It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  He brought the excavator the next afternoon and began to dig between the stairs and the olive tree. He stood at the controls in his tank driver’s hat, naked to the waist, peering through the windscreen over the top of the hydraulic arm. He shouted encouragement to the sharp metal teeth as the machine bucked and groaned and gasped blue smoke. After a metre he was through the topsoil and biting into soft, ochre rock.

  I stood at the side of the pit peering for a gush of spring water, a trickle of moisture, patches of damp, but the rock remained dry. At four and a half metres, which was the limit of the machine, we gave up.

  ‘So much for Aristotle,’ I said to Barba Vasilis later as we gazed down into the hole.

  ‘Did you believe there was water there?’ he asked. ‘Did you really believe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what are you complaining about? Believe in nothing, lose nothing,’ he counselled and polished his nails on a lapel.

  Sea stories

  It was warm enough to swim, not for Greeks of course but for anyone used to British beaches. Driving over the hills behind the house, from the top you can see miles along the cliffs and craggy headlands facing the open Aegean. This is a wild coast, open to deep-sea rollers, with few safe ports or beaches. In summer the Melteme from the north whips up white horses and brings cool sea breezes into bays like those around Limanaki, the little harbour, where we are going now. The dirt road winds down the mountain to the mouth of a ravine, a reedy river, a beach and a village in the middle of a wide, sheltered bay. It is a lovely place, spoiled only when we were there by us and the orange blob of our camper.

  About a kilometre out to sea in the mouth of the bay is the little island of Gameela. This is an Arabic word via Turkish and means both camel and beautiful, which says something about Bedouin aesthetics. It is narrow and steep-sided and does look a bit like a sleeping camel, complete with hairy hump.

  When we first came to the bay there were two dozen little stone houses along the shore. They were shaded by tsitsifies, jujube trees, which look like olives and thrive on salty air and brackish water. Men dragged their boats up onto the beach when they came back in the morning and mended the nets in the afternoon. They went out every night except when the moon was full and fish swam to the moonlight instead of the gas lights in the bows of their boats. Women sat outside the front doors of their houses spinning wool with distaff and spindle or working at looms in the shade inside. They did not wear the Evia yellow scarf but solid black, because of a boating disaster when a dozen children on a school picnic drowned in 1922 or because all the men were lost in the Melteme in 1895 or because in 1823 the Turks took away the women whose husbands joined the War of Independence. It depended on whom you asked.

  Twice a day a bus lurched down the potholed road to take children to the school in Lepoura. Once a day when there was no full moon a truck came down for the catch. Once a month a BP diesel truck drove onto the beach to refill a communal fuel tank by the water’s edge. When it got stuck in the sand, all the boats were hitched to the back and thrashed the water to foam while the truck whisked up the sand in a tug of war, which somehow gave the wheels enough traction to escape.

  When we bought our house the place was beginning to be discovered by Greeks from Halkida and Athens. They were not interested in swimming or sunbathing. They thought that lying around in the sun with no clothes on was madness and swimming was for catching seafood. The main purpose of tourism, and of almost everything else in life, was to eat. To cater for them Kyria Sofia had built a concrete terrace round the jujubes in front of her house for a dozen tables and chairs. The menu was salad, chips and whatever her husband brought back in the morning. The kitchen consisted of two gas rings and a charcoal grill, on which she produced some of the finest meals we have ever eaten. She had also built an extension at the back for three simple rooms. This is where we stayed at the weekends while we were doing up the house.

  Kyria Sofia provided one of my most memorable meals. It was pouring with rain, so I couldn’t do anything at the house. I was out of books and didn’t feel like getting sucked into an ouzo session in Yannis’s café. I had exhausted the wet-weather charms of Aliveri the day before. I drove down to Limanaki, expecting no more than a morose walk along the beach before I went back to bed for the afternoon.

  Walking past Kyria Sofia’s taverna, I saw her through the glass doors and went to wish her good day. Her two children had just come back on the bus from school. The three of them were sitting draped in blankets in the middle of the room around a pot-bellied stove that barely took the chill off the air. She waved me over to sit down with them.

