Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

  It was, in fact, a good many Greeks and Yugoslavs, with their heaps of luggage, who got thrown off, at the German border. I don’t know what became of them: another side of the booming German economy. I stayed on, still standing, but in ever less crammed conditions. After a while I could use my rucksack as a seat. I may even have nodded off as we threaded our way up the Rhine.

  My principal remaining memory of that journey is of arriving after nightfall in Cologne, where I had to change trains for Ostend, and of finding myself on another railway platform with more military uniforms. I was pretty instantly befriended, in fact—one last strange upswing of that see-saw of fortune that travel brings—by a gang of young British squaddies, on the point of returning home on leave. They seemed to make it their purpose to fill me with beer. I’ve never forgotten their extraordinarily generous good company, when anyone could see we were different creatures, if not so different in age. There was I with the unkempt trappings of five months’ very rough wayfaring; there were they with their uniforms and boots, caught in the still lingering ethos of National Service and of the Army of the Rhine. If I’d been born a few years earlier, I might have been one of them. But I was too tired, and then too drunk, to absorb another lesson in post-war change. I’d also lost by now all worries about my inoperative tickets. I felt I was assured of a charmed and invincible passage home.

  I don’t recall much about the train to Ostend or the night crossing to Dover. I remember that on the ferry my army friends deserted me for the bar below while I stretched out with my faithful rucksack on a bench on deck. I might have been all alone up there, but I’d slept in some funny places by now and I hadn’t stretched out anywhere for four days. The cold and wet of the North Sea air in September were neither here nor there.

  I recall waking up in Dover, because one of my military chums—who must have remembered me and been concerned—was shaking me. He looked rather green around the gills. He said simply, ‘We’re ’ere.’

  So we were. There were the white cliffs. There was England looming through a murky early autumn morning. It looked extremely strange, my country; it looked very weird indeed. It continued to look very weird as we clacked through Kent. How ironic if I’d been finally turfed off that train at Ashford or Tonbridge.

  But I heaved my rucksack at last onto a platform at Victoria. I realized that if I hadn’t been detained by two idiot friends in Thessaloniki I might have thrown away a lot of what was in it—dirty clothes and no-longer-needed accoutrements—and spared myself some weight. But that sensible moment had passed me by, and anyway I’d got used to travelling with a sort of house on my back. In it, too, among the debris of five months, was a Bulgarian knife (it hadn’t even been confiscated) and a copy of Isaac Babel’s collected stories. In a two-and-a-half-day journey by train I’d never had the chance or been in a fit mental condition to read a single word.

  But I still have the book. And Babel’s photograph is the only photograph of another writer I’ve ever felt the need to place before me on my desk as I write.

  GREECE AGAIN

  1974

  The following piece, to which a few details have been added, was originally written in 1993 for an anthology brought out to celebrate the twenty-first anniversary of the publishers Picador. The anthology was called simply 21, and the idea was to ask twenty-one Picador authors to choose any year from the imprint’s life span and to write about it from whatever angle they chose. I quickly nabbed 1974 (1967 would have been before Picador’s existence) but the later year brought me back to a second, longer time I spent in Greece, working as an English teacher, with some summer months of travelling added on. The travelling was redolent of my earlier wanderings in the Aegean, though now I had rather more cash. The cash, in fact, had not been so easily acquired, as the commercial language school where I taught had a crude, if not actually corrupt, approach to commerce and my pay tended to arrive in small, unpredictable parcels of very used notes.

  By odd historical coincidence I found myself in Greece for the fall of the seven-year military junta, when previously I’d been there at its start, and had even come close, in Thessaloniki, to feeling its bite. This piece refers back to that railway-station episode, but rather suggests I was the only one involved and to blame. To keep the original piece down to length, and perhaps to pardon their complicity, I omitted my two friends, but they were definitely and instrumentally there. Would that they hadn’t been.

  The years in between, from the autumn of 1967 to the autumn of 1973, were my student years, first at Cambridge, then at York in the somewhat fraudulent way, academically speaking, that this piece alludes to. It was from Greece that I wrote to York University, after their formal reminder was sent on, to say that I wouldn’t be submitting my PhD thesis. The truth was that it would never be completed and it was a cover, anyway, by which I’d managed to wangle three years living on a postgraduate grant.

  It was at York, nonetheless, by dint of this subterfuge, that I really did at last begin to write. That is, to practise writing or—though I never thought of it so formally and programmatically—to teach myself to write. I had no one else to teach me. Some people have assumed, because of the generation I belong to and because I wrote a novel set in the Fens, that I’m a product of the University of East Anglia’s well-known creative-writing school. The reality is that I spent three years at York, pulling a fast one about my doctoral intentions while, as a novice writer, being entirely on my own. Creative-writing courses, which have now proliferated, can be valuable ways of giving aspiring writers useful time, temporary security and the company of like minds, but I retain a stubborn antipathy to the notion that writing can be institutionally and communally ‘taught’. Like rough travelling, I think the learning’s best done alone.

