Expanding from the chicane of the gateway like the opening of a peacock’s tail, they filled the garden with noise and colour in what seemed like a matter of seconds. From a solemn gathering of self-conscious people spreading themselves expansively in an attempt to make the garden look busy, the party was abruptly transformed into a roil of jostling, bubbling humanity questing for a place to sit or even stand. I greeted as many as I could, all the time religiously avoiding the incredulous eyes of Kyria Fotini which I could feel lasering the crowd from the relative safety of an upstairs window.
It was amusing to watch how the crowd sorted themselves out. The Greek women took no prisoners, single-mindedly appropriating all the chairs and moving them into the shadiest areas of the garden. That done, they assured themselves of a supply of drinking water, subjected the salads to a judicious inspection, and resumed their avid daily examination of village affairs. The Greek men congregated around the fire, lit cigarettes, and proceeded to offer advice and criticism of my cooking.
The Europeans8 made a fairly orderly circuit, formally greeting people with whom they must have just walked up the hill, and all of them took the earliest possible opportunity to make the acquaintance of Piggy, intrigued no doubt to find out what atrocities the much maligned English cuisine was in the process of committing. It seemed that, on balance, they just approved. Men pursed their lips and nodded sagely, women shrugged and tilted their heads in vague acknowledgement. Then they made for the bar, and of course found the Brits and Paddies already in residence.
I never at any time found out how many people were there, but I doubt if even the excessive number I had invited accounted for more than a third of them. Piggy wasn’t looking quite so plentiful now, with this herd of amiable carnivores drooling over his obsequies, and when I saw the speed at which the sausages were vanishing I sent the girls back down the hill for some more grub. Even the dustbin lid was starting to show through the salad at an alarming rate.
The retsina was going down very well, too. I had early on found that the retsina from the adjacent island of Aegina was a wonderful, heavy, oily wine of gravity with a smooth, resin tang. Many retsinas, especially the bottled ones, were rather too tart, but the Aegina farmers had the true secret. They didn’t grow the grapes, but they imported the must and completed it themselves, and the farmer’s market on the Aegina waterfront was where they sold it. Charlie had been happy to bring down a few ‘gallonia’ for the party, and I was relieved to note that the locals obviously approved.
I circulated for a while, and to begin with I beat my breast and said my mea-culpa’s for the lateness of the feast; but the answer I received was always the same... an unconcerned shrug, and ‘Oh, everyone in the cafe knew you were a bit late. That’s why we didn’t come earlier.’
The roast was starting to concern me. By the time the crowd arrived, the pig had been cooking for over four hours; the animal had shrunk somewhat and was loosening up on the souvla. A succession of men were turning the handle slowly but constantly now, and with each rotation the backbone was starting to come away from the spit and then fall back again. It didn’t take an expert to see that this could end in disaster, for if the back broke the best of the pig might fall into the fire. Almost every one of the Greek men present sought a private interview with me, at which they kindly drew my attention to this. As five hours passed and six approached, and as the bar stocks declined, advice turned to warnings; then to pleas.
“Time to take it off!” they advised, and “It’s ready now”... “You’ll dry it out”... “It’ll fall to pieces!”
As steadfastly as I could, I ignored them. In my heart I thought the meat was done too, but the persuasive mantra of Kyrios Manolis had me in thrall: “Anybody he say something another, no you listen nothing. Two kilos, 1 hour. No less. Maybe more.”
In my time, I have conned some of the world’s largest ships in some of its busiest and narrowest waterways. I have been shot at a time or two. I have tackled fires at sea, and had occasion to tell a Prime Minister to sit down and shut up. I have, to cap it all, thrice faced those immutable, dispassionate, disdainful dispensers of judgement, the Department of Transport Examiners of Masters and Mates. The degree of tension I experienced on any of those occasions was as nothing compared to the anxiety I now felt, isolated in opinion from everyone else at the party still sober enough to make an informed judgement, and quite a few others besides. The opportunity to look exceedingly silly here gaped like a shark at a shipwreck.
For the last hour of cooking, the tension knotted my guts in the manner of a model aeroplane’s rubber band and my heart leapt into my mouth every time the backbone of the pig moved. Fissures opened in the skin, and anyone could see how tender and loose the meat was becoming. I took over turning the spit myself, in an attempt to be sure that it was turned as gently as possible, but this was a terrible mistake, for every time the pig moved on the spit I could now physically feel it, and each gentle jolt wound my inner spring a notch tighter.
