Monologue
Red, Amber, Green. These were the colours of the last cartwheel my brother set-off for me in the garden of our English home, while I, only ten then, sat inside looking out. The colours seemed more magical, trapped between window pane and sky. When that green faded, my childhood died out. The year was 1988. In the year to come I would be in a little Island flung into the Mediterranean Sea like one of Medusas snakes, chopped off by Hercules. I would be in my parent’s homeland. A place they left thirty years before to seek work, a way out of poverty and a better life for the children they would have. What a shame they did not let me live it then.
I was the youngest, a mistake I was told by my sister and brother, thirteen and eleven years older, respectively. I remember the front of our car having two badges on it. One was the flag of Greece and the other the flag of Cyprus as if ENOSIS was alive and well on the front of our German made vehicle. I remember being taken to the outdoor market of Wakefield on a Saturday morning and always racing to the stationary and book stall. I remember being in love with words, English words, the only words I knew then. I remember listening to their sounds long after they had fallen out of the air. The air, somewhere I was taken in the Summer I was eleven.
And so we landed there, got out of the plane onto a hot and sticky tarmac landing area. How barbaric, I thought, how medieval. The first few months were spent with my Grandmother in the village. I admit I liked it at the beginning. It was as if I were on a long holiday. A tradition and culture learning holiday. I started to pick up words, learned to say kalimera and euxaristo. I would wake with mosquito bites on my legs and my uncle would kid me by saying that he snuck in my bedroom at night and bit me because I was such a tasty little child. There were also other children around at the time and I was free to just take off by myself and play for hours in the fields with the other children. We had our own little Eden for a playground. Then change came again. Nicosia was where our house was and it had become free of tenants four months after our arrival. Four months of a nice holiday break and then the honeymoon slashed from the sky like death’s scythe swiping at the thread of life.
They put me in Greek school but because my Greek was barely fluent, I had to spend a few hours in a classroom with people of my age and a few hours a day with a classroom of six-year-olds. It was not enough that I was big for my age when I would sit on those small chairs and tables designed for these people just out of their toddler stage, I looked like a giant. And it didn’t help. This brilliant plan to get me to learn their language didn’t work. I learn more playing with my cousin who was a year younger than me than I ever did going to that horrible school with a horrible uniform. Who decided to dress school girls in a black and white tablecloth anyway, with a collar like a bib? If I wanted to look like a crap version of Alice in Wonderland I am sure I would have accomplished it all by myself. Thank God that only lasted a year.
1990 saw me in an English school where again they had the bright idea to put me in a class with the Greek-speaking kids. When the teachers realised that I only knew Mars as Mars and not Aris, or whichever Greek God they wanted to dedicate a planet, they placed me in the class with other kids whose parents had had the bright idea to bring them back from Britain, Australia, South Africa, and America. Seven years I spent there and, well, I did make some great friends, friends I could talk to in my language but very few of them understood my drive to write in a genre which no one cared for and everyone thought was just a waste of paper. My life seems to work in sevens. I spent seven years at my last job and seven years trying to get a BA, first in Marketing and finally in Literature. Always writing, always creating a poem.
Red, Amber, Green, those were the changing colours of the first set of traffic lights that the taxi that picked me up from Manchester airport met. Red, Amber, Green and off we went, just me and the taxi driver, asking me for my destination. ‘Ibis hotel’ I said, but what I really wanted to say was ‘home.’
