Plomari or Los Pallos Verdes?

The views from the third story of my brother’s place in Plomari Greece. Being Scandinavian (or a long time resident of Denmark, anyway) he likes to huddle downstairs in the dark during the hot afternoon hours, watching Monty Python or Australian Rules Football, but being a Montrealer, someone who can stand REAL heat, not small time heat like here in Greece I like to open the windows and spread the shutters on top and feel the warm breeze waft or sometimes blow through. And besides, I watch enough media at home.

(It’s funny, years ago, when my family would go to Old Orchard Beach, my brother, then a teen, would spend his days inside, watching the American TV Stations and only go out at night to play pinball. He hasn’t changed: but whenI remark upon this he denies it. But he’s had this house for years and admits he ‘s never been on a beach. I am going to drag him to the best beach here that is but 1 kilometer away.

It may say 105 outside, but it’s fine as far as I am concerned, and great at night, like the very best Montreal summer nights, without the ever-looming thunderstorms, although I’m not too stupid, I don’t do anything much in the heat at midday and I’m not going to fry on the beach, despite my Mediterrean colouring.

OK. So these, above, are world class views, it reminds me of Los Pallos Verdes in LA with a little Street Car named Desire ambience thrown in, women yelling at men, men yelling at women, both yelling at kids, mothers in law yelling at everyone, kids crying, kids laughing, kids having profound discussions with each other, their whispers carrying up through the stairwells, kids playing for hours, clippety clack, on same echoey stairwells. If I could understand Greek I would know all the neighbours’ business. (Ironically, one night, I started to sing Hallelujah on the porch listening to my iPod and someone slammed a window shut!)

And the food is great of course. And the wine is cheap, but I am not drinking as much as I thought I would. Who needs to drink when the sun is perpetually shining? That’s Prozac enough, as everyone knows.

Oh, yes, and with respect to Flo in the City, my book in progress about a girl coming of age in the 1910 era, I’ve had plenty of time to read The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson, which is about the post war period through the eyes of ordinary and extraordinary Edwardians. She mentions Coco Chanel of course and says that she used stretchy material in her clothing because that was what the jockeys used and her boyfriend BOY was into the horses.

But I had read she used that material because the established couturiers made sure she couldn’t get the typical materials used in haute couture…. so she had to improvise using men’s underwear material. Whatever the truth, it proves necessity is the mother of invention and you have to be in the right place at the right time. Nicolson’s book beautifully illustrates this…without being blunt.. it’s just left there for you to figure out yourself.

My husband, Flo’s great nephew, with his Scottish blood hates the heat, and although I’m sure he would like to be here with me, he might find it torture . His favorite weather was my standard poodle’s favorite weather, cold and damp. And my dh doesn’t mind the extreme cold either. He just suits up like a spaceman and goes out for a long walk. I huddle all winter in the house, and drink wine…and watch Mamma Mia on the big HD screen over and over.

But one thing that might change, when I return, I may go for walks in my area. As it is, there are two hairpin turns on either side of my house and I am reluctant to go out as don’t like having to be wary of cars coming my way out of the blue. The schoolbusses are the worst, they careen around the corner, even in icy conditions. Well, here, in Plomari, it’s all wariness all the time. It’s all narrow passages and crazy scooter and car and sometimes truck traffic and dogs underfoot and an occasional kid on a bike as in velociped.

One day I got a flashback to the sixties: two kids were doubled up on one bicycle and streaking downhill on the bumpy cobblestone road leading from my brother’s home to the main square.. a narrow road with shopfronts shared by pedestrians carrying groceries or pushing baby carriages, young men (or couples with child) on motorbikes, dilapidated cars spewing exhaust and even small trucks. (I saw no donkeys but there are memorials at the side of the road, where people met their end.)
This morning, scoping the main drag for a place that serves eggs for breakfast, I found myself automatically stepping out of the way of some vehicle, as if it were second nature. Now I get it! The truth is Greece feels like home. Montreal, after all, is a multicultural place.

The Circle Game: Lunch Time Takeaway (Take out)

My husband’s great uncle Herb Nicholson, one of the characters in Flo in the City, my middle school novel about a girl coming of age in the 1910 era.

I just read one of Herb’s 1905 letters, from September, where he has just arrived in Montreal to work at the bank. Marion, his sister, is also just arrived, as she is at McGill Normal School. (I wonder if their parents, the Nicholsons contrived that he be there, fearing for her. As it was, he hardly ever did anything with her that year, and probably picked up bad habits. In 1908, I have him whoring on de Bullion.

