The Trojan Walrus

by Julian Blatchley

  I eventually swayed into the meat market as they began to close up for mesimeri... the afternoon break, or siesta. One of the singular and enchanting features of this market is the rather ingenious use of a ceiling-fan to keep flies off the meat... a sloped display table is sited below the fan, to the blades of which are attached frayed rope’s ends which almost reach the produce below. The fan runs at low speed, whisking the frayed ends just above the meat and effectively deterring the flies. In that simplicity of mind which tends to accompany a whole morning of drinking mixed wines and spirits, I swayed and communed with the fly whisk for a quiet, contemplative moment or two; and then I went completely mad.

  In the glass refrigerated case was a pig’s head, regarding me critically through half closed eyes, and it gave my befuddled thinking-muscle an idea. I had always wanted to spit-roast a pig, and it occurred to me that Kyria Fotini’s barbeque was equipped with a business-like looking souvla, or spit; so, on the spur of the moment, I decided to give it a go... without, of course, the least idea how to go about the business, nor a moment’s consideration of how silly I would look if I got it wrong in front of a crowd of people. Without any consideration of how this was to be achieved, I engaged with the butcher and stated my intention. And, on an island as gregarious as Poros, every action is a public one and there’s no honourable way of going back from that point.

  My butcher listened gravely to my expectations of twenty-five people, and advised that I needed a piglet of about twelve kilos. I had just enough wit still about me to check how long that would take to cook... three to four hours, I was told... and I put in my order. The pig would be ready for collection the next morning from seven thirty onwards.

  Collecting the impoverished and hungry Gina and Andrea for company, I made a half-hearted effort to sober myself up with a steak lunch away from the infernal waterfront; but the owner of the butcher’s taverna up in the town was grateful for a recent party of tourists I had sent his way and insisted on giving me a free kilo of retsina, so that didn’t work. It did, though, help me persuade the girls to take care of preparing the salads for the following day.

  Whilst waiting for the shops to re-open I tried a couple of strong coffees in a cafe, but if I did in fact sober up at last, it wasn’t the caffeine that did the trick; it was the sudden realisation that half the waterfront was by now aware that I was roasting a pig in my garden the next day. An astounding number of people managed to find themselves in front of me, some openly hopeful, some (predominantly those I had met earlier in the day and not invited) mildly reproachful. By the time I had engaged Apostolis from the Kava4 to deliver wine and beer, asked Petros to send up some ice, and bought a bin-bag full of paper plates and plastic cutlery, I was vaguely aware that I had weakly admitted another imprecise number of people to the guest list.

  * * *

  The day of Piggy’s passion dawned bright and clear, and I legged it down to the butchers in optimistic mood, a spring in my heels and rosy with anticipation. True it was, I had a nagging concern about what Kyria Fotini would say when a battalion of hunger pig-chompers swarmed into her garden, but there was no longer anything I could do about that; so apart from hoping mildly for an outbreak of a debilitating pork allergy, I ignored it. The butcher had been true to his word, and there was Piggy, in all his glory in the glass case. As I took delivery a moustachioed, bespectacled Groucho Marx look-alike, whom I recognised as the chef from one of the beach tavernas, was attempting to conceal a half-dismantled scooter under a heap of pork chops.

  “About three to four hours to cook, you say?” I asked the butcher; but with the deal done and the cash in his pocket, his answer had none of the assurance of the previous day. He shrugged, then waved his hand at Groucho and said, “Kyrie Manolis cook pig. Many pig he cook. You ask him.”

  I raised my eyebrows towards the bristling moustache, which switched rapidly left and right a time or two. Then he fixed me with intense black eyes, and lifted one finger of his left hand and two fingers of his right.

  “Two kilos, 1 hour,” he said, “No less. Two kilos, one hour”

  “Eh?”

  As the implications of this hit me, Groucho marched round to the back of the cabinet, opened it, and hefted the piglet.

  “Dhódheka kilá! Twelve!” he announced. “Six, seven hour.”

  “Seven hours!!!” I cried in anguish... I had invited everyone for drinks at midday and food at about two o’clock. I didn’t even have the fire hot yet.

