Every year Tony’s family would go to Zagora 1 on Mount Pelion to celebrate Easter. In the summer of 1963, Fiona, Zoe and I went, planning to stay for several months, having given up the lease in the little house in Agious Georgious. Tony stayed in Athens, working, and since I wasn’t getting on well with him anyway, going up to the mountains for the summer was a welcome break. He was working on construction in Athens, not a well-paid job, and completely dead-end, having been taken on as a favor to the family, so he had been applying for jobs in Greece as well as in Arab Africa (he spoke fluent Arabic, plus French, English, and a couple of African languages).
He got a job in Libya and came up to Zagora midsummer to talk with me about our relationship. He wanted to stay married, but live separately. I was not having that. I wanted a divorce, and I wanted to go to England to tell my relatives, face-to-face. He was going to send me airline tickets, but for some reason, I got really scared about flying and wanted to go by train instead.
So in the late summer of ‘63, I took the train to the northern border of Greece, taking a couple of days to get there, starting off with the 3-hour bus ride from Zagora to Volos, then staying the night in Volos so I could get the morning train to the border, on the way going past Mount Olympus and Delphi, to just a mile outside of Thessaloniki 2. There, I discovered my visitor’s visa was invalid, as I had, without knowing it, applied for Greek citizenship and been accepted. The custom and border people wouldn’t let me through. I was devastated, totally thrown, standing there at the border, crying.
One of the officers there took me back to Thessaloniki to find a bed for me for the night whilst things were sorted out (on the way he asked me to marry him—not an unusual occurrence). Turns out there were no hotel beds available as the city was having its yearly International Fair and it was crammed with people. He took me to a friend of his who had a small hotel close by, which also had no rooms, so they put me up in a bathroom. I was delighted. I had a truckle bed to sleep on, but more important, a hot shower, which I immediately took advantage of (I have no clue how the rest of the hotel occupants managed with me inhabiting the bathroom). After the shower, in the early evening, after siesta time, I walked up the hill to the city proper.
I spent a couple of hours there, seeing Hagia Sophia 3 (which, at that time, was a huge open, empty space), visiting the market (very crowded), but mostly just looking, noticing the more eastern, Islamic influences in the architecture. The next morning, after sleeping really well in my very own private bathroom, my policeman friend collected me, took me up to the border and saw me through customs. Going through Yugoslavia (as it was then) took a day and night of very slow train travel. When I woke up in Austria there was mist and pine trees, so different from the dry, brown, empty terrain I had spent a day passing through, and continued through the rest of Europe, Germany, Belgium to the ferry across the Channel, and another train to London.
After I got back to Greece, the girls and I had to move back to Athens (the house in Zagora was not winterized), and then, at a New Year’s Eve party, talking with a friend of mine from Beirut about how I was now a Greek, her husband, a lawyer, asked to see my papers. When I showed them to him the next day, he said I had a visitor’s visa on my British passport valid until January 31, 1964—that I had 27 days in which to get out of the country.
I wrote to my Great Uncle Amphlet for airline tickets for the three of us. He sent the money by return post, and we left Athens on January 30, 1964.
To leave Greece, I needed the help of the policeman at the border, the border guards, and his friends, and help from my guardian angel, spirit guide, collective unconscious, or whatever, to be able to renew the visitor’s visa on my British Passport, and that, plus my great uncle’s generosity helped me to get me out of a difficult situation, so I could go back to London, and eventually move to America, to Minnesota, to Saint Paul, to this house where I have lived for near-on fifty years..
Photo taken by Tony in 1962 of Zoe and me at Sounion, a temple near Athensn
1 Zagora is a small village on Mount Pelion facing the Aegean Sea, where the family had property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagora,_Greece.
2 Thessaloniki, aka Salonika is a city in the north of Greece, dating back to prehistoric times. https://www.visitgreece.gr/mainland/macedonia/thessaloniki.
3 Hagia Sophia. Located in Thessaloniki, dates back to the 7th century On looking the church up online, I think I got the buildings mixed up. What I remember is being in a very large, open and empty space with a huge domed roof, definitely not Hagi Sophia. https://thessalonikilocal.com/hagia-sophia-thessaloniki-history-and-architecture