Children of the Volcano (eBook)


Mythological Resonances

That evening, in Kensal Green, when the girls are asleep, I sit in the kitchen eating pasta and pesto and begin to think. Just because Eating the Odyssey hadn’t worked out doesn’t mean that nothing could. I have my royalties coming and the pound is strong against the euro. We could just go and live in Italy. If I am careful, we could almost manage on the royalties alone. But whereabouts? I know and love Rome, Florence, Venice and the art towns of Tuscany and Umbria, but they are expensive, and the past year, living on the coast of Massachusetts while the children’s father set up a business importing Indonesian furniture, had been a revelation. On the beaches of Cape Ann I discovered that if you have sea and sun, you don’t need much else when children are young. Sandcastles, sea glass, beachcombing, sea creatures, fishing nets. They play and you get odd moments to lie in the sun, swim, even to read.

But I know it is more than that. I had discovered that out-of-season beaches are good places to be alone without feeling lonely, good places to think without staring into nothingness. On Cape Ann, I learned that there were fears, dreams, memories that I would have been afraid to contemplate in a room, even in the countryside, that I could face up to without flinching by the sea. Living in an old wooden house on Good Harbor beach, I found that the sea made things bearable that otherwise might not have been. The wild seas were exhilarating, waves crashing with therapeutic abandon against the rocks, and calm seas were a salve, the shifts in light, mood, colour compelling me to stand still for a moment, swallow the lump in my throat and look at what was before me. It wasn’t some hackneyed notion that the sea put life into perspective; it was more visceral than that. During those awful months when the relationship was crumbling, my reflex responses to the sea reminded me that feeling wonder at the beauty of the world can be enough.

However, although I need to know that solitude is available, I am not a recluse. I am not self-sufficient enough to have no one with whom I can share emotions, opinions, ideas, anxieties. I need to go somewhere I will meet people. I love the buzz of small-town evening life in the Mediterranean. And the chance to dress up sometimes. I am an outdoor person, and even in my prettiest clothes I am happier in a pavement café watching life pass by than in the finest of bars or restaurants.

I would like a fishing harbour. It’s not just that I like fresh fish; it’s the culture, with its ancient roots and rhythms, the boats, the nets and the fact that all is dictated by the vagaries of the weather. It could be a fantastic education, I think as I wash the dishes, to live in a community where the girls would learn that they were not in complete control of their surroundings. It might foster respect for the planet, and perhaps help them to grow up questioning the metropolitan world most people we know inhabit, with its mania for instant gratification and aspirational consumption. And wouldn’t it be great for them too to be able to eat only local, seasonal fruit and veg, as an antidote to supermarkets where anything is available all the time? OK, reality check. I make myself a camomile tea and go to sit in the window. Currently, the only vegetables they will eat are potatoes and cucumbers, but surely that would change surrounded by the fantastic colours and smells of an Italian market? We could grow our own vegetables. I have never successfully grown anything but surely it can’t be hard in Italy.

Finally, I think, I might have to forget about following Odysseus, but I am fascinated by the way classical mythology gives the sense of tapping into a common humanity that stretches back over the millennia – the fear of illness and death, the dread of betrayal, the dream of love, the fear of harm coming to loved ones, the struggle to understand life and what it means, and how to live well.

So, the sea, the sun and Italy. But I can’t think of anywhere along the coast that I want to live. I’ve seen the chic, over-populated seaside towns of Tuscany, Liguria and Amalfi; the dreary Adriatic coastline, with kilometres of featureless sand punctuated with grids of sun loungers and umbrellas. I remember some nice little coves in Puglia, but the interior depressed me, motorways slicing through agri-industrial fields of wheat, and dead flat hectares of olives and vines.

But that is all about me, not the girls, and though it is probably true that the kids have a nicer time when their parent is happy, is that really a valid argument for taking them away on what could essentially be a very long holiday? On the other hand, who can argue that a childhood by the sea, absorbing another language and culture, would not be a fantastic basis for the rest of life?