  On her lap was a loaf of bread, on one side of her a plastic flagon of wine and on the other a basket with gopes, the cheapest and least prized of all the white fish. It was all that her husband had come home with that morning. There were just enough to make a decent meal for them, but there was no question of not sharing. She sprinkled coarse salt on the top of the iron stove and laid the fish down for a couple of minutes each side. As the Greek saying goes, ‘Fish, chicken and women with the hands’. We picked the meat off with our fingers and threw the bones into the stove. I can still taste them as I write this twenty-five years later. Hunger is a good sauce and so is hospitality.

  ‘Tell us a Fingers Bumcrusty Dad, go on, tell us …’ The adventures of the hairless and sublimely fat international master criminal Jeremiah ‘Fingers’ Bumcrusty and his accomplice Ebenezer ‘Soapy’ Flannel helped to while away the interminable hours of waiting for ferries to arrive, planes to depart, destinations to be reached and above all the eternity between the ordering and serving of food in tavernas. One Friday evening we were sitting under the stars and a string of forty-watt bulbs on Kyria Sofia’s terrace waiting for our kilo and a half of baby red mullet.

  ‘I’ll tell you about Kyria Sofia and the camel instead.’

  ‘Bo-ring,’ said Jack.

  ‘There aren’t any camels in Greece,’ said Harry.

  ‘Yes there are. There’s that peeling one by the Corinth Canal.’

  Kate was right. For many years the main attractions of the Corinth Canal were a permanently moulting camel and the excellent souvlaki stalls. As for the famous canal, once you’ve seen it you’ve seen it.

  ‘This was when Kyria Sofia was a young girl. Before she opened this taverna. She couldn’t make up her mind who to marry. She was a pretty girl and lots of boys wanted to marry her. One of them was Costas, but he never said very much. Sofia liked him the most but he was too shy to ask her out.’

  ‘This is a rubbish story,’ said Jim.

  ‘No, it’s good,’ said Kate from across the gender divide.

  ‘One evening in September all the men went out fishing as usual. Silent Costas fished with lines by himself. He used his father’s boat.’

  ‘Where was his father?’

  ‘He’d been a dynamite fisherman but one day he’d held on to the dynamite too long. Anyway, after an hour or so a big storm blew up. The little boats scurried back in first, followed by the bigger ones. All except for silent Costas. The last anyone saw of him he was pulling away at the starting string of his motor. Then the mist and the spray closed in and waves piled on waves and it was every boat for itself. The storm lasted all night and through the following day. The waves came right up to where we’re sitting now. The whole village watched out for Costas on the top of the cliffs over there. But all they saw was the wreckage of his boat washed up in the evening. Still the storm blew and blew and the women of the village all crowded into his house to keep his mother company and say prayers. The next morning the wind dropped, the sun came out and white horses galloped over the blue sea again. The villagers went back on the cliff and waited for the sea to give them back their boy.’

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Sofia spotted him first. Way out to sea. Actually she spotted what he was riding on. You know what it was?’

  ‘How do we know? You’re telling the story,’ said J
ack.

  ‘Costas had been blown right out to sea by the storm. The wind howled and lightning flashed and the waves were as high as houses. His little boat could hold out no longer and was smashed in pieces by an enormous wave. Like a lot of fishermen, Costas couldn’t swim. He thought he was going to drown and all he could do was pray with all his might to Our Lady and Aghios Ioannes. Just as he was going down for the last time, a camel swam past. He held tight to its hump and so he was saved.’

  ‘Camels can’t swim,’ said Jim.

  ‘Why are they called the ship of the desert then?’ retorted Harry.

  ‘Too right, Harry. Aghios Ioannes came from Egypt. It was probably the best he could do. Sofia could just see its head like the head of the Loch Ness Monster and his hump. And then she saw Costas sitting on top of the hump and waving his arms. She got in the boat that went to fetch him. His lips were all cracked and salty from riding the camel in the sea for two days, but the first thing he said was “Will you marry me?”’

  ‘You made that up,’ said Jack.

