The Minister, the Underwear, and the Improbable Life of my Mother Anthoula

Mama's ID photo in her early 20s

My mother stood on a stranger’s doorstep in Athens, clutching a paper bag containing twelve pairs of underwear, and wept.

This was not how the weekend was supposed to end. The Big Smoke—as Athens seemed to my mother, fresh from her village in the south of Crete—had swallowed her whole. Somewhere between her relatives’ apartment and the nursing residence, the city’s labyrinthine streets had rearranged themselves into an impossible puzzle. She was lost, thoroughly and completely, with nothing but her provincial certainty and those twelve sensible undergarments to her name.

But here’s what you need to understand about my mother: she was a war child who had buried a father, outlasted the Nazis, and convinced a village teacher to open an entire night school just for her. Getting lost in Athens was merely Tuesday.

So she did what any practical woman would do. She scanned the street, assessed her options with the calculating eye of someone who’d learned early that survival rewards the bold, and knocked on the door of the most impressive house she could find. “Surely”, she reasoned with that particular logic that had carried her through impossible circumstances, “nobody in such a beautiful house would harm an innocent girl like me”.

The door opened. A well-dressed man stood there, radiating the kind of authority that comes from actually having it. My mother—and let me tell you, my mother is a “storyteller”, the kind who can evoke the high drama from her theatrical widow’s role back in 1950  as it was yesterday—unleashed her tale. The shopping expedition. The confidence. The labyrinth. The underwear (twelve pairs, as required by the residence). The fear.

The man’s face transformed. Not at her—oh no, not at this tearful girl on his doorstep—but at the nursing school’s residential director who had sent young provincial women into the urban wilderness without proper safeguards. Their families had trusted the school to keep them safe!

Because this man, standing in his doorway on a Sunday afternoon, was the Minister of Health himself.

In all of Athens—that sprawling, indifferent metropolis—my lost mother had somehow found the one door that could not just help her, but reshape her entire trajectory. The Minister escorted her back personally, in his ministerial car, with his chauffeur, and apparently delivered such a blistering lecture to the residence director that my mother enjoyed exceptional care for the remainder of her training.

This was not luck. Or rather, it was luck of the kind that seems to find people who refuse to surrender to circumstance.

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Mama as an infant with her parents and older brother, 1938

Let me take you back, because no story exists without its context, and my mother’s context was war and poverty and the casual cruelty of a world that believed girls didn’t need education.

She was born in 1938 into a rural Crete under Nazi occupation, one of eight children in a family stretched thin by war and resistance. Her father helped the resistance with taking to safety the allied forces soldiers stranded after the Battle of Crete, which meant their lives balanced on the knife’s edge of discovery. There was never much to spare—not food, not safety, not futures.

My mother was weeks from finishing school when her father pulled her out. He needed hands to harvest wheat. “Anyway,” he said, “she is a girl. She does not need an education.”

Those words. As if her mind, her hunger for learning, her entire potential could be dismissed with a shrug and the accident of her gender. When he died of cancer not long after, my mother’s options narrowed from slim to nearly invisible.

But then—because this is a story about serendipity and stubbornness in equal measure—a miracle. The village elders announced a position: a practical nurse for the village clinic. They needed a young woman they could train. A short stint at the island’s main hospital to learn the basics, then she’d return to serve her community.

My mother’s family might have been in dire straits, but their name carried weight. In that time and place, your family’s reputation was your résumé, your reference letter, your entire credential. They chose her.

Suddenly, this orphaned girl with no school certificate was elevated. A civil servant with a regular salary! In the 1950s, this meant everything: stability, respect, the chance to better yourself. And crucially, money to support her younger siblings who needed education and dowries.

She threw herself into training with the fervour of someone who understood there was no margin for error. How does a girl with incomplete formal education become a nurse? Through sheer, bloody-minded determination. She learned. She memorized. She asked questions. She ‘willed’ herself competent.

Back in the village, she rode a horse—a gift from her elder brother, better than any car for crossing rivers and muddied fields—accompanying doctors on their rounds through the rural community. She was finding her vocation, this work that would eventually make her name synonymous with nursing care across the entire region. Simply say “Ms. Anthoula,” and people would know.

And then the directive came.

Only school graduates could qualify for nursing training and practice.

In one bureaucratic stroke, her dream collapsed. Just as she’d found her calling, it was being ripped away—again—by that same casual dismissal: she’s just a girl without proper education.

But fate, or design, or perhaps just the universe’s recognition that my mother was too stubborn to be defeated, intervened once more.

She was on her community rounds, visiting a nearby hamlet, when she found herself pouring out her misfortune to the local teacher. Through tears, she told him what had happened.

The teacher had received his own directive: selected provincial schools could offer night programs, for a limited time, to help people earn their qualifications. He hadn’t planned to open one; he had no candidates.

“I’ll open it,” he declared, “just for you.”

Mama as an apprentice nurse, late 1950s

So my mother, after full days of nursing work, would mount her horse and gallop through the darkness to that nearby village. Night after night, learning what she’d been denied, claiming the education that had been called unnecessary. There were risks—a young single woman traveling at night, her reputation vulnerable to gossip—but relatives offered harbour and protection, another small miracle in a life made of them.

She earned her certificate. Which meant she could go to Athens for the formal nursing program.

Which is how she ended up lost on a Sunday afternoon, underwear in hand, knocking on the Minister of Health’s door.

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As my mother has grown older and memory has become more selective, she has been repeating certain stories with increasing frequency. Some I have grown tired of hearing. But the story of the Minister coming to her rescue? I never tire of that one.

Because it wasn’t really about the improbability—though that was astounding—or even the rescue itself. It was about what it represented: confirmation that she was on the right path. ‘Her’ path, the one she’d had to fight and scheme and weep and gallop through darkness to claim.

My mother used to tell me, when I was young and making excuses: “There is no ‘I can’t,’ there is only ‘I will not.’”

Her life was testament to that philosophy. Resilience, resourcefulness, an unquenchable hunger for learning, a determination to better herself despite every odd stacked against her. She was a war child who became a healer, an orphan who became essential, a girl dismissed as not needing education who made herself indispensable.

The universe kept opening doors for her—sometimes literal doors, answered by Ministers of Health—but only because she kept knocking. Lost in Athens with twelve pairs of underwear and an impossible dream, she looked at the biggest, most beautiful house on the street and thought: ‘Surely they’ll help me’.

And they did. Because sometimes serendipity is just another word for refusing to accept that the story ends where others say it should.

My mother, Ms. Anthoula, whose name alone was enough to know who was meant—she knew that better than anyone.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​