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A beautiful and personal account of the time spent by Brenda Chamberlain on the Greek Island of Ydra in the early 1960's. Sea and harbor, mountain and monastery, her neighbors and friends are unforgettably pictured; these were the reality outside herself while within there was a conflict of emotion and warring desires which is also vividly brought to life. Joy and woe are woven fine in this record: the delight of a multitude of fresh experiences thronging to the senses, the suffering from which she emerges with new understanding of herself and human existence.
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Brenda Chamberlain was born in Bangor in 1912. In 1931 she went to train as a painter at the Royal Academy Schools in London and five years later, after marrying the artistcraftsman John Petts, settled near the village of Llanllechid, near Bethesda in Caernarfonshire. During the Second World War, while working as a guide searching Snowdonia for lost aircraft, she temporarily gave up painting in favour of poetry and worked, with her husband, on the production of the Caseg Broadsheets, a series of six which included poems by Dylan Thomas, Alun Lewis and Lynette Roberts. In 1947, her marriage ended, she went to live on Bardsey (Ynys Enlli), a small island off the tip of the Llyn Peninsula, where she remained until 1961. After six years on the Greek island of Ydra, she returned to Bangor. She died in North Wales in 1971. She described the rigours and excitements of her life on Bardsey in Tide-race (1962) and the island also inspired many of her paintings. Her book of poems, The Green Heart (1968), contains work reflecting her life in Llanllechid, on Bardsey and in Germany where she had an unhappy relationship with a man she met before the war. Her experiences in Germany are also portrayed in her novel The Water Castle (1964). A Rope of Vines was published in 1965. a rope of vines Journal from a Greek Island brenda chamberlain L I B R A R Y O F W A L E S Parthian The Old Surgery Napier Street Cardigan SA43 1ED www.parthianbooks.co.uk The Library of Wales is a Welsh Assembly Government initiative which highlights and celebrates Wales’ literary heritage in the English language. Published with the financial support of the Welsh Books Council. The Library of Wales publishing project is based at Trinity College, Carmarthen, SA31 3EP. www.libraryofwales.org Series Editor: Dai Smith First published in 1965 © The Estate of Brenda Chamberlain Library of Wales edition 2009 Foreword © Shani Rhys-James 2009 All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-1-905762-86-6 Cover design: www.theundercard.co.uk Cover image: The Fisherman’s Return by Brenda Chamberlain © Estate of Brenda Chamberlain with kind permission of the National Museum of Wales Printed and bound by Gwasg Gomer, Llandysul, Wales Typeset by Lucy Llewellyn British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A cataloguing record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. L I B R A R Y O F W A L E S Foreword I was on the island of Venice for the Venice Biennale in 2007, at the Welsh exhibition party on the Giudecca. I was asked whether I knew the ink drawings that Brenda Chamberlain drew on the Greek island of Ydra in her biographical journal A Rope of Vines. I did not. I knew little about her although I had heard that she lived for a time on Bardsey, the island of Enlli: an island I had also visited once. There are only certain times when the weather is suitable for crossing to Bardsey, and on the day we went I had a migraine. As we approached, the sea was filled with the bo