I was going to make myself some coffee, but even without looking closely it was apparent that the general standard of nightwear wasn’t high, and what there was of it was not all where it should have been. The cabin looked like someone had gassed a nudist colony. It seemed a bit voyeuristic to hang around, and so, muttering to myself, “It is a far better thing I do than I have ever done,” I trotted ashore for a coffee in Tassos’ cafe.
I sat in that cafe in a state of quiet contentment. It was mid-morning already, and the quayside was teeming. Mules brayed, boats jostled, people swarmed. Wafts of coffee, bacon and eggs, baking bread, mule and donkey by-products and boat-exhaust ebbed and flowed over a constant scent of pine. In this vehicle-free11 environment the chatter and clatter of conversation and eating utensils is like plain-chant sung to the metronomic clopping of mule-hooves. Scantily-clad tourists and elegant socialites mingled with the locals in their heavier working-wear, the former boasting early sun-burn, and the latter gravely contemplating the world over a selection of magnificent moustaches… for Hydra was moustachioed on an almost Cretan scale, with styles ranging from the Gallic Spiked through the Revolutionary Extravaganza to the ‘This-Cat-Is-Delicious’ schools of facial hair. The butcher looked like one of those early scuba-divers, with two enormous tubes coming over his shoulders to meet under his nose.†
As I sat over my yoghurt and melon I took in the kaleidoscopic, pungent, vibrant, all-function workout for the senses that is Hydra and had the greatest sense of satisfaction with the almost involuntary turn my life had taken. This, I thought, I could put up with for a while.
CHAPTER FOUR
STRUTTING AN HOUR ON THE STAGE
A skipper’s lot... crewed behaviour... competing for Miss Iceland... musical beds... PeePee jumps ship... the Nob and the Oik... table dancing redefined... the many ways of beating one’s chest... needs must... Iraklis expires... post-coastal depression... gale-force altruism... more of Blatchley’s nautical philosophy... an extant sextant... the captain and his mate.
Thus the flotilla proceeded for four or five days. We visited Spetses and Ermioni, had a barbeque on the lovely, uninhabited island of Dokos and spent a night anchored off a beach taverna somewhere east of Thermissia. Shergar was managing very well, all things considered, but every night Billy-Bob and the American lady on the faculty crew took time to assure me that he was still acting as if he didn’t know one end of a boat from another, and to tell me the latest ‘Shergarism’.
Apart from the lazy, late morning starts, the pace of life continued to be somewhat hectic… the general pattern which developed involved a short, quiet sail in the late morning, with hangovers being slept off on deck; some sort of activity (swimming, water sports, water-fights, etcetera) in the afternoon; an evening meal and then a party into the early hours. For the skippers, it could get a bit wearing... late at night there were all sorts of problems to be sorted out; documents and hand-bags gone astray; misunderstandings about bills; people to be pulled out of harbours, mule-bites to be salved; unwanted suitors to dislodge. Also, of course, the skippers had to constantly replenish the water and make the boats ready, so they couldn’t sleep late the next morning as the clients did. Any regrets were expressed cheerfully and ruefully, however. No-one dreamed of complaining.
The general atmosphere was very genial and good-humoured. The girls were not, of course, the anthropophagic wantons which chauvinistic alpha male fantasy, fevered by a long, womanless winter with nothing to do but tell lad’s tales and consume caffeine, had contrived to imagine; but they were nevertheless very charming and it was fun to help them. As for the boys… well, I’m not sure anyone noticed them much unless they got into trouble, so they were perhaps a little less esteemed...
I quickly learned to enjoy my solitude in the early hours before the crew awoke. I would take a very leisurely coffee and a stroll; watch the world a while, and then set about my chores very, very quietly in order to be left with my thoughts a while longer. This was something which became very much easier after the second night, in Spetses, where we had a boozy cockpit-party late at night. The corollary of this was that a dishevelled and transparently euphoric PeePee emerged the next morning from Karrotos’ boat, hand-in-hand with a blonde Canadian lad. I was delighted to assure Spiros that Clemmie and I could manage Iraklis, and PeePee was seen no more on board ‘the big boat.’
