Myths we live by… seafaring greeks and Palestinian ranchos

My grandmother around 1914

From an early age, I'd always had a halcyon vision of Palestine, alongside a sympathy for its people. My grandmother had spent some time there before World War One. Her mother was in a relationship with a Greek ship's carpenter from the isle of Kassos, and aged seventeen my grandmother had the privilege of accompanying them on a voyage to the Mediterranean. It was a cargo ship, and the ship's carpenter was on board to maintain and repair the ship's wooden parts. And that's how in my childhood I was regaled with stories of the Acropolis, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and camels spitting in her eye. She was there during the dying days of Ottoman dominance and several years before the British assumed their fateful mandate. She met a young man called Naim in Palestine and fell in love. He was about to emigrate to America and promised to write once he'd set himself up and invite her to join him. Some years later, having made good in Texas, he wrote asking my grandmother to make the trip. He'd done very well and boasted he'd acquired "three ranchos".  However, my grandmother, having returned from her adventure, had settled with her mother and siblings in the port of Liverpool where she met Chan Chin Lee with whom she would have five children and spend the next five decades.
The opportunity she'd missed to be with Naim was something she regretted until she died. It was nobody's fault. The 1910s were a time of international strife and chaos; the disorder and uncertainty brought about by the First World War turned everyone's lives upside down. 
The Greek ship's carpenter, Ellefteris Moschona,changed his name to Nicholas,  and settled in Liverpool with my great grandmother, who'd separated from her husband. With the scent of imminent war becoming stronger by the day and foreigners in an increasingly precarious position, he decided to demand naturalization as a British subject. It was granted just ten days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on 28 June 1914. So, although her daughter's Palestinian romance was star-crossed, my great grandmother's own happiness was assured, at least for a time. Moschona died in 1926 at the age of fifty something from pneumonia leaving his English lover distraught. In his memory, her grandson born shortly afterwards was named Ellefteris Vassceloas, and thus went through life with an unpronounceable Greek name and a half-Chinese face. Even her Pekinese dogs were given Greek names: Calliope and Cosmos. So, that's the story of my boyhood Mediterranean imaginary... 
And yet, there's a little more. Recently, I was digging around in the family papers. Rejigging the jigsaw puzzle, it became apparent that things were not quite what they'd seemed. At the start of the year in which my grandmother was born, the mariner from Kasos had landed at Barry Dock, near Cardiff, and lodged with my great grandmother. My grandmother seemed never to have suspected Moschona was her father, it was never even hinted at. But now, in retrospect, that Mediterranean voyage seems less a young woman's romantic adventure, and more an unsung pilgrimage to the lands and waters of her ancestors.

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