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Steve Foote
Synopsis
Penelope's story starts in Ireland, moves to mainland Greece and then on to Cyprus, Egypt and England. She was the youngest of the three daughters born to an Irish father and a Greek mother; both of whom had died by the time she was ten. She lived with wealthy guardians an Alexandria for most of her young life, being groomed for eventual marriage to a Greek merchant. Quite by chance, she meets Jeffrey, a young corporal in the British army, falls in love, elopes, and marries him in Jerusalem. Banished from her Greek family, she adopts the role of wife of an NCO but her main ambition is to become accepted as a British citizen and return, one day, to her ‘class'.
Following her husband's posting to Mesopotamia, she travels to England to live with his working class family and is forced to earn a living for the first time in her life. Penelope earns their love and the respect of the people of a little market town in Hampshire. Then begins a pattern of life close to that of her namesake in mythology - her husband is continually fighting wars around the world. The onset of the Second World War only emphasises that pattern and, now with two children, she, like millions of other British women, fights her own war on the Home Front. With the war over, Penelope persuades Jeffrey to leave the army and take a job in civilian life into which he has difficulty settling. Jeffrey dies and Penelope lives a comfortable life with her dog and amongst friends. One day, just before she dies, Penelope has a Greek visitor.
Sample
PROLOGUE
Arisdopolis Estate, Cyprus 1915
The big black coffin hovered momentarily above the newly dug grave. The dark brown earth, excavated earlier that morning and piled along one side of the grave, smelt fresh and damp, but not for long under this hot, Mediterranean sun.
Six weather-beaten men grasped the straps passing under the coffin to keep it suspended above the cavernous hole, their faces unemotional with their concentration on the task in hand, their bodies braced against the weight of the coffin, which swayed above the grave as if impatient to enter its final resting place.
They would have to bear the weight a little longer as the priest intoned the final prayers of the burial service. His loud, deep voice echoed around the hill top cemetery and into the valley, borne by the southerly wind, warmed by its journey from North Africa and across the Mediterranean Sea to Cyprus.
The priest was a large man, his girth emphasised by a black gown, caught at the waist by a knotted tassel, from which was suspended a large, silver cross. Even without his priest's stove-pipe hat, he would have stood a head taller than the tallest of the mourners. His unruly black beard, surmounted by brown eyes and bushy eyebrows, completed an imposing picture of authority - a man of God, a priest of one of the oldest religions in the world, a spiritual leader to those now gathered around him - yet apart, holy yet threatening, detached but wise in the ways of living in the hard world of the Eastern Mediterranean.
He knew the man in the coffin well, from the time when he arrived in Cyprus with his newly-wedded wife twenty one years ago. They were an unusual couple: the man was Irish - a Catholic - and the woman a Greek from the mainland. They had been sent to Cyprus by the woman's family to manage the extensive estate, set in the foothills of the Troodos Mountains, where he himself had been born over sixty years ago.
The marriage had been blessed with three children, all girls. The woman’s parents in mainland Greece had been disappointed that no son had been born as an heir to the estate. The wife had died about five years before, when she was only thirty seven, and the priest had buried her at a spot only a stride away from this very grave.
The man, John Redmond, had been a loving husband to his wife, a good father to his daughters and a fair and generous employer to his estate workers. An image of John Redmond flashed before his eyes: he was a tall man, taller than the priest himself, thin with an aquiline face and a fine mane of red hair. He spoke Greek fluently but English was his preferred language, which he spoke with a strong Irish dialect, betraying his origins of County Cork in Southern Ireland.
The priest raised his hand, now bearing the silver cross, above his head in final blessing of John Redmond, and nodded to the pall bearers to lower the coffin into the grave. The six men partially released their grip on the straps to let the coffin move under gravity. It swayed unsteadily as it descended, its ornate silver handles flashing in the strong mid-morning sunlight, as though they were bidding farewell on behalf of the coffin's occupant, before they sank into the earth's darkness, never again to reflect the light of day.
