Last month, I dropped off my two-year-old daughter Nicci Alise at her nursery during a downpour that lasted barely an hour. But this being Athens, that’s all it took for many of the shoddily maintained roads to flood. As I navigated the five-minute drive home, stinking bags of uncollected garbage sailed past in the torrents.
It could have been a scene from Slumdog Millionaire, except that I was driving past multi-million-euro mansions with gilded gates and cascading bougainvillea in one of Athens’s most affluent suburbs. The imagery was potent. Greece 2011: a country that has allowed itself to be capsized by its own accumulated waste.
It’s been barely a fortnight since new prime minister Lucas Papademos was parachuted in, and Greece’s so-called ‘national unity’ government has already devolved into a Mexican stand-off over the crucial signing of the eurozone rescue deal. But regardless of any new political scenario, Greece’s citizens still face years of brutal austerity when, even now, there are so many who haven’t been paid in months.
Lost Idyll: Amanda and Dmitri with their daughters
On that rainy day, the city’s refuse collectors were on strike, as they had been for the past fortnight, along with a good proportion of Greece’s labour force. We were in the grip of a 48-hour general strike. Airports, state schools and banks stopped working. They were joined by bakers, doctors, customs officials, taxi and bus drivers and even judges. Clothes shops and tax offices shut down, but the beggars who clog Athens’s road junctions cleaning windscreens were still hard at it.
Every night, my husband Dimitri and I log on with foreboding to the strike website that has the most reliable information on the next day’s industrial action. That’s right: we have chosen to live in a country where we must consult a website devoted solely to strikes. It is dawning on us that we must be crazy.
Six years ago we left London for Athens in a spirit of great optimism with our first child, Poppy Grace. It was a chance for Dimitri to reconnect with his Greek roots in the great Olive Belt.
Last month’s 48-hour paralysis was certainly the most severe I have witnessed. The day before, we all rushed out to stock up on milk, bread and petrol: siege preparations.
When rumours of another extended petrol station strike broke earlier that month, I queued for an hour to fill my tank. The last time it had happened, we had no petrol for more than a week.
Eighteen months ago, three people died – one of them a pregnant woman – when protesters torched the Marfin Egnatia bank in Syntagma Square, 300 yards from where my husband works for a small Greek investment bank. Like thousands that day, he had to fight his way home on foot through tear gas and flying rocks.
Every night, my husband Dimitri and I log on with foreboding to the strike website that has the most reliable information on the next day’s industrial action. That’s right: we have chosen to live in a country where we must consult a website devoted solely to strikes. It is dawning on us that we must be crazy.
But back then, and for a long time afterwards, our pampered expat bubble held firm. Not for us the crushing anxiety about austerity and job losses. Out here on this desirable strip of the south coast they call the Athenian Riviera, we thought we had nothing to fear from extreme new tax collection regimes. Unlike entire generations of Greeks, we actually paid our taxes.
We still enjoyed our inflated salaries and our £5 frappes at Athens’s most exclusive beaches. Our carefree weekends were spent sipping champagne in Mykonos or on friends’ 65ft private boats. If the husbands worked in shipping, the wives worked at shopping. We didn’t care that the Greek education system has one of the most dire performance records in Europe. We sent our children to the international private schools.
Not for us either the cramped inner-city dwellings – staring at the neighbours’ wet laundry – which most people imagine when they think of Athens. We live in large whitewashed apartments with manicured gardens and security gates.
But now, finally, it appears our expat bubble has burst and we, too, are starting to feel the burn.
A month ago, Dimitri once again braved the riots and tear gas, the piles of burning rubbish and Molotov cocktails to get home from the city’s beleaguered centre. But the mood of the people, he reported, had shifted and there was now an ugly undercurrent to these ritual protests that frightened him.
For the first time, protesters targeted one of the guard boxes outside Parliament House. Traditionally, these military sentinels have been revered by the Greeks as a symbol of the people. Last month, they burned a guard box too. Greece – her unemployment rate soaring at 16.5 per cent – now officially appears to be a country that is fragmenting.
Six people have already been ‘let go’ from my husband’s small team. One colleague has had his pay slashed by 66 per cent but, with two children to support and no other jobs available, he has no choice but to stay on. The Greek banking industry is not exactly a great place to be right now. But at least it has one rare distinction: here, the banks haven’t sunk the country, the country has sunk the banks.