This was by no means the only liaison which was made on the Grave-Robber. There was a fair amount of late-night smooching… referred to by one of the American girls as ‘mashing’, which I thought a splendidly colourful and accurate description… and quite a few people changed boats during the course of the trip. At night there was great variation too... the boat one sailed on was not necessarily the boat one slept on. People migrated like nomads with defective compasses, and laid themselves down to sleep wherever affection, fatigue, alcohol or sheer convenience deposited them. On two occasions we left people behind, skippers thinking they were on other boats, and they had to catch up by ferry, and there was one Welsh lad who, I think, slept on a different boat every night. I found him snoring contentedly on the beach the morning after the barbeque.
There was enormous competition amongst the other skippers for the attention of my Icelandic goddess... which she returned with graceful acknowledgement of the compliment, and not the slightest hint of interest. This, of course, merely made the Mediterranean blood boil all the more effervescently for her.1 Yeorgaki, Karrotos and Xanthos were locked in a good-humoured contest for her favour, and by my reckoning the cheery, rotund Yeorgaki was a narrow head in front of the other two and still getting absolutely nowhere. I highly approved of this jealous devotion, as it made it unnecessary for me to have to worry about her being bothered by men in the towns we visited. Her suitors guarded her from each other and from outsiders with equal devotion, and she proceeded through the streets like an American president surrounded by the Secret Service.
I trust I do not give the impression that our archaeologists were a depraved lot: we all wished that had been so, but it was not. They were just healthy young people with a truck-load of vigour, in mixed company and a vibrant, stimulating foreign country, feeding off each other’s energy. There was an end-of-term sort of atmosphere, and it was party-time. Some might think the studious, committed nature of archaeological study and frenzied revelry unlikely bedfellows, and perhaps they become so with time… the lecturers who accompanied the tours were sensible, abstemious sorts by and large… but there appeared to be no sense of incompatibility amongst the student body. Even the more mature scholars were likely to end up jumping into harbours in the early hours; and, on consideration, perhaps there was an element of catharsis in their carousing... an archaeologist, after all, is someone who will spend a week in silent, single-minded concentration gently brushing dirt out of a gladiator’s coccyx in an attempt to separate his pilum from his prostate; there must surely be a reaction to such a degree of absorption.
* * *
On board Iraklis things were becoming quite well organised by the morning of the third day. Clemmie had assumed the role of chief mate as smoothly as she did everything else, and I had no qualms about letting her berth and unberth the boat... she was completely competent. Then, to my great surprise, our Nordic beauty abruptly began to pay attention and progressed quickly to Fender-Tender First Class.
The Italian boy… time, time, the thief of all things, what was his name? Giovanni seems to strike a chord… turned out to simply adore helming. The only occasion when he willingly left the wheel was when Jana, his Czech consort, disappeared into their cabin... then he was gone like a missile leaving its silo, regardless of whether anyone else was there to take the wheel or not. On more than one occasion I heard a door slam, then felt the boat coming up into the wind, and hopped up on deck to find a Marie Celeste situation in the cockpit… and presumably another Czech getting bounced.
A Scots lass called May, who was a climber, knew a few knots and took a bit of an interest... most
ly in shinning up the mast. She could go up it like a monkey fetching coconuts, and spent a good while happily sitting on the crosstrees until Spiros took her to one side and quietly explained how long it takes to get to hospital from a boat. She also became one of my ‘trusties,’ capable on the wheel at sea and on deck in harbour.
Other than that, my crew were occasionally inspired to get involved but generally just made the boat untidy. At sea they took little interest, and it would have been fine by me if they had been the same in port as well, but they did feel it incumbent upon them to do something when we were berthing, which was really when I most wanted them to sit down and keep their extremities inside the boat. Then, on the third day, I had a stroke of genius.
One of the party had a yellow portable stereo with a bulging circular speaker at each end, an implement I regarded as the death-knell of civilisation because I am a musical caveman who tends to the opinion that music ceased to be written the day Teddy Elgar turned up his toes. The term ‘boom-box’ was in current usage for such an ‘asset’ at the time, but because of its suggestive shape we called it the ‘boob-box.’
