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    A Rope of Vines: Journal from a Greek Island
    A Rope of Vines: Journal from a Greek Island
    A Rope of Vines: Journal from a Greek Island
    Ebook132 pages1 hour

    A Rope of Vines: Journal from a Greek Island

    By Brenda Chamberlain and Shani Rhys James

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    About this ebook

    A beautiful and personal account, this memoir recalls the time spent by Brenda Chamberlain on the Greek Island of Ydra in the early 1960s. Sea and harbor, mountain and monastery, her neighbors and friends are unforgettably pictured; these were the realities outside herself while within there was a conflict of emotion and warring desires. Joy and woe are woven fine in this record: the delight of a multitude of fresh experiences thronging to the senses, the suffering from which she emerges with new understanding of herself and human existence.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParthian Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2009
    ISBN9781909844926
    A Rope of Vines: Journal from a Greek Island
    Author

    Brenda Chamberlain

    Brenda Chamberlain was born at Bangor in 1912. In 1931 she went to train as a painter at the Royal Academy Schools in London and five years later, after marrying the artist-craftsman John Petts, settled near the village of Llanllechid, near Bethesda in Caernarfonshire. During the Second World War, while working as a guide searching Snowdonia for lost aircraft, she temporarily gave up painting in favour of poetry and worked, with her husband, on the production of the Caseg Boroadsheets, a series of six which included poems by Dylan Thomas, Alun Lewis, and Lynette Roberts. In 1947, her marriage ended, she went to live on Bardsey (Ynys Emlli), a small island off the tip of the Llyn Peninsula, where she remained until 1961. After six years on the Greek island of Ydra, she returned to Bangor; it was there, depressed and with financial problems, she died from an overdose of sleeping tablets in 1971. She described the rigours and excitements of her life on Bardsey in Tide Race (1962) and the island also inspired many of her paintings. Her book of poems, The Green Heart (1968), contains work reflecting her life in Llanllechid, on Bardsey and in Germany where she had an unhappy relationship with a man she met before the war. Her experiences in Germany are also portrayed in her novel The Watercastle (1964). A Rope of Vines was published in 1965.

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    • 3/5
      A Rope of Vines is a journal, non-fictional, by Brenda Chamberlain, of the time she spent on a Greek island, Ydra. It reads like quite lyrical fiction writing -- I mean that I think a bit of fictionalisation has crept in.

      It isn't so much a story as a set of impressions, really, with some beautiful descriptions and really good ways of stating a thought -- the idea of finding a big hairy spider in the corner of your soul if you look too hard made me smile.

      The journal is accompanied, in the Library of Wales translation at least, by her sketches, which add a lot to it.

      The introduction to this edition is more of an explanation of the contents of the text than anything critically helpful.

    Book preview

    A Rope of Vines - Brenda Chamberlain

    INTRODUCTION

    I have returned to the good mothers of Efpraxia while my friend Leonidas serves sentence for manslaughter of an English tourist in the port of Ydra.

    I am putting my thoughts together, for here the mind can clear itself. The nuns ask only simple questions, I have freedom to come and go as I please, no games of pretence are being played as they are every day of the week on the waterfront, I can take a siesta in a juniper tree if I feel like it.

    International travellers throw an unreal glamour over the port, but step out of the harbour and you will come upon club-footed boys, women withering in the sun’s luminosity, mal-fed children grossly fat, dwarfs with sun-smitten faces. A powerful dual reality exists on this island of 3,000 souls and 300 churches. There is a boy in Kaminia who begs for alms running on all fours, his hands calloused from contact with the ground. In the evening, workmen put on their best clothes, and carrying a gardenia between their fingers or gripped between the teeth, saunter into the port for the evening parade along the waterfront.

    Where the houses end, the desert begins. Above the desert, on the mountain, is the monasteri.

    Since I can do nothing for Leonidas while he is shut away in the prison on the mainland opposite, I am going to see what prayer can do for us both. If living and praying with the nuns leaves Leonidas unmoved and unhelped, then I make my care and prayer an offering to God, from the cell (my flesh) within the cell of plaster and wood, within the cell of the island within the cell of the sea.

    From my window in the corridor I can look upon all manner of aerial freedom, so that I long for wings on which to ride over this world of dried-out plants and stone-pines and monasteries, unshadowed and realistic, crazed with cicadas; but the feathers of my wings will have to be strong enough to break the glistening spider’s webs slung from cypress to cypress.

    I feel no nostalgia either for the stark town lying exposed at my feet or for the rest of Europe. And yet, though only half-willing to leave this high situation, I am for the battle of the marketplace.

    The Fates, the inimical forces, will not give me respite.

    In the name of God, let me continue to love, and to be loved in return.

    For the love of God, let us be made wiser through what we have suffered.

    The gods are at war. The air is brittle with thunder and lightning.

    I am writing outside my cell, sitting on the wide windowsill from which the wall of the monasteri drops to a small garden of fruit trees. Below the garden, a precipice, under the precipice, the sea. Rain is falling. I find myself surprised by homesickness for my own island when small fishing boats come into sight, with men standing up in them, as they do in the Enlli craft.

    Here, for me, the Welsh sea has joined its fountain- head, the maternal middle ocean that hisses round promontories of pale-boned islands.

    The sultry steaming sky is riven by signs and white trees. A mitera passes, trailing a broom.

    I have lived for many years in a world of salt caves, of clean-picked bones and smooth pebbles. Towards the end of this period of my life, I began to paint salt-water drowned man, never completely lost to view. They are ledges of encrusted rock, an armoured leg braced in silt, the loins of a body changed gradually into a stone bridge, a wounded torso, flood-tide rising on the walls of a cave into the far corners of which a storm has embedded stones. In particular, there is the breast of the drowned, the man in rock, or the rock-man. A cloud crosses the breast, or a golden light strikes it in shallow water. Detached bones are set in violent motion by storm on the sea-bed.

    Now I have surfaced, and it is the light of the world above around in the mittelmeer that fills and nourishes me. It breaks my heart. Look how other people write. I just glanced at a snatch of Lucretius, copied down in my notebook.

    ‘The moon, night and day, and the stern signs of the night, night-wandering torches and the flying fires of heaven, clouds, the sun, storms, snow, the winds, lightning and hail.’

    It must be good to write flowingly and with detachment. It’s always by massive bounds and blank pauses, with me. Passion, boredom, despair, flutterings of happiness, memory, and anticipation.

    I wish I could write really well, like T. E. Lawrence for example, in certain passages of Seven Pillars Of Wisdom, where words became the skin of his adventures in the desert.

    I can write. I have a lot to say, but the meaning may not be immediately apparent to more than a few people.

    At last, out of this ordered existence, I have thought of a good rejoinder to those who sneer at one for not having a mechanical nine to five

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