Peel Me a Lotus – Charmian Clift’s Love Letter to Hydra
Monday, 22 December 2025
No question, a highlight of my 2025 travels was my visit to the Greek island of Hydra. I definitely should have read Charmian Clift’s Peel Me a Lotus, her love letter to Hydra, before my visit, but no problem, it worked equally well reading it back home in Australia, where Charmian was from.
Charmian’s luminous book tracks the months from February to October 1956 as she and her husband George Johnston, with their two children and a third about to arrive, buy and renovate a house on the island of Hydra and set out to make their lives there as writers. Her book was finished, and submitted to publishers, in early 1957, but it was not published in Britain until 1959 and remarkably it has never had a US edition although Amazon will certainly sell you a copy in the US.
The problem is this is ‘50s Greece, down and dirty. If you wanted to live there you could do without air-conditioning. Or running water, you pumped water from the well in front of your house and carried it upstairs to the water tank. A travel book? You wanted the sanitised, cruise ship (even in the ‘50s) international travel version. Not the reality of life which Charmian so wonderfully writes about. Soon other trail blazers would be turning up, including Leonard Cohen who arrived in Hydra in 1960 and stayed at first with Charmian and George, until he found his own house.
▲ I tracked down their house when I visited Hydra – and Leonard Cohen’s house too – but for me the most remarkable thing (forget air-con, running water and other mod-cons, all on tap today) was that Hydra in 2025, 69 years later, was just as wonderful as they found it all those years earlier. It was recognisably the same place. Although tragically I read her book with tears in my eyes because, after they left Hydra, things went so desperately wrong for the couple and their children. Check the Guardian article ‘Bohemian tragedy: Leonard Cohen and the curse of Hydra’ for the sad story of life post-Hydra.
◄ If you want more on Hydra then turn to Paul Genoni & Tanya Dalziell’s Half the Perfect World – subtitled Writers, Dreamers & Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964. The cover features Charmian Clift, George Johnston, Marianne Ihlen and Leonard Cohen. Clift and Johnston’s ‘Australian House’ was the gathering place for Hydra’s expat art colony, Leonard Cohen reported that the Australians ‘drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration.’
