On December 2 Prime Minister Rallis returned from Luxembourg where Greece had for the first time attended as an observer a session of the Community’s Council.
At the session, rises in OPEC prices, the Gulf War, the crisis in Poland, the situation in Afghanistan, the threat of a renewed arms race between East and West and above all the dramatic rise of balance-of-pay-ment deficits in the most prosperous West European countries were among the matters under discussion — all of which Greece could do nothing about but which would undoubtedly have a profound effect on the country. The EEC which Greece was about to enter was in the midst of a formidable economic crisis.
The Prime Minister came back from the meeting in a somber mood and national self-control was one of the major preoccupations on his mind. On the day of his return, thirty thousand high school teachers started a six-day strike and railroad employees began a four-day walkout. The day before, a general strike had been called which affected over 400,000 workers with the result that shops lost five billion drachmas in trade. On the following day 38,000 teachers in public elementary schools began a strike which would last until the Christmas recess and which threatened to be resumed in January.
On December 4, Rallis held a cabinet meeting at which the policy of national self-restraint was outlined. Warning his ministers not to give in to further pressures, the Prime Minister admitted that he had been following a course which had been too generous. While he insisted that strikes were legal, many of the strikers’ demands were unjustified and could lead the national economy to destruction. At a time when the economy was approaching a zero increase in productivity, it was impossible that people should expect to work less and be paid more. Having satisfied many demands with the recent introduction of the five-day week and a series of wage increases to offset rising inflation, Rallis announced that during the pre-election period no more strikes could force the government to give in to further pressures.
The Prime Minister’s plea for the country to follow “the wise path of self-restraint” did not, however, arouse any immediately positive response. The strike-wave continued with unabated kefi. Within hours of Rallis’ warning the employees of the Telephone Company (OTE) went on a three-day strike which at once was followed with strikes by post office personnel, taxi drivers, airplane engineers, the administration staff of the National Health Service (IKA) and ambulance attendants.
On December 8, IKA pensioners and half of the management of the National Tourist Organization went on a six-day hunger strike, the latter organization’s act causing some amusement among critics who believe that EOT’s official menu for tourists leaves something to be desired. While hunger strikes on the part of a great number of civil servants might do something to bring down the price of food, they could do nothing at all for the government’s desire to create productive incentives.
After 20 years of effort on the part of Greece to join the Common Market, the actual juncture had come at an infelicitous time. What had looked like a haven of security and prosperity and ease for so long was suddenly, at close sight, neither so prosperous nor easy nor secure. A great challenge for Greece was unexpectedly met On Jan. 1, Greece turned out to be far less prepared for its entry into the EEC than its nine godmothers were to receive it. Perhaps former President Tsatsos was right in saying that it was Greece that the Nine were joining and not the other way around. For if there is to be a period of uncertainty, an unexpected necessity for imaginative adaptation, a need to improvise in a difficult situation, and a way of finding a solution to what seems to be insoluble, then the Nine have joined up with the best of partners, a Tenth which has lived, and has even prospered in just this way for hundreds, even thousands, of years.
There is a story still told in Andritsaina of a Rolls-Royce carrying a party of rich and noble foreigners up to the Temple at Bassae. On the then still rocky road outside the town the limousine cracked its axle which the chauffeur, who was an expert mechanic, was unable to fix. Some local villagers had a sudden idea — smearing the damaged part with kilos of Turkish Delight, they swathed it with old issues of Acropolis and tied it up with leather shoestrings. It is said that not only did the car get to the temple, but it even got its noble party home.
Ticket to Ride
The following experience has been recorded by Robert Bowman, a lawyer and writer who lives in Glyfada and London:
I took a ride on a bus today. Nothing special in that, you might say, the kind of journey thousands of people round the world take every day — except that by the time this particular bus journey had finished I was a little sadder and a little wiser.
Not unusually for this December morning in Greece, the sun was shining out of a blue sky but the untypical cold blustery wind that had brought snow to the mountains during the night still whipped the exposed areas of skin. Not surprisingly, all the taxis had been hired in Glyfada this morning so I joined the small queue for the bus to Athens.