Anyway, in his letter, he says he is just arrived and that he has found a room on Mansfield for 7 dollars a month and if he pays another 10 dollars he can get his meals there, breakfast and supper and on Sunday all three meals.

And he has to ‘order in’ for dinner (or lunch) at work because the boys don’t get time for dinner. Imagine. 15 cents a meal.

What goes around comes around. Now people eat their lunches at their work stations, too.

I discovered the letter looking for something else, the diary belonging to Elizabeth Fair (my husband’s great aunt on another branch of his family tree, and first cousin to General Douglas MacArthur. ) I have just finished the book The Perfect Summer by Juliet Nicolson, which is about 1911, a momentous year in the UK, due to the Coronation, strikes, impending war, and the heat, where it reached 90 degrees in the shade. Elizabeth visited London (and Paris) in 1911.

I read the diary a while back and found nothing at all interesting in it… as I think I wrote earlier. She was just a shallow woman doing the rounds, visiting the usual places, Hyde Park, the Tower, and meeting with ‘contacts’ and shopping until she drops. (I don’t think she goes to the ballet, which might have been very interesting as the Ballet Russes with Nijinski were there.. )She doesn’t even mention the heat, although she is from Norfolk Virginia, so she isn’t hot I guess. (She does change her outfits often, but that’s what the rich did.) The one interesting event she remarks upon is a suffrage parade. But Nicolson’s book says the suffragettes took a break in 1911 in respect for the Coronation. I wonder if Aunt Elizabeth actually saw a union parade. There were many strikes in London that year, the heat being the straw that broke the camel’s back when it came to unbearable lower class working conditions. In probably the most interesting part of the book, Nicolson describes the upper classes eating bon bons in the heat and then how those bon bons were made, by lower class women in Hades-like conditions..

Nicolson describes the life of servants and she doesn’t make it seem all that bad. A life in service seems a better life than in the factories. In fact, that year they implemented a kind of health insurance and many people in service thought they didn’t need it. Their employers took care of them in times of ill health.

Funny, I recently learned that my grandfather was a footman, in England, who, family lore goes, worked for an Earl whose daughter fell for him, so he was sent off to Malaya. (It was a privilege to go to the Colonies. It cost money and a position had to be procured. )Hence my family’s story, Looking for Mrs. Peel at www.tighsolas.ca/page745.html

A footman was a respectable job. You had to be tall and presentable. My grandfather was 6 foot 5.
I think he was the son of a Yorkshire sawmill worker.

Anyway, after reading about the lives of the factory class, and Montreal had poverty equal to London’s.. I can’t feel sorry for Herb and his take out lunches.

Indeed, yesterday, I went to the resto where my son works as a chef for a summer job and it is very hot. He came out to the terrace where I was sitting with my wine and reading the Perfect Summer in the big purple sun hat that I bought in Quebec, and eating the Greek salad he had prepared for me, and my son complained of the heat, he said it was 45 in the kitchen, and, to make him feel better, I told him about women in Nicolson’s book, who went on strike in 1911, who sweated in the chain making factory, sparks flying, their young babies in bags hanging over their heads, their toddlers around their feet.

Having a Heatwave 1911

Emmaline Pankhurst 1913

I’ve read the first four chapters of The Perfect Summer by Juliet Nicolson, about 1911 in England and it’s a lot of fun. But I also went back and read the forward. Nicolson says she chose 1911 randomly. She was re-reading The Go Between, (one of my favorite novels) that takes place sometimes at the turn of the century during a hot summer, which inspired Atonement, and decided to write about a hot summer. So she researched and discovered that 1911 was very hot indeed. Seems a bit weird. But I think that’s how creative people work.

1911 was also a hot year in Quebec. Margaret writes in July: We have had awful heat. We slept out on the verandah. Took the mattresses. The Skinners (neighbours) did as well.” There were terrible forest fires in Ontario where Norman was posted on the railroad.

The next chapter is on the Ballets Russes. I’ve read a lot about them, in other contexts… biographies of Belle Epoque characters.

The Perfect Summer 1911 Juliet Nicolson

Image from a Corner in Wheat, D. W. Griffith, 1912

I just got the books “The Great Silence” and “The Perfect Summer” both by Juliet Nicolson in the post (I’m talking like a Brit now:)

Pretty pastel volumes which I could not wait to start reading.

Well, I’ve just read the first chapter of The Perfect Summer, 1911, and WOW it covers exactly the same territory as Tighsolas, except from the point of view of the rich and famous or soon to become famous. (And it has wonderful speeding prose, to illustrate the time it is talking about. Like the first chapter of A Tale of Two Cities.)

