Library of Wales: A Rope of Vines - Journal from a Greek Island

Brenda Chamberlain was born at 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 artist-craftsman 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 Emlli), 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; it was there, depressed and with financial problems, she died from an overdose of sleeping tablets 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 Watercastle (1964). A Rope of Vines was published in 1965.

A Rope of Vines Journal from a Greek Island is 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 harbour, mountain and monastery, her neighbours and friends are unforgettably pictured; these were the reality outside herself while within there was a conflict of emotion and warring desires. 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. Both in the intensity and force of the writing and the eloquent island drawings, A Rope of Vines Journal from a Greek Island is a distinguished achievement.