As I refused steadfastly to do anything, the pleas to take the pig off became demands, and then to something close to anger. Hands were raised to the heavens, Greek pejoratives took to the air like a rookery disturbed by a gunshot, eyes rolled. And then, as we passed the sixth hour, the mood changed entirely. Everyone gave up, and sank back in defeat. It was reminiscent of that moment in the submarine films when the boat passes crush depth, and the crew stop turning valves, fall silent, and accept their fate.
“I told him!” ran the litany now.
“It’s ruined!”
“Ti na kaanoume?... what can we do?”
“Foreigners! They don’t know.”
“Well, I told him!”
“You did! I heard you! I told him too. Yiannis told him!”
“Ah, well, at least the sausages were good.”
Hopelessly they refilled their glasses and lit cigarettes, glanced sadly back at the spit from time to time and generally assumed the air of mourners outside a church waiting for a funeral to begin.
Seven hours. By this time, Piggy was almost bent double and lolloping around on his spit in the manner of a burst tyre on a speeding lorry. Turning him on his back, I used a long, thin knife to probe into the ham. Every fibre in my being yearned for the juice to be clear, but there was still a trace of red. Stoically, I returned to cooking. Equally stoically, the audience extinguished any final embers of hope in their breasts and forced themselves to speak gaily of other things.
Seven and a half hours. The juice was clear. With extreme caution, Joe and I lifted the spit from the fire and placed it on the table. Holding my breath, I carefully carved a piece of shoulder, and sudden hope kindled in me. My heart began to glow as I felt how easily the knife went through the meat, saw the juice bubbling up below the surface.
I made a bit of a ceremony about presenting the first cut to Kyria Fotini, who certainly deserved no less recognition for putting up with the annexation of her garden by a barbarian horde. The party fell silent as she speared an unctuous gobbet with her fork. She closed her eyes as she popped it into her mouth. A moment later they sprang open again, and a look of wonder passed across her face.
“Loukoumi!” she cried, “Loukoumi iné!”
Was that good or bad?
Good, it seemed... the Greek women present surged forward, brandishing paper plates, and as fast as I put meat on the serving-plate it vanished. When a piece of skin hit the porcelain, it was frequently pinned immobile for an instant by two or three forks, and then rent asunder. By the time I had stripped and served all the easy meat, a good few people were already ambling innocently back to the table casting sidelong, hopeful and enquiring looks at the carcass. They cast in vain. Piggy was sped.
Loukoumi, it turns out, is the word for Turkish Delight,9 and is a term used to describe something soft, sweet and juicy; I could hardly have wished a finer accolade. My heart soared to see the fruit of my labours so keenly devoured, but my back felt as if it had been broken with a sledge-h
ammer... I supposed this to have been the result of a day on my feet, combined with the posture I had used whilst carving, but muscular tension caused by stress was probably also a significant factor. I shamelessly stole Gina’s chair as she went for another drink, and compounded this un-gentlemanly behaviour by instructing her to get me one too. Then I sat with a pint mug of icy retsina in my paw, tension draining out of my feet. I felt like the amateur who has just landed the airliner after both of the pilots had the Chicken Tartare for dinner.
As I sat there limply, people congratulated me on the way Piggy had turned out. Several of the Greeks said, “Poli orea! Ver’ nice, Tzoulian!”
I got a little of my energy back and expostulated keenly, “Sas ipa! I told you... two kilos, one hour; maybe more, not less. And if I had listened to you, we would have taken it off two hours ago, and it would have been raw!”
Entirely unabashed, they looked at each other in an enquiring manner for a moment, several of them shrugging and others tossing their heads and making the little tutting noise as Greeks do in negation. Petros roared with laughter.
“Nobody here ever cooked a pig before!” he crowed.
But then, when did a little thing like complete ignorance ever stop a Greek from giving advice?
* * *
The sun was declining, the temperature was dropping, and the pig was a memory. The remains, picked so clean that they looked as pristine as a skeleton in a medical school, had finally been tossed over the wall to a couple of street-dogs. The muleteer and Petro had appropriated the head and skilfully stripped that before questing after the brains with the assistance of a log-axe. I had eaten very little pork for myself, contriving to secure only a piece of leg by way of tasting whilst carving. There hadn’t even been an un-gnawed bone to regale myself on after my labours at the carving-table... that would annoy me on the morrow, but for now I was basking with contentment at the success of the day.