The priest lifted his head and looked up to the tall cypress trees which surrounded the cemetery. They were swaying in the wind and, he thought, appeared to be pointing heavenwards as a signpost to the recently departed. He looked into the distance to the Troodos Mountains, so familiar to him, which were now purple and hazy in the growing heat of the day, and sighed.
"Pa-pa." The word was shouted - not screamed - pronounced in two distinct, sharp syllables by a child's voice. It echoed around the cemetery, startling the mourners, who turned their eyes towards the smallest of the three young girls standing at the graveside, holding hands to comfort each other. The priest fixed his eyes on her and put a finger to his lips.
The tallest girl put her arms around the shoulders of her youngest sister and quietly said, "Shsh – Penelope.” The mourners turned their attention back to the grave and the final committal.
The priest signalled the girls to come forward to pay their last respects to their father. As they approached, he noticed, not for the first time, that, like their mother, they were Greek beauties, with black hair, brown eyes and olive skin. They were now dressed in black and wore veils.
The eldest, Helene, aged sixteen, tall, calm and controlled, threw a tied bunch of purple heather collected from the mountain, where in the summer the bees hurried noisily about their honey-making.
Kristina, the second daughter, aged thirteen, was shorter. She was tearful and less controlled, as she threw her offering of brightly coloured flowers, gathered from the estate that morning, into the grave.
Penelope, now ten, appearing small and vulnerable, approached the grave with slow, measured steps and paused. With a struggle, she extracted from her dress pocket a small teddy bear, which had been passed down over the years from sister to sister. Much handled and sucked and very much loved, its fur had long gone and its limbs were hanging on only by a few threads. Holding the bear between finger and thumb, Penelope extended her arm to its full length over the grave and, in a dramatic gesture, opened her fingers. Surprisingly composed, she peered into the grave to confirm the bear's safe landing on to the coffin containing her father… and her best friend. He would understand and appreciate the gesture.
She felt her eldest sister's hand on her shoulder. "Come, Penelope, we are needed back at the house." She would have liked to stay on after the others had gone, and chat to him: he would have heard her. She would now have to leave the cemetery with her sisters.
Penelope walked past the other mourners, awaiting their turn to honour her father, conscious that their eyes were following her, trying to read her emotions, now concealed by an immobile face behind her black veil.
The girls approached a horse-drawn open carriage, where their Greek grandfather was waiting, his hand on its open door. Costandinos Arisdopolis was short, but sturdily built; his head was bald, his face was round and his mouth wide and thick-lipped. When he smiled, which was often, his hard eyes did not give out any warmth but concealed his inner emotions. For all his sixty nine years, he was still a forceful personality, owning and managing a successful shipping line out of Piraeus.
"Get into the carriage, girls. We will follow you back to the house shortly. Then we will have a family conference on what is to be done with you. Go to your rooms. We will send for you when we need you."
Her grandfather's sharp, insensitive commands sounded even harsher, spoken in the dialect of mainland Greece. Penelope had grown used to the softer tones of the Greek spoken in Southern Cyprus and was equally at home with the English, often spoken by her father in his velvety Irish brogue.
"Drive on, Nikos," her grandfather ordered the groom, with an expansive gesture.
As the carriage drove off, Penelope considered the words of her grandfather - what did he mean - ‘...... what's to be done with you?’
She looked at her sisters, who appeared to be lost in their own thoughts, and obviously were not wishing to talk.
The carriage was now travelling on the track back to the estate. It was uneven and pot-holed, rutted from the frequent passage of carts and carriages and patterned with the hoof marks of horses, which were the main form of traction in those times and in these parts. The carriage was mounted on large elliptical springs which smoothed out the worst of the bumps but produced a rocking motion to which the sisters' seated bodies responded by moving in unison.
Penelope turned in her seat to look back at the cemetery, getting a view of the white and black headstones, the sloping stony ground, with a few patches of cultivated grass, framed by hawthorn bushes, symmetrical bay trees and tall swaying cypresses. In the distance she could just make out the up-sweep of the distant Troodos Mountains, invitingly snow-capped and, even in summer, providing Cypriots with a chance to ski and bathe in a warm sea, all on the same day.
