Kevin Andrews (writer) - Traveller in The Peloponnese

Traveller in The Peloponnese

Andrews spent the long summers of 1948 to 1951 travelling around the Peloponnese, the winters writing up in Athens. His journeys and the people he met are described vividly in The Flight of Ikaros (published 1959, 1969 and 1984), "one of the great and lasting books about Greece." As this overlapped with the Greek Civil War and its aftermath, it was a time of mistrust, particularly of foreigners (and especially of one making plans and notes in the hills), but he soon gained the trust of country people on both sides of the conflict. He became friends with a shepherd in the Gerania (Γεράνεια) hills and become his child's koumbaros or member of the family and godfather. The fruit of his work, Castles of the Morea, was published in 1953 (republished in 2006).

He returned to the US only to feel an exile, after failing to get a job connected with US aid in Greece. Greece was in the process of reconstruction and the domestic politics were dominated by America, left-wing politics was banned and many activists were shot or placed in camps. During this period he met Nancy Thayer, E.E. Cummings's daughter, who was married to Kevin’'s friend Willard Roosevelt at the time. Kevin and Nancy married in 1954 and the next year moved to Europe with her first two children, eventually settling in Athens; the couple later had two children of their own, Ioanna and Alexis. In 1968 Nancy and Kevin separated, and she and her children moved to London because, according to Kevin's biographer Roger Jinkinson, "she did not want to live under the Junta nor have her children brought up in a police state"; she kept the name Nancy T. Andrews and hoped they could someday reconcile.