TEA WITH MUM…MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

Whenever I think about afternoon tea with Mum, it fills me with a deep satisfying sense of comfort. It’s somewhat like when you settle down in front of the TV at night, watching your favourite programme with a plate of comfort food. For me it’s a plate of curried chicken, aromatic but mild…..like Mum’s….. on a mound of steaming white rice and a lovely Greek salad on the side with a drizzle of lemon juice and olive oil. I dig into the food….. my taste buds exploding with flavours…..my eyes never leaving the set…..and now and then I reach out for my glass of wine and wash it all down and then start again with the next mouthful…..and finish off with a nice chunky square of dark chocolate with roasted almonds. Yes….. it’s almost as gratifying as having tea with Mum in the summers when we visited Malaysia. It was the ultimate word for comfort. There we were with Mum, the whole family assembled, my siblings and their families, drinking tea and popping biscuits and her little savoury bites into our mouths, under the tropical Malaysian sky. It was a true celebration of life in the most pleasurable but simplest of ways.

Annie and I have had the same mother daughter bond, but more intense because she’s an only child and I was a working-mum. Our family life was a tightly packed schedule of work and school and homework and extracurricular activities…..gymnastics, French and German and piano lessons etc. I sometimes look back with stabs of guilt when I think how I whizzed her about in those formative years of hers…..the words that fell from my lips were always ….. ` quickly, quickly ‘….. rushing her through her young life. I remember once when she was four, sitting at the breakfast table, her legs dangling and swinging underneath and me hurrying her through her cornflakes and milk because the school bus was due in ten minutes…..then the phone rings and I rush off to answer it and then rush back to see our cleaning lady, a middle-aged Greek woman, hovering over Annie, trying to hurry her through her breakfast…..urging her forward with cries of…..` kli kli, kli kli ! ‘ That was what ` quickly ‘ sounded to Kiria[Mrs] Maritsa…..and Annie continued swinging her legs, totally oblivious of the adult world of time constraints.

We were raised Catholic. Mum was very Catholic….. grace before meals, chanting the Rosary in the evening…..my siblings and I bounding off on a daydream, mouthing out the prayers but our minds on the playground…..and before bedtime, kneeling by our beds and murmuring our night prayers. And when we started school, the whole thing was hammered in by the very Catholic nuns at the convent school, where we developed Catholic guilt and Catholic knees. When I grew up, I shook myself free of all the prayers and led a life of a….. heathen…..a life devoid of church and prayers. Then Annie came along and I began to feel a tingling of my old Catholic guilt…..come back to haunt me….. Shouldn’t I give her some religious instruction until she goes off to school and the teachers take over from there?

So I taught her to make the sign of the cross, which caused her endless problems at school….because the Catholics go from left shoulder to right when it comes to the Holy Spirit and the Greeks from right to left…..That was as far as I went, all very spartan because I didn’t teach her any prayers. She crossed herself every night. But her sense of religion was built on no foundations at all, she never understood who the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit were…..I offered no explanations as I was grappling with it myself. Then one Easter, we went to Yiannis’s aunt’s place in the countryside to celebrate the day. We roasted the lamb on the spit, quaffed Greek wine and munched into cheese and spinach pies. After we had cracked the Easter eggs, Annie and her grandfather, the ex-general, trotted off to the olive groves to catch butterflies. She came running back after an hour, clutching a glass jar with butterflies fluttering about inside and told us breathlessly about the kittens she had seen, playing in the tall clumps of wild fennel. On the way home, she chatted endlessly about her adventure in the groves. At bedtime, when her mind was full of images of Easter Sunday and her eyelids heavy, she started her nightly ritual, crossing herself and mumbling.…..` In the name of the Father….. of the Son……..’ then she paused for a while…..I gently shook her shoulders and she continued drowsily…..` and in the name of the Cats.’…..The cats made a lot more sense to her than the Holy Spirit.

