Hellas Revisited
By COMPTON MACKENZIE
0 N the night of September 9, 1917, I left Greece in a French torpedo-boat that was escorting two battleships across the Straits of Otranto in a savage gale. All of forty years were to pass before I beheld again the mountains of that dearly loved country last August, as a guest- lecturer on the SS Adriatiki. My job on one of the Swan Hellenic cruises was to lecture for an hour four times and supplement those lectures with short talks about several of the iEgean islands, to sit at a different table every day for lunch or dinner, and to look as wise as possible When answering the unanswerable questions put to me by some of the more earnestly intelligent members of those 200 people, most of whom were visiting Greece for the first time. The other lec- turers had a harder task because they, together
with the admirable Greek guides appointed to the ;
cr11-se, had also to discourse with authority on the
sites that were being visited—Olympia, Mycerue, Knossos, Delos, Patmos, and the Acropolis of Athens among them. They were all masters of their job and Mr. Kinchin Smith of London University gave them every opportunity to dis- Play that mastery.
Most of the party went by train to Venice, but the guest-lecturers were flown. There was a long delay at Heathrow because just as the Alitalia Plane was going to take off it was discovered that the compass was misbehaving. It was lucky this Was discovered in time; flying as we were at night W, _e might have found ourselves in Prague or Moscow instead of Venice. Mr. R. K. Swan, the director of the cruise, was worried by the delay, but when we reached Venice we found that the Adriatiki had been held up by the Soviet authori- ties when making a tour of the Black Sea ports With a shipload of Italian passengers and there- fore we could not sail until sunset. Mention of Mr. R. K. Swan demands an expression of thanks for the seemingly effortless way in which every excursion ashore was arranged. The buses were always waiting where we were told they would be Waiting. The times allotted to the various sites Were always kept to the minute. The meals taken ashore were always ready and always good. It Was a little• miracle of organisation. The only thing missing was a botanist able to identify all the flowers and leafy sprays that people brought back from the various islands. I was almost glad that we were visiting Rhodes in a month when its flowers were scarce, for if we had been there in the prodigality of April my knowledge of the 'Egean flora would have been even more ruth- lessly exposed for its superficiality.
There was one little girl of twelve who began by supposing that I must know the answer to every question, and who after a fortnight was convinced, I am sure, that I knew nothing. Child- ten were rarities on board but there were lots of charming young people who, believe it or not, Were too tired by their strenuous days to dance bathing the final night after a restful day at sea. The °athing was superb, each bathe better than the last, with that on the island of Paros, which once Provided the marble for all the great Greek statues, voted the best of all.
Therewere many memorable moments during this magical if rather exhausting fortnight, but I shall remember one above all the rest. Refreshed by drinking at the Castalian Spring, we had reached nearly the end of that arduous walk up the Sacred Way when a party of German tourists passed us on the downward path in an explosion of gutturals. I was asking myself how, after the crimes committed by the Germans in Greece during the last war, any of them dared to visit Delphi let alone talk there at the top of their voices, when a nightingale began to sing and was answered in equal loveliness of music by another nightingale. The hour was noon; the date was September 1. Had these birds just arrived back in Hellas from a Surrey garden and was this a salute to Philomela, their ancestress of long ago? Much English verse has been written to the nightingale but we had with us a contemporary English poet and I hope Cecil Day Lewis has been inspired by his draught of the Castalian Spring to com- memorate those nightingales and that Jill Balcon will one day broadcast the poem to us in her own incomparable way, unless Cecil Day Lewis reads it to us himself, he being within my experience the only contemporary English poet able to read his own or anybody else's poetry. It will be idle for James Fisher to tell me when next we meet that nightingales do not sing at noon on a blazing September day. Over 150 of us heard them.
Another memorable moment for me was my return to Syra all but ten days of forty years after I left it on a stormy midnight in the little armed yacht of the iEgean Intelligence Service. Neon lights advertising loukoum, which we call Turkish delight and which at the moment seems the staple diet of British journalists, lit up the thronged quayside. The population seemed to have quadrupled itself. Many of the refugees from Smyrna after the horrible massacre of 1922 had joined the descendants of the refugees from Chios, where the Turks had had another massacre a cen- tury earlier. I went ashore and ate octopus in my old office, now a restaurant. It was cooked to per- fection and if you can imagine a cross between lobster and the inner tube of a bicycle you'll know what octopus is like.
I visited the old Turkish consulate, seized by us in 1916, where for ten months I had slept in the ex-harem, and was courteously allowed by the present owners to wander round the house, though it was after eleven o'clock. Courtesy! Wherever we went in that fortnight we were welcomed with courtesy, kindness and hospitality by the Greeks. Perhaps I can best illustrate the impression made upon us by our reception when I say that a col- lection for the hospital on the island of Cos to which the widow of a Scottish doctor had brought the instruments bequeathed to it by her husband realised £60. That is the way those 200 British people expressed what they felt about Greece. As for me I returned home exhilarated by the revelation that there were so many of my country- men with imagination, commonsense and generosity.
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