And on the back cover, it is stated outright, that 1911 was a pivotal year in Western History. (In the second chapter, Nicolson relates that Winston Churchill wrote in a 1911 entry in his diary “Al the world is changing at once.”

I’m pleased, because I am not an historian, and I had little background in history, when I stumbled upon the Nicholson letters (belonging to my husband’s grandmother and great grandmother and father and written mostly in 1908 to 1913) and even though the Nicholsons were in no way famous, just middle class semi-rural Canadians of Scots origin, I realized that these letters were important, that there was something going on in the background. This was in 2004, three years before Juliet Nicolson (a grand daughter of Vita Sackville West and likely an Isle of Lewiser too, like my Nicholsons (who were once Nicolsons)…published her book The Perfect Summer. I posted the first version of Tighsolas in 2005 after educating myself about the era.

This book, The Perfect Summer, I can already tell, is a perfect complement to Tighsolas (http://www.tigholas.ca/) and when I get my novel Flo in the City written (based on the life of Flora Nicholson of Tighsolas) that book will serve as a perfect complement.

Funny thing. I have a diary belonging to another Great Aunt of my husband’s, Elizabeth Fair. Elizabeth was Douglas MacArthur’s first cousin and the daughter of a properous family in the South, Virginia, the Hardy’s. She went to Europe in 1911, London, Wales, Paris and kept a diary.

This diary proves that if you are an ‘airhead middling socialite’ and she pretty well was (sorry to state fact) than even if you are ‘in the right place at the right time” you miss everything. All she writes is about shopping and meeting other people of her class who all are “lovely.” Not ONE interesting item in the entire diary. And according to Nicolson, it was a wild summer in London. Well, my husband’s great aunt does witness a suffrage parade in London. Yes, , most diaries are dull and boring, but this one takes the cake. Considering where she was and when.

Oh, there is one scene of interest, she meets a man from back home in Virginia, who is coming out of the Venus de Milo room in the Louvre. Seems an odd coincidence. And if this were in a movie, like Room with a View, the scene would have significance. As it was, Elizabeth married a Montreal banker and lived in the luxurious Linton Apartments on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal until her death. She had no children, and left no money at her death, having spent it all on, well, not much.

The Perfect Summer 1911 – Someone else’s take

Marion, maybe the Charles River, Boston. Maybe that’s Henry Watters…

My my. Amazon.co.uk, where I often buy books suggested a couple of volumes and I jumped on it. I purchased two books, both by a woman called Juliet Nicolson, one about 1911 (yes!) and one about 1918-20.

The one about 1911, The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow was published back in 2007, but I missed it somehow. It is about famous women in 1911 in England and appears to cover the same territory as Tighsolas. It was very hot in England, too!Gee. I posted my Tighsolas website in 2005!

I can’t wait to get these books! Oddly, this book was serialized on BBC 4, must have been in 2006, just before BBC radio four came online and I became one of that station’s most devoted listeners. (I’m listening right now to a BRILLIANT production of The Idiot on Radio 7)

Anyway, maybe, once I’ve read this book I will get back to writing (or editing the first draft of the first chapters) of Flo in the City, my novel in progress about a Canadian girl coming of age in the 1908-1913 era based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ my social studies website.

I was hoping to do a little first hand research by visiting Boston next week and also Nantucket and Newton Center where cousin Henry Watters lived and worked as a doctor and whom Flo visited in 1908 and Marion and Edith visited in 1912. He seemed to be the very best kind of man, and I suspect (well, he even mentions it in a letter) that there was pressure on him to marry.
He never did marry, despite being a successful doctor. Maybe he was gay, who knows? He died young, before Marion even in 1937 and is buried in Melbourne…

That might be him in the picture above. Anyway, after making hasty reservations for two nights in Ogunquit and two nights in South Yarmouth, Cape Cod, I cancelled. I am departing on the July 4 weekend and I don’t want to be caught in traffic at the border or anywhere else. Beside, I like the seaside in the fall, when it’s rough.

My husband and I are going to Halifax – to see friends and pick up my son’s college gear he left behind in the Maritimes. More sensible. I love Peggy’s Cove, as much as I love Perkin’s Cove.

I did read over my first draft – after a long pause- and it wasn’t half bad. Nice rhythm to the writing. Could use some spicy (non cliche) metaphors… Those are hard to make up, you have to be in a creative mood. Must channel my inner Barbara Kingsolver. (I’m reading her book The Lacuna – and, at the same time – the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.)