Since they had so much energy when we came in to port I suggested that our status as Largest Vessel should be emphasised, and revealed that I had a cassette recording of the works of Offenbach about my person... and you know what he wrote. Thereafter, every time we came in to port, all the spare girls donned whatever they had in the way of a short skirt, lined up along the boom and, with Offenbach’s most recognisable work crashing out of the boob-box, they performed the Can-Can with enormous gusto. This amused everyone, entertained hordes of cheering Greeks, and kept the girls well out of harm’s way. It also had the fringe benefit that they paid for significantly less of what they drank when ashore.
Being the principle sailors on Iraklis, Clemmie and I were more often with each other than with other people. She always stayed to help me with the watering, engine checks and general care of the boat whilst the rest were in town or at the beach, and we often wandered off and had a drink together, or ended up enjoying the cockpit in peace and quiet whilst the mob were marauding in the discos.
Clemmie’s far-back upper-class accent and dated slang grew on me, and we teased each other unmercifully about our breeding, or lack of it. Offenbach had outed me as a classical music hound and, although she was primarily a folk- and ethnic-music aficionado, Clemmie had been brought up playing the classics. During the evening on the island of Dokos we wandered away from the barbeque and she played me a stunning improvisation on Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy as we watched the sun set over Ermioni.
We weren’t an item. She was still rather too much of a hearty to appeal to me romantically, and I had no delusions of being irresistible to her; so there was no romantic tension. We worked and conversed easily together, I admired her as a sailor and a musician, enjoyed her company and very much appreciated her help. We laughed a lot.
* * *
The penultimate night was quite amazing. We anchored off a beach some way east of Thermissia, with a single taverna on an otherwise deserted beach. Spiros had pre-arranged the meal, which was followed by a spectacular display of unbridled Greek waiter machismo.
The show started with some Greek dancing. Notwithstanding the rural setting, the restaurant boasted five waiters all impeccably attired in black-and-whites. They now supplemented their costume with scarlet sashes, and heel-slapped, high-stepped and genuflected their way through a couple of dances to much applause.
Then they started to get competitive. First they danced individually, with bottles on their heads, turned somersaults, and generally tried to outdo each other. Whilst awaiting their go, they also began to drink quite freely with their customers. Next, one of them made a standing jump onto a table,2 alarming the occupants so much that two girls overbalanced backwards off their chairs. This led to a competition as to who could make the most consecutive such jumps, and I think one chap managed six or seven.
After this, the rest of the waiters demanded an opportunity to showcase their own particular talents, and it rapidly got silly. One of them squatted, gathered up a girl in the crook of each arm, and lifted them both off the ground.
The next tried to repeat the feat with an additional girl sitting on his shoulders... and succumbed to gravity spectacularly, ending up compressed under a wriggling assortment of female anatomical components (which may, of course, have been his intention all along). The surface was loose stone chippings, so no-one was really hurt.
Then other waiters started to load themselves up with girls from the table-tops and stagger under the greatest possible load to another table about five or six metres away, some with quite successful results, others with hilariously abortive ones. Some of the male archaeologists tried their hands… or, rather, their entire skeleto-muscular systems… at it too. And finally, of course, one of the waiters had to try it on the rickety pier extending over the water, and that ended inevitably in a rapid succession of three loud splashes. Laughter, squeals and bouzouki music flowed into the calm night air.
It would of course be an intolerable breach of storytelling convention had such an evening not had a finale, and the reader is easily forgiven if he suspects that, to give my story the classical form, I gild the lily to create the predictable denouement; but to doubt the existence of a definitive climax is to misunderstand the flamboyant nature of Greece and Greeks. There is always going to be a finale... that is the quintessentially theatrical nature of the place. It really happened.