  “Not less!” admonished the moustache. “Maybe more, not less. Anybody he say something another, no you listen nothing. Two kilos, 1 hour. Káli órexi!”

  He straddled the only remaining visible part of his scooter and, trailing several dogs and a music-hall raspberry, he wobbled off along the waterfront. I screamed for Shergar, and moments later we were legging it up the hill to my house, piggy slung between us, looking like Burke and Hare doing a quickie.

  Putting out fires in Greece is often exceedingly difficult, but starting them rarely presents a problem. A handful of last year’s dry vine-twigs, a match and we were away. Any Greek garden will yield some kindling... there is always a bit of collapsed pergola, an old window-shutter, a failed attempt at a plate rack, or a moribund chair somewhere. The flames were soon thrusting keenly up through the charcoal, and Shergar and I set about spitting our pig. Simplest thing in the world, you would think. Big spike, insert in bottom, vigorous thrust, job done. Not so. It is a grim business, involving repeated efforts, indignities that Egyptian mummy embalmers would have quailed at, and, in extremis, resort to the non-too-delicate application of a hefty hammer. By the time the guest of honour was installed another forty-five precious minutes had fled into the cerulean sky.

  It was by now almost ten o’clock, and a disaster confronted us. The garden was not prepared, the fire still not hot enough for cooking, we had as yet no ice, no salads, no cutlery or crockery, and no help. You can’t face debacles of this magnitude sober, so we popped the first beer-cans, toasted ineptitude, and cracked up laughing.

  Gina and Andrea arrived at about eleven to find Shergar and I, already in a very rosy frame of mind, poking and peering experimentally at the pig. We had it low down over the coals with some vague notion of making the skin crisp before cooking the meat at a higher level.5 Being men, of course, we wouldn’t have read how to do the job before attempting it, even if we had known where to find the instructions; and the girls were unable to help, as it appeared that they had been playing truant the day their domestic science class addressed the dos and don’ts of ramming an eight-foot spike up a pigs bum and bunging it on a bonfire. Nonetheless, appropriate things seemed to be happening... the first, fleeting savoury wafts began to taint the air, and the skin was starting to whiten and blister in a way that brought crackling to mind. Our innate optimism, assisted by some liquid accelerant, allowed us to believe that we had the job nicely under control. We adopted a policy of turning Piggy about sixty degrees every five minutes or so, and started arranging tables and chairs.

  Apostolis arrived with the drinks, and we were trying to get them all into the kitchen fridge, when Joe Burke’s brogue outside bellowed “Mary, Mother of Jesus! What’re ye doing to that poor pig?”

  I trotted outside to find a roaring inferno entirely engulfing our lunch. Shergar and I galloped up to the flames, seized an end of the spit each, plucked the beast out, then dropped it as the metal seared our hands. As we plunged our own roasted flesh into the yard-bucket, Gina and Joe gallantly put out the fires on the pig’s skin with a towel. Then we all stood looking at the smouldering, blackened remains whilst the barbeque, which so recently had been a respectable, well-behaved bed of hot, grey coals, raged like a rocket-engine.

  We soon worked out what the problem was. The skin of the pig had been starting to weep some fat, which made the fire smoke and flare a little, although not enough to be a problem; but just before we had gone inside, we had turned the spit belly-down... anxious to appear as if I knew what I wa
s doing, I recalled having made some completely fabricated but plausible remark about ‘getting some heat into his hams’... and obviously the fats which had been created inside his belly cavity, captive when he was on his back, had run into the fire with a rush when he was turned; and there they had ignited.

  A plan ‘B’ was obviously required. Experimenting feverishly, we sprinkled water on the fire just sufficiently to quench the flames and then raked the coals to each side of the barbeque, leaving a bare space immediately below the spit. The girls washed the worst of the soot off Piggy, as nonchalantly as if self-immolating porkers were ten-a-penny in their native Lancashire.* Then we put the sorry-looking pig back on his pyre, and stationed a fire-watchman with a water-bottle.

