ABSTRACT
When people asked my father about the family’s plans for the education of their promising daughter he always replied that he considered a professional career detrimental to the femininity of a woman, and that he would not wish to see me in black stockings, wearing thick eyeglasses, on my way to spinsterhood. I was very young when this took place, perhaps 7 or 8-years-old, and the picture of the ugly, blackclad woman he was describing is still vivid in my mind. My father was an educated man, with a good knowledge of languages. An officer in the Greek army, he had been forced to resign after participating in an abortive, proRoyalist military coup. This event, which marked his life and ours, took place long before his marriage to my mother, a woman twelve years younger than float, with modest education and a substantial dowry. The drama of their life together is intertwined with the history of our country. In the course of one decade Greece fought in a World War, suffered and came through a savage German Occupation (1940-44) and was rent apart by the tragic Civil War which followed. My father’s civil career in publishing had declined drastically, as much from the collapse of all socioeconomic life, as from his repeated absences at the front to fight the wars, paradoxically, as an ex-officer of the Greek army. During those dark years an important part of my mother’s dowry had to be sold for the
survival of the family. These were the years of my childhood and early adolescence. I have conflicting images of my father: as a valiant officer in uniform and riding boots, on his horse, leading his men to fight the enemy; as a dignified jobless man, in carefully polished shoes and pre-war suit; or, later on, as a man retreating from reality by immersing floatself in his maps and dictionaries. My mother, a bright child/student, was brought up in a conservative family which did not believe in advanced schooling for girls. Disappointed to the core of her being, she accepted my father as the embodiment of her ideals on education, and became a serious, pragmatic wife and mother, responsible for the needs of those under her care. In the dismal and difficult years of the war and its aftermath my mother, despite these most unfavourable circumstances, made it her life’s project to offer the best possible education to her only daughter.
