Theodora's Diary Read online

  2 a.m.

  Eventually laid out my entire wardrobe and nearly all my portable possessions on the bed. Too tired to sort it out tonight. I’ll slide into bed under all the clutter.

  Wednesday 26 August

  Slept really badly. It felt as if a large, hairy yak was lying on top of the duvet. Every time I turned over, things rolled off and crashed to the floor. Woke up sweating with a mouth full of jumper. Leapt out of bed, trod on the travel iron and stubbed my toe on the parasol. Said some words that were not in the Greek phrasebook.

  Mum rang at 7.30 just to check that I was up and dressed. I lied and said I was. Then I looked despairingly at my two small suitcases and put half the stuff back in the wardrobe.

  Ended up with my ski boots, a Laura Ashley ballgown and two pairs of tights left on the bed. Sat down and read an article in a Christian women’s magazine entitled ‘Packing the Evangelical Way—a short guide to a spirit-filled suitcase’. I was rather disappointed that it contained no references at all to the duty-free allowance. The article ended rather puzzlingly with Luke 9:3, ‘Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic.’ Best leave the barley sugars behind, then.

  9.30 a.m.

  Starting to panic. Need to leave by 10.30 and still not packed. Mum rang again to check I’d packed travel sickness tablets. Feel more in need of Valium. Confessed my packing problem.

  ‘Don’t worry. If you forget anything you can always buy a replacement. They do have shops in Kos, you know,’ was her less than helpful reply.

  10.30 a.m.

  Kevin came round to give us a lift to the airport in his van. I’d intended to drive, but Mum is a very nervous passenger and, quite frankly, I couldn’t face driving round the M25 with Mum in the passenger seat, her eyes tightly closed and feet braced against the floor, screaming, ‘We’re going to die! We’re going to die!’

  It doesn’t make for a relaxing start to the holiday.

  Kevin had promised to remove the immersion heater and old toilet from the back of his van. I didn’t quite expect him to leave them in the communal front garden. ‘They won’t be in anyone’s way,’ he protested.

  Suitcases still not packed. Kevin gallantly offered to help, but I had to send him off to buy a newspaper, as he seemed to be rather too enthusiastically inspecting my piles of clean underwear.

  11 a.m.

  Mum rang again to find out where we were.

  11.20 a.m.

  Packed. We’re off!

  11.30 a.m.

  We’re back again! Realized I’d forgotten to cancel the milk, switch off the gas and water the plants. Also, I’d forgotten to pack toothbrush, underwear, tickets, money and passport.

  I gave Kevin a big kiss when we said goodbye. He looked a bit pathetic. ‘You haven’t got room to pack me in your suitcase, have you?’ he asked.

  Wish he was coming.

  September

  Wednesday 9 September

  Back again after a wonderful, relaxing holiday. Mum was right, you could buy most things in Kos. The only thing I’d forgotten that I couldn’t replace was my diary. The apparent inconvenience didn’t cause me too much irritation, however, as the entries would have been extremely monotonous:

  Got up.

  Went to beach.

  Went to bar.

  Went to bed.

  That was the composition of at least 12 of the 14 days of my holiday. The other two varied only in that ‘went to bar’ happened a good deal earlier and ‘went to bed’ didn’t appear on the itinerary at all. Not that I drank a great deal, not alcohol, anyway. Most of the time was spent eating, reading or chatting to the other holidaymakers. I now have a figure that would send a sperm whale rushing to Weight Watchers and the pattern of the sun-lounger seat permanently imprinted on my backside.

  Thursday 10 September

  Mum called round with some of my clothes which had been packed accidentally in her suitcase. The packing routine was no smoother on the return leg of our journey than it had been on the outward leg.

  Mum had a wistful look in her eyes. Although she was physically in England, her soul had stayed among the purple bougainvillea that sprawled over the ancient walls of Kos Town.