  ‘You ask Kyria Sofia when she brings the fish. Or go and ask Costas over there.’ Costas was quietly gathering up his lines in a basket and sticking the hooks in the cork rim round the edge.

  ‘I bet he got shipwrecked on Camel Island out there,’ said Jack, ‘so what you said isn’t true.’

  ‘All stories are true. The truth is just tweaked a bit to make them more interesting. Look, here come the fish.’

  ‘I bags the eyeballs,’ said Jim.

  I tried to get the family involved in the house. Like hunting or growing your own food, building your own house satisfies a deep instinct. I hoped that heaving rocks and earth and slates and wood with their bare hands would leave a lasting impression. The fun of heat and sweat and blisters and fatigue lasted about ten minutes.

  To counterbalance the deep resentment of this primitive experience, Arfa and I introduced them to our passion for sailing. In my case it was a theoretical passion rooted in Treasure Island and Captain Hornblower and the odd bank holiday outing in rowing boats on park lakes. When I first met Arfa she told exciting tales of dinghy sailing on her exchange in Spain, luffing and jibbing in the teeth of gales and hanging over the water on a trapeze, so I deferred to her in practical navigation. I caught up with her by an afternoon’s lesson in London docks soon after we were married and assumed that the essentials were unforgettable. I am tempted to say like riding a bicycle, but I have the example of Arfa who every time she mounts the saddle looks as if she has to learn all over again.

  We bought a second-hand Mirror dinghy. When it came to giving her a name I lobbied for Argos, but the children saw this as a ploy to indoctrinate them with more classical mythology. With its maroon hull and yellow decking and angry red sails the popular vote was for Bumboil, but this was overruled by the Guardian of Taste in favour of Blister.

  It was no accident that the boat had red sails and was called a Mirror. It was promoted in the early 1960s by the left-wing Daily Mirror, a tabloid daily with a red banner. Its mission was to bring sailing to the people. The boat came in a kit with pre-cut plywood panels, which you slotted together and joined with fibreglass tape. They said it took 120 hours to build. The fleet is now 70,000 worldwide, but there must be a lot more still lying around in garages and lofts with bits glued together the wrong way round. There was a big black M for Mirror stitched into the sail, which we told Kyria Sofia stood for Mole and she was impressed that we had a monogrammed boat.

  The Mirror’s revolutionary design was by Barry Bucknell, the father of British DIY and television programmes about giving your home a makeover. His shows went out live and the ceilings and wardrobes that collapsed on air were legendary. Inspired by Barry, our generation ripped out old-fashioned Victorian fireplaces and dirt-trapping plaster cornices and flowery tiles and replaced them with Contemporary. His dinghy and his pump-action screwdriver moulded our leisure pursuits as much as the Dansette record player on its spindly black legs. He died recently aged 91, but he will live on whenever I hoist the mainsail or put up a shelf. We explained all this to the children.

  ‘Daad, when we grow up will we have our own memories or will we just have yours?’

  So we shut up and hoped that their nostalgia for the Mirror would be more exciting than ours. It was certainly a memorable moment when we first lifted Blister off the roof of the camper onto the sands of Limanaki. I was in tears because the stern landed on my foot, Arfa was in tears because I yelled at her for dropping her end, Jack was in tears because the boom fell off the roof rack and whacked him on the head – a foretaste of things to come – Jim was in tears because Jack had punched him for laughing, Kate was in tears because she was being made to wear sailing shoes she didn’t like and Harry was in tears because everyone else was. We wailed round the boat like a Viking funeral.

  Sailing is an excellent family activity that teaches teamwork and fosters togetherness, according to Dinghy Sailing for Fun, published by the News Chronicle, priced at 2/6. It had been hanging around our shelves since before the decimalisation of the pound, but I saw no reason to splash out on a metric version.

  ‘Is that what it’s supposed to be?’ mused Arfa when she saw the title. This should have given me a clue to her innermost feelings about the sport. The News Chronicle, by then defunct, was a middle-class paper that sponsored a rival boat called the Enterprise and made no mention of how to rig a plebeian Mirror. So we had to work it out for ourselves. This led to more accusations and tears as we tried various combinations of pulleys and stays.

