A Saint for the Summer

by Marjory McGinn

  “Thank you again, but it’s occurred to me … that if Angus should have bad chest pains, can’t I just call an ambulance?”

  He pulled a face. “We don’t have much of an ambulance service in general, but now in the crisis, it is another thing that has been cut back. You will be lucky to get one if you call. Don’t bother with it. Just drive your father straight to the hospital.”

  He noticed my panicked look.

  “Don’t worry, Bronte. Everything will be fine.”

  I’m in a country, I thought, with an unreliable ambulance service, looking after a man who is one pork souvlaki away from a heart attack and everything will be fine? My own heart was doing a kind of nervy salsa now. I suppose this could be one of the reasons I was here: to ferry Angus to hospital if needed. On Greek roads? I’d need more than 12 saints on the dashboard!

  The waitress brought the bill, Leonidas paid it and got up.

  “I must go back to work now. It was very nice to see you again,” he said, squeezing my shoulder lightly before he turned and strode away. It felt like a reassuring gesture, one a doctor might offer when he’s just told a patient about their incurable illness. But it was not unpleasant, of course.

  I waited for Angus, wondering what the hell he’d found to do that was suddenly so urgent. I was playing with my mobile phone when I heard the grating of metal chair legs on paving stones. Angus had returned.

  “I thought we might walk up to the old sector of the city near the Kastro, that’s the castle. There are plenty of small tavernas there, where we can have lunch and a carafe of local wine.”

  “You’re supposed to be cutting back, right?”

  “Tomorrow, pet.”

  “You’re calling me pet again.”

  “Sorry. Habit, that’s all.”

  “From when? From over 10 years ago?”

  “Let’s not start up. I didn’t ask you to come to Greece to have a rammy over the past.”

  He noticed my frown and softened his approach. “Look, we’ve got two more weeks together, so let’s enjoy it while we can. Let’s not argue.”

  “You’re supposed to be too worried about your health to enjoy yourself, aren’t you?”

  He had his arms folded over his chest. He looked defensive. “Well, we don’t have to act like we’re in mourning. I’m not dead yet.”

  “Just as well,” I replied. “Because I feel you’ve got something else planned while I’m here that you’re not owning up to.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Let’s go to that taverna I told you about. We’ll talk there.”

  So, there was something else. We trailed up Aristomenous Street, past fashionable shops, paper sellers, and one bank with a long queue snaking along the pavement outside.

  “People are trying to get their money out now in case we crash out of the Eurozone,” said Angus, as we walked around the end of the queue, where people were waiting with grim stoicism. For some odd reason I thought about my icon of Saint Dimitrios. It seemed to me that Greece could do with another caped crusader sometime soon.

  Chapter 7

  Mission improbable

  The Perdika taverna was in the historic sector of the city clustered below a ruined 14th century castle on a low hill. It had some tables outside on the pavement. Inside, a queue shuffled past a glass-fronted display of metal trays brimming with food. Angus told me this was one of the oldest, most popular tavernas in the city. It was nothing to look at inside. The only nod to the past seemed to be the stout wine barrels along the back wall.

  The food was what I had come to associate with Greece: moussaka, oven potatoes, fried fish, and mounds of boiled greens, slippery with oil. It looked wholesome and I was suddenly starving. We made our choices and decided to sit outside under a small lemon tree that offered some shade from the afternoon sun. The meal arrived, with a carafe of wine. I had salted, fried cod and a salad. Angus had a meaty casserole in tomato salsa. The wine was strong and honeyed, the bread thick but not volcanic.

  Angus refused to take up our previous discussion until we had finished our meal. “I want you to savour the moment. Be a little Greek. Enjoy the food, the atmosphere,” he said, sluicing his bread through the meaty sauce.

