My landlady, Kyria5 Fotini, utterly enchanted to have a long-term, cash paying and apparently solvent guest in her house so early in the year, was an enormous floral bundle of motherly solicitude with a taste for scents so powerful as to eclipse the loo-cleaner and so indiscriminate as to embrace, on occasion, her husband’s after-shave. She installed me in her best room, a cavernous, elegant, high-ceilinged affair on the second floor with classical plaster cornices, a split-level, stripped wooden floor, shuttered windows on three sides and small balconies facing the bay and the channel.
The room boasted what would now be called a ‘futon,’ but was then known as ‘a mattress on the floor.’ There was a curtain to close-off the raised section where this elegant sleeping arrangement lay, one rush-seated wooden chair and one extruded plastic one, a tin table, a rickety set of three drawers with a cracked mirror, a clothes-rail with a plastic cover, and a tiny fireplace. This latter did very little to heat the room but contributed enormously to the ambience of an evening. It also seemed to give warmth and cheer to the seagulls, which flocked to the chimney and iced the roof terrace around it like a wedding-cake.
Downstairs via an exterior staircase was a small communal kitchen shared with two other rented rooms, which tended to be occupied only at weekends. It contained a marble sink with cold water, a fridge which sounded as if it was powered by a diesel engine, a single-plate electric hob, a small camping gas burner, a briquette, a knife, a few mismatched plates, two forks and some drinking-vessels which had started life as mustard-jars. The gas burner was an essential asset; when it rained even slightly seriously, the electricity was more often off than on. I soon learned to kept candles and a gas-lamp in the room.
Adjoining the kitchen was the toilet and shower, so close together that one could- and in fact had to- use them simultaneously. The strident acoustics in this oubliette transmitted every horrible intimacy through the whole house. The water pipes rattled like the terminal breath of a lung-shot rhinoceros, the toilet flush crowed like a cockerel and the shower-drain slurped like the child of a Titan draining his milk-shake... there really was no need for a lock on the door. Which was probably why there wasn’t one.
As far as I was concerned, all of the above were features, not shortcomings; I was a young bachelor of no detectable sophistication, conditioned to sailing boats and elderly tramp-ships, and I would probably have been happy in a Gulag, so long as it was co-ed and had a bar. My lodging was amazingly cheap, Kyria Fotini and her rambunctious family made me palpably welcome, and the views from the room and the terrace compensated a thousand-fold for any discomfort. I had a panorama of mountains, sea and islands extending about three hundred degrees, from the naval base right around the whole bay of Poros, with its stunning backdrop of a mountain-range resembling a sleeping woman, to the narrow straits between the island and the mainland. I was as happy as a pig in shit... and thanks to the seagulls, I had plenty of shit!
* * *
Thus comfortably installed, I let Spiros and a couple of other contacts know that I was available for boat deliveries, and contentedly fell into a lazy routine as I waited indolently for some work to stray in my direction. My great confederate was Petros, the sardonic, cynical and golden-hearted owner of the Square Cafe, and there I would go each morning for my coffee and to catch up on developments.
The Square Cafe is so named because it is set in a square, but it works both ways as the building is one of those charmless concrete cubes which, although sadly common in Greece, are refreshingly rare in Poros. Despite its lack of aesthetic qualities, however, the cafe was delightfully set amidst orange trees a little back from the road and right next to the museum, so its architectural shortcomings were mitigated by the greenery and the more elegant adjacent buildings. All along one side of the little square lay an amazing number of artefacts too big or too numerous to fit into the museum; ancient capitals, bits of columns, mill-stones, grinding-tables and even a great stone anchor.2 The buildings sheltered the square from the wind and made a wonderful sun-trap in the cooler seasons; the noise of the road was kept at a respectable distance, and the scent of the oranges pervaded. I loved to sit there, to chew the fat with Petros and his clients, to cogitate on the aeons of history represented by the museum pieces, and to marvel at the historical wealth of a place which has so much of this stuff that it leaves it out in the rain.