I open my notebook and write a list:

Sea and sun

Quiet beaches

An old town or village – evening passeggiata, some life

Fishing harbour

Primary school

House with a sea view

Garden? Grow fruit and veg?

Ancient, preferably mythological resonances

Accessible and cheap

Over the next week I read. I google. Beaches. Fishing villages. Coastal reserves. Houses to rent by the sea. I pore through guidebooks, cut out photographs from magazines and research places on the web. I look at maps, at low-cost flight routes, call friends. That we should head somewhere in Italy, obvious. But apart from that, I wasn’t getting anywhere. It is all too random.

I rang Mum.

‘Do you really think this is a good idea?’ she said. ‘After all, it’s nearly time for Izzy to start school.’

Exactly. I am surrounded by friends buying houses in the catchment areas of the state primary schools with the highest Ofsted scores or going to church every Sunday to try to get their kids into the local C of E school. Children as young as five are sent to private maths and English tutors, music lessons, drama lessons, language schools, in the hope that at eleven, they will secure scholarships at public school. And in case they don’t, parents are feverishly saving money to add to the school fee accounts grandparents have been persuaded to open. Anything rather than see their children end up in the community school, where, if the stories passed between parents pushing their kids on swings in the park are anything to go by, our offspring will spend their days writing misspelled essays, getting stoned in the toilets or being laughed at for over-achieving and threatened with broken bottles.

‘You’re a mother now,’ says Mum. ‘You can’t just carry on living like a nomad. And you don’t even seem to know where you want to go.’

So even Mum thinks I am being irresponsible and selfish. Perhaps she is right. She’d dreamed of having a boat but had put us first, worked hard to pay for music lessons, roller skates, seaside holidays in a fisherman’s cottage.

Living by the sea in Italy is what I want, how I want to be a mother, but how can I know if it will be good for the girls or not? Is it egoistic to think what I could offer them, alone, in some Italian paradise, would be more than the museums of London and one of Ofsted’s top-rated primary schools?

After Mum rings off, I look back at my notes and despair. Perhaps, I think, we should just go to Italy for a few months and have a look. So I start to plan a journey right around the Italian coast. I am frantic. Manic. Gripped by the fear that if I pause for a moment, or think too much, I will end up spending the rest of my life in Kensal Green.

I write to a magazine editor. Could I write a series of monthly columns following my travels around Italy with two young kids as I look for the perfect place to live? She emails straight back. ‘No.’

I pull out my list again. If we can’t go everywhere, I will have to choose somewhere.

‘There are plenty of beautiful places in England,’ my mum had said.

I look back at my list. The Northumberland coast, Cornwall, even the Scilly Isles would not cut it. I want an outdoor life that does not involve technical fabrics, battling the elements and swimming in freezing water, and I want an abundance of fish, fruit and vegetables that does not involve ice freight, Israeli poly tunnels or overpriced farmers’ markets. And, pretentious or not, I want to inspire the girls with my love of classical history and mythology, and give them a sense at first hand of the roots of Western culture.

Then, a few days later, the magazine editor emails. ‘I need a piece on the tuna massacre, the mattanza, on the Sicilian island of Favignana. £320. Are you interested?’

Sicily. I have never been to Sicily. Of course I am interested. Not in the tuna massacre, nor even in the fee, which will barely cover our flights, but because it feels like destiny has stepped in. The cost of living in Sicily is low, isn’t it? And the sun shines all year. What about the Mafia? said Mum. I look to see what my colleagues Jules Brown and Rob Andrews had written in the Rough Guide to Sicily. ‘The Mafia is usually an in-house affair, hardly likely to affect travellers.’ I google Favignana and find images of turquoise seas, white beaches, golden cliffs that looked as if they’d been sculpted by a Cubist. I also read about the mattanza. Every spring, bluefin tuna leave the Atlantic for the warmer waters of the Mediterranean, swimming through the Straits of Gibraltar and along the Tunisian coast to Sicily, where the fishermen of Favignana...