The most thick-set of the waiters, a moustachioed enthusiast of about fifty years, who looked like the villain in an Arabian Nights tale, bellowed for attention and then tore off his shirt… quite literally, cloth sundered and buttons pinged into the audience… to reveal a body somewhere between stalwart and stout. His chest and shoulder blades were thickly forested with greying hair. He stalked around the circle of onlookers as though looking for someone to eat, and selected a slim American girl as his partner for the next event. She went willingly enough, giggling and rolling her eyes at the waiter’s hairy body, and he took her waist in two hands and swung her up easily to stand on a table. She looked a little nervous, but bowed left and right, gamely playing her part. And then she looked a bit puzzled as the waiter produced a blue plastic bottle and commenced squirting fluid up and down three of the legs of the table.
By the time the waiter had finished, she was beginning to show a little more agitation, but if she was going to bail-out she delayed too long. The waiter squatted down at one corner of the table, placing his chest against the leg and holding the side of the top in both hands. Then he took the corner of the table-top in his teeth. And stood up.
The whole restaurant gasped. The powerful little chap made it in one smooth, clean lift, holding the weight of the girl and table with his bared fangs and keeping them level by the pressure of the leg against his chest. The girl staggered and squeaked, but he had the table-top quite horizontal and unbelievably steady, so she hung in there, teetering a little with her arms spread to balance her. Then the waiter spread his arms out wide, and an acolyte started Zorba’s Dance on the stereo. He began to move slowly, smoothly. The girl pleaded, half seriously, to be let down; but she didn’t jump. And then the assistant performed the second part of his supporting role... he flicked his lighter quickly one-two-three against the table legs, and they burst into flame.
From the blue-ish hue of the conflagration it was obviously only methylated spirit, but you can imagine the reaction of the girl. After an instant of incredulity, she felt the warmth on her ankles and, emitting a shriek that would have put a band-saw to shame, she launched herself sideways into the audience, collapsing half of the front row. The table spun the opposite way, one blazing leg coming into contact with the waiter. He righted the table serenely and danced on, eyes wide, and now a trickle of flame was extending over the table-top towards him. By the time he dropped the table there was a definite smell of singed hair, a suspicion of smoke around his Adam’s apple,
and any mere mortal would have beaten his chest like a gorilla after happy-hour; but our Hercules paraded around his applauding audience like a victorious prize-fighter, arms high, until he came to his erstwhile partner as she adjusted her clothing and eyed him with wild-eyed consternation. Then he gathering her into his powerful, hairy arms and, drawing her into his chest, gave her an enormous hug. C’mon, baby, put out my fire.
The girl took it extraordinarily well. She even laughed about it. Eventually.
* * *
The waiters weren’t the only macho ones. The skippers weren’t exactly deficient in testosterone either, and were always in competition. We raced whenever there was enough wind, naturally, but that was very indecisive, as the boats were not evenly matched, so the competition took other forms... fanciest dive off a high rock, deepest dive, biggest fish caught, biggest octopus, longest time underwater. The Greeks were in their element, of course… they all had spear-guns, which they used at every opportunity, and knowing the water temperature they also had wet-suits. They spent hours fishing, and when not in the water they prowled the rocks and harbour-quays with their kamakis, the long, wooden-handled octopus spears. They took the girls out in the dinghies in the evening and bounced their octopus-hooks across the seabed. Daily they brought in their harvest to feed the barbeques... Karottos in particular was a fine spear-fisherman who could stay under water about three minutes, and generally won the deep-diving contests.
All this was stuff I couldn’t possibly compete at, so I threw down the gauntlet in my own field, and just tried to down-right out-sailor them all. I made sure that I tied the fastest, flashiest knots, and I sailed every possible inch of the way. With Clemmie’s help I got my sails up and down as quickly and smoothly as could be… it was counted a deep disgrace if Iraklis didn’t have her mainsail up before she left the harbour… and I sailed in and out of anchorages without the engine. I pontificated on navigation and seamanship and, despite the fact that we were never more than a couple of miles from land, I desperately regretted the fact that my sextant was lying idle in Kyria Fotini’s best bedroom. I shamelessly expounded maritime lore… history, mythology, nautical etymology of common words and phrases… and analysed great naval battles and shipwrecks.
The Trojan Walrus Page 8