  Although born in Sidcup, my mother has a deep, intense affinity with Greece. We have a family joke that if you cut her, she would bleed ouzo. The affiliation started when she went on a Mediterranean cruise in 1960 when she was 15 years old, courtesy of a maiden aunt who still believed that ‘gels should be “finished”’. Mum, in spite of originating from one of London’s less culturally distinguished suburbs and being far removed from the finishing-school type, had the foresight to seize the opportunity to travel and broaden her mind. In short, she became hooked. Homer, Alexander the Great, Hippocrates, all came to life for my mother along with the myths and stories of that country. Chaperoned by the maiden aunt, she drank retsina in Athens, danced to the bouzouki in Rethymnon and bathed in the Aegean at midnight.

  Ever since, she has been obsessed with the nation, the people, the history, the language and the food. We were the only kids in the street who regularly ate moussaka and meze instead of sausages and chips. That was over 20 years ago, and people’s taste in food was not as cosmopolitan as it is now. Having schoolfriends to supper was a complete nightmare. Sitting round the dining room table, they would look from their plates to our faces and back again with a mixture of pity and disgust. One child even ventured to ask, ‘Do you eat this?’

  ‘No!’ I shouted back, red-faced with anger and embarrassment. ‘You rub it on your verruca. What do you think you do with it?’

  So great was Mum’s love of anything Greek, she decided to make a return trip when she was 20 to find a Greek man to marry, preferably a rich one. Much against my Granddad’s wishes, she saved her money, quit her job and caught a train to Dover. It was when she was buying a ticket for the ferry to Calais on the first leg of her journey that she met my Dad. He was tall, blond and called Dai Llewellyn. His family was from Newport and the only thing remotely Greek about him was that he had once owned a Nana Mouskouri record. Much to Granddad’s relief, she fell in love with him and, instead of a Greek shipping magnate for a son-in-law, he ended up with a Welsh ticket office clerk.

  My father, lanky and yellow haired, with a temperament as fiery and Mediterranean as damp asbestos, humours my mother by allowing her annually to indulge her passion for Greece, courtesy of Thomas Cook. His only other concession to her love of all things Greek was to allow her free reign in naming their three unfortunate offspring. That’s how Ariadne, Agamemnon and myself came to have pretentious Greek forenames while being saddled with the surname Llewellyn.

  Friday 11 September

  The parish has arranged for some refurbishment work to be carried out on the rather dilapidated vicarage over the next few weeks. I volunteered Kevin for the plumbing work, but they had already appointed a ‘Christian’ plumber who calls his business Living Waters Plumbing Services. Apparently he’s one of Nigel Hubble’s distant relatives and lives somewhere in Dorset. I asked Jeremiah, who had arranged for the work to be carried out, why the plumber was travelling so far when we have a perfectly competent plumber on our doorstep, so to speak. He replied that Nigel’s cousin (or whatever he was) was a Christian and Kevin was, in his opinion, ‘of uncertain religious persuasion’.

  I leapt to Kevin’s defence. ‘Kevin is just as religiously persuaded as most people at St Norbert’s!’ I protested.

  ‘Exactly,’ retorted Jeremiah.

  I decided to try a different tack. ‘So what difference does it make, anyway? The water would still come through the pipes, the toilet would still flush, the central heating would still heat up if the work was carried out by a Christian, a Muslim, or someone who thought we were all controlled by little green men from Mars. Kevin’s just as reliable and I’m sure his price is just as reasonable.’

  Jeremiah shook his head sympathetically and pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket to mop his wate
ry eyes. He was obviously having to deal with leakage problems of his own. ‘How could I possibly trust the Reverend’s private plumbing to the hands of one of the unchurched?’ he said earnestly.

  I managed, by sheer willpower, not to laugh.

  Just.

  Saturday 12 September

  11 a.m.

  Still feeling relaxed and at peace after my holiday. Nothing in the world can make me stressed or anxious. I’m just floating along on a cloud of tranquillity, spreading my inner calm to everyone I encounter.

  2 p.m.

  That blasted woman! If anyone was designed to test me to breaking point, it has to be Charity ‘Stepford Wife’ Hubble. I bumped into her outside the greengrocer’s this afternoon and forced myself to resist the urge to comment on the new car sticker she had on display in the window of her beaten-up minibus: ‘Anglicans do it on their knees.’ I’m sure there’s something not quite wholesome about this, but Charity is blissfully innocent about any form of innuendo. In spite of the proliferation of children, she can be alarmingly naïve sometimes.