But the best times of all were the summer holidays. In mid June I would bid the children happy holidays and turn the key in the lock of my English language school and head home feeling as free as a bird. I would get to spend three carefree months with Annie…..no running around in dizzy circles, no homework, no extracurricular activities…..but reading tons of children’s stories and just leisurely catching up….. on being mother and daughter. Lunchtime was a ritual for us. Yiannis would return from work at four so we’d start off without him. We had lunch on the back terrace…..our summer retreat….. with large pots of hydrangeas of pink and lavender, seasonal blooms in the flower beds and a bougainvillea with bunches of pink flowers spilling over the garden wall. We’d sit on the flowered cushioned chairs under a cloudless blue sky of swallows diving and shrieking. As we tucked into our lunch, I would weave out stories of my childhood in Malaysia under an equally blue but different sky. But all the while we kept a wary eye on one end of the flower bed where a yellow hibiscus grew. When its leaves trembled, we knew he had picked up on our chatter and the clinking of cutlery on our plates. He would emerge from behind the hibiscus bush and lumber towards us on his short scaly legs. Benji, our tortoise, would be joining us for lunch as usual. He’d stretch out his wrinkly neck and we’d feed him bits of food from our plates….. our feet sticking out above the ground because Benji had a fetish for feet. The minute our Siamese cat, Rama, sauntered out, Benji would withdraw into his shell. Rama would paw him and then sit on him and remain there…..like a statue atop a pedestal. One day a friend came over…..he knew about tortoises and turned Benji over, then looked at us and said…..` Benji??? It’s not a boy, it’s a girl!!!’ After that Benji became Benjamina.

The highlight of our summers was when we planned our trips to other countries. In August, when Yiannis would close shop for two weeks, we’d pack our bags and fly off, leaving our pets and plants in the care of his parents. A month before, Annie and I would pore over books and pictures of our destinations to get a foretaste…..to whet our appetites for the adventures ahead. We visited museums, marvelling at some of the exhibits, yawning through the rest and recoiling in horror at others….. the mummy of Ramses V, his parchment like skin stretched over his skeletal features and his red hair, dried and frizzy. We travelled through famous cities and saw monuments and statues and sat in gondolas and turned our noses away from the murky waters and listened to the gondolier’s baritone rendition of Santa Lucia. The best of all were the nature trips…..our visit to Alaska where we took a boat cruise from Valdez into Prince William Sound and feasted our eyes on the creatures of the sea, air and land. There were frolicking otters lying on their backs, seals lounging on ice floes, salmon leaping out of the sea, puffins with their bright orange beaks diving into the water, hunchback whales and their young, heaving out of the sea and crashing back in, bald eagles soaring overhead and a solitary black bear plodding towards the shoreline, hoping to pluck out salmon from the water…..a magnificent display of wildlife in a backdrop of glaciers. Another indelible memory was in Sarawak, where we trekked through the jungle with a guide and came out into a small clearing…..a tiny white sandy beach with huge boulders and proboscis monkeys, screeching and leaping from the trees into the waves.

Then adolescence came all too soon….. storm clouds gathered in our house with explosive outbursts. There was a power struggle between the young teenager….. in low slung jeans, short cropped tops, listening to Eminem, rapping out his songs, talking about parties and boys, eyes glued on her mobile phone, messaging rapidly …..and me….. struggling to keep up with the change. I complained to Yiannis about her….. and he nodded in empathy…..and she….. poured `pestilence into his ear’…..about my nagging ways and her rights as a young individual…..and he nodded in sympathy. We quarrelled and argued through the week and on Saturdays we went shopping. She would let down her guard and chatter all the way to the shops about…..classmates, boys, teachers etc…..me indulging her and trying to be in sync with her. But alas, we were not friends…..we were mother and daughter…..and it showed up in spurts of disagreements over her choice of clothes. Once before a school trip, we were at a boutique and she was in the fitting room trying on something, an off-shoulder number, totally inappropriate for her age…..and to my horror….. in walked Annie’s classmate and her mother….. a nice conservative pair.`  PLEASE DON’T COME OUT JUST YET! ‘…..I thought. But it was too late. She drew the curtain open with a theatrical swish and stepped out beaming …..I shall never forget the look on their faces.

Then before we knew it, she was off to university in England. I missed her and fretted over her and waited anxiously for her calls…..and when she did call, it was always about` chilling out’ at parties and pubs…..and I fretted some more. Her next stop was Brussels, where she started her working life. She is now married in Brussels…..and they live with their pet…..a cat called Romance. We talk on the phone and I look forward to their visits in the summer holidays…..when we sit on the back terrace and have dinner, the four of us. After dinner, the two men retreat into the house to their computers. Annie and I stay on to finish our wine and ramble on…..delving into one subject and coming out into the next. One by one the stars pop out of the Cretan night sky and the cicadas come out to sing in the summer warmth….. and we’re still there. Miu curls into a pot on the low stone wall that separates the terrace from the rest of the garden, pretends to be sleeping but is listening in to the pair of us…..talking and laughing like old friends.

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