# Transcript

IRINI:
My story starts with my father. He was born of Greek parents in Wales and went to Cyprus with a colonial servant's service to work. He met my mother, who was a Greek Cypriot, a native as the colonial service would call it the time, and fell in love, married and had a family, as it were. However, we were really not entirely accepted by the British contingent because my father had married a native. But equally, we weren't entirely fitting into the Greek Cypriot bit with my Greek Cypriot mother because of the language and the language problem was around whether we spoke English or Greek. My father absolutely insisted that we speak English at home because he wanted us to be bilingual. And even though my Greek mother was entirely Greek at that point, she had to learn English along with us, and we were simply not allowed to speak any Greek at all at home. And if we did, we would get a slap across the mouth with the back of his hand, which was actually quite painful. Also, so we learnt to speak English to him and at home all the time. And we were christened in the Greek Orthodox Church, and we did attend Christmas and Easter services at that point. And, you know, the culture was there, but we were still one step outside everybody else.
When I was 17 the troubles in Cyprus finished with Cyprus becoming independent, but that meant that my father lost his job. He was chief education officer at the time, and we packed our bags as a family and arrived in London, and it was really, I guess, in a way, a surprise and not a surprise that we were on the outside again, because now we were Greeks in London and we were, again, not quite belonging to anywhere. And there was racist abuse. It was after the fight for independence and all those troubles. And there was a fair amount of prejudice and racial tension there. And I went off to become a physio and I have found a lot of racism amongst my peers. I still remember the old boy, Mr Hawkins, his name was, who told me that he did not want to be treated by a dirty 'Cyp' like me, all of which, you know, was not entirely comfortable. And at that point, I fell in love with my husband, an Englishman. Of course, that was the wrong side of the dividewasn't it, it was the fight against the Brits and in Cyprus, and here I was falling in love with an Englishman.
My father interviewed my husband, he also interviewed his parents to establish quite what they thought of their son marrying a foreigner. And it was my lucky day when they actually said, I don't know, I think something like we hadn't even noticed, which probably wasn't true, but it was enough for my dad to accept that it was OK. And we got married and we have been married for quite a long time, quite happily, actually. So it did work out, even though my parents did not think it was going to be anything but a disaster. We have two children, and right from the start, I felt that I'd married an Englishman, I's settled in England, my children were going to be growing up in England, and whatever happened, I did not want them to have the same kind of issues and problems that I had had, and my siblings as well, about where we belonged, what we were and how we were going to fit in. So in a way, we kind of tried to adjust everything that we did so that we fitted in with the Britishness of the situation.
So my daughter is called Anna, which is an English of the Greek name, and also my mother-in- law's name. So that was following a Greek tradition. The Greek tradition also is that my son would be called after my father, my father was Christoph, so my son was Chris, and so that also worked out quite nicely. But it really was always just a little bit of a balancing act between the Greek and the English, with the English coming up uppermost. We've been married in an English church and now the children are christened the English way in an Anglican church. So, you know, that was the all the time the kind of balancing act, making sure that they were OK and that they were fitting in.
At the same time I think it would be fair to say that we have managed to instill in our children a love of Greek things, Greek culture. We've taken them and the grandchildren to visit monuments and things and kept the myths and talked about things. So they love it. I mean, they are perfectly comfortable. The grandchildren are in a kind of way even more comfortable with where they are. They are a quarter Greek, and they are very happy to be entirely English as far as they're concerned. But they love the food, and they love the family and they love the culture. And when they come to visit, they are always asking for their special dishes to be prepared, and their special things to be done, and the Greek Easter eggs to be dyed, all the traditions that that I've tried to keep going with my children, and we've managed to keep going with the grandchildren. And they are even more comfortable, I would say, with that all than my children are. My children didn't feel quite as comfortable with with all of this. If if we had their friends to tea or birthday parties, they would always request that I didn't do any of my funny things, any of my funny foods or whatever. They did want baked potatoes, baked beans and sausages. 'Please, mother, don't make it any of your fancy silly things because they just won't understand what you're about'. And it a bit sad that things do become diluted down the road of the generations because actually all the time it's my my half of of my children which is being washed out and a quarter of my grandchildren now. And by the time they have grandchildren as well, there won't be any of me left at all.
When the census came, it simply seemed to be just a question of ticking the boxes. And my husband Ewan was doing it for me, and he was asking me the questions and I was giving straight answers. And he comes to the bit about religion. And my reply immediately was, I'm Greek Orthodox. And, you know, no hesitation, no problem at all. I asked myself the question, am I really Greek Orthodox? Because I'm not religious, I'm not... I have values and I have beliefs, but they're not necessarily even Christian, they're my beliefs and the ways that I want to behave and the ways that I think one should behave. And it becomes became really quite a question in my head about why, when there is no rationality to all of this, I still feel that I am a Greek Orthodox. And yet when it came to it, I helped to set up a Greek Orthodox church in Milton Keynes and, you know, I got involved in all of that because I guess it's, I guess it's the culture. A friend of mine was very, very keen to start a church in Milton Keynes. And I thought it would be good for the community rather than the religious side of things. And we worked together, and other people, lots of people were involved. And it was a small community to begin with, mostly Greek Cypriots, which grew gradually, and of course, young Greeks come along later, and they have children, and the children have to be baptised and all the children get married and they also need to go to school. So, there is a Saturday and an evening Greek school for the children. And we have Greek dancing, and we have Greek food nights, and we have huge celebrations at Easter, with all the traditional lambs on spits in, would you believe, Stony Stratford, with everything happening and people walking by and invited to come in. And it's actually an absolutely buzzing, lively, helpful community, which gives people a huge amount of support and I think comfort in being living abroad amongst other people. And where we are at the end of the day, foreigners. But that's the community that belongs together. And the church is very much at the centre of all of that. The really significant thing for me was that my mother, who came to England two or three years at the end of her life, was given a Greek funeral. And it's absolutely wonderful for all of us that she was able to have that because somehow these big events in one's life, you need to go back to your traditions and to your, I think, roots. And the language is also so important in all of that. And it was really super to do that. I'm really, really pleased about that.