Interview

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“I was unashamedly a swot”

When people talk about school being the happiest time of their lives, I utterly subscribe to that. I am the very fortunate product of a fantastic grammar-school education. I was a bright girl, which I say without embarrassment because when I was at my best, I was top of the class and top in exams. School was an amazing time for me. Each day I walked in through those gates and I loved every second.

Tonbridge Grammar School for Girls was selective but had a diverse intake: girls from council estates and girls from the very wealthy villages around Sevenoaks who lived in houses with crunchy gravel drives and ponies in a stable. Better still, they had comfortable and secure family set-ups.

Victoria in 6th form at Tonbridge Grammar School for Girls

 

I wasn’t a posh girl, nor a rich one. When I was about 12 my mother got work as a waitress in a local restaurant and that labelled us because in those days most mothers didn’t work unless they had an economic need to. It was a French restaurant in Tonbridge called À La Bonne Franquette, considered very haute cuisine at the time. TV chef Fanny Cradock used to go there with Johnnie, her ever-faithful husband – it was that kind of level.
Knowing what was what

I had a very unstable family life. Although my parents were still married, my father wasn’t around much; he never once came to parents’ evenings or concerts or Speech Day, so my mother was in effect a single parent. Actually, we were a strong female unit: there was my sister and me, my mother and my grandmother, who lived with us, plus girl cats, Sophie and Susie, who were Siamese and twins. And there weren’t any rows, except sometimes when my father was there at weekends.

As a contrast to this chaotic home life, I loved the certainty of school. I loved not having to make any decisions about anything and knowing what was what. The teachers were strict: there were detentions handed out if you didn’t hand in your homework. And the headmistress, Miss Mitchener, would stand at the bottom of the school drive with a ruler to measure whether your grey school skirt was the regulation height above the knee – three inches max.

Daily Telegraph Bestselling author Victoria Hislop pictured at her London home, UK
Victoria Hislop: ‘I loved the certainty of school’

For the most part, the teachers were unmarried women who were absolutely dedicated to the school; they had incredibly high standards and lived and breathed their vocation in a way that I now look back and marvel at. They were brilliant at teaching us to learn French subjunctives backwards or learning physics principles by rote.

We had a particularly inspirational English teacher. Miss Waldron had a passion for literature, and she infected me with her enthusiasm. She taught us that we could feel how words sounded and how writers’ lives and loves were visible through their work – all of which might now seem obvious, but to a teenage mind that had to be pointed out.

After a few years I got a job at my mother’s restaurant. I was first of all a washer-up, a plongeur. On Friday and Saturday nights I’d be washing pots and pans in huge quantities: plates had to be gleaming and glasses look like new. I hate washing up now, but I loved doing it at the restaurant – somehow it was very satisfying. Later on I assisted the chef, putting things in pans, getting what he needed from the cold room. He was a perfectionist, but I liked to get things right and usually did. He taught me professional slicing and chopping techniques with huge knives and I can still chop vegetables faster than anyone I know without losing my fingers.

Latterly I was a waitress and I adored that too, smiling and being charming when needed – and of course eavesdropping on people’s conversations, which was fun (people always think waiters are deaf). But it never affected my school work: nothing got between me and Latin verbs and the French novelist André Gide. It was simply a way of earning lots of pocket money.
Top of the class

During the week, I worked hard at my school work without distractions: the girls who were interested in boys were not the academic ones. There was a group of us who were unashamedly the Swots, and I can’t think of any of the academic girls who went out with anyone. I formed important friendships within that group. Angela Shaw and I were two weird little girls with our hair in bunches that stuck out. I had frizzy, untameable hair – this was when there were no smoothing products; no hair straighteners – and I yearned to have straight silky hair like the cool girls.

Victoria in 4th form at Tonbridge Grammar School for Girls

Every single day between the age of 11 and when we left school at 18, Angela and I walked to and from school, which was a mile and a half each way. We never took the bus because we didn’t quite live far enough to get free bus passes, and that long daily walk – even in the rain – was never relieved by a parent in a Range Rover, as my mother went everywhere by bike. I don’t want to over-egg things – my parents’ somewhat precarious financial situation did allow for violin lessons – but there was no extra tutoring, nor the luxury of a tracksuit for games on freezing cold days.