After my morning coffee, I would betake myself to something vaguely resembling activity. I rarely had a plan before I sat down for coffee, but Petros’ terrace was so strangely conducive to creative thought that I generally arose slavering with anticipation for some enterprise. Often I went over to the boatyard on the mainland and chatted with people readying their boats for the season. Sometimes I strode out, full of purpose and vigour, bent on a hike. I rented bikes or scooters and explored, and occasionally I hopped on a ferry and spent the day on another island. Whenever I heard of boats for sale I went off to look at them, but mostly I just patrolled the waterfront, mingling with yachties and watching young ladies getting off the ferry until it was time for a long, lazy lunch.
I was fortunate with regard to the weather in Greece at the beginning of March. It can be an unkind month of temperatures in single figures and overcast skies which leak badly, but that year the firmament remained very largely clear, bathing the land in light and clarity. The north wind, dry and still cool, swept the air of all impurities, and, when I ventured forth, I enjoyed breath-taking views. I would go often to the Paradise Taverna, close to the Temple of Poseidon up on the northern slopes of Kalavria, to marvel at the view of the Saronic.
In weather like this, one can see a hundred miles if one gets high enough, and looking northwards to Aegina and north-west past the jagged crater of Methana towards Corinth every minute detail seemed crisp in the transparent air. The clarity foreshortened the scenery, so that I felt that I could lean forward and touch the islands across the brilliant blue of the sea. Fruit-blossom and wild flowers rioted on every hand, and rebirth was in my eye and in my soul. I was delighted to be back in Greece, and as far as I was concerned, it was unquestionably spring. The foreigners readying their boats for the season thought so too; Poros, however, was under no such illusion.
Orthodox Easter was still some weeks off when I returned to the island, and the European Easter3 (which would bring the first real ingress of tourists) was even later. A few visitors were already in evidence, but the combination of Lent and a paucity of punters meant that most of the restaurants were still closed. Despite the sunshine, and a riot of spring blooms, the Porioties, as the indigenes were known, were mostly visible only as shadows in darkened cafes. A few, hunched in their boufan jackets and steering single-handed with one hand in their pocket, buzzed along the front on the ubiquitous step-through motorbikes. Poros was still deep in winter mentality.
This somnolence was broken occasionally by the arrival of ferries and hydrofoils, which brought a few people onto the streets and briefly rippled the placid atmosphere, but even this disruption was a fleeting thing. Most of the ferries were the old open types called by the locals a pantouffle. This means ‘slipper’, and refers to the shape of the ship, with a ramp forward, a low, open car-deck, and a passenger section cantilevered high up over the back end, but the word also has connotations of grandfatherly inactivity which is appropriate too. They rumbled across the bay, through the strait and over to Galatas in a suitably leisurely manner. At this time of year their clients were all locals, highly familiar with boarding and disembarking, so there was none of the frantic shouting and blowing of port policeman’s whistles which the herding of a summer payload involved, and the venerable argosies were quickly and smoothly on their way again. The only real animation on the winter paralia4 came with the daily visit of the Hermes, the Aegean Glory or the City of Poros, ships which did a three-island day-cruise from Athens to Hydra, Poros and Aegina.
As the arriving ship’s whistle boomed across the bay, mopeds erupted from alleyways and converged on the main qu
ay. The gift shops threw open their doors and vomited their wares onto the pavement just as the first mooring-lines landed on the dock, and then a couple of hundred Japanese and Americans would perform a re-enactment of D-Day. Some remained aboard, spraying the waterfront with video-cameras. Others, telephoto lenses at the high port, rampaged down the gangways and advanced in short dashes interspersed with momentary pauses when they unleashed rapid bursts of shutter-noise from their 35mms. Then, having duly recorded every cat, flower-pot and child, it was summer for sixty minutes as they porpoised through the gift shops, burned up a few miles of ASA 400 and milled outside the ouzeries whilst waiting to have their photographs taken with an air-drying octopus.
At another imperious hoot the tourists re-embarked and, as their ship churned away from the quayside, the gift shops did not so much close as implode; clothing-racks and postcard stands were sucked back into shop interiors like a pair of skimpy knickers going up a vacuum-cleaner, lights blinked out, doors slammed, keys rattled and the proprietors sprang onto motorbikes as smoothly as gymnasts mounting a vaulting-horse. It all happened with the speed and silky ease of an umbrella folding, so that before the ship had turned the corner out of the bay, the town was contentedly back in its midwinter torpor, somnolence so tangible on the air that one breathed it in and exhaled it in a yawn.
