Noisy six-seater dinner tables where 14 of us were seated, feasting on the spoils of a life that was starkly different from the one the homeowners started out in, grandparents who bickered but could not live without each other, and a red-bricked house — these are part of the mirage of memories that come to mind when I think of my childhood.

If the walls could talk, they would speak of a childhood of late nights watching TV with Yiayia and Papou on school nights (ears on alert for Mum and Dad’s creaks on the staircase), cousins playing marbles for hours on end in the sala, after-school feasts of sausages and mashed potato (I know — very Australian), gold jewelry stashed amongst pots and pans, and tying Papou’s laces together under the table, thinking he didn’t have a clue (he did – they always do).

Two grandparents, three children, seven grandchildren. That’s how many people have called Vulture Street, West End home. We flew from the nest as the years went by, though always flocking back together for birthdays, lazy Sunday afternoons, new babies, and homemade feasts of fasolakia (green beans), gemista (rice-stuffed vegetables), home-cooked chips, and oil-soaked bread topped with feta cheese and roasted piperies. My intention isn’t to incite hunger, but if that’s a side effect, I apologise.

I feel myself go glassy-eyed writing this. You see, my cousins and I were granted these memories off the back of a Papou who had a childhood marred by war. I remember the night I sat at the dinner table with him, suddenly aware that I merely knew the dot points of his life but not the thesis. So, at 11:30pm, I sat opposite my Papou, me in my pajamas, him playing solitaire, and began my gentle interrogation. With each question, answers poured out of him as though he lived it yesterday. Here was a man in his mid 80s, who has not only built a life from scratch for him and his family, but for generations to follow. With a whole lifetime of stories that felt worlds away from the one we were living. Like a gift, he proceeded to tell me the story of his life.

Life in Greece

My grandfather, Michael Manis, was born in Mesanagros, a little village hidden among the mountains of southern Rhodes, Greece, in 1936 to parents Flora and Simeon. It had a population of 500, and a single Kafenio as its beating heart.

He speaks of his time there as “a village existence.” “There were good times. We played with other kids; we went to school.” In 1940, his life would change forever. It was this year that Italy, and a year later Germany, invaded Greece.

Unlike his granddaughter who embellishes a story with useless facts and six sub stories on the way, he was ready to skirt right over his life in Greece and jump straight to Australia. Not on my watch.

My grandfather is a man that lived through hostile invasions, spent nights sleeping in caves, survived on little to no food, lived without a father until age 11, and had to leave behind the place he called home for an unfamiliar foreign country.

Flashback to 1938, when Papou was two years old and his sister Demitra was four months. Their father left the family behind and journeyed to Australia, to build a better life for them all.

As I delicately pushed and prodded, he started to get the hang of it, and allowed himself to journey back in time. He began by recalling the moment they heard bombs go off a little too close to the village. Fearful that they were next, members of the community congregated and fled to the mountains, finding shelter in the caves. “The ground was wet, and we had only a few clothes and blankets with us,” he says, bellowing a laugh as he spoke — a coping mechanism, I suspect.

I took note of the matter-of-fact approach he took to retelling a period of his life which, in this day and age, is far from matter-of-fact. I guess when you’re living a delicate line between life and death, the big things feel, well, not so big.

It was at this point that I opted to ‘phone-a-friend’. Even at that late hour, his younger sister, who barely recalled the time, chimed in, “We were only very small, but I do remember vaguely, like it was a dream, when we all had to vacate the village and flee to the mountains when the Germans invaded. We had to hide in cold holes and wet caves for a week.”

Food was scarce and they survived mostly on horta, the wild edible greens, and items of food the parents managed to grab before escaping. She recalled how they were too afraid to light cooking fires, lest the smoke alert the Germans to their whereabouts.

“We were hidden so well that they couldn’t find us. We had to be very quiet and not make sounds. Especially us children. We slept on the ground with blankets from home.”

As I relay this, images flash of my Papou pushing my cousins and me in the go-cart he built for us, followed by sleepovers where our bellies were filled before being tucked tightly into bed, bound like mummies for our maximum warmth.

As war raged, they had no choice but to become accustomed to a vastly different life to the one they knew. There was no school, and they spent cold nights in front of the living room fireplace, where one bed was shared among his mother, sister, two uncles, and grandparents.

Forced to swap Greek school for Italian lessons, he chuckled as he spoke of hiding at the top of the church with the Papa (priest) and the other village kids, just so they could continue Greek lessons. “We would have to hide because we weren’t allowed to speak Greek in front of the Italians,” he says.

The harsh reality of life during the war was the debilitating hunger. “Whoever had livestock, goats, or cows, they took them from us, because they wanted food to feed their soldiers and themselves. They were rough because they wanted our wheat. They wanted something to eat,” my Papou’s sister said.

So you got hungry? I asked. “We did. There was hardly any food — although there were fakes (lentil soup). We couldn’t go out in the fields to plant and sow. We used to wake up at night and tell our mother that we were hungry.”

There were days when Papou’s mother wouldn’t eat so the kids could have enough food for themselves — a familiar story among that generation.

Leaving the village

In 1948, after the war had ended and ten years after their father left, it was time to join him in Australia.

His face went somber, and his eyes glazed over. Mine did too. “Everybody was crying,” he says, “All the relatives.” It’s funny how you can hear someone’s sadness in their throat. He chokes up yet resolutely carries on.

“That was very sad because the night before we left, all the villagers came to the house to say goodbye. They were crying and singing songs of departure because we knew we would never see many of them again.”

So, along with his mother, and his sister, he bid farewell to the village they called home and their loved ones — this included both sets of grandparents, many cousins, and friends.

“We went from Greece to Egypt, Cairo. Then, they took us to a small 900-tonne liner that looked like a yacht and told us it would be the boat that would be taking us to Australia. We saw it and it was so small that everybody started crying, and crossing themselves. No one wanted to get on this small boat. They were all afraid.”

“When it was raining and storming, one end of the boat was going into the water and then it wasn’t long before the other end was submerged too.”

As most of that generation do, Demitra found a speck of light while speaking of the darker times and made sure not to leave out this one detail:

“It was nice and calm at first. We would go up on the deck where we would look out as far as the sea could reach. We could see the fish from the window in our cabins and the dolphins that were following beside us.”

Docking in Perth, Australia

“It was a miracle that we made it. Everyone heard about the boat that was coming to Fremantle from Greece and came to see it dock.”

When they docked in Perth, Western Australia, “A lot of people were waiting to greet their relatives, but we had nobody,” Papou says. “My dad was in Brisbane. He couldn’t make it because he had a shop. We were calling out, but nobody was there for us.” I hear another choked-up laugh as I try to hold it together myself.

They stayed at a migrant camp for one night, before heading to the airport for the final leg of their journey — a flight to Brisbane.

When I asked if he remembers seeing his dad for the first time, and how it felt, he said, “I didn’t know him, so it was just like meeting anybody else… like meeting someone for the first time.”

“It was weird. We were embarrassed. And then we learnt to get used to it.” his sister echoed.

While they had to leave their village life behind, the essence of it remained deep-rooted within them. From Papou planting basil in the garden and singing hymns on the balcony, to raising his family like his community did with him back home. Whenever he thinks of the village that he briefly called home, there’s a smile on his face, his eyes glisten, and you sense a palpable longing to visit once more.