  ‘Charity,’ I enquired, ‘why have you got so many stickers and texts all over your van? Don’t you think it’s a little over the top?’

  ‘Well,’ she smiled beatifically, ‘two reasons, really. One is to show I love the Lord, and the second is that it’s a way of telling non-Christians about Jesus. I drive around all the time, taking the children to school, travelling to Mothers’ Meetings, going to my arc-welding classes. How many people see my old bus in a day? Must be hundreds. So few people bother to read the Bible these days, that Nigel and I decided [she couldn’t make a decision without consulting the omniscient Nigel] to bring the Bible to the unsaved.’

  I had to admit, grudgingly, that she had a point. Lots of people at church have little shiny fish, ichthus, stuck on their cars. These fish are supposed to tell people that the people in the car are Christians, but I’m sure it’s only other Christians who know what they mean.

  I mentally flicked though images of cars belonging to other people I knew. Mary Walpole has a sticker saying in tiny letters:

  If you can’t read this, contact an optician.

  Underneath is her optometrist practice phone number in very large print.

  The Boswells, next door, have a sticker proclaiming their support of the ‘Keep Sidcup Nuclear Free’ campaign. I didn’t even know Sidcup was under nuclear threat.

  Even Kevin has a little wobbling football kit in his team’s colours in the back of his van.

  You can tell a lot about someone’s personality by looking at his or her car.

  I stood in the street and surveyed my own rusting automobile. What did it say about me? It was bare of decoration, except for a sticker proclaiming where I’d bought it:

  MULDER & RUST

  Quality Used Cars,

  Emergency Vehicle Repairs and Recovery Service

  ‘We’ll drive you to a breakdown’

  It seemed characterless and impersonal. I don’t have any shiny fish or texts stuck to my windscreen, no indication that I belong to any clubs, groups or societies, no record of my holidays. It doesn’t bear any evidence that I support a charity or good cause. There’s nothing to tell any of the hundreds of people who see my car every day anything about its occupant.

  I don’t even have furry dice.

  A horrible thought struck me. Maybe there’s nothing to tell. Perhaps my life really is so empty and void that there’s nothing to write on a car sticker. Maybe I’m a non-person. How depressing! I’m glad there isn’t a Bible passage proclaiming, ‘By their cars shall they be judged.’

  I could buy a sticky fish to show other Christians that I’m one too. Then we could smile and nod in a ‘we’re in the club’ sort of way when we drive past each other, but that would mean forfeiting the pleasure of shouting and making gestures at people who cut me up at the traffic lights. Blow that! It’s my only vice. I’d rather remain anonymous.

  5 a.m.

  Can’t sleep. I’ve been haunted by dreams about car stickers. At one point I dreamed that Nigel and Charity had nailed a giant crucifix to the roof of my car and were decorating it with fairy lights. Now I’m worried that I’m not using opportunities to tell people about Jesus, like Charity. I can’t even get away from her in my sleep. A fortnight’s worth of relaxation wrecked in one afternoon.

  Sunday 13 September

  HARVEST FESTIVAL

  A cynic would call it an opportunity to empty your kitchen cupboards of all the tins of marshmallow-and-aniseedflavour rice pudding, anchovies and pasta wheelbarrows and inflict them on the less fortunate. Not that I’m a cynic, of course. I’d never dream of fobbing off the contents of my cupboards on distressed pensioners in the parish. I went to Tesco specially and spent a not inconsiderable sum, which humility forbids me to record, but it was more than you normally win over the counter on a scratch lottery ticket.

  Not that I do the lottery, of course.

  Anyway, I thought that just because people are elderly or poor, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to enjoy life’s little luxuries occasionally. It will make a change from all those Rich Tea biscuits.

  Kevin came round with a few tins and some tap washers which he insisted the poor and deprived in the village should have in their store cupboards just in case. Tried to talk him into coming to the service.

  ‘Don’t you think this “patty dee foy grass” will be too rich, and the caviar might stick to their false teeth?’ enquired Kevin, peering into my shoebox.