  It was plain by now that we didn’t have a hope in hell of serving lunch much before dinner time, so I sent Shergar down to town to buy some sausages to keep people going. We also didn’t have enough room in the fridge for all the drinks, so Gina was sent to her bar to try to borrow an ice-box. Also, the girl’s efforts at a salad... potato salad in one bowl, coleslaw in another... were quite charmingly presented, but probably only enough for a dozen people at most, so Andrea was despatched with Joe’s niece Morna to buy veggies to make a big horiatiki salad. Joe and I remained to battle the flames, which still periodically flared when fat pooled under the spit and threatened to turn a culinary event into an auto-da-fe.

  By one o’clock, despite the constant battle with the flames, the guest of honour was starting to brown nicely and a very appetizing smell was eddying around the garden. A second, small, portable barbeque had been started and sausages were beginning to sizzle.

  Cold beer and wine was now in abundance. Unable to find her boss, Gina had used her initiative and bought a plastic dustbin... plastic-ware in Greece was ludicrously cheap... and the bottom half was now our ice-box. We filled it with ice which Petros had sent up with the garbage mules, mules which were now contentedly consuming the neighbour’s window-boxes and turning the street outside into a midden whilst the muleteer seated himself by the barbeque. Helping himself to a glass of ouzo, he contentedly set about telling us what we were doing wrong, and looked about as likely to move as the Western Front in 1917.

  The lid of the dustbin also came in handy... propped upside-down on three bricks, it became a man-sized salad-bowl, full of the traditional horiatiki salad... olives, sweet little reddish onions, tomatoes, cucumbers and feta, all drenched with olive oil and vinegar. Kyria Fotini now made an appearance and inspected the salad critically. She sniffed in a non-committal manner and brought some capers to add to the mix, which instantly turned a competent salad into a speciality.

  We were ready. The beer was cold, the first tranche of sausages were hot. The salad glistened, packets of picnic utensils gaped, and the gentle strains of Dhirlada and Frangosyriani oozed out of my old cassette-player. Over the rebellious fire the pig glistened, spat and steamed. Charlie arrived, florid from his climb, but no-one else apart from him. My wishes for a pork allergy appeared to have been granted; people stayed away in their thousands.

  So, there we sat: Joe and Morna, Charlie, Shergar, Gina, Andrea, the garbage muleteer and I, making small talk and contemplating having to eat a twelve kilo pig and a dustbin lid-full of salad. As one o’clock faded and two o’clock loomed, I grimly distracted my thoughts by addressing myself to the problem of the flaring of the fire, and came up with a solution... I borrowed two narrow baking-tins from Kyria Fotini, and placed them below the spit. Now all the fat was collected in the tins, preventing the fire from flaring, and we could also use it to baste the beast. I was quickly finding out that the skin wasn’t as crisp as I had expected, but it looked pretty scrumptious all the same. Not that anyone would ever know, I thought in a resigned way.

  The muleteer watched my efforts with mild approval, and seemed to be turning over a matter of some weight in his mind. Eventually, he approached the spit and gestured to me to take the pig off the fire. He used a large clasp-knife to quarter some lemons and oranges, which he plucked without so much as a by-your-leave from trees in the neighbouring gardens, and then did the same with three onions left over from the salad. All of these he ladled into the stomach cavity of the pig. Then he twisted a piece of rusty wire out of the fencing, used it to deftly close up the belly, and gestured for us to put it back over the fire.

  I instantly understood that this was a wonderful tip... the fruit, of course, would steam as the heat increased and the juices would be infused into the meat. The muleteer nodded gravely at my thanks, refilled his glass, and returned to his seat. It was quite evident that his secretary had cancelled his appointments for the rest of the afternoon.

  Charlie too settled in very readily. He quenched the inner fires ignited by labouring up the hill with a couple of rapid-fire beers, and then settled down with a mug full of wine to tell us a story. I was ready enough to listen to anything at all, to distract me from the apparent snub which my absent guests were delivering, but as it happened it was a wonderful tale and remains one of my favourites.

  * * *

  Charlie sailed an old Westerly centre-cockpit boat called Aquafrolic and was a rotund, jolly, mischievous chap with twinkling blue eyes, a bald patch like a monk’s tonsure, and a carbuncular nose that looked like one of those animal shapes made out of twisted balloons. I knew that he was retired, that he was a widower, and that he lived year-round on his boat, roaming the Eastern Mediterranean from Cyprus to Italy. Other than that, I really only knew that he was immensely likeable and a walking databank of entertaining stories which he told in a lazy, liquid, warming Devonshire burr.

