Hydra, Greece: Brenda Chamberlain, A Rope of Vines, Journal from a Greek Island

I am currently reading "A Rope of Vines". I knew little about Brenda Chamberlain, the Welsh poet, painter and writer.

"This is an uneasy island, ghost-ridden, and with black danger in the air. It is advisable to keep the well covers closed at night..."

"With a cable of vine tendrils, I anchor the ship of my heart to this comfortless island, like the small Ydriot seamen who were accustomed to moor their boats with twisted vine-stems, before they learned the use of steel cables".

"For this is an island of terror, where no gentleness is, no cool glades in which to hide oneself away while wounds grow shining new skin".


I look forward to Paul Genoni's paper on Brenda Chamberlain's Hydra: "an iron-bound savage island", to be presented at "Writers, Dreamers, Drifters and the Aegean", Hydra, 25-26 September.

Here is a short video clip

Some of her paintings

From BBC Wales Art

"In 1963 Chamberlain moved to the Greek island of Ydra, where she stayed sporadically for a few years before returning to Bangor in 1967. During this time spent in Greece Chamberlain wrote her only novel The Water Castle (1964) and A Rope of Vines (1965), a journal of her time spent on the island.

Towards the end of her life Chamberlain suffered with bouts of loneliness and depression, which led to a mental breakdown after the publication of Poems with Drawings (1969). In July 1971 she took a number of sleeping tablets and although was rushed to hospital, died two days afterwards".

A review of "A Rope of Vine", from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council:

"An invaluable addition to the Library of Wales series, A Rope of Vines is a haunting and compelling account of the six years Brenda Chamberlain spent on the Greek island of Ydra. From the opening lines it is clear that behind the exuberance of the light, colours and smells of the island, there is a continual, lurking sense of violence: ‘I have returned to the good mothers of Efpraxia while my friend Leonidas serves sentence for manslaughter of an English tourist in the port of Ydra.’ 

Later on she writes, ‘This is what life is, too, violent encounters, inexplicable withdrawals.’ She experiences her own anguish after the imprisonment of Leonidas as an inner violence, ‘How much further can I bend before I break, how much salt water covers my head before I drown?’ It is a violence mirrored in the threat of an earthquake, the build-up to a taverna brawl, and the policemen looming with guns during the elections and voting.

Chamberlain retreats to the mountain monastery after Leonidas’s imprisonment to pray for him. Her retreat is also a necessity for her – to withdraw from the world – something that island life, both on Ynys Enlli (the subject of Tide Race) and Ydra, can provide. She needs solitude ‘to hear the earth breathing’. We have a sense that she never dwells happily for too long either in the ‘non-world’ of retreat or in the noisy human world of the market place, but must oscillate between the two.

The journal is accompanied by black-and-white line drawings of the buildings, people and creatures on the island – drawings with bold lines and vast space within them which seem to conduct the heat and the light of the island and draw the reader in. There is a hypnotic, meditative quality to the drawings and the text – an elusive moving backwards and forwards between belonging to the world and retreating from it. What is certain is that Chamberlain seeks to explore and express all that points the ‘way to life’. She rejects what she describes as ‘almost-living’: ‘On this island . . . one can forget the souls who wander in the miserable gulf of almost-living, those who are unable to work out the difference between monotony and rhythm. They act under compulsion, at the dictates of a machine-driven existence, when they could know a meaningful pattern of behaviour ordered by the nature of their surroundings.’

The ‘way to life’ may bring with it suffering, but suffering, she concludes, is a source of greater wisdom and clarity of vision: ‘And disaster when it overtakes causes clarity of vision as if one were lifted high above the earth to see life in its perspective in a moment. The problem is to remember the revelation, and not to be lost in the complicated cities of the plain. It is imperative to transform the dismal world and to turn the vision into a kind of sacrament.’ "

Jane MacNamee