How Greek Is Your Love

by Marjory McGinn

  Leonidas had left the front door open for me at Villa Ambelia. I found him in the kitchen opening a bottle of white wine. We sat on the balcony, off the sitting room, which was on the top floor, to take advantage of the views. Our chairs were side by side. He pulled me close. His skin smelt of sea air and lemons.

  “You must be more careful, Bronte. There are people about now who have been fired up because of the crisis. Extreme right-wing people, and many who live in the Mani. You know the party, Ellines Patriotes Enomeni? Greek Patriots United, as it’s called in English.”

  I’d seen TV footage of demonstrations in Syntagma Square in Athens, of thugs dressed in black shirts holding flags with Nazi-style symbols and slogans. Angus had told me about them and stories were filtering into British newspapers as well, along with all the crisis reports. The EPE had been just a marginal party in the 1980s, full of right-wing agitators who were more of an annoyance than a force to be reckoned with. But during the 2012 elections they had won 21 seats in the Greek Parliament, appealing to the Greek electorate who opposed austerity and also the threat of increasing migration from the Middle East and India. With 7 per cent of the vote, this was a political development that shocked moderate Greeks and harked back to the days of the military-led junta of the 1960s and 70s.

  “The EPE has had a lot of publicity since it gained seats in Parliament, which is a situation I still find incredible. I mean the fact they are actually in our Parliament,” Leonidas said, running a hand through his curls.

  “But isn’t it the way much of Europe is going now – to the right?”

  “Perhaps, but EPE is dangerous and it is increasing its influence here all the time, with many party supporters to help it carry out its propaganda against the European Union. It has support as well among the police force, in this region anyway. The party has started a campaign of beating up foreigners and communists, or anyone they don’t like. They spread the idea that foreigners are the enemies of Greece. All foreigners, not just migrants from the Middle East. They want all of them out, British and other European settlers too. You see what a threat they are, my love.”

  He told me that in some of the towns and villages further down the Mani, where the party had a strong base, British expats had been targets for abuse. Cars and houses had been spray-painted with hate slogans and expats harassed.

  “One of my patients, an Englishwoman, lives in the town of Areopolis. She has a small business there and she is frightened because of the rise in aggression towards foreigners. She has had a few small confrontations with EPE supporters and now she wants to sell her house and leave Greece. I cannot say more about her but she is a very strong woman and to come to this point is shameful. Those who intimidate are men mostly who don’t have much work and plenty of time to go about causing trouble. Now I don’t know if your creep is one of them, but be very careful. Perhaps take your car when you go out with Zeffy. Park it in the village and then walk the dog around where you can be seen. Or just take the dog the other way, past Myrto’s land. She’s always there, and Angelos. Okay?”

  “Yes, I’ll be careful. But I didn’t think things were this bad, Leo.”

  “I don’t want to frighten you, agapi mou. We have none of these people in Marathousa that I know of and most villagers here would be opposed to their ideas. Just be careful. Take your mobile always. If you can, get a photo of this man. If he bothers you again, we will go to the police. Not that they will do much probably, between you and me. They don’t like coming down this far. But I have a friend in the Kalamata police. I can talk to him if you have more trouble.”

  I nodded.

  Leonidas’s warnings disturbed me but I was glad that he would now see the point of me having a dog. We sat for a while side by side, lost in our own thoughts, until he turned to me, his eyes narrowed with curiosity.

  “Zeffy isn’t that dog we heard last weekend barking like a crazy thing when we were in bed?”

  “No, of course not. How could you even think that?” I said, looking away, towards the gulf where a northerly wind teased white caps out of the dark grey water.

  Early on Monday morning, I woke to the sound of Leonidas whispering in my ear.

  “I must leave now, my love. But stay here as long as you like.” He kissed me softly and then left and I remembered with some disappointment that he had an early start, calling on a patient who lived in a hill village east of Kalamata. Despite the sounds of Marathousa waking – the donkeys braying, goat bells peeling through the still morning air, the odd clapped-out car juddering into the village – I had no urge to get up. I fell easily into a delicious sleep, sprawling on Leonidas’s side of the bed, my head buried in his pillow as if to recapture the intoxicating essence of the night before.

  It must have been mid-morning when I woke finally under a tangle of hot, sweaty top sheet with the sense that there was someone in the room – the sound of feet padding softly around the bed.

  “Leonidas?” I said, pulling the sheet away, expecting he must have come back to the house again for some reason. But I was wrong.

  The sight of a tall stranger looming over me made me cry out and grasp hold of the sheet again to cover my nakedness. A woman with very black eyes glared down at me as if I were a specimen on a petri dish.

  “Who the hell are YOU?” I said, my heart bumping with apprehension.

  “And who, my dear, are YOU?” she replied in not bad English.

  She straightened up and stood beside the bed, hands on hips.

  “And that’s your business because…?”

  She gave a derisory grunt. I wondered if Leonidas had a cleaner he hadn’t told me about.

  “You’re the girlfriend?” she asked.

  Then it dawned on me.

  “Ah … and you must be Leo’s aunt Thekla.”