Angela and I competed to be top of the class. We were both very keen on languages and in our first couple of years when we were learning French we spoke only in French on the way to school. In the third form we started German, so we spoke only German, practising all the time and testing each other; and in the sixth form we both took up Spanish, and then we only spoke Spanish. My other best friend, Ailsa, was one of the posh girls from Sevenoaks and we are still connected: I’m godmother to her oldest daughter. She married one of my husband Ian’s closest friends, so I’m responsible for a good bit of matchmaking there.

My last day at Tonbridge, I had a feeling of unutterable sadness and melancholy. It had been a place that made me incredibly happy. I can’t think of anything negative to say about my school. Also, my education was free from start to finish: primary school, grammar school and then a maintenance grant for Oxford – all the fees were paid by Kent County Council. I feel that I was very, very lucky and I’m eternally grateful.

And here I am now, a fully-fledged grown-up, but in many ways just like the schoolgirl I was in the 1970s: still diligent, still with a strong work ethic, still eager to please and do my best. And I’m still obsessed with taming my hair, although I have discovered the hairdresser – and it’s blow-dried to a shine once a week. Hurrah.

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Victoria Hislop on “Inheritance Tracks”

Victoria on the BBC’s “Inheritance Tracks” discussing songs inherited from her parents and songs she would pass on to her children

VICTORIA HISLOP WRITER GIORNALISTA E PROFESSORESSA DI LINGUA INGLESE AL ST.HILDA S. A OXFORD © LEONARDO CENDAMO

Featuring Take Five by Dave Brubeck and Pio Poli by Michalis Hatzigiannis

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Victoria Hislop talks to Graham Norton about her new book Maria’s Island

Victoria Hislop has returned to the islands of Greece for her new book, and her first novel for children, Maria’s Island.

She joined the Graham Norton Radio Show with Waitrose to chat about how she adapted the book from her original novel The Island.

 

Explaining why she was suprised she didn’t have more pushback adapting from fiction for adults to fiction for children, she says: “I haven’t held back with either the ideas or with some of the vocabulary”

“The setting is principally a little island called Spinalonga which is just off the coast of Crete, which for 50 years was a place where people with leprosy were sent during the period when it was still an incurable disease and they needed to be isolated, so almost worldwide the law said that if you were diagnosed with it, you had to go into a place of isolation.”

Victoria is an ambassador for Lepra, who raise money to treat sufferers of leprosy around the world.

So how did she bring the subject manager down to a children’s eye-view? “In my book The Island, which takes place over a couple of decades, we have a family where two generations are afflicted by this disease. What I suddenly realised last year was that my principal characters were actually children, even in the adult book” she explains.

“And when a schoolteacher out in Crete said to me ‘I’d love to read the island to my class but it’s a little bit adult’ I realised that I could actually adapt it for children, because I think generally children like to read about children.”

“So I just took the main characters in the early chapters in the original book and just led them all the way through and it actually wasn’t that difficult to do because, as I say, children’s emotions and reactions were very much at the core of the original.”

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Interview with Sloane Square Magazine

Svelte and dressed in black, Victoria Hislop looks healthy and relaxed as she sits at a corner table for afternoon tea. The sun is out, there’s a pleasant hubbub in the cafe and for a moment 1 imagine we’re in Greece, such is her ability to transport us through her stories (her readership totals 10 million). She is telling me about her latest novel, Those Who Are Loved, which promises to be her most fascinating odyssey yet.
(read Sloane Square Magazine online)

We are in fact sitting beside the King’s Road, Victoria having just arrived from a Pilates class at nearby Heartcore. She is now describing a different journey, closer to home. “I’d always wanted to live on the King’s Road,” she says. “Gradually I worked my way up through South London, at a time when taxis didn’t always agree to go south of the river. The King’s Road always had this incredible buzz, this atmosphere. I can’t imagine living anywhere else in London now.”

Favourite haunts today include Colbert in Sloane Square, where she enjoys a glass of house champagne and the chopped chicken salad. “I like food that doesn’t get in the way of conversation and isn’t over-priced,” she says. “The new Granger & Co. in Pavilion Road is also very good.”