  ‘Plebeian,’ I sneered.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Kevin.

  The church looked beautiful. Jeremiah Wedgwood had donated a giant marrow and people had brought flowers and produce from their gardens to decorate the building. Charity had made a cornucopia-shaped loaf of bread, complete with pomegranates, dates and figs and decorated with woven grapevines. She said she felt it was important to be faithful to the historical and geographical context of the Bible and portray only authentic Middle Eastern fruit. It was a shame someone had propped their tin of curry-flavoured beans with pork sausages against it. I found a single vacant seat next to Miss Chamberlain.

  Kevin had ignored the invitation to come with me and had stayed back at my flat to realign my ball cock and grind my cistern valves. Apparently it’s an essential plumbing job which shouldn’t be delayed. Sometimes I think he’s just finding excuses for not coming to church. I told him he would be condemned to hellfire for all eternity, but he started up his blowtorch and pretended not to hear.

  We sang ‘We plough the fields and scatter’ and took our little boxes to the front. I helped Miss Chamberlain carry hers, filled with Rich Tea biscuits and packets of tea. Surely she should be receiving Harvest gifts, not giving them. ‘Just a little something for the old folks,’ she sparkled.

  At the end of the service they asked for volunteers to take the boxes around to the old, sick and needy in the parish tomorrow afternoon. I looked across at Charity, beaming over her basket of home-made delicacies, and felt a pang of envy. I could do that, I decided. I’m due a day off. My hand shot up.

  I’m going to visit those in need with provisions and a word of comfort. This could be the ministry I’ve been searching for.

  Monday 14 September

  2 p.m.

  Collected my four boxes and loaded them into my car ready to deliver to the names on Nigel Hubble’s list of needy people. Made sure one of the boxes was the one that I’d donated. I must admit, I really want to see the look of surprise and gratitude on the face of the person when I hand it over. I won’t tell them it’s from me, of course.

  Just time for a quick cup of tea before I start my ‘ministry of deliveration’.

  5 p.m.

  I am never ever doing that again!

  The first house I visited had a brand-new Mercedes parked in the drive. An elderly lady with a complexion like a sun-dried tomato and wearing a cashmere sweater opened the door.

  ‘This is from St Norbert’s a
s a gift to the poor and needy in the parish,’ I explained.

  ‘Oh, how kind! That will come in very handy. We’ve just got back from a month in the Algarve and I haven’t a thing in the house.’ She took the box and shut the door before I could draw breath.

  The second address appeared to be inhabited by four or five savage Alsatians, which slavered and snapped behind the six-foot-high security gate. I threw the box over the gate like a champion shot-putter. There was a whimper as the box landed and I swear I could hear the sound of teeth piercing tin as I drove away.

  The third address was on a small council estate where the inhabitants had purchased most of the houses and decorated them in a variety of styles ranging from neo-classical and Georgian to stone-cladding. The address for the package was a dingy, unmodified, mid-terrace house. I rang the doorbell and waited. I could hear feet shuffling up the hall.

  ‘Wha’d’ya want?’ came a husky voice from the other side of the door.

  ‘I’m from the church. I’ve brought you a Harvest gift.’

  ‘Push off. I don’t want yer blinkin’ charity.’

  ‘It’s, um, just a few things—’ I peered into the box, ‘—fruit, and that.’

  ‘Fruit gives me the trots.’

  ‘All right, I’ll take it away and give it to someone else. Sorry to have bothered you.’

  ‘Wait a minnit.’ The door opened a crack. ‘Got ’ny booze in there?’

  ‘No,’ I snapped. ‘You’ll have to brew it yourself from the fruit.’ I prised the box through the crack in the door and left.

  I had trouble finding the fourth address, so I stopped to ask a couple of workmen who were sitting on the back of a delivery lorry enjoying the autumn sunshine.

  ‘Do you know where number 42 is?’ I asked. ‘I’ve got this box to deliver.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s just round the back, love. Do you want me to take it round for you? It looks a bit heavy.’

  ‘No thanks. I can manage.’

  One of the men hopped down from the tailboard and opened the gate for me. He peered into the box. ‘What’s all that food for, then?’