  “Yes, and xairo poli,” she said. The Greek expression means ‘Good to meet you’, but there was only sarcasm in her delivery.

  I pulled the sheet up higher. “Do you always come into other people’s houses unannounced?”

  She cackled like an outraged hen. “I’ve been coming into this house a great many years. I have a key, you know.” Oh, great!

  She ambled around the room with proprietorial ease, glancing at my clothes piled on a chair, make-up on the dressing table. She ran a finger over the surface of the wood and then rubbed her finger and thumb together, as if to determine the quality of the dust. Strange woman.

  I sat up in bed, leaning into the pillows, watching her.

  “I came over to the house this morning to see Leo. I thought I would surprise him. I came to Marathousa very late last night. He must have left very early. When I knocked at the door there was no answer. Then I see that he has gone to work and left a side window open. I came in to close it and make sure all was well. But I see all is not.” Hands on hips again and a face like a lemon harvest.

  “Well, everything is fine here and, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get up,” I said, glancing towards the door, willing her towards it.

  “Leonidas didn’t tell me you were living here.”

  “I don’t live here. I live next door with my father.”

  “Ah. Visiting then,” she said with a sneery inspection of the rumpled bed.

  I could tell that Thekla and I would not be bosom buddies. She was a curious mix of traditional village matron and something a bit more modern, from the years spent in Athens, no doubt. She wore a dark suit, as if she were about to go to church, and an elegant gold chain, with a thick gold cross on it. She had blonded hair, which was not a good match for the dark eyes and eyebrows, and a slightly sallow complexion. The hair was big, bouffant, as if it had been recently styled. She may have been beautiful once, with a long nose, a little like Leo’s, and shapely lips, but in every way, she looked all of her 60-odd years. There was a flintiness about the eyes. When she stared at you, it felt like laser surgery on your emotions.

  “Do you mind leaving me now while I get up?” I said.

  She sn
iffed, turned on her heel and left. She wasn’t in the house when I finally emerged from the shower and got dressed. I guessed she might not try a surprise house visit again. But she had her own key, for God’s sake!

  Chapter 7

  Aunts in your pants

  “I’ve just met Leo’s aunt,” I said, walking into Angus’s study. He was staring at his computer screen, the cursor winking at the top of a blank document.

  “I didn’t even know he had one,” said Angus listlessly, picking up a heavy mug of tea and slurping it loudly.

  I explained about the aunt and our dubious introduction.

  He laughed. “Welcome to Greece, Bronte, where nothing is ever private. Did she ask to see the blood-stained bedsheets?”

  “Oh, please, don’t be so gross!”

  “Oh, don’t be coy. That’s what happened in traditional communities in the past, checking to make sure the deed was done, that progeny was assured,” he said, smirking.

  “You’re talking about virginal brides, and can we please change the subject now.”

  But he barrelled on. “The real point is, the old dear will find it unsettling that her favourite nephew is shagging a foreigner in what she probably thinks of as her family home, or one of them anyway. And as a foreigner you will have no status anyway as far as the aunt’s concerned. And Leo hasn’t made a formal declaration of intent, has he?”

  “I thought you liked Leo?”

  “I do, very much. He’s an outstanding Greek, but I thought by now that something more might have gelled.” His eyes flickered in my direction, a slight hint of paternalism in the expression.

  “You’re talking like Thekla now,” I said rolling my eyes at him. “Leo and I have been together six months. We’re still getting to know each other. And how do I know it will work out? We’re very different people, different cultures. We fell in love so quickly. Let’s just see how we go without making big commitments yet.”

  I said that mostly out of pride and to scupper Angus’s cynicism. I didn’t want my father thinking I was a fool for love. And I adored Leonidas. He was the most charismatic, gorgeous man I’d ever met. Sexy from his curls to his Italian shoes. But even so, one part of me also enjoyed my independent, freewheeling life in Greece, even if I struggled with trying to learn the language and understand the customs, all in the heat of an economic crisis. I didn’t need other parameters and pressures.

  “It’s none of my business anyway, Bronte. You’re old enough to sort your own affairs. I meant that last word in its more general sense, of course.”

  I marvelled at how a conversation about Leonidas’s pesky aunt had turned into an analysis of my love life. He turned back to his blank screen, his fingers softly strumming the keyboard. But he wasn’t actually typing anything. I’d seen him a couple of times in the past week sitting just so at the computer, fiddling about.

  “You haven’t got a touch of writer’s block?” I asked, smiling to myself. Writer’s block seemed to be multiplying around me like a flu virus. I hoped I didn’t catch it. I started straightening out his desk, as I often did, putting the books into piles, sorting the sheaf of papers he always had spread over the desk top – research notes and early drafts that he printed out and corrected by hand.

  “No, I haven’t. Just thinking,” he said, writing the word ‘when’ at the top of the blank page. I felt quite sorry for him.

