When it comes to setting composition topics, teachers often get stuck in a rut. At their Greek village school, my three sons were in turn driven mad by the subject The Almond Tree In Winter, which seemed to be a particular favourite. The most common Australian topic was similarly dreaded: What I Did In My Holidays.
It so happens that I've just returned from winter holidays, and am thinking about them. It seems to me now that in childhood I never pondered holidays, so that recall was often a difficult chore. My siblings and I took the long breaks for granted, and I'm sure most of our friends did the same. Those summer weeks were an idyllic interlude that would be unfailingly repeated: that was simply the way things were.
It seems incredible that there were ten of those summers, consecutive ones when three generations coexisted happily. My siblings and I had an idyllic Ocean Road beach practically all to ourselves, the men went fishing every afternoon, except when, to Grandfather's annoyance, an easterly was blowing, and the women, in time-honoured fashion, kept everybody fed.
It was basic living in a rough fishing shack, with a wood stove, Tilley lamps, and a shower made out of a kerosene tin and a hose nozzle. And there was always a lot of interaction between grandparents and grandchildren.
There were rules: butter was kept under a tank tap and draped in hessian, no sand was to be tracked into the kitchen, and men had always to clean the fish they caught. We children were expected to help with the setting of the table and the washing-up. Nine o'clock was the time set for the last cup of tea, after which we trailed off to bed, youngest first. Of course change was inevitable, although I didn't really believe it, and started with my grandmother's death. I was 19.
Decades later, I am now the grandmother. Three generations visited Crete, my daughter-in-law Nina's ancestral place, towards the end of the old year. The morning of our departure, northern Athens lay under a thick blanket of snow, resembled nothing so much as a German Christmas card, and was eerily silent. There was more snow near Heraklion, with an estimated four metres on Mt Ida. This break, I told myself, was as different from my early Antipodean ones as it could be.
But then I wondered. Nina's mother was the cook, and there was never any threat of starvation. Nina's father kept the supplies of wood up to the stove, and both of them entertained their grandchildren endlessly.
At only five months, my granddaughter Natalia will remember nothing; yet I like to think of the atmosphere somehow becoming part of her accumulating experience. But big brother Orestes is nearly four, and thus may recall all sorts of things.
"At first Orestes was inclined to be daunted by the first really long beard he had ever seen, and by the accompanying mane of hair, but the musician paid him a lot of attention, so that the feeling was only fleeting."
Eventually he may remember his grandfather bringing plastic bags full of snow into the garden so that they could make an admittedly idiosyncratic snowman (pictured). Then there were the visits made by Psarantonis, a family friend who is also an internationally famous exponent of the Cretan lyra.
At first Orestes was inclined to be daunted by the first really long beard he had ever seen, and by the accompanying mane of hair, but the musician paid him a lot of attention, so that the feeling was only fleeting, and before long Orestes was scraping away at the mandolino and the lyra himself. I had a sudden memory of Grandfather, his violin, and my first efforts.
And one evening a relative brought a ten-day old lamb into the kitchen, where it gambolled about, and made itself very much at home. City boy Orestes was able to bottle-feed it, and grinned delightedly as he did so. Again the memories came back. As a child I had visited the nearby cow yard, and had helped bottle-feed calves. Both my grandson and I have made connections with some of the essentials of country life. And we have both experienced the uncomplicated love of doting grandparents.
Despite wide gaps in both time and space, our respective holidays were not so different, after all.
Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.