  Though, like the travelling, it can be pretty rough. This piece mentions that—perhaps with excessive self-censure—I destroyed most of what I wrote at York. I certainly wasn’t in the business of sharing work with anyone or of even thinking of getting anything into print. But it was a real, formative apprenticeship and when I came out of it, my ambition still intact, I could at least say to myself I was a writer, even if I still had no absolute faith that a writer in the fully fledged sense was what I would become.

  Later events proved ironic. I was enormously touched, wrong-footed—and honoured—when in 1998 York gave me an honorary degree. I got my doctorate after all. It was twenty-five years since I’d last visited the university and my former, duplicitous association came embarrassingly back to me. It had been three years of false pretences, but also of a lot of hard work. Skivers aren’t unknown among the postgraduate community, but I didn’t feel like a skiver, and perhaps because, in those days at least, postgraduate students were an inconspicuous breed much left to their own devices, the success of my fraud wasn’t really so remarkable. I didn’t live in daily fear of being found out.

  I keep fond memories of York in the early 1970s—of the city, principally, where I spent most of my time, rather than the university. This was before York was theme-parked and boutiqued, and it still had an easy, unpretentious relationship with the stony history you could see at almost every turn. Past and present rubbed shoulders naturally. It had a plethora of pubs, wonderful butchers‘ shops, a magnificent railway station: a working city that just happened to be extraordinarily picturesque. For a while I lived near Rowntree’s chocolate factory, east of the centre. Whenever I walked to the university campus out to the west (I can’t remember going anywhere in York except on foot), I’d slip through the huddled medieval gateway of Bootham Bar, the Minster towering just ahead, pass along High and Low Peter-gate, down the impossibly narrow and crooked Shambles, then, skirting Clifford’s Tower and York Castle, emerge through the city walls on the further side—so taking in, in a routine twenty minutes, what tourists travel from all over the world to see.

  Later, I moved inside the walls, south of the Ouse, where there were still some sleepy, almost forgotten streets of small terraced houses and
, by the river itself, clusters of quietly deserted warehouses. I shared a two-up, two-down, which had an outside loo that in the extremes of the York winter became a no-go area in every sense and necessitated a resourceful use of old milk bottles. The shivering, coat-wearing and, frankly, urinous conditions in which I sometimes wrote then were a far cry from the donning of honorary robes or, indeed, from a jasmine-scented veranda in Greece.

  1974

  1974 was the year I failed to write my first novel. It was also the year that the military dictatorship in Greece collapsed almost overnight. The two events are not entirely unconnected. For most of ’74 I was living in Greece, and it was in Greece, though I didn’t know it at the time, that my literary failure occurred.

  Having reached the end of my student years—the last three spent posing as a PhD candidate while I secretly began learning my craft as a writer—I’d answered a dubious advert for teachers with the Strategakis Schools of English, a chain of commercial language schools operating throughout Greece.

  It was a fanciful attempt to embrace, or perhaps postpone, my future. It had precedents. There is the fairly well-known case of John Fowles, who went to teach on a magical Greek island and found there the inspiration for a successful novel. I don’t recall if I saw myself as following his example. I certainly saw myself under some vine on a veranda, conjuring up that—for me unprecedented—thing, a novel of my own.

  There was no magical island. I was sent to Volos, a port on the east coast, largely destroyed by an earthquake in the 1950s and unattractively rebuilt. And the general state of the Strategakis School in Volos can be characterized by the school manager, who met me off the Athens bus, strapped my suitcase to an ancient bicycle and spoke perhaps six words of English.

  But I did find a veranda and a vine. They came with the rooms I rented on the edge of town. Thrown in was a little terraced garden with below it a straggly orchard of apricot trees where in the weeks before Easter, but not afterwards, grazed two innocent white goats. And there was a splendid view. Volos itself may lack glamour but its setting is genuinely inspiring. Before me lay the bay from which Jason set forth with the Argonauts. Behind me, cloaked in chestnut woods, rose Mount Pelion, home of the Centaurs.

  And one day on my veranda I duly sat down and began to write a novel. There’s no point now in disclosing its contents. My memory of it is happily dim. But there I was, fulfilling my vision, intently writing—in the early hours before I set off to teach or sometimes late into the night—my first novel.

  Voluntary exile is an extraordinarily self-protective thing. Back home there’d been the tension between dream and reality. Because I feared the judgement of reality, I was my own toughest critic. I tore up perhaps more than I needed to of the stories I wrote. But in Greece I seemed to enter a state of suspended self-doubt. All questions of appraisal could wait till I returned. The important thing was just to do it.

  It was a quiet spot, perched above the edge of town, where the built-up streets gave way to rough tracks and smallholdings. At night, along with the bark of dogs or the bleat of a doomed goat, the only sound would be that of raised human voices: children being scolded, husbands being called in to supper. Occasionally there would be a hooting from the hardly thick traffic climbing or descending the tightly twisting mountain road behind me. At one of the bends, not far above, was the site, it was claimed, where Peleus married Thetis, with all Olympus in attendance, and where Eris delivered the fateful Apple of Discord.