Being able to walk to places is one of the great joys of living in Chelsea, she feels. “You can walk into the West End. I walk to the London Library, which is like my office. Going about on foot lets me take things in. Have you seen the new blue plaque for P. L. Travers, creator of Mar}’ Poppins, on the corner of Smith Street?” She points across the King’s Road to it.

The last time we saw each other, we were squashed onto a table at a Christmas book event in our local Waterstones together with William Boyd, another author living near the King’s Road. “He is one of only a handful of authors whose latest book I’ll pre-order without knowing anything more about it, so good is his prose.”

Much of her time is spent at an apartment she rents in Athens. She first fell in love with Greece by visiting Athens in the Seventies. “I also have a place in Crete where I do lots of writing.” Her books have been translated into more than 35 languages and she travels to various foreign sales territories, too. “It turns out my books sell very well in Norway. Perhaps they like to travel somewhere sunny through my stories.”

But her latest book, Those Who Are Loved, visits one of the darkest chapters of modern Greek history – the Nazi occupation and the ensuing civil war. “The right-wing factions collaborated with the Nazis in order to suppress the Communists. Files were kept on Communists well into the post-war period, and the fault lines spread down the generations,” she explains.

It’s the tale of an ordinary woman leading an extraordinary life. “The central character is a female communist – with a small ‘c’ – named Themis, who is imprisoned on a succession of islands but who never gives up her fight for justice and for love. It was only after I’d picked her name that I discovered that the figure you see on top of the Old Bailey – blindfolded, holding a sword and scales – is also

Themis, so there was this wonderful sense of synchronicity.”

As for Victoria’s own taste of Greece right at home, she tells me, “I’ve started growing olives in our little back garden. Perhaps I’ll press them into oil and put it into those tiny little bottles used for snail serum. Perhaps I’ll sell them at a stall in the farmers’ market on sunny days,” she jokes with a smile. And if she did? I’ve no doubt people would buy them.

Those Who Are Loved is out now, published in hardback by Headline

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An interview with Victoria Hislop

Following on from the success of The Island, The Sunrise and Cartes Postales from Greece, Victoria Hislop’s latest novel, Those Who Are Loved, is set against the backdrop of the German occupation of Greece in World War II, the subsequent civil war and military dictatorship. The novel sheds light on the complexity and trauma of Greece’s past and weaves an epic tale of an ordinary woman compelled to live an extraordinary life.
Interview by Alice Beazer for New Books  – 100th issue

Image Credit © Bill Waters

Congratulations on your amazing new novel; what was the original inspiration for Those Who Are Loved?

The inspiration really was seeing Makronisos from a distance – the island prison – and realising that Greece had its own Alcatraz or its Robben Island. I found that deeply intriguing! And ten years later, here is the novel. It was a big subject to investigate.

Those Who Are Loved begins in 2016, as Themis sits with her grandchildren. The narrative then goes back to Themis’ childhood, and tells the extraordinary tale of her life chronologically. Why did you choose to structure the novel in this way – beginning and ending in the present day (well, almost the present day)?

I have always been drawn to the notion of an older person telling a story to a younger one. Now that I am writing this, I am wondering whether this goes back to our early years when our parents, grandparents, teachers perhaps, read to us. It seems very natural to be told a story by an older person. I have done this in several of my novels. But there is an added layer perhaps – where the life of the older person has contained events or actions which they have wanted to conceal, for reasons of stigma or perhaps fear of persecution.

The powerful bond between grandparents and their grandchildren is a lovely theme in this novel; firstly, with Themis’ warm-hearted grandmother Kyria Koralis, then with Themis’ own grandchildren. Interestingly, Themis feels comfortable to discuss the details of her life with her grandchildren, but not her own children – why did you choose to write this?

I think the revelation of family secrets often takes some years. In a sense this is inevitable. Such things need the distance of time and hindsight, when there can’t be any repercussions perhaps.

Themis is the strong-willed protagonist at the heart of Those Who Are Loved – why did you choose to call her ‘Themis’? And what inspired the character of Themis? Was she based on any real woman?

