I loved Peel Me a Lotus by Charmian Clift,  first published in 1959, mainly because of its exquisite evocation of place. But there was also something about it that reminded me a little of the two years I spent living in a Portuguese village in the ’80’s that made me feel quite nostalgic.

To accomplish anything it is obvious that a talent is not enough. You need a motive, an aim, an incentive, an overwhelming interest be it ambition or fear or curiosity or only the necessity to fill your belly. You need a star to steer by, a cause a creed, an idea, a passionate attachment. Something must beckon you or nothing is done – something about which you ask no questions.

Charmian Clift and George Johnston fled post war London for Greece in 1951, settling on the island of Kalymnos. Later they moved to Hydra where they bought a house. Peel Me a Lotus is a chronology from February to October as they get to know their new home and the people of Hydra. It is the companion volume to Mermaid Singing (which I have not yet read).

Today we bought the house by the well.

Peel Me a Lotus opens with the family of four in the process of buying a crumbling stone villa, almost exhausting their savings in the process. In the same month Charmian receives news that an American publisher will publish Mermaid Singing.

Was it for this that I so gladly renounced the pleasures of material success? The assurance of the monthly cheque? The visible achievements? The automobile, the well-dressed wife, the comfortable apartment at a ‘good’ address, the tidy, well-mannered children going to tidy, well-mannered schools?”

The villa is on the island of Hydra that has a sizeable expat community made up mostly of artists, writers and intellectuals. Charmian is expecting their third child and there is an urgency to make the house habitable before the baby arrives. The first part of the novel focusses on the trials and tribulations of renovating the property, the people they encounter, moving in, and having the baby. The children slide into their new life, attending Greek school and running amok on the streets of Hydra.

Every one of us, in his own particular way, is a protestant against the rat race of modern commercialisation, against the faster and faster scuttling through an endless succession of sterile days that begin without hope and end without joy. Each of us has somehow managed to stumble off the treadmill, determined to do his own work in his own way…

As spring gives way to summer, their sleepy island paradise grows to be a destination for day-trippers, artists seeking a new life and international celebrities, along with an entire film crew that arrive to shoot the film Island of Love. They bring a promise of change and income for the islanders, while apologising for spoiling their paradise. By the end of that Summer, Charmian’s husband George threatened to sell the house back to London.

Ask nothing of it and the soul retires, the flame of life flickers, burns lower, expires for want of air. Here, in the midst of all our difficulties, life burns high. Though it seems sometimes that we make no progress towards the ideal, yet the ideal exists, and our energies are directed towards it.

Peel Me a Lotus is a beautifully written lyrical memoir about the struggle to make a living from a writing life on a rural island amongst a mix of locals and expats without modern amenities, little water in summer, dodgy sewage, cheap and bountiful food and a magnificent landscape. 

We are poor, but then we have been poor for the last two years – poorer, indeed, than we are now, with a house of our own, and enough money to live for another six months or so even if we should earn nothing more. Those two years of poverty have been the most eventful, the most enjoyable, the most exciting of our lives; we have felt richly defiant and adventurous eating lentils and wearing darned sweaters and thumbing our noses at the Jeremiahs who had said we couldn’t do it.