As a young teacher in charge of a class of unruly teenage boys, I occasionally lost my voice: an occupational hazard and inconvenience. But 30 years ago, I lost the voice I had always taken for granted; I lost it, even though I could still speak.
With the move to a Peloponnesian village, my language skills were reduced to those of a three-year-old, for my Modern Greek was rudimentary, and so I was effectively silenced.
The pain of that reduction was immense, and was exacerbated when six months to the day after our arrival, my six and eight-year-old sons started speaking to each other in Greek. I am sure I heard my heart crack that day, but I suppose the wonder is that they had held on to English for so long.
It was then that I began writing; in effect, I was calling out and pleading: Listen to me. Please listen.
I have now spent 45 years listening to a language, which though it eventually became familiar, will always be foreign. My three children are truly bilingual. To those of us who are not so blessed, this capacity seems a miracle, as we observe the fortunate ones apparently just flipping a switch or pressing a button in the appropriate part of the brain.
But even now, my sons still seem different people to me when they are using their Greek voices. Noise levels, for example, vary from culture to culture, and many's the time I have instructed, through gritted teeth: Tone it down; you're not on stage.
Voices are as individual as fingerprints, or so it has always seemed to me, and I had apparent confirmation of this notion when I met my elder grandson for the first time. He was four months old, and I spoke English, not Greek, to him, as I still do, nearly five years later.
He cocked his head, giving me such a wise look that I am sure he was thinking along the lines of This funny old chook is making noises different from everybody else's noises.
Because of the unique quality of voices, I bitterly regret that I have no recording of my mother's and sister's voices.
I hear my grandparents calling down a longer avenue of memory, and I register the differences there, too, for the Australian accent has changed so much even in my lifetime that I do not believe anybody now speaks the way they did. They never used the rising inflection, never swore or blasphemed, and indeed considered swearing evidence of an impoverished mind and vocabulary.
My grandfather used to take me to the football, to watch the Mighty Cats, quite regularly, but was always the soul of dignity and decorum. Goodness me, what a sausage of a kick. Do better myself, was the strongest reaction I ever heard.
This conduct was in sharp contrast to that of my volatile father, whose full-throated bellow sounded throughout four quarters every Saturday. But he didn't swear, either. Open the other eye, Umpy. Go home and get your little dog. Ya oughta be shot. The messages were much the same at cricket matches.
While the women in the family were people of spirit, they took their example from Cordelia, whose voice was ever soft, gentle, and low, an excellent thing in a woman. A real lady — and, way back then, this was what girls and women usually aimed to be — was never, ever loud.
But there was always a lot of play with language: puns, riddles, parodies, and I am still convinced that I heard my mother speak at her own funeral, for as the minister solemnly intoned Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I swear I heard that irrepressible laugh and the familiar voice adding And if God doesn't get you, the Devil must!
I started writing all those years ago in order to be heard: now I have the voices of my departed people speaking to me through the letters that I have never thrown away. I can hear the voices as I read, although not always very clearly.
Mostly, as the great Greek poet Konstantine Kavafis wrote, those lost voices are heard in dreams and imagination, their sounds faint, 'like far-off music in the night, which dies away'.
Gillian Bouras is an Australian writer who has been based in Greece for 30 years. She has had nine books published. Her most recent is No Time For Dances. Her latest, Seeing and Believing, is appearing in instalments on her website.