Text copyright © Bernard Ashley 2011
The right of Bernard Ashley to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988 (United Kingdom).
First published in Great Britain and in the USA in 2011 by
Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 4 Torriano Mews,
Torriano Avenue, London NW5 2RZ
www.franceslincoln.com
With thanks to Iris Ashley, Gullë Stubbs and Litsa Worrall
for their help in researching this book
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-84780-055-8
Set in Palatino
Printed in Croydon, Surrey, UK by CPI Bookmarque in January 2011
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
For Spiros, Makis, Dimitris and Poppy Karaviotis,
Gerasimos Razis-Galiatsatos and Anna-Maria Simpson
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Copyright
Chapter One
Shakings and tremblings beneath his feet were as normal a part of life as the hot sun in the summer, goats on the hillside, and shoals of silver atherina in the sea. Makis had always known the rumble of the earth, when for a few seconds the land would move like a slight swell under his father’s boat. He was used to getting out of his mother’s way when he heard a pot crash because someone had put it too close to the edge of a shelf. Whenever he felt the ground begin to shake, he knew how to stand firm, with his feet apart; and if it went on for more than a few seconds, he knew to run outside – or if he couldn’t, to get beneath a door frame, or crawl under a bed. He knew that the walls wouldn’t wobble all that much, and that while one village had its walnuts shaken from the trees, another village might feel nothing at all. This was life. People on his Greek island of Kefalonia still talked of the horrors of the two wars they had lived through – World War II, and the Greek civil war – but no one talked much about the perpetual war between two tectonic plates deep beneath the Ionian Sea.
So when the earthquake struck that August morning, he wasn’t too bothered. At first.
The village of Alekata was made up of ten or so one-storey houses, a small church, and a kafenío where the men drank coffee, the buildings all lying along a narrow road above St Thomas’s Bay, between the ferry at Pesada and the wide beach at Lourdháta. It was ten kilometres on Makis’s father’s motorbike from the island capital, Argostoli, where he moored his fishing boat; and with the goats, the olive grove, the walnut trees and the constant sound of the sea, it was home to Spiros, Sophia, and Makis Magriotis. The house might tremble a bit, but it never suffered more than cracked plaster or a fallen vase. It had walls of local rock fifteen centimetres thick, with strong oak beams and a roof of solid, interlocked red tile.
But there had been rumbles for a couple of days, as if a restless underground giant was shifting in his sleep. Adults had begun looking at one other with knowing faces, nodding seriously as they talked in low voices. Makis and his friends knew what all that was about. So many small tremors so close together could be the giant Poseidon waking up to a wall-shaker. His father knew a song about it, which Makis and his mother used to sing with him, sitting under an olive tree at sunset: Sofia mending clothes, Makis reading a book, his father Spiros plucking the strings of his mandolin.
‘When the ground beneath begins to shake
Beware, beware, beware:
The giant below has stomach-ache
Beware, beware, beware.’
The first word of something more serious came from Sami, the ferry port on the east coast. In Alekata the tremors had been slight, but buildings had fallen in the east – and the faces of the adults began to look the way they had during the wartime troubles. Things could be working up to something big.
That Tuesday morning, Makis’s father brought in his Monday night catch to the Argostoli quayside. There weren’t many boxes of fish to unload, not even of the common silver atherina. The sea had been agitated the night before, the lantern at the boat’s stern had twitched like a sprite, and the fish had been nervous.
It was a school holiday, so back at home Makis caught and milked the goats – but they were skittish, and somehow the milk seemed thin. In the kitchen, Sofia was mixing red wine with oil to sprinkle over a horiátiki salad. When Spiros was back from Argostoli the three of them would eat together.
But he never came.
Finished with the goats, Makis went through to his bedroom to find a towel for a swim in St Thomas’s Bay, but as he grabbed it off the chair, his world suddenly collapsed on him. The earth went crazy, the wildly shaking floor threw him off his feet, a terrifying wind howled through the house, and deep beneath him a monstrous thundering roared. There was no time to run outside to the safest place. Shattering into mosaic pieces, the plastered walls fell in upon him, the blue shutters banged off their hinges, the beams lurched, and the ceiling disintegrated as the roof came crashing down.
Makis screamed and rolled frantically under his bed, shaking with fear for almost the full minute that the earth quaked, curled like a hedgehog, covering his head with his arms. Then came a stillness, no sound but that terrifying wind, and no sight but a choking grey dust screening the sunlight coming in through the gaping roof.
Makis was fighting to breathe, drowning in dust. And again the ground shivered. Fallen doorways and broken furniture creaked, and from somewhere outside he heard his mother’s voice: ‘Makis! Makis!’ It was muffled, as if she was far away.
‘Mama!’ he croaked.
‘Lie still! Don’t bring down more! I’ll get to you…’
And Makis knew that lie still was all he could do. His bed was covered by wall and ceiling and roof. He’d have to tunnel out from here, or do as he was told and wait to be rescued. The dust seemed to be settling. A good coughing and spitting relieved the tops of his lungs; and in a new state of fear he prayed, and lay as still as he could.
