To Kythera

'Who hasn’t longed to run away?’ asks Susan Johnson at the beginning of this memoir-cum-travel book about her time on the Greek island of Kythera. It is a question that invites a show of hands. Fewer people, however, might be inclined to bring their mothers with them.

Johnson’s plan is to spend time with her widowed mother, Barbara, while working as a writer in a place she has longed to revisit since her early twenties. For her, Kythera, mythical birthplace of the goddess Aphrodite, is a sweep of sky and rock and ‘singing light’ surrounded by a sea of an ‘exultant’ blue, and she is eager for Barbara to love it as much as she does. And so, Johnson writes, the two women set off on their adventure with light hearts.

This mutual exuberance doesn’t last much beyond the first chapter. It is soon clear that mother and daughter carry very different baggage, starting with their attitude to travel. Johnson, who has lived in many places over the years, presents herself as eager to embrace different places and cultures. Barbara has also travelled, but always as a company wife, on business trips with her husband. According to her daughter she is incurious, a woman for whom Goondiwindi and Uzbekistan have as much resonance as Kythera. There are other differences. Johnson has a bawdy sense of humour; her mother disapproves of jokes about sex. Johnson has rejected religion; Barbara is a devout churchgoing Anglican who rejects her daughter’s invitation to attend an Easter service with a prim, ‘It’s not our Easter.’