  By the time we’d finished our leisurely lunch, most other diners had drifted away home for their siesta. The city grew quieter: only a few shoppers trailed about with bags of food from a nearby market, a papas in his stove-pipe hat walked majestically, his robe lapping the tops of his shoes. Even the street vendors had gone. The city oozed a thick, sleepy ambience. A noisy group of diners at the next table had already gone, leaving a collection of plates, many with small portions of leftovers. Yet no-one seemed to be in a hurry to clear the mess. After a while, stray cats appeared, leaping onto the table and helping themselves.

  “I hate that about Greece, the way they let swarms of cats onto tables. It’s a filthy habit. I don’t know what’s with the waiters today. They usually clear the tables straight away,” said Angus.

  So, not everything about Greece was glorious in his mind. As we sipped the rest of our wine, a dirty ginger cat hoovered up a plate of leftover meat, eyeing Angus all the while.

  “Och, that one’s got to go!” he said, picking up a hunk of bread. With one deft movement, he threw it, hitting the cat on the head. It shrieked and leapt away. A solitary old Greek guy sitting at a nearby table shouted out, “Bravo!” Angus laughed and the two bantered for a while until the waiter finally arrived and cleared the table. Angus ordered more wine and ignored my sanctimonious look.

  “So, okay. Tell me now, why I’m really here,” I asked.

  He took a long, indulgent swig of wine and I could see how much he was enjoying it, dragging out the Greek ‘moment’.

  “Honestly, Bronte, I did ask you here because of the health issue. I kept thinking if my condition suddenly got more urgent, I might even have to pack up and get back to Scotland. Still might have to.”

  “Okay, fair enough,” I said, not believing for a minute he’d want to go back to Scotland unless he was nailed up in a box.

  “And there is something else that I need your help with. It’s to do with Kieran.”

  We both went quiet. He wasn’t looking at me. He was playing about with the salt cellar. I should have guessed all along that this summons to come to Greece had something to do with his late father Kieran, even after all these years.

  “Oh, Angus, I thought you’d exhausted the subject long ago!”

  He frowned. “I know. But I’ve come across some new information.”

  I felt a stab of disappointment − pity as well − over this endless mission.

  When Angus embarked on his ‘odyssey’ at the age of 61, it surprised many people he knew. What didn’t surprise his family, however, was that he picked Greece for this mid-life escapade. For us, Greece wasn’t just the sunny holiday magnet it is for other Brits, it was a country that had been locked into our family’s psyche since the Second World War. It had shaped our destiny, more so Angus’s.

  Just before Angus’s young mother, Lily, had found out she was pregnant, his father Kieran joined the war effort. Until then, he had worked on his parents’ Stirlingshire farm, where he and Lily also lived. He had been late in joining up because as a farmer’s son he had special dispensation to remain on the farm, all to do with the imperative of the nation producing enough food to fuel the war effort. But by the end of 1940, he had been desperate to enlist, and do his bit for his country. He enlisted in the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) and was sent first to Alexandria in Egypt and then to Greece in March 1941 − but he never returned.

  He was one of an estimated 60,000 British and allied troops in the Greek Campaign against the German invasion who had to retreat from northern and central Greece in the face of overwhelming Nazi forces. Many of these troops had ended up in the southern Peloponnese awaiting evacuation by sea and had launched a brave rear-guard action in Kalamata in late April 1941. This
became known as the Battle of Kalamata, and more chillingly, the ‘Greek Dunkirk’.

  As an RASC driver, Kieran had been caught up in this battle and had later gone missing, presumed dead. His disappearance was made all the more difficult since this was a military campaign in Greece that had not been well documented after the war. It was a campaign the British armed forces didn’t want to remember – ill-fated and badly conceived, with a tragic outcome. Not the finest moment of the Second World War.

  In 1940, Greece had been brought into the Second World War due to the Italian offensive by dictator Benito Mussolini, an ally of Adolf Hitler. Mussolini sent five heavily armed divisions over the border into Greece from Albania, which the Italians had held since 1939. In October 1940, the small but heroic Greek Army managed to drive the Italians back into Albania. However, Hitler drew up plans to invade Greece in April 1941, through Bulgaria, to achieve a hold on southern Europe in readiness for his planned invasion of Russia. Hitler sent four Panzer divisions, the Luftwaffe air force and his elite parachute corps.