‘The first thing to go was our boat,’ says British expat Tessa, a mother of three from Cheshire whose Greek husband has been forced to leave the family behind and relocate to Dubai after losing his lucrative civil engineering job here. ‘Then the Maserati and then the Volvo. Now I’ve just got the Mazda,’ Tessa laughs, aware of the contrast between her family’s concept of hardship and that of the average Greek.
Before the problems started: The couple used to lead an idyllic lifestyle but things have started to come crashing down
The financial crisis is also proving ‘completely catastrophic’ for Sara, a British expat who has been living in Athens for 13 years. She and her Athenian husband run a Greek-based watch import business.
‘Many of our Greek buyers are giving us cheques dated eight or nine months down the line,’ says Sara, 45, who is originally from Surrey and has a seven-year-old daughter.
‘Eating out is finished. So is any form of retail therapy. We have to keep it all back to pay the Greek government.’
But the prospect of having to move back to England is horrific, she says. ‘How would we get on the property ladder? We’re both in our 40s, who on earth would employ us? So, like many other people here, we feel trapped. We have no choice but to dig in.’
British couple Andrea and Jimmy Phillipson, an olive trader whose company supplies British outlets such as Fortnum & Mason and Marks & Spencer, left their home in central Athens last year and headed for the safety of the suburbs. Andrea, 38, an interior designer and mother of two, says: ‘The riots started to crank up. They set fire to the post office at the top of our road. That was the final straw.’
In our own home, the cold nights have set in but our landlady is often unable to buy fuel for our heaters because of the strikes. On the really bad days when we get the full monty – buses, trains, underground trains and taxis all striking – Dimitri has to hire a driver at great expense to get to his office.
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My Greek tutor, Lizzy Robson, talks movingly about the loss of hope that the Greek people are experiencing and their unprecedented sense of helplessness. Originally from the North of England, she has lived here for 33 years.
‘There have always been strikes but before there was the perception that things would go back to normal. Now, there is no hope in the future,’ she says. Her sister-in-law and husband came to visit for a weekend recently and were trapped for an extra week, unable to get back to Manchester because of strikes.
‘They won’t be coming again,’ Lizzy laments. ‘They’d already spent a week skirting round piles of rubbish. Then they didn’t know how they were going to get home.
‘The Greek people I know realise they’re making it worse for themselves. Many are embarrassed about what’s happening. One of their biggest worries is that so many young people are leaving the country.’
But the rot continues. A friend whose official salary has been cut receives a cash-stuffed envelope each month, making up the difference. Our landlady complains about the corruption and then hands us a receipt for our rent with only half the amount written on it.
‘Every single Greek person I have met has taken advantage of the system here for years,’ says Sara. ‘Even if it was just passing an envelope of money to the hospital staff when their children were born to make sure they were looked after properly.
A friend whose official salary has been cut receives a cash-stuffed envelope each month, making up the difference. Our landlady complains about the corruption and then hands us a receipt for our rent with only half the amount written on it.
‘It’s just taken as part of life here. The philosophy is, if you don’t look after yourself, no one else will.’
At this day-to-day level, it is easy for us outsiders to understand how the Greeks have brought this awful mess upon themselves. As one embattled Greek tax collector said: ‘The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes because no one is ever punished.’
There have been many times we have been tempted to call it quits, long before Greece was having trouble squaring the books. The chaos on the streets, the depressing contempt for the environment (some beaches and parks should have a World Health Organisation warning) and the arrogant driving culture which borders on the criminally reckless.
I once saw two small boys standing in the back of a Smart car, gripping the seats in front, Ben Hur chariot-style, while their father belted down the motorway chatting on his mobile.
It’s pretty obvious from the whole debt disaster that Greeks don’t like being told what to do. Take what happened when the government introduced a smoking ban a few years back. Nothing.
The restaurant and cafe owners just shifted a few tables.
But there is so much about life in Greece that positively sings: a family-first culture and a low divorce rate compared with Anglo-Saxon societies; less alcoholism, less violent crime. We’ve had unforgettable experiences, such as driving to the mountains to pick wild flowers from the sacred Oracle of Delphi – a site so beautiful it hurts.
And despite the ugly images on your TV screens, most British expats unequivocally believe life here is still much safer than back home. But, sadly, we now feel, like so many other families, that we are living on borrowed time. Default, even with Europe’s rescue money, seems inevitable.
My 22-year-old Greek hairdresser is desperate to find work abroad, but can’t afford the fare. ‘Greece? Greece is about the past,’ he says, angry at his country for denying him a future. Once the young go, what hope is there for any nation?
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