At last he heard his mother coming, nearer and nearer, stone by lifted stone. Beams were shifted and tiles thrown. He heard a man’s voice, too, but it was not his father’s – it sounded more like the priest. They seemed to take forever getting to him. But Makis knew that they could easily bring more of the building down. His father had told him that rescue from an earthquake had to be as planned and delicate as a hospital operation.
Finally, lifting the roof beam that was pressing hard down upon his bed, the priest gently but firmly pulled Makis out by his feet.
Still shielding his head, Makis coughed up powdered Kefalonian rock. He couldn’t even get his breath to kiss his mother ‘Thank-you!’ But he was alive, and uninjured; and she was, too. Now they had to find out what injuries his
father had sustained.
But Spiros Magriotis was dead. While Father Ioannis sent Makis and a village girl, Katarina, into the shade of the olive grove, Sofia ran to Argostoli, along the cleaved and cracking road that Spiros would be trying to ride on his motorbike. But he didn’t come; and as she searched the waterfront and found his scuppered boat with no sign of him, she ran into the town that stood no more. Fine Venetian buildings were strewn across the roads and the main square; the sewers stank where they had burst, and rescue still went on for people trapped, and for the removal of bodies. It was a place of scream and wail and sudden silence when a whistle blew to listen for sounds of life.
Sofia ran inland to where Spiros usually went delivering fish, to the Mandolino restaurant. But that had fared badly – and she was called by a shop-keeper she knew to a collapsed building in nearby Kabanas Square – to have a sheet lifted before her, and to see a terrible sight that she would never forget.
No village, no home – and no father any more. That Tuesday morning Makis’s life changed from routine and security to an existence where nothing shocked him, and anything could happen. His father was dead. Three of his village friends were dead. The boat was in splinters on Argostoli waterfront and the house a pile of rubble. That night, he and his mother slept with the goats. But at least she was here. She had run outside when the first wind howled, not realising that Makis was in the house. And thank goodness she hadn’t been cooking in her kitchen! A mother in the village had been burned alive when their gas cylinder exploded.
For the first few days they lived in what they’d been wearing when the earthquake struck. It was the same for everyone. They herded the scattered goats, drank their milk, and on the third night slaughtered a ram to cook over a fire made from salvaged wood. It was August, so the nights weren’t cold; but the chill Makis and his mother felt as they slept under the olives was the coldness of death: of Spiros, father and husband, claimed by what people called an act of God. To which Sofia shook her head, and spat, ‘You mean an act of the Devil.’
Help came. A British ship in the area brought sailors and a field hospital and fresh food and water. This was quickly followed by other naval vessels, and villages of tents were set up for the thousands of homeless. Wheelbarrows and carts carried relief along the roads and the tracks where cracks and great holes stopped vehicles from driving; and the churches sanctified nearly six hundred burials, so that gradually their part of the island lost the sickening stench of the dead. But what were Makis and his mother to do with their lives? Makis’s only grandparent – whom they rarely saw – lived away north in Fiskardo; she could not support them. Without the boat there could be no fishing. In any case, Sofia was no fisherman; and Makis was too young. Like thousands of others on the island, their way of life had ended. Beautiful Venetian buildings had collapsed into the same common rubble as humble village homes, or stood like decayed teeth in the town’s jaw. There was no government building or Mandolino restaurant in Argostoli because there was no Argostoli. There was no Alekata village, either, no church, and no kafenio where the men might drink coffee and plan for the future. And although Makis had learnt to play the mandolin from his father, he had no heart to sing Spiros’s folk songs. Everything special about the island of Kefalonia had gone.
So it was no surprise to Makis when his mother told him she had taken up an offer from the Greek government to go abroad, to start life again in some other country. And because the first ship to help had been the Daring from England, when given the choice for this ship or that, she chose for them both to go to London. Some of Makis’s friends went to New York, some to the Greek mainland. Instead, a month after the life-changing earthquake, Sofia and Makis Magriotis boarded the ship for England, and Tilbury Dock, and a Greek-speaking part of north London called Camden Town.
Chapter Two
It was as gloomy as a cave. When Makis looked up out of the window, all he could see were the bottoms of black railings, the tops of the houses opposite, and the grey sky. Ninety-seven Georgiana Street in Camden Town was no Kefalonian house. It didn’t stand alone – it was squeezed in a long terrace – and their part of it was almost under the ground, down a flight of stairs from a door in the hallway. Because the small concrete yard at the back was not theirs to use, Makis and his mother couldn’t just walk out into the daylight, the way they could in Alekata: it was up the stairs, along the hall, through the front door and out into the street. And far from being warmed by the sunshine of their island, the house was as full of coldness as the ice room at Argostoli market. But their kitchen did have cold running water, which meant no bucket-carrying from a well – one small consolation for being in this English dungeon.