  ‘Kate, give me the sheet. Hey! Where are you going?’

  ‘To get the sheet. Maam, Dad wants a sheet. Single or double, Dad?’

  ‘Tell him we only have a picnic blanket.’

  My vigorous explanation that sheets were the soft ropes that you fix to the bottom of the sail to control them certainly fostered family togetherness. With one voice they made me promise not to shout at them again or they would never get in the boat, ever.

  The Mirror is more complicated than the archetypal yachts that landlubbers doodle, in that it doesn’t have a long upright mast but what we mariners call a gaff rig. Trying to puzzle it out, I accused Arfa of not pulling her weight.

  ‘Don’t hide your light under a bushel, darling. Come and help.’

  ‘It’s OK, darling. You’re the best at rigging boats.’

  ‘Daad, what’s a gaff?’

  ‘A big mistake,’ said Arfa, smugly.

  ‘That’s with an e. G-a-f-f-e.’

  ‘Like I said, darling,’ said Arfa sweetly. ‘Does your ship have front-wheel steering or have you rigged it the wrong way round?’

  All we had to go on from our advisers at the Chronicle was the definition ‘Gaff: the spar on a mast, on which the head of the sail is bent.’ At least this cleared up the mystery of why we seemed to have a stubby little mast and two booms.

  ‘Daad, what does bent mean?’

  ‘Er, the mast is in two pieces, son. So it’s bent at the top. You need it a bit crooked to catch the wind.’

  When I found out that bent means knotted, I didn’t have the courage to confess. When they found out they had no such inhibitions, but by then my cover was blown. I got off to a bad start by my technique for getting into the boat. Launching from the beach against the prevailing onshore wind meant that I usually had to hold Blister until the crew got in, push it out until I was waist deep and then spring agilely over the stern. Being overweight and undercoordinated, this did not go well. In the early days we drifted back to shore with the skipper’s head in the bilges and his legs waving in the air and the boat heeled over in the capsize-ho! position.

  ‘Daad, you told us you were good at sailing.’

  ‘The sea’s different in England, son.’

  Finally we got the hang of it, although I was too nervous to venture out of our sheltered bay into the rolling swells of the deep. I preferred light airs, as we sailors say. The boat didn’t rock and roll around so much. The g
entle slap-slap of ripples against the bow, licking round the boat with happy gurgles, lip-smacking, creaming round the stern, a few bubbles from the rudder showing we were making headway, were excitement enough. I was happy to see the dinghy bobbing around in the shallows. Unlike our orange camper, which disfigured the scenery, it wasn’t a blot on the seascape. The little red triangle gave it focus, contrast, movement, a sense of scale, like a figure or a cottage in a romantic landscape.

  One day we took advantage of a dead calm to picnic in the shade of the cliffs. For once Arfa came along, but it was only much later that I connected this with the weather conditions. We paddled gently over to a natural grotto. The water was Perspex clear, like looking through a diving mask. We gazed down at the lovely intestinal hues of the rocky bed five metres down, purples and greens and greys, silk-shot with darting fish and sinuous fronds of weed.

  ‘Heave-ho my hearties, let’s park and have our picnic.’

  ‘Do you mean heave-to, Dad?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Er, that’s what I said.’

  ‘You said heave-ho.’

  ‘Heave-ho is what you say when you pull the anchor up,’ said Jim, ‘It’s in the Hardy Boys.’

  ‘Good point. We’d better do our anchor drill.’

  ‘Oh no, not more lessons …’

  ‘Very important, the anchor. It’s your handbrake. What if we drifted? There’s nothing between us and Turkey. It’s a long row back.’

  While Arfa got out the sandwiches, I laid out the anchor and its coil of rope on the foredeck.

  ‘It’s vital that the end of the rope is well tied to the boat. The best place is the foot of the mast. You feel a real fool when you toss the anchor overboard and it sinks to the bottom with the rope and you sail on regardless.’

  ‘Has that happened to you then, Dad?’

  ‘Me? What a silly idea. Now watch.’

  Tying the rope to the boat is good advice as far as it goes, but it’s only half the story. The other half is tying the rope to the anchor.