‘Athens – The Truth’, David Cade

I am so enjoying this just published title from sometime Kiwi, now UK-based writer/traveller/linguist David Cade. I was immediately arrested by his 20 page introduction wherein he explains his fascination with all things Greek and offers readers a comprehensive, liberal, up-to-date, and entertaining view of the capital of Modern Greece.

The author has kindly allowed me to reproduce the first five paragrahs from his introduction which I hope will give you something of a feel for the book which is "both a gripping read for the armchair traveller and a rich alternative to the traveller's traditional guidebook.

" My journey to Athens began 50 years ago, on the South Pacific island of Viti Levu, Fiji. Enveloped one morning in the heady fragrance of one of Planet Earth’s most gorgeously-scented flowers, the little frangipani, delicate creamy-white with an eye of intense yellow, I sat under the great arching leaves of a banana tree and held, almost to the point of caressing, a brand-new transistor-radio. Despite the strong sun and the trenchant tropical heat, I remember too how all the brilliant-red petals of the hibiscus bushes which surrounded me on every side that mid-morning, still sparkled as brightly and vividly as they had when I’d been up first thing at dawn, full of excitement. But now, three or four hours later, ever so slowly turning the dial backwards and forwards, I was all agog in that South Pacific paradise with rich new layers of aural sensation, sounds that were totally foreign, exotic, bewitching, and magical."

"That morning, in 1962, I had become an eight-year-old, and the big heavy radio on my lap, about the same size as an A4 page, was my one, but very great, birthday present. My parents, having fled grey damp Britain after the trauma of World War II, were ecstatic to be living in Fiji, and so for my birthday they’d hit Suva’s duty-free shops determined to splash out. And now here it was: a luxurious radio, ‘Made in Japan’, gleaming with complicated wavebands, with silver switches and sensitive dials, an extendable aerial like a long chrome fishing-rod, and the whole thing protected within a durable case of highly-polished richly-smelling deep-brown leather! That morning that transistor seemed to me the most marvellous object in the universe. But this was mostly because the music it produced was something I’d never before encountered: the strange music of the East. Fiji had, and still has, a large Indian population, and so whether the music that was being broadcast in those days was Carnatic, Hindi, or comprised of the greatly popular ‘filmi’ songs of Indian cinema, I found all of it absolutely mesmerising. But why did it so hit the eight-year-old me, like an asteroid from outer space, why was I so captivated by it, while my parents, and their friends, and the few other white boys amongst my classmates, either sniggered at it or were indifferent to it? I have no idea."

"Some years later we were settled in Christchurch, New Zealand, and during my first year at an all-boys secondary school there an architecturally splendid new science-block was opened. Its corridors, labs, and seminar rooms had all been lined and floored with fresh pungently-scented New Zealand timbers. These woods, however, smelt sweetest and most strongly in the building’s little theatre, which unlike all of the other spaces had no windows and was dark. With its tall science-lab taps and deep basins built into the great raised bench that stood directly in front of the blackboard, this room had been designed specifically for serious demonstrations in physics, chemistry, and biology. But one afternoon, after lunch, when we’d all expected to return to the classroom for more miserable maths or suchlike, our teacher announced a surprise, a treat: a film in the fine new theatre! We were then all single-filed in a state of considerable excitement over to the science-block and up into the steep rake of its little ‘cinema’. A projector started up behind us, its reels clicking as they turned, the lights were killed, and then in the blackness there suddenly leapt upon the screen - in that little space in a small school in the Antipodes - an intensely bright light, the daylight of some unknown, undreamt-of, unimagined, and very far distant land. In the vivid luminosity of that remote place we boys gazed upon stone and marble monuments; dense concrete apartment buildings, such as simply didn’t exist anywhere in our country; we saw crowded streets with people passing up and down in fashionable summer clothing, wearing dark glasses and looking sophisticated; and I can also remember trains, and trams, and trolleys. This place, apparently, was the city of Athens, a large and thriving metrópolis that none of us young Kiwi boys knew anything about, other than, of course, it once having been a very important part of Ancient Greece."

"The film was a well-produced documentary, a forerunner of the TV travel programme, and with that intense effulgence which had burst upon the screen in the film’s opening moments, there had come a rippling surge of tinkling music, a magical entrancing vibration of sound that we boys, of mainly English and Irish stock, had never before heard: the music of Athens and of Greece. But unlike my classmates, I instantly and somehow ‘recognised’ it. There was something about it that flashed me back to the Eastern music of my transistor, to those exotic sounds that had suddenly gone from my life when our family departed sunny Fiji. Now, here in cool and temperate New Zealand, alongside the rapture of the warm and glowing images of that faraway country upon the screen, a related music fluttered in like a flight of delicate glasslike wings, a flock of gentle bouzoúkia, beating and soaring in and around phrases of beautiful plaintive melody."

"Eleven years old, I sat there devastated. I had known of course that Greece was a place of antiquities, of old columns and carved stones and very many statues, often connected with the tales of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and each year on ANZAC day there were references to the six hundred or so New Zealand soldiers who’d died in Greece’s defence during the Second World War. But this rippling, magical, glasslike music was an aspect of Greece that was completely new - unexpected, a revelation. But such was the gulf at that time between we lads down there in the South Seas and the lands of far-distant Europe, in the Northern Hemisphere and truly the other side of the globe from us, that it did not, or could not, even occur to me that one could at least go to a library and find out what instruments those were that gave off such remarkable sounds. I was just too much in awe, too removed. It was simply music ‘from far beyond’, from ‘heaven’, from a foreign world an incomprehensible thousands of miles away, music from a continent which people said it took months to reach, by ship. And as the film had purely been meant as a treat, a diversion apparently granted us on a whim, back in the classroom there was no follow-up to it, not even a ‘So what did you think of that then, boys? Any questions?’ "

www.davidcade.net - for stockist details in NZ and around the world.