  Fearing the outcome of the German invasion, the British government under Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a force from Egypt to Greece in March 1941, comprising British, ANZACs and a few thousand other Commonwealth troops. However, the Greek Campaign on the mainland had been disastrous, due to poor planning and communications, the poor state of the road system and the speed of the German offensive, with around 3,000 British and allied troops killed or wounded.

  By mid-April, as the Germans secured northern and central Greece and Athens, the allied troops were forced to retreat, engaging in a huge evacuation by sea, called Operation Demon, which began with embarkation from ports in the northern Peloponnese. As the ports came under heavy fire from the Luftwaffe, the remaining troops fled further south, ending up in Kalamata, the end of the road, awaiting evacuation by Royal Navy warships. During the seven nights of the operation, around 50,000 troops were evacuated, with 9,200 leaving from Kalamata. The operation had been fraught with difficulty at Kalamata because it had to be done under cover of darkness − due to devastating German bombing raids but with virtually no RAF cover.

  On April 28, the Germans finally entered the city in force, with the remaining allies putting up a spirited fight against them. The action was centred in the port area of the city that night, and mainly involved a small heroic band of New Zealanders who refused to heed talk of surrender. An attack was led by Sergeant Jack Hinton, armed only with grenades and a rifle but who routed out the Germans, allowing the allied force to briefly recapture the port area, with 41 Germans killed and 100 taken prisoner. He was later shot and taken prisoner himself but was awarded the Victoria Cross – the highest military honour for bravery.

  The allies fought on during the night but by morning the troops, under the command of Brigadier Leonard Parrington, surrendered to the Germans. By now the British warships had departed and around 7,800 troops were left stranded in Kalamata, many of whom would become POWs. Parrington informed the troops on April 29 that “…any officer or man is free to make his own escape”, so basically it was now every man for himself.

  Around 300 of them fled down the nearby peninsulas, looking for a means of escape to Crete by boat, 160 miles to the south. Kieran was believed to have been one of them. Some of these troops managed to get away but many were captured or killed in daily Luftwaffe raids or while in hiding. Many were reported missing in action and their remains were never found.

  The War Office had informed my grandmother Lily that Kieran had not been evacuated, or listed as a prisoner of war. He was last seen alive with some other RASC troops south of Kalamata, but where he went from there and how he died was never known. Like other families with loved ones missing in action in Kalamata, our family had been stymied by a dearth of information on this part of the Greek Campaign.

  Angus’s odyssey in Greece may have had something to do with a mid-life crisis and a personal sense of failure, but our family believed it was probably underscored by his search for closure over his father, and how and where he actually died. This had been all the more heartbreaking because of the knowledge that Kieran had apparently died not even knowing his wife Lily had been pregnant when he left for the war effort. Although Angus’s family understood his bid to find closure, what made it hard to accept finally was that the search for Kieran had gone past its logical limit, with no more useful information coming to light.

  “This quest over Kieran is just a damned excuse,” Marcella would say, “for a long mid-life romp. He’s a daft old bugger!”

  We pieced together Angus’s life in Greece from the letters he’d written home, mostly to his uncle Peter. We heard about some of his jobs, like the private English lessons he gave for a while to help to stretch the redundancy money. When Peter died two years ago, he left a small inheritance to Angus that allowed him to keep his life in Greece going a bit longer.

  Angus gave me a grim look. “I know what you’re thinking, Bronte. Why carry on with this useless search? But it’s like this. I did talk to a lot of people about the Battle of Kalamata when I first came here. I hooked up with veterans at the remembrance day held in the city every May – all of that. I started Greek classes and did some research in the library here. I got nowhere. The reason is that the Battle of Kalamata was total chaos, everyone who was left behind who wasn’t taken prisoner of war had to flee for their lives, as you know. Some veterans even believed the failure to evacuate everyone from Kalamata was hushed up by the top brass in the British armed forces because it was an organisational mess.

