Anthony's mailed postcards

Anthony's mailed postcards are the first objects through which Ellie Thomas begins to imagine Greece as somewhere she might belong, rather than a distant picture. Sent to her home under the ambiguous signature A, they accumulate into a vivid, incomplete map: one that makes her want to travel, then gives the silence after their arrival a force of its own.

Arrival and Accumulation

The cards arrive addressed to S. Ibbotson, a name Ellie does not recognise. Their sender is unknown and signs only with an A; nothing else has arrived for the addressee during the three years Ellie has lived in her flat in Kensal Rise. Since the cards cannot be returned to a known sender, she keeps them rather than throw them away.

She pins them to a large corkboard that had previously been useful only for an occasional shopping list and a scrap of paper bearing her National Insurance number. Week by week, the postcards become a mosaic, predominantly blue and white: skies, sea, boats, whitewashed buildings with blue shutters, and sometimes the Greek flag. The board turns a collection of stray mail into a persistent presence in her home.

The names on the cards extend that presence beyond their pictures. Methoni, Nafplio, Kalamata, Kalavrita and Kosmas take on a musical quality for Ellie, even before she knows them as places she might visit. When three cards arrive together one April, she finds an old atlas, tears out a page, pins it beside the postcards and marks the locations, following the writer's journey. Preveza and Meteora become part of this hand-made map as well.

From Pictures to a Journey

The postcards offer only glimpses. Their writer points out that pictures cannot transmit the scents or sounds of Greece, but the limitation does not blunt their effect: the country, still unvisited by Ellie, becomes part of her life. As the cards continue to come, she falls in love with the imagined place and longs for its light and colour.

That longing gathers force against the conditions of her everyday life. During winter, Ellie leaves for work before dawn and returns at seven; the curtains remain closed, and even spring does not seem to bring the sunlight inside. Her job selling advertising space in a trade magazine has never fulfilled her hopes of entering publishing. In the evenings and spare hours, she looks up images and information about Greece. The postcards offer a destination beyond the West End and beyond the life she had expected after moving from Cardiff to London.

Then the arrivals stop. During August, Ellie checks her pigeonhole each morning and feels disappointed when it is empty. After visiting her parents in Cardiff, she returns to London and realises it has been more than a month since the card from Ikaria. Back in the flat, she sees that the postcards have begun to curl on the pinboard, although their colours remain bright. Their imagined blue skies prompt her to test whether the real light will match them. She checks her passport, finds a cheap flight to Athens, and books a week near Nafplio. The choice is spontaneous, yet feels to her as if the cards had planted it months earlier.

The Picture and the Place

The postcards establish an ideal of Greece through bright colour, sea and sun, but Ellie's journey complicates the idea that a beautiful view guarantees a welcoming experience. Near Lamia, she visits a fishing village that seems almost too picturesque: a sheltered harbour, colourful boats, a sandy cove, pine trees by the water and old olive trees on the hillsides. Yet the residents show little interest in visitors. There is no sun lotion, straw hats or postcards for sale, and no accommodation or signs advertising rooms. In the restaurants, locals dismiss her requests for a table; dinner is served reluctantly.

The encounter makes the postcard image an unreliable measure of hospitality. The village is visually beautiful, but Ellie feels unwelcome and conspicuously alone. Later, in a modest two-star hotel in a workaday town, the owner cheerfully offers her another espresso and asks about her travels. Against the village's polished scenery and chilly reception, this ordinary welcome shows that the lived meaning of a place cannot be read from its appearance alone.

What the Cards Set in Motion

When Ellie later explains the postcards to Anthony, she describes how she pinned them up at home and how much they meant to her. She tells him that when they stopped coming, she decided she had to go herself. The cards' significance lies not only in their images, but in the chain they set in motion: keeping the unexplained mail leads to following its locations on an atlas, and following those locations leads Ellie onto the road.

By the time she returns to Athens after forty weeks of travel and decides to stay, Ellie has stopped sending postcards of her own. The distinction matters: Anthony's cards first draw her towards Greece through images, while her eventual decision to remain is grounded in a life she has experienced directly. They are an invitation, not a complete account of the country—and the gap between the two is where Ellie's journey begins.