  In the other direction was the village of Ano Volos, a place of steep, narrow lanes down which, depending on the season, donkeys carried huge panniers of chestnuts or olives. It lay alongside a ravine with a rushing stream which powered an olive press, next to the lay-by at the foot of the village where the buses into town turned round. When the press was busy, the lay-by and the sloping road would run with the purple-brown must left after the extraction of the oil.

  The vine and the veranda were not always available. Autumn came, with spectacular thunderstorms, and the Greek winter is not as mild as Greek summers suggest. More than once I watched the snowline creep down Mount Pelion almost to engulf me. Even in a well-provided-for town like Volos, the Greeks seemed to have a standard, inexpensive way of dealing with winter: they attempted to ignore it. In one of the schoolrooms in the outlying villages where I also went to teach, it was my duty to light and manage the primitive stove. It would just about get going, and class and teacher would have recovered from the fumes, when it was time for the lesson to end.

  But winter back home was hardly preferable—this was the crisis winter of Heath’s three-day week—and I confess I wasn’t particularly troubled at making my temporary home in a country whose own politics and social condition bore no scrutiny at all. Greece in those days was littered with propaganda, and radios or public loudspeakers regularly blared out martial music. The grotesque symbol of the junta—a soldier standing before a spread-winged phoenix—was everywhere, and if the infamous regime had in fact not long to last, it could still demonstrate what it was capable of. In November 1973 there were riots, bloodily suppressed, in Athens, and the whole country was placed under curfew.

  Six years before, on a previous trip, I’d had my own vivid run-in with the Greek authorities when I spent a night in a police station in Thessaloniki after a Greek army officer had accused me (with some reason) of threatening behaviour towards him on a railway station. I was frankly lucky to have suffered no more than a night’s detention and a missed train. But I was younger then, and I was not writing a novel.

  Winter eventually melted into spring. After a few false starts, the air turned suddenly warm. The goats appeared and disappeared. A pair of nightingales took up residence in the jasmine bush in the garden. I carried outside the little fold-up table that was all I had for a desk and, once again, in the early hours I’d sit with my pen and notepad, listening to the nightingales, breathing jasmine and watching the pink light spread over the hills of Thessaly.

  I don’t know what happened to the Strategakis School in Volos after my departure in June. Its days were plainly numbered. Its finances and its classroom furniture were in ruins. In nine months I’d grown attached to its odd mixture of impoverishment, mercenariness and ingenuousness. I was fond of my students, who taught me more Greek than I taught them English and who boasted among them an Ares, a Socrates, an Adonis and at least two Aphrodites. I’d grown fond of graceless but not uncompanionable Volos. I knew the cafes and ouzeria, where to eat the best fish. I’d made good friends in town. And I would miss my veranda.

  But the best of my time in Greece was yet to come. I’d always intended to stay on when the school year was over and, with what was left from my salary, to travel at will. I took the bus to Athens, left the bulk of my things with a friend there—including the now quite voluminous, if unfinished, manuscript of my novel (it could wait till I was back in England)—and that same evening took the night boat from Piraeus to Lesbos. On the darkening upper deck I met three girls, one English, one American, one Greek, rolling out their sleeping bags. They were going to stay in a little beach house on Lesbos owned by the Greek girl’s uncle, and asked me if I wanted to come along. I rolled out my sleeping bag next to theirs. Sometimes life is very simple.

  In the weeks and months that followed I was as happy, as free, as lucky as I’ve ever been. I hopped at random around the Aegean and, beginning with that charmed week in Lesbos, idyll followed idyll as island followed island. I went my own way when I wanted to, but there was no lack of fellow travellers. I fell in love, certainly in lust, more than once. I knew the country, could speak the language, and my saved-up drachmas seemed to last miraculously. I don’t recall sparing a thought for literature or making a single note for my novel.

  And none of this was greatly altered when in July, following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the intensification of the fighting there, all of Greece was mobilized. The life of vagrant hedonism went on, even as guards were mounted, rifles issued to every adult male
and blackouts imposed. I remember sleeping one night on a beach on Kos—just across the water from the Turkish mainland—and being woken by the rumble of trucks and the shouts of orders as an army convoy moved along the island’s perimeter road. If the Turks intended to invade, the beach was probably not a good place to be. In the troop-carriers were conscripts younger than me. I turned over and looked back up at the stars.

  But before the summer was out even Greeks had cause for joy. In the wake of the threat of full-scale war, which never materialized, the seven-year dictatorship dissolved—a military tyranny brought down by military exigency. The realization that this had indeed happened spread, even in the remote Aegean, like some quickening breeze. I’d never before seen a whole people touched by political glee. I should perhaps have reflected that while Greeks had still been oppressed, I’d been having the time of my life and I had no right to share in their new happiness. But it was infectious stuff, and what I think I actually felt was that larger events had only crowned my own lease of bliss. It was nearly time to go home, but I would leave the country on a high note.