  Angus’s book was no mere whim. It had been his idea late in the previous year to write about the Battle of Kalamata, a calamitous conflict that took place in the southern Peloponnese in 1941. Although it had not been widely written about, not as much as the Greek campaign in Crete, it had been described by historians as the ‘Greek Dunkirk’, in which thousands of British soldiers and other allies gathered on Kalamata beach for several nights waiting to be evacuated by the Royal Navy as German troops invaded the city. But in the end, under a heavy Luftwaffe air assault, the navy ships had to depart, leaving some 8,000 troops behind. Hundreds tried to escape down the Mani. Many were never accounted for. Angus’s father, Kieran McKnight, had been one of them.

  It was to help Angus solve the mystery of what happened to Kieran after he fled down the Mani peninsula that had kept me in Greece the previous September, and not just the reason he’d first summoned me for – his heart problem. Kieran’s fate had engaged us for a few months and we had been helped by many Greeks, including Leonidas. The mystery had overwhelmed our family since the Second World War, and Angus in particular. His father had died in the war months before Angus was born and because of lapses in war communications, Kieran never found out his wife Lily was carrying his first and only child. Angus would spend a great deal of his life seeking closure for all this. The fact it was Greece that Angus headed to for his 10-year adventure seemed to bear this out. But at 71, with time running out, he’d made one valiant final effort to unpick the mystery of Kieran.

  Kieran was a handsome 25-year-old when he was sent to Greece with the Royal Army Service Corps. He was sweet-faced with a thick head of wavy auburn hair, a family trait that I had also inherited. Kieran joined 60,000 British and allied troops during the Greek Campaign against the German invasion. When the allies were forced to retreat, many ended up in the southern Peloponnese, with the Germans close behind. While awaiting evacuation along Kalamata’s beachfront, the allies engaged in a brave rearguard action against the advancing German forces and under fierce bombing raids by the Luftwaffe, with virtually no RAF cover.

  On April 28, 1941, the fighting had reached its peak when the Germans secured Kalamata city and the allies were gathered on the beach. Unlike Dunkirk, however, where a remarkable evacuation was carried out by British civilians in a flotilla of small boats crossing the English Channel, Kalamata was far more isolated, with the closest safe landing point being the island of Crete, almost 200 miles to the south.

  The Greek evacuation strategy in Kalamata would be remembered as ill-fated and badly conceived. While many of the troops left behind were taken to POW camps, around 300 managed to escape down the Mani. From the small amount of research Angus had been able to do through the War Office and in later years online, all he discovered was that Kieran was one of the men who fled down the Mani, but whether he died on Greek soil or had made it out of the country, but perished later, was never known.

  We unravelled the mystery in a difficult search that eventually led us to a Taygetos mountain settlement. It was an amazing story that Angus had wanted to tell in a book, to highlight this infamous battle but mostly to pay tribute to his father’s tragic war efforts. It had been a discovery that had changed both our lives irrevocably. It had brought us closer together and had rooted us to this part of Greece, where Kieran’s remains were now buried – in Marathousa’s graveyard.

  Angus had been a talented, inspiring teacher in his former years in Scotland and he often said he wanted to write a book one day, as people do. But during the preceding winter he set to work, using the colder days, when storms raked down from the Taygetos mountains. His commitment and passion were valiant and he seemed to need little guidance on the writing, and so I let him be. But after a few months, his stamina had understandably flagged. Angus was smart but he was also no saint. He was a man who liked conviviality too, and all that went with it, in Greece. Long days at the computer were often punishing and the medication he took for his heart problems had also probably slowed him down.

  “I’ve already written eight chapters, Bronte, and it’s been enjoyable, but it needs discipline, I’ll admit that,” he said, with a long sigh.

  “Can I read them yet?”

  He girned a bit. “Later on. They need a bit of polishing. You’ll pick holes in them, being a journo.”

  “Are you going to try for an agent when you’ve written a bit more?”

  “Maybe later. If you’ve got any input there, I’d be glad to hear it.”

  I didn’t, but I thought that one day I might contact Eve Peregrine for some input. That was probably a long way off.

&
nbsp; “I need to read a bit of your opus first. But keep going – you’ll get there. But if you get really stuck, I’ll help you, you know that.”

  “Aye, I know. I’m just weary today. The old ticker slacks off sometimes.”

  “Take it easy, okay.”

  As I walked past him, I saw the cursor hovering over ‘when’ but nothing else joined it. I smiled in sympathy.

  I made coffee, took him a mug and sat down at my own desk by the sitting room window. I watched as a car went by, towing a small trailer in which a farm worker was sitting, holding a wooden ladder aloft with one hand, talking on his mobile phone with the other. Most days I saw at least one marvel of Greek eccentricity spinning by me.

  I spent a few hours that day writing up the interview with Eve Peregrine. It was an interesting, informative insight into expat life in Greece and enough to keep her millions of readers very happy, but there was very little humour in her observations. Maybe that’s what writer’s block did to you, sucked the fun out of your life.

  About her latest book, I simply said it would be out by the autumn. Apart from the fact that it would be set in Scotland, I knew no more and had to embroider something about it probably being another best-seller with a rash, combustible hero and a heroine with a maverick taste for them. The features editor would be satisfied, I hoped. Then I started writing my column for the week. I’d already seen the first one in print under the simple title of The Greek Column, for which I had been given an arty picture byline: an illustration of me leaning on a truncated piece of ancient column, possibly Ionian.