  “Apart from one or two fairly recent books with veterans’ accounts of the battle, which I have read, and re-read, no-one has really documented the whole thing. There is no telling exactly how many people died in the southern Peloponnese, trying to escape, as opposed to dying in POW camps or on the way there. Or where people died. Each year it gets harder to research. Each year the veterans’ numbers dwindle, with the only survivors in their 90s now. However, in the past couple of years, some veterans’ groups have started up websites and Facebook pages. I’ve seen most of them and that’s where the interesting stuff can now be found.”

  He gave me a funny look. “Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but just because I don’t like using mobiles doesn’t mean I can’t surf the net.”

  “I never said anything …. Go on then.”

  “More stories are gathered all the time and put on these sites, often by the veterans’ families. Amazing tales of bravery and hardship: men lining up in their thousands on Kalamata beach every night, waiting for the landing craft to pick them up to take them to waiting ships. Mostly it was the fighting units that got out first or the officers or signalmen, the important guys. The RASC – the drivers, mechanics and so forth – were generally among the last. There are tales of daring escapes down the Mani with soldiers looking for small boats to take them out into the gulf with the hope of being picked up by a returning warship. Some did sail from Souda Bay in Crete to the gulf for a few days after the surrender at Kalamata.

  “While I was searching one site, an account caught my eye. It was uploaded by the daughter of an English veteran called Thomas, who was also in the RASC. She had found a diary he must have written years after the war as a way to remember what happened, but she hadn’t seen it until the poor guy died early this year and she was sorting out his belongings. The account she uploaded was only a section of Thomas’s diary concerning the Battle of Kalamata, his escape attempt and capture by the Germans. He later became a POW. I’ve got a copy of his account here,” Angus said, pulling a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. He had obviously come prepared.

  “But briefly: Thomas wrote about heading down the coast with a group of mostly RASC lads looking for a boat to get to Crete. They had a few ANZACs with them, a Greek Cypriot as well, who helped them talk to locals, and a couple of Yugoslavs. They passed coves on the way, where there were scores of other allies trying to do the same thing but with little success. Finally, t
hey came to a long beach, not far from the end of the coastal road. Here they befriended a local Greek, with the Cypriot acting as an interpreter. He told them the Germans were moving down the peninsula fast and the allies would probably be rounded up before they found a seaworthy boat. He had a different idea about escaping …”

  Angus unfolded the paper and started to read: “The Greek was a farmer, as nice a bloke as you’d ever want to meet. He said he knew the mountains and they were safer. We wouldn’t get picked off as easily by the Jerries. He pointed to the mountain area, some distant peaks, high bloody things, some thick with snow. There were some villages up there, well out of sight. The Jerries wouldn’t bother us there, he told us, and then we could advance from there through the mountains, due south. I remember thinking – blimey! It would take about a week to hike up there. All the same, the Greek told us the name of one of them. None of us would have remembered one village from another with their strange Greek names but it’s funny what things stick in your mind. I remember this one because it sounded like the philosopher Plato. I had a grammar school education so it wasn’t lost on me. Platonos, I think it was. The Greek told us to head straight up from the coast through the olive groves, keeping to the northern side of a deep gorge. At the base of the mountains, there was supposed to be a track of some kind that led up to this village. Well, the boys weren’t keen and pinned their hopes on a boat, except for two of the RASC boys who were Scottish ...”

  Angus stopped for a moment, to see how I’d taken this bit of information. I deadpanned it and he continued. “These boys wanted to have a crack at it. They were used to mountain terrain I’d say. I don’t remember much about those poor lads now or their names except for the way one of them looked. Tall thin bloke with a thick head of auburn hair, good looking. A plucky sort, he was. He must have made an impression cause I still remember him to this day. We tried to talk them round, tried to tell them it was better for all of us boys to stick together, but the tall one was keen for the mountains and off they went. I never heard of either of these lads again. I guess they didn’t make it.”