The bus was late, and when eventually it did arrive the mood of the crowd wasn’t helped by the extravagant stop in the swirl of dust and the smile on the face of the young driver. We all boarded — a gaggle of teenagers, young housewives, working men and the old ladies in black and a few other foreigners – paid our fares and settled down for the trip. Maybe it was the cold or their own particular worries, but the passengers this morning weren’t chatting with their usual exuberance — it wasn’t surprising, really; the newspapers that some of them were reading weren’t that full of cheerful news, considering that Christmas was just around the corner. Just gloomy reports of more cold weather to come, strikes in Athens, Soviet troop movements on the Polish border and the unexpected death of a forty-year-old musician in far-off New York. It wasn’t surprising that most of the passengers contented themselves with quietly watching the passing scenery.
After a short while the young driver turned on the small transistor radio he had hanging discreetly by his seat. The heavy rock music that suddenly bounced around the inside of the bus seemed to satisfy him as well as bringing a grin to his and a few other passengers’ faces. One or two of the old ladies stopped their idle chatter and gave him a sharp look. He shrugged and turned the volume down to moderate and the bus continued on its way to the subdued but steady accompaniment of some rock band.
It wasn’t long afterwards that the music changed and slowly but surely the chatter and the mood on the bus changed with it. It was an eerie feeling to sit there and hear all human activity literally die around you to leave nothing but the grinding of the gears to the background of the ‘old’ music that was now playing on the driver’s radio.
But there again it wasn’t just any Old’ music that those passengers were gradually beginning to listen to one by one; it was music a lot of them had grown up with, music they had literally lived with, courted with, partied with. It was music the older ones among them had originally dismissed out-of-hand on first hearing but had then grown to like, music the younger ones present had heard and respected even though, if asked, they would prefer the faster, punkish music of today…and after one Beatle record finished, another came on straight away without a word from the D.J. and when that one was fading another started. Then another until suddenly that Greek bus became a little world all of its own, enraptured by the words and music emanating quietly from that young driver’s radio, until the sound of that nasal voice singing in English with a heavy Liverpudlian accent about the delights of a girl named “Michelle” seemed to drown even the harsh noise of the bus engine. “Norwegian Wood” followed and then “She’s leaving home”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “If I fell in love with you”, “She loves you”, “Please please me”, “All you need is love” and more until in a strange way the bus became not just another crowded and dilapidated Greek bus chugging its way into Athens but a streamlined modern coach embarking on its very own Magical Mystery Tour to the background of the Beatles’ music.
Such was the power of the local radio station’s way of saying John Lennon may be dead but the Beatles live on. The radio station played nothing but Beatles for the remainder of that strange bus journey but no one complained. No one asked the driver to turn his radio off. Everyone sat or stood silently listening to the songs that now had a new poignancy.
For the driver and passengers it was a private, emotional journey as they listened to John Lennon and the rest of the boys telling them out of the past what Life was all about. And as one saw the effect on those people — a cross-section of society of all ages — no endless eulogies or opinions, no T.V. pundit’s quick summing up would ever completely encapsule what the Beatles as artists have given to the world more than the feelings written large across the faces of the people on that battered old Greek bus rattling its way to Athens.
Sure, they knew they would hear those songs again; they knew they would hear John Lennon’s rasping tones again, but never would they hear them in quite the same way. It was as if in recognition of the fact that something had gone forever that a strange, almost tangible wave of sadness swept the bus around me, affecting young and old, female and male. As the disembodied Liverpudlian voice sang out of the radio, all were visibly moved as if they’d lost a member of their own family or a close friend. And I suppose they were right, for in a strange way we’ve seen each other grow up and go our separate ways, and now we’d seen one of them die way before his time.
When the bus reached the terminus in Athens, the driver brought it quietly to a stop but continued to stare straight ahead, tears running down his cheeks. No one said anything. After all, there was nothing to say. The music had said it all. We all silently disembarked and walked away with saddened faces from that bus, but I think somehow we realised we had all taken part in a rather unique, silent appreciation of the life and work of a forty-year-old musician from Liverpool named John Lennon.
I took a ride on a bus today. But I felt and saw enough on that bus to realize that a small part of me – a small part of all of us – had died too in Manhattan that cold Monday night in December 1980.
