As I observe the ideological civil war now raging in the UK, along with the disintegration of the political system into a fascist dictatorship, I'm reminded of the original reason why my dad had decided, in the late 1960s, that it was time for all of us to leave Greece, and to start a new life in a land with a more mature democratic system.

The German occupation of Greece, from 1941 - 1944, had never covered the whole country. Almost 30% of the Greek countryside had remained firmly in the hands of the Communist Party, who formed the only credible national resistance. Whereas famine stalked the big cities, in the "liberated" areas of the countryside famine was averted by compulsory land reform and, (put simply), a fair sharing of whatever was available.

It certainly didn't help matters that the departing German troops, in October 1944, had taken with them everything that could be moved, including all livestock, and had simply blown up everything that couldn't be moved.

After Germany's defeat, Winston Churchill was obsessed with preventing Greece from joining the Eastern Bloc of Socialist States. Along with the United States' Air Force (which first used the naphthalene/palm oil mixture known as napalm against Greek Communists, from 1945 - 1949), British troops were sent to defeat the Communist Party of Greece. The Civil War, which raged from 1945 - 1949, resulted in total victory for a Royalist/Far Right government which went on to govern the country for the next thirty years.

Any guerrillas of the Communist Party of Greece who had failed to escape to neighbouring countries were arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. This actually meant that ordinary people who had joined the ranks of the Communists simply to fight against German occupation, now found themselves branded as criminals !

Groups of these Communist "lifers" were, now and again, released, in dribs and drabs, but the fact remains that well into the 1960s there were STILL hundreds of men and women languishing inside Greek prisons, whose only crime, apparently, had been that they had fought against the German occupation of the early 1940s !

Political development in postwar Greece was stunted and lopsided until the 1980s. I can definitely remember that the political divide, between far right and far left, broke apart almost every family, and you had to choose your friends carefully.