The ‘yellow house’ as Clift’s observation post

In the opening pages of Mermaid Singing, Clift describes the house (actually an apartment of a few rooms above a sponge warehouse) that the family moved into on their first day on Kalymnos (in December 1954).

‘It was a spindly yellow house on the waterfront, with a little cast iron balcony overhanging the plateia and four staring windows that looked down the broad harbour road with its row of coffee-houses, under the ragged casuarina trees and across to the small coloured cubes piled higgledy-piggledy at the base of the mountains. ‘

The ‘yellow house’ is still yellow, but a tree hides the balcony and the ‘four staring wiindows’. A shop has replaced the sponge warehouse below.

Clift would describe the balcony and the ‘staring windows’ as her ‘observation post’. And certainly, a lot of the material that she crammed into her letters and her journal (and which later was collaged into her travel memoir) was seen from this observation post. About a week after arriving on the island, Clift wrote her friend Jo Meyer in London a letter which is like a first draft for Mermaid Singing.

We have rented a house on the quay, overlooking a harbour filled with orange and yellow and blue caiques; the house costs us about £6.10.0 a month, which is regarded by our friends as extortion on the part of the landlady.  They are all scouting around for a cheaper one... In the meantime I am most happy, and would pay much more for the view. Kalymnos much more beautiful than we had anticipated. Great stark pepper and salt mountains and the town huddled beneath them around the harbor — the houses blue and yellow ochre   and brown and pink — simple cubes like a child's drawing — and casuarina trees along the            waterfront.  Our house is over a big cellar filled with sponges — Shane spends a lot of time there flirting with the young men who sit around all day with big shears, clipping the sponges smooth.  We have three bedrooms and a living room and a kitchen and a lavatory —   furnished with the barest essentials — beds, a table and four chairs, a few    pegs to hang things on, a saucepan to cook in, and four knives, forks and spoons. The cooking is done on an open charcoal grate and a primus; I am      forced to improvise a great deal.  But in all my problems I am helped by the local women (wonderful creatures in black dresses and headscarves) who come bringing me little gifts of preserves and fruit, or extra saucepans  and dishcloths and even odd chairs and tables…

In the summer of 1955, Australian artist Cedric Flower and his writer wife Pat came to stay with the Johnstons on Kalymnos, and Cedric sketched the view that Charmian could see from her observation post.

Sketch by Cedric Flower in the summer of 1955 of the balcony jutting precariously from the ‘yellow house’ and some of the things that could be observed.

In less than a fortnight, I will be taking this year’s tour group of Clifties to Kalymnos for the Charmian Clift Readers’ and Writers’ Workshop (organised by Limelight Arts Travel). Like last year’s group, whose journal observations feature below, this new group will be living in Clift’s books Mermaid Singing and Honour’s Mimic, seeing not just her yellow house but also the things Clift saw from her observation post.

Please feel free to join us over the next month or so, as we post our own journal observations to this blog!