Some of the other residents acted as if these earthquake refugees were lucky to be lodging there. On the top floor, an old woman in black lived alone with her sewing machine, and if ever Makis met her in the hallway, she’d stand against the wall with an arm round her bundle of work as if a look from him was going to dissolve all her stitches. On the ground floor were Mr and Mrs Papadimas. The man worked at Lawford Wharf on the canal, and his wife was a bossy forewoman in Daphne Dresses round the corner in Selous Street. Both were Greek-Cypriots, but they might as well have been Turks, going by the friendship they showed. Daphne Dresses was the clothing company that was helping Sofia and Makis to settle by giving Sofia a job as an apprentice machinist; but however welcoming most of the other women in the factory might be, Mrs Papadimas wasn’t of their kind. She was a woman with a voice like a cracking beam, who’d kept her own bits and pieces down there in the basement before they came – so now she acted as if the Magriotises had deliberately caused the earthquake that had forced her to give up her downstairs space.
Pleasanter sounds came from the middle floor. Walking home from school, Makis could hear piano music and singing and violin coming through the windows. But Mrs Papadimas told him there was to be no noise from children because Mr Laliotis worked in an orchestra at the BBC. He needed to practise in peace, and his wife gave piano lessons in the house. Makis thought it would have been nice, bumping into people who played their instruments as well as his father had done, but Mr and Mrs Papadimas lived on the floor between them, and stared accusingly if Makis or his mother hovered in the passage between the doors.
No longer did Makis go to school on the bus, the way he had in Argostoli. Although the Camden Town school was a long walk away, it was not on a direct route. And after school there was no father to grip him by the arm and say, as he always had when he met him with his motorbike, ‘My clever son. Tell me how you made this dunce from Assos proud.’
The schools nearer the house were full, and Imeson Street School had few Greek-speaking children in it, and not much understanding of Greek ways. There was no translating English words for Makis there, no gentle introduction to the English language. He had to sit at the back of the class, and most of what the teacher said was a mystery, what was in the textbooks just marks on the page. He sat next to a girl who snivelled all the time, so she was no help; and the teacher who set about teaching him to read in English was in the infants’ school, where for an hour a day he had to sit with six-year-olds. And to add to everything, there was a Greek-Cypriot boy called Costas who went round telling everyone that Makis Magriotis smelt of goats.
The school was big, too – three storeys high, reaching up like St George’s Castle near Perátáta. With its thick walls, from inside the building the outside world seemed far away. But on Makis’s third day sunshine spread itself across the playground. Out of pity one of the boys in his class picked him for the dinnertime football match. One team’s goal was painted on the wall of the boys’ lavatories, and the other was between two posts of the wooden fence at the far side of the playground. No one wore anything special for the game – they all knew who was on which side; and the ball wasn’t a real football, it was a scuffy little tennis ball. But Makis soon found that the game was real enough. Even if he had to run round people who weren’t playing, and
even if there were no throw-ins – just bounces off the walls and fences – in their heads everyone was playing in a stadium. It was real, and it was as serious as the Olympics.
Makis had never been a footballer in Kefalonia. He had fished and swum and wrestled the horns of the biggest goats; but his village had been on a sloping hillside, so playing football on a pitch had never been possible. But he found that he wasn’t bad at the game. He was put at the back of the team, to defend: but as the game went on he found himself moving further and further up the pitch; and when the ball came to him, instead of thumping it down the playground like a defender, he kept it at his feet and tricked it round an opponent before he passed to someone who was shouting, ‘Mak!’
There was no half-time; they didn’t change ends in these dinnertime games; but about halfway through, the boy who’d picked him – David Sutton from the top class – sent someone back to defend in his place and pushed Makis forward. ‘Inside-right,’ he said – which Makis didn’t understand, but when he ran to stand just behind the forwards on the right hand side, Sutton put his thumbs up, as if to say, ‘Stay there.’ And at the end of the game, when the going-in bell went, Makis got a slap on the back that nearly floored him. ‘Good game!’ Suddenly he started to feel he belonged.
When the same teams fitted in a quick match during afternoon playtime, he was put at inside-right from the start, and again he did well. In fact, the headmaster, who was on playground duty, joined in the game, and as Mr Hersee was bringing the ball out from near the goal to make a run across the playground, Makis tackled, and robbed him neatly.
‘Lucky bounce,’ the man said.
‘Thank you,’ Makis replied, as he passed the ball up to David Sutton.
It was hard to take that happy feeling home with him. His mother, who’d been ruler of the house in Alekata, seemed lost in London. She said the electric sewing machines at the factory were too fast; a slightly-too-heavy touch on the pedal sent everything rumpling on to the floor in a tangle of cloth and thread. The factory talk was of London things, or of Cyprus, and the jokes were rude; while all the time the overseers wanted more and more ‘pieces’ to come off the production line faster and faster.
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