Blue Thirst

Blue Thirst Read Free

Book: Blue Thirst Read Free
Author: Lawrence Durrell
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matters like those recounted by Ralf Brewster, who died recently, and who wrote two or three good books about Greece. When he was a student he was studying in Austria, he went down and spent a summer in the islands—he spoke good Greek—in a caïque. And in Siphnos one afternoon they found the museum wide open and the guardian asleep under a tree. He just said, “Go on, have a look around.” So Ralf looked around and there was a beautiful little statue of a Pan lying on its back among the nettles in the garden, completely untended. And Ralf, who suffered from cupidity like us all, picked it up and put it in a shopping basket and carried it back to the caïque and took off with it for Austria. Well, nothing was heard of this loss for a little while, but the curator must’ve noticed it was missing and unluckily for Ralf, they suddenly discovered it was one of the most celebrated examples of its period. It appeared as an illustration in all the history books and it was really a national trophy that the Greeks couldn’t afford to part with. They traced it to this youthful criminal—he was then a student at the university—and they threatened all kinds of actions against him, through the Austrian government. He probably risked a prison sentence, and he had to return this thing. Well, he returned it and he was blackmarked and couldn’t go to Greece for five years after that. But when the sixth year came he managed to get a visa and he went back and in passing Siphnos again, out of curiosity he called in to have a look at the museum and he couldn’t find this trophy anywhere in the museum and said, “Oh well, they must’ve taken it to Athens.” Then he went outside in the garden and there it was in the same place, lying in the bushes where he’d found it first. On its back.
    In this tiny community—it was a hamlet of about four houses—we had one doctor who was highly eccentric, who wasn’t a doctor at all. In the town of Corfu there were some highly trained medical people and a good surgical laboratory, a good hospital and people trained at places like Edinburgh and in Paris, but in this tiny hamlet there was one old doctor on a bicycle. At the end of the war with the Turks there was a great shortage of doctors so the Greeks took all the pharmacists in Athens and created them doctors and sent them to the front. Then afterwards you couldn’t take away their license to practice, so there were a great number of elderly men practising quite ad hoc in all these villages. And then there were the women bone-setters and herbalists who were much better than the old men and the only other literate person was Niko, the village schoolmaster. And a delightful priest who was extremely drunk most of the time. But he used to give tremendous services and excommunicate everyone from time to time and then take them back, you know. It was a small community and very tightly knit. I should suppose that you would find in an Irish island or in the Isle of Aron something rather comparable. But meanwhile, as a poet of 21 or 22, I had the most extraordinary stroke of luck—in fact the more I think of it the more amazing it seems to me—for if you cut yourself off from the ordinary literary life with all the things it has to offer you and you decide to go sit on a Greek island you would never hope to have the sort of friends I as a boy of 22 acquired almost by divine accident. I was later to call them my uncles, none of them wicked, all of them good. I had two American uncles at that time. They didn’t come at once. First, I had T. S. Eliot as a publisher who guided and helped a great deal and consoled me against the loneliness of living in such circumstances. It was beautiful but it was terribly lonely. And then Henry Miller started bombarding me from Paris with a great deal of encouragement and documentation and masses of ideas. He was full of energy and enthusiasm which

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