Promised New York, He Got Greek With a Texas Accent

Every family that moves abroad has a word for the lie it tells the children, and ours is “temporary”. We have used it in four countries. The eldest now hears it the way other people hear a smoke alarm.

So I have a professional interest in a boy who spent the summer of 1984 in Halandri, a suburb of Athens, waiting to be told the family was going back to New York. He was eleven. The move had been sold to him as temporary. In late August it became permanent, which is the only direction “temporary” has ever travelled.

He started fifth grade at the American Community Schools of Athens that September in a state of formal mourning for Queens. He sat near the back. He did the arithmetic on the number of school days left until June, and the arithmetic did not help.

Then his teacher said good morning. The teacher was from Texas, and this was clear by the second syllable. A little later a boy asked something in Greek, and the teacher answered him in Greek. Fluent Greek, correct Greek, Greek that had very obviously grown up near Houston.

The boy laughed. He had not meant to. It was the first time he had laughed since the plane, and as a matter of principle he held it against the teacher for the rest of the morning.

I recognise the principle. When we moved to Brussels the middle one refused to enjoy a single waffle for six weeks, on the grounds that enjoying it would count as agreeing. My husband, who had chosen the flat, ate the waffles for both of them and called it diplomacy.

The year at ACS went the way these years go when the school is any good. There was a friend from New Jersey who was equally unconvinced by his parents. There was football practice in heat that would have shut a school in New York. There was a detention he still considers unjust, which in my experience is the surest sign that a child has settled in, since nobody bothers to feel wronged by a place they are leaving.

Somewhere in Halandri a boy who had been counting the days to June lost count, and nobody has ever asked for the number back.

By the end of the year the Texan was still saying good morning in two languages, and the boy, by his own later account, had stopped mentioning flights. Athens had become home without asking his permission, which is how it works and why the word “temporary” should be confiscated from parents at the border.

We are on our fifth country. Last spring I told the youngest the posting was “probably for a while”. She asked me to put it in writing.