She decided to return to the cemetery on the following day to be
close to papa and talk to him in her usual way.
The silence continued amongst the sisters for the rest of the journey to the house, broken only by the clopping of the horse’s hooves, the crack of a flicking whip and Nikos' growling commands to the horse. They passed through groves of oranges, lemons and olives, now devoid of estate workers, who had been given the day off to attend the funeral.
‘This is where it happened,’ thought Penelope to herself, ‘right here, where papa had his heart attack.’ They had been riding together on one of his routine tours of the estate. This had become a regular, pleasurable event for her, in the afternoons, after siesta but before school lessons started with the governess in the early evening, when the fierce heat of the day started to give way with the setting of the sun.
These rides with her father usually started at a leisurely walking pace but were soon followed by a racing canter or even a full-blooded gallop. He rode a huge black horse called Prince and was dressed formally in a black frock coat, cravat and top hat. Penelope, dressed in her riding breeches, would sit firmly on her pony, Nell. Keeping up with her father, especially at the gallop, was almost impossible, her little pony's legs thundering a tattoo on the dried track, whilst she held on, crouched over its mane, with her knees locked around its girth.
She loved this other side of her father - not the Estates Director, firm, disciplined and commanding - but the devil-may-care Irishman, who often threw caution to the winds, galloping full pelt through the groves, swerving around trees and ducking under branches, singing and laughing at the top of his voice, calling over his shoulder to Penelope to give chase and catch up with him.
When she was younger and too small to ride with him, she would skip alongside him, holding his huge hand, as he strode through the estate. Sometimes he would lift her off her feet, screaming and giggling, and plant her on his shoulders with a ‘there ye are, my princess!’ From that position she felt like a princess, no longer small, but towering above the others and looking over the hedgerows.
‘Yes, this is right where it happened,’ thought Penelope as the carriage slowed to take a corner. Her father, crouched over Prince's neck and riding at a gallop, had stood up in the stirrups, dropped his reins, clutched his chest and gave out a huge cry of pain. Prince had reared with fright, unseating her father, and started off in headlong flight towards the stables. Her father's boot had become snagged in one of the stirrups and he had been dragged along the track, his head banging on the stones and hardened mud. Penelope had witnessed this at close quarters as she hurried behind, screaming out his name.
Some nearby estate workers had managed to stop the horse and release her father from the stirrup before she had caught up. She could see by the way they lifted off their caps and carried him slowly to a cart that he was already dead. She would never forget that moment.
The carriage was now approaching the house - a huge, stone-built mansion set in landscaped gardens. Every day, gardeners watered the lawns and tended the numerous flower beds surrounding the house, the summer blooms a riot of colours, their perfumes dispersed by the wind.
The carriage's wheels crunched on the gravelled drive leading to the imposing, columned front porch. Nikos jerked the reins and shouted at the horse. The carriage came to a sudden halt, swaying violently on its springs causing the girls to hold on until the oscillations had died away. Nikos sat impassively on his high seat, looking forward, waiting for his charges to alight. ‘He is in a bad mood,’ thought Penelope, ‘he was a nice man, normally so kind and gentle. Perhaps he was taking papa's death badly or perhaps grandfather had annoyed him?’
The sisters stepped down from the carriage and mounted the flight of steps up to the hallway of the house.
"Penelope," said Helene, "let me take off your veil."
"No! I want to keep it on - for papa - forever."
"Very well," Helene responded, "go up to your room and drink some water. Grandfather will send for us soon."
Penelope climbed the stairs to her room, opened the door and walked into the bright sunlight streaming in through the windows. She loved her room with its pastel decoration, its soft fabrics and her books and toys lined up neatly on shelves. Her bed stood in one corner, arched over by canes carrying a net, used throughout the summer when the mosquitoes were at their most active. She sat at her school desk, by the window, where she took lessons from her governess. On some occasions the three girls were taught together in the book-lined study on the ground floor, but often singly in their own rooms.
Penelope cupped her chin in her hands, closed her eyes and started to think of her father and the many stories he had told her of his young life……..
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