  I had always had a feeling that Charlie was an ex-serviceman... he had never said as much, but he had a Royal British Legion sticker on his boat, and on the rare occasions when I saw him actually doing something he was decisive and authoritative in a way which had ‘N.C.O.’ stamped all over it. It now turned out that I had been right, for he confided that, during World War Two, he had served in a tank regiment in the desert campaign. By the time of the D-Day invasion, Charlie had been a sergeant in charge of a Sherman tank.

  Charlie’s squadron, it appeared, had been selected to land in the very first wave of landings on D-Day. Their unenviable task was to follow mine-clearing tanks across the beach, flatten the wire for the infantry, and then get off the beach and attack the defenders from behind: But, as Charlie graphically described, no-one had the least expectation of getting as far as the road. They all expected to be knocked out on the beach, and the cynical opinion of the crews was that the planners knew that perfectly well, and really intended to use the disabled tanks as shelter for the foot soldiers.

  “Soo, y’see,” Charlie said, “...We never bo-othered much with reme-emberin’ all the stuff we wuz surppozed to do after we got off that ole’ beach. It worn’t gon’ t’appen. We just pra-acticed gettin’ out o’ that ole’ tank as quick as possible, an’ troid to thi-ink about other thi-ings.”

  One of the other things they thought about was driving through a house.

  Apparently, all of the crews had rather a thing about driving through houses. It looked very good on the films, but in the desert they hadn’t had the chance... houses tended to be scarce. Also, their tanks were earlier models, too light and underpowered. They might have got stuck, and, as Charlie somewhat superfluously pointed out, getting stuck half way out of a house with a ton of masonry on top of your gun in the middle of a battle was not a situation people relished being in. He added that a few of the lads had found a tent to flatten, but it wasn’t the same.

  In training for D-Day back in England, of course, driving through houses was frowned upon. A few of the more adventurous souls had flattened a hen-coop or an old sheep-pen, but the deep and enduring satisfaction of going right through Number Seven, Magnolia Gardens, emerging in a shower of bricks from the other side with curtains across the turret and Granny in her bath on the engine-cover, eluded them. No such restrictions were expected to apply in France, however, and t
he Sherman, a very much heavier and more powerful tank than their desert equipment, was clearly just what a chap needed for indulging in the ultimate gate-crashing. To divert their minds from what was likely to happen to them on the beaches, the crews talked long and hard about how to drive through a house, what would happen when they did, and took bets on who would be the first to do it.

  Along came the great day and, to his utter amazement, Charlie’s tank churned across a Normandy beach with no worse harm than a few annoyingly loud noises as things bounced off the outside. In tip-top form the tank crested the dune, skidded sideways from behind a mine-clearing tank and roared away up a tarmac road. Then, just as Charlie was desperately trying to find out where he was and recall where he was supposed to go, he found slap in front of his snarling steel steed a smallish house with a machine-gun blazing out of a window.

  “Oi’m ha-avin’ that!” roared Charlie and, slamming his hatch closed over his head, he directed his driver to drive straight through the building.

  He described how the garden wall went down, the frantic patter of bullets on the outside of the tank, the exhilaration and adrenaline rush as the house came closer and closer until the roof could no longer be seen through the narrow viewing slits. As they crossed the garden, Charlie fired the main gun into the building and swung the turret backwards, to protect the barrel; then, at full throttle, they crashed into the brick wall.

  Charlie paused at this point in his story, looked thoughtful for a minute, and took a deep, reflective draught of his wine. Then he looked directly at me.

  “’Ave you ever driven though a ’ouse in a ta-ank?” He enquired brightly.

  “Not recently,” I admitted.

  “We-ell, son, whe-en you do,” he said, and shook his head with a look of weary martyrdom, “When you do, try an’ pick one without a bloody cellar!”

  * * *

  The clock tower struck four and the clock itself said six-thirty, by which I knew that it was a quarter to three,7 and at that instant, a chattering started and gradually grew louder. Moments later, it seemed to me, half the village arrived.