The simple fact was that, regardless of flowers or weather, all Poros was still curled up in its hibernatory cave. All Poros, that is, apart from the sailing community.
* * *
One charmingly sunny morning in mid-March, with a genuine harbinger of summer present in the air temperature, Spiros erupted out of a Flying Dolphin like a hen in front of a fox and didn’t touch the ground until he was almost the other side of the road. Then he appeared to go in seven directions at once. With the energy and deportment of a ninja on ecstasy, he began rousing sailors from hibernation. Shergar, Xanthos and The Pretty Panzer were ripped untimely out of their winter lethargy, and within moments an electric activity bordering on panic raced headlessly up and down the waterfront.
Within a remarkably short time for so restful a place, all was bustle. People scurried to-and-fro with arms-full of boat gear; hoses snaked across yachts; laundry piled up on cabin-tops; mops, brooms and vacuum-cleaners were plied with gusto. Engines ran, and the fuel truck lumbered from boat to boat. Even O Geros and Megali, the Grand Old Men of the Poros yachting scene, were pottering on their boats with a methodical edge to their stately indolence that bordered on activity. The Grave-Robbers Flotilla was imminent, and the whole winter, which had once been available to prepare for it, had inexplicably disappeared.
As I smiled at the antics of the scurrying dock-rats I had not the least premonition that I was about to become one of them, but when Spiros exploded out of the hydrofoil on that fine morning he had a Grave-Robber to organise and a scant twenty-four hours to do it in... and the solution to one of his problems had my name written all over it.
“My dear boy!” he cried, his customary conversational bellow gently agitating the window-panes behind me with as he rounded the corner of the square twenty yards away, “How are you? How are you?”
I started to tell him that I was in the pink and then stopped, because he hadn’t.
“And what are you doing this week? Nothing, I suppose... too early in the season... but we might have a little job, just five days... it doesn’t pay much, I’m afraid. ” At this point his face registered anguish equal to that of Juliet holding Romeo’s corpse, “Just students, they don’t have much money, but I like to try to help them out.”
I grinned inwardly as I remembered first meeting Spiros, when we started our charter the previous autumn; on that occasion too he had given us to believe that he was virtually a charitable organisation.
“Still, it will pay your keep for a few days, and it will be a lot of fun. Lots of girls, you know. About fifty of them.” He winked massively. It looked like a car-crusher closing on one of those little Fiats.
This proposition surprised and delighted me. It had not so far occurred that Spiros would want me for any charters; I assumed he had plenty of skippers whose local knowledge was much greater than mine, guys who wanted to sail at a holiday pace, schmooze with passengers and earn tips. That sounded pretty idyllic to me, but I had no expectation of getting that sort of work yet; I expected to serve my apprenticeship doing boat deliveries, which were less popular. Deliveries had deadlines, and being predominantly against the wind they often required hard sailing; there were no perks either... no tips, no half-full bottles of Talisker left in the galley, no bikinied crew to delight the manly senses.
“I thought all the local lads were queuing up for this job, Spiro?” I asked, and indeed that was what I had heard... everyone wanted in on the Grave-Robber. But Spiros’s smile took on a shark-like width, and with one avuncular hand on my shoulder and another one, more opportunistic, on my last ham-and-cheese toastie, he dropped his voice to a confidential roar.
“Well, they are, they are... but Julian, to be quite honest, I have a small problem. I have a large boat on this charter... she’s forty-eight feet. I need her because she has a lot of beds, but none of the skippers here want to take her... she’s too big for them. And also, she uses a lot of fuel, so I want her to sail as much as possible... I need a real skipper.”
That was the genius of Spiros in a nutshell; in a few words he had employed me, fed my ego, tempted me with carnal delights, manoeuvred me into a position from which I could not retreat without losing face, told me he wasn’t going to pay me the going rate whilst still casting himself in the light of a benefactor, and had a free breakfast.
