Girl Gone Greek by Rebecca Hall Read Free Book Online Page B

leg’ (highly doubtful as I wouldn’t have put Mrs Stella down as one to joke with her students—actually, not anyone come to that) or if it was possibly true—and I wouldn’t put it past her. I didn’t get time, however, to investigate if this was indeed the case because a few minutes later I’d had to separate Konstantinos and Dimitra—she’d been about to start throwing punches. Apparently Konstantinos had made an inappropriate comment about her mother.
    My classroom looked out onto the back garden of the school, still filled with summer flowers, a little overgrown but with a delightful lemon tree in the centre, I’d taken them by their wrists into the area and demanded, “OK, fight it out like proper adults then. Come on! What are you waiting for?” The other students all looked out of the window, eagerly awaiting the result. And was that a few Euro notes being swapped between a couple of people? Maybe they were placing bets. My ploy had worked though; I’d realised the situation could have gone either way—they would either simmer down, or fight, albeit verbally. Fortunately they chose the former. Looking at me as if I was slightly mad, (they’d still not recovered from the cow incident), Konstantinos and Dimitra had slunk back into the room, the rest back to their chairs (Euros exchanged back) and settled into an uneasy silence. I’d figured that the best thing was to beat my students at their own game. When working in a mental asylum, best to behave as if you’re madder than the inmates, right?
    Having (at least for the moment) defused the tension, and in the light of the near fracas that’d occurred, I’d proceeded to change the lesson plan. The class would discuss what attracts men and women to each other and then as a homework assignment, prepare a Personal Advertisement in English.
    “I think two of my teenage students, who appear to detest each other, will end up getting married and having kids,” I now told Kaliopi, “and I think that my boss doesn’t like me.” This was based on Mrs Stella’s general demeanour.
    “Ah,” she said, dragging heavily on her cigarette and closing her eyes in bliss as she inhaled, “you are too sensitive. You have yet to toughen yourself to the Greek way of being. When we have something to say, we say it…unlike you British, who take an hour to come out with what they really want to say. Look at our language structure by comparison. Let’s suppose you want to know the time.”
    “Ok then, ask me like I’m a stranger” I was intrigued.
    “We’d simply ask you what the time is. You Brits use so much language! For example, ‘Excuse me, but would you happen to have the time, please?’ If you said that to a Greek, he’d probably reply, ‘Yes, I do,’ and then you would have to ask a follow up question, asking him to tell you what the time actually was. You people are so caught up with being polite and false and fake and nice to each other that you never get down to the point at hand. Your boss, it’s that Mrs Stella woman right? Yes, she’s known around these parts as being cold-hearted…I hear things at work…but she’s also probably just being her normal self. I mean, she doesn’t
dis
like you, how can she? She doesn’t know you well enough yet to have formed an opinion. And if she doesn’t like you, at least she’s being honest to your face about it.” Kaliopi said all of this without pausing for breath.
    The barb about being too sensitive had stung—rather proving the point at hand. I grimaced slightly, but Kaliopi hadn’t finished.
    “Yes,” she continued, “we here in Greece, we fight—how you say, like cat and mouse? —but at least we get it over and finished with. We scream. I tried to scratch my sister Stavroula’s eyes out once,” she reflected rather flippantly, her own eyes clouding at the memory. “We throw things, but then it is finished. You people? You let things build inside of you for months on end. You hold—how