanting to embark on an adventure that would help their writing. I think the idea of escaping to a Greek island to write is one that many people daydream about.
Clift does a great job of letting readers into the highs and lows of their move, and one scene that really stuck with me was when their servant Sevasti spoke about the misogyny of island life and what is considered 'women's work'. I found this a fascinating insight into island life that is sometimes not explored in other writings.

I think this book is perfect for fans of 'My Family and Other Animals', and I'm looking forward to reading the follow up book, 'Peel me a lotus', that continues the story of Clift and her family.

Charmain Clift's memoir of moving with her writer-husband George Johnson and their children to Greece in 1954.
Her vivid writing immerses us along with her and her family into peasant life on an impoverished Greek island. Her two companion memoirs (Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus) are insightful, charming, and funny. Despite occurring only decades ago, life there mirrors peasant life centuries ago. A delightful read for anyone enjoying memoirs about the awkwardness of not fitting in and family life in other places.

"'You are a pair of romantic babies,' said a friend of ours. 'And of course you'll live to regret this folly. On the other hand I believe that although the mermaids are mute it is necessary for everybody, once in his life, to go down to the sea and wait and listen.'" Beautiful phrasing, and not an unreasonable response if, in the 1950s, a couple with two young children should tell you that they're leaving London for life on a Greek island, and not even one of the big or famous ones. Kalymnos' dramatic scenery belies its size ("ten miles long and, at its broadest point, less than five miles wide"); its economy rests on a sponge-diving trade which always crippled those who dove, but is now itself faltering thanks to the increasing availability of artificial alternatives. Meaning "It is an island under sentence, an island in suspense" – a sunnier version of all those remote Scottish fastnesses where in the end everyone emigrated. Except, of course, that wasn't how it happened, because not long after this was written, mass Mediterranean tourism became a thing (although if that was unforeseen in 1956, so was the trade's sudden end in 2020, so who knows where they're at now?).

But to go back to that eloquently sceptical response which gives the book its title – obviously the immediate response was that the kids interrupt, taking the statement at face value because small children tend not to be familiar with much modernist poetry. And it cannot be emphasised enough that this is travel writing as done by the mother of two young kids, simply because that's still not the default mode, and was even less so in the mid-20th century. From Stephen Graham through Patrick Leigh Fermor to Clive James, my mental picture of a wanderer thenabouts is an unencumbered young(ish) man. Granted, there is the one obvious counterexample of Dervla Murphy, but even if I was too young to remember it myself, I've always associated her with an awkward anecdote of my infancy, which has shied me away from much investigation. Still, it puts a whole different complexion on proceedings: the traveller themselves may be fine with roughing it in a leaky hovel, or unfamiliar foods, but young children...well. And although being outsiders to some extent exempts the Clifts from Kalymnos' rigid gender roles, it's still unsurprising if Charmian has a more pointed perspective on the matter than her husband might have done were he writing this, or if the pair had collaborated as they did on their novels. Indeed, she offers a fascinating report on a warning from another expat, who found that at some point, and she couldn't even quite put her finger on when, she and her husband had gone from mocking the island's expectations together, to gradually emulating them. Of course, now we have the extra lens of distance, because the Clifts give the impression of having been moderately bohemian by the standards of the day yet pretty old-fashioned by ours – but Charmian still offers an acute account of Kalymnos' set-up, which one might now characterise as 'patriarchy harms everyone' turned up to 11, with absurd strictures placed on both genders such that everyone feels limited and as if the others are getting a better deal.

Also interesting is that these rigid gender roles aren't perceived just as a case of going back in time, but as sometimes distinctly different to what she's known in England and Australia. This was, after all, a time before cheap flights and TV had made such in-roads in homogenising even the Western world, and much of the island life, even when it is presented as a matter of religion, seems to Clift to represent more of a pre-Christian survival. Which is perhaps inevitable when names like Xanthippe and Calliope are just that, names, names which a neighbour might bear without it being thought remotely remarkable, even though they seem that way to Anglophone ears. In places, the weight with which superstition is regarded, or the firm taboos, reminded me of that folk horror mainstay, the pagan village conspiracy – with the key distinction that the locals here are much easier on the unwitting outsiders than those born into them. Also, they seem less invested in the classical past than the incomers – Clift's surprised when the children come home from school to learn that the heroes of whom they're taught there are not those of myth, but of the war of liberation from the Ottomans, simply because it's so easy for an Anglo to forget that Greek history is an ongoing thing, not a distinct and distant era.

At its best, Mermaid Singing catches the wild mood swings of making a new life far away, the way that an infuriating day can shade into a delightful one and then into some baffling alloy of the two. There are some wonderfully whimsical passages: "An unpaid gas bill still pursued us politely from the Edgware Road. Because it was our only surviving link with our previous life we were loath to pay it." In a few setpiece scenes, we get intoxicating cascades of impressions and images which rhapsodically capture the white and blue of the streets, the phantasmagoria of Carnival and christening. At its worst, one is sorely tempted to shout 'Oh do give over!' as Clift lapses towards 'the poor are happier because they're more spiritual' territory - as when, towards the end, she suggests that "what gives the faces a nobility almost unnatural in our age is the complete absence of resentment and pettishness, or those tell-tale lines that mark the frustration of little egos". This mere pages after a study of the pathetic figure of a failed captain, who demonstrates all those attributes in abundance. See also "I knew by experience that labour is not eliminated by gadgets, you can't get entertainment at the flick of a switch" – which is all very easy to say when on Kalymnos you can outsource much domestic drudgery for a pittance. Still, these annoyances were rarer than the poetic passages, or the clear-eyed ones. The overall effect is of a caught moment; a record of a world that was ending, which, even if that's probably for the best, was still a loss for all that.

(Netgalley ARC)

This is a gem of a book! The writing is just beautiful it feels like poetry. A really wonderful account of the author, her author husband & young children to a remote Dodecanese island (Kalymnos) in the 50’s. So unusual and full of cultural anecdotes. This book is full of light and hope. This is the first memoir and there is a follow up to their future move to Hydra. Originally I believe they were part of one book.

I don't think I read the blurb very well going into this book as I thought I would be reading about their life as part of the bohemian community of artists instead of there time on Kalymnos. I since reread the blurb and realised it was the second book that went into their life in Hydra. I also thought the book was set in todays time not in the 1950's where times were a lot more simpler and children ran free so perhaps not so unusual for her children to embrace island life. I really need to read the synopsis before I start a book.

That said, I enjoyed this book and imaging what life was like on the island. It sounded harsh but also idyllic. I would have loved to have seen some photos from their time there included in the book. I did end up googling the island so I could get a better sense of what it looked like and where it was. Makes me want to visit now!