My character is not based on any one individual but is inspired by all the women who got swept up in the civil war conflict in Greece – for the first time putting on trousers and picking up a gun. It was a very liberating time for women in Greece – they were very much domestic creatures until that time – and indeed they mostly returned to the same domestic position in society afterwards. The use of the name Themis was inspired by two things. Firstly, a wonderful woman I met in Athens, also called Themis, who seemed very forward-thinking, very strong, very inspiring and feminist. Secondly, Themis was the Goddess of Justice – and this is very much the motivation of ‘my’ Themis. She is motivated by a desire for justice and for equality – for the right of everyone to have food to eat and freedom to hold their own political views. This is what drives her to fight rather than a belief in communism per se. A statue of Themis stands on top of the Old Bailey, always shown blindfolded, and holding a pair of scales. She seems as relevant a symbol for our times and for 1940s Greece as she was for the Ancient Greeks.

Whilst Themis is a child, she befriends Fotini, a refugee – I loved reading about their blossoming friendship. I was struck by the clear parallels with the refugee crisis in Greece today. What did you want to show through Fotini’s story?

The influx of refugees into 21st century Greece definitely has some parallels with the wave of refugees that came in almost 100 years ago as a result of the Greek-Turkish War which resulted in the huge population exchange of 1923 (when more than a million Greek Orthodox Christians arrived in Greece from Turkey and hundreds of thousands of Moslems left for Turkey). Fotini’s family is one of those who has been displaced in this way and forms part of the huge number of largely impoverished people who struggled to survive at that time – and who allied themselves with the Left. Many of them lived as well as they could in the rapidly expanding city of Athens – and there are still areas, such as Nea Smyrni (New Smyrna) which reflect where they settled. There are some real differences, however, between refugees arriving in Greece today and those from the 1920’s. One of them is that many have ambitions to return to their home countries and do not regard Greece as a permanent home. For most 21st century refugees, Greece is a place that they are passing through in order to get to countries in northern Europe. In the 1920s the arriving refugees knew that they would never return to their original homes and also they were Greek Orthodox Christians so assimilated more speedily into Greek culture and life. I wasn’t particularly wanting to show anything through Fotini’s story, apart from the fact that social mobility is often denied to people – and poverty is often a hard situation to struggle out of.

(read the full interview at the New Books website)

 

 

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Interview with Greece Is”

In writing her latest Greece-themed, critically acclaimed book, “Cartes Postales,” a book of stories linked through the voyage of a heartbroken man, Victoria Hislop adopted an experimental approach. Usually gathering a vast body of research notes and reference images and then sitting down to write, a process the author says takes her around three years from idea to completion, this time she wrote mainly while traveling: “The journeys I made for research took me all around the country and the inspiration for different parts of the book came very easily – so I was scribbling a lot of the time as I was actually on the move,” she says.

(Interview with Alexia Amvrazi for Greece Is)

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Apart from being a book rich in evocative personal stories set in fascinating Greek locations such as Delphi, Meteora, Andros, Ikaria and Preveza, the book bequeaths the reader with two other pleasures – one is the nostalgia-inducing experience of reading postcards, something people nowadays rarely get to do, and the other is that the texts are punctuated by poignant images which verge from the abstract to the illustrative.

Joining her on this somewhat unorthodox novel-writing adventure was her photographer friend Alexandros Kakolyris, who understood exactly where she was coming from when she came up with the idea for the book. “Children’s books have pictures and a few words. Then there are less and less images, and then there are just words, no more pictures!

“And I thought, why? We live in a world where we’re seeing things all the time, and a lot of the newspapers, magazines as well as non-fiction books have masses of pictures. Why should fiction be any different? So I met the photographer and we talked about how what you see at that moment can actually be the basis of the story.”

Very much like Anthony, the protagonist of the book, who travels from destination to destination without any set purpose, the author’s journey around Greece was not entirely pre-planned: “We didn’t know what to expect, whether each place would deliver something picturesque or interesting to us. At some point we even relied on a weather app to decide where we should go next! But the photographs were very integral to the story I tell, and what I saw and what the photographer saw did affect the course of the book. (read the full interview at Greece-Is)

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