Well, I wouldn’t have taken much persuading anyway… I was happy doing any sailing at any time, quite apart from being avidly heterosexual… so I took his explanation at face value, and accordingly hoisted my self-esteem a notch higher up the flag-pole. Oh, boy, I still had a lot to learn! If my own invitation to participate in a Grave-Robber came as a complete surprise... well, that was only because I was new in Greece and had not yet learned see things through the eyes of the locals.
* * *
So I was roped in for my first charter, and quite a charter it was too. The Grave-Robber’s Flotilla was, in the mid-eighties, already a tradition in the local yachting industry. A certain international archaeological school (hence the ‘Grave-Robber’ title) naturally spent a lot of time in Italy, Greece and Turkey, and their students were young people whom the necessity of travel made even more impoverished than your average undergraduate. They toured the Mediterranean in the off-season, partly to have better access to the archaeological sites and museums when they were less crowded, and partly to save money. They also came from pretty much everywhere in the world, so by the time they got to the Mediterranean many had travelled a very long way. It therefore made sense to get the most out of their long-distance travelling and combine their field-trips with a bit of a holiday; since Italy was expensive and Turkey lacked economical airline connections, Greece was where they dallied.
Sometime in the early eighties a lecturer involved in organising these tours- an American at one of the numerous archaeological institutes to be found in Athens- had taken a sailing holiday in the Saronic and hit upon the idea that penurious young folk, who did not mind roughing it a little to save some money, could have a memorable vacation at quite moderate expense by hiring a few sailing boats and some skippers to drive them.
Fortune, fate or ferocious business acumen (my money would be on the latter) had then led this lecturer, his scheme still embryonic in his mind, to stray into the path of Spiros, the charismatic, fabulously plausible proprietor of Saronic Sea Charters, and a man whose mind was so fertile that his body never had a chance of keeping pace with his cerebral output. From the moment of that meeting, the Grave-Robbers Flotilla was not only conceived, it was also hand-cuffed to the midwife, frog-marched through pre-natal classes and booked in for a Caesarean section.
To describe the Grave-Robbers Flotilla, it
is probably best to start with a brief sketch of Saronic Sea Charters and its enigmatic proprietor, and so I digress.
* * *
Saronic Sea Charters was an entity of no substance whatsoever, due principally to the fact that Spiros couldn’t afford a boat. It also employed no permanent staff, possessed no capital that anyone had ever located, and its office was essentially a tatty leather satchel generally to be found in the back of a sand-coloured Lada Jeep; anyone wanting to sue the company would need to serve a writ at forty kilometres an hour (although certainly no more) to a car which blended into the concrete around it, travelled in its own personal smoke-screen and boasted a single, deeply ambiguous registration plate. The only real assets the business possessed consisted of a ream of headed stationery, a portable typewriter and what might have been termed a ‘compound intellectual property’- the confidence, imagination, language skills and sheer brass neck of the proprietor. To these you might, if you had a very generous interpretation of the term ‘asset,’ have added the Jeep.
The company chose to do business largely in the field of renting out sailing yachts, with or without skippers, but could, in fact, have done almost anything at all... and when opportunity arose, it did. It certainly did not operate a ‘walk-in’ style of business- it was the sort of firm that you would have expected to have a double lock and a spy-hole in its door, if only it had possessed a door- and preferred to come to its clients rather than the other way about. For a few weeks of the year it could be reliably located at the London, Paris and Dusseldorf Boat Shows, but apart from that it existed with nomadic elusiveness, visible only in the form of adverts in the classified section of various yachting magazines.
Spiros was the company’s only regular employee. During my first voyage in Greece, I had been surprised by his receptionist’s unfamiliarity with nautical matters... I now knew the reason. In those days before mobile phones arrived in Greece, all the company’s calls and faxes were received by a barmaid at a hotel near Alimos Marina. The ‘after-hours emergency number’ on the stationery was Lefteris’s souvlaki joint in Amfitheas Street. If Spiros himself wasn’t available, there was generally someone there prepared to do him a favour by sorting out a cock-up.
The Trojan Walrus Page 3