A few people had drifted away to sleep it off, but many remained, and some more people even arrived. Two of them were policemen, who came to investigate reports of a disturbance during mesimeri, or siesta time; however, they had evidently completed their own afternoon nap before investigating. Arriving, therefore, after the end of the official siesta, they naturally found no crime in progress, so there was no legal or moral reason they could not stay for a drink.
Similarly, three firemen wandered in claiming that some concerned citizen had reported smoke. Since I recognised one of them as the owner of a house just down the lane, it didn’t take much of an intellect to work out who the concerned citizen had been.
Another late arrival was Big Savvas, a colleague of our eternal and stalwart muleteer; tall, rangy, dark and moustachioed, he was possibly the most Greek-looking Greek I ever saw; and he was one of the best Greek dancers too.
Morna and Ilse were in the lane feeding the remains of the salad to the donkeys whilst their inexhaustible owner continued disposing of wine by the embers of the fire. Every now and then one of the Greeks... generally Big Savvas... would start dancing, and we would all clap in time. Chatter filled the evening. The police and fire service vied for the attention of the girls. I sat, so relaxed in my chair that I moulded myself to it like a chocolate on a radiator, and chatted quietly with Joe and Charlie. Sunset turned the west to cerise, then to ice-flecked indigo.
The ebb-tide started when the policemen took their leave. Their example was catching, and the party began to die. The garden emptied quite rapidly, people calling out to each other to pass their adieus or making new assignations to reconvene in the waterfront cafes. They swirled around the garden gate before disappearing, rather like the last of the bath-water gurgling down the plug-hole, and as they ebbed the magnitude of the morrow’s clean-up hit solidly home.
Almost the last to leave were Joe, Morna and Charlie, who made their farewells, collided in the gateway, and then linked their arms for support. They weaved down the lane, kept upright by judicious contact with the walls, singing an Irish goodnight song.
Kyria Fotini and her husband went tipsily to bed, climbing unsteadily but uncomplainingly over the slumbering Shergar on their steps, with no evident ill-will at the carnage I had wrought in their garden. I headed for my bed, only to find that it had been appropriated by Gina and Andrea. I fashioned a makeshift couch from a blanket, a repaired sail and some waterproofs in the lower part of the room and lay down on that.
In the moment or two before slumber overran my senses, it dawned upon me that this hadn’t been my party at all... I had been merely the hapless mouse running on the laboratory treadmill; the commanding force, from start to finish, had been the whimsical Poros waterfront. Like some Olympian God meddling in the affairs of man to pass an idle hour, it had completely ignored my own intentions and wishes to create a party entirely to its own satisfaction. It had dictated the guest list, the menu, and the schedule. By constantly informing the guests of my progress... or lack of it... it had prevented people arriving early. When I needed extra supplies, it had provided them. When I needed people, it had made it easy to find it. When it was time for people to leave, it lured them away again. All I had to do was add money. Indeed, when I reflected on the deft and thoughtful manner in which the waterfront had managed things, I concluded that I could hardly have done better myself.
Smiling at that last thought, I made myself as comfortable as possible on the impromptu bed and closed my eyes. The last thing I heard was the cough of a donkey, the clink of a bottle on a glass, and the gentle crooning of the muleteer as he watched the last of the embers.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PRE-DATE-ORY BEHAVIOUR
Love is almost all around... how to make a miss-ogynist... captain’s mates... a dramatic performance... homosapphians... why a sailor must know his flags... the gentleman’s guide to crossing the Aegean... involuntary espionage... sub-ornation... the beauty of Kamares... a souvlaki seller’s dream... all the nice girls love a sailor... a profound farewell
The lack of a partner had not greatly concerned me earlier in the year, when prospective amours were few and far between and the end-of-Winter feeling had lingered; but as we progressed into May I not only hankered for the solace of female company but also began to feel that my continuing state of celibacy did not reflect to my credit.
Every house acquired a floral wreath on May-day, and with this tangible symbol of spring Greece finally conceded the passing of winter. The sun flew higher and brighter every day, the hotels came to life, the beaches opened. Waiters laid down their paint-brushes and took up their trays, ferries began to swarm and music drifted on the air. The locals, who had finally discarded their winter anoraks but remained well covered-up in heavier clothes, began to cede predominance in the kafeneions to more scantily-clad tourists.
The water, still far too chilly to tempt a Greek, was already warm enough for the increasing numbers of Northern Europeans who began to shriek delightedly as they frolicked in the astringent, glass-bright shallows. The skies were intensely blue, the flowers rioted on every hand, the bees began to buzz, and there was a lot of smooth young skin on display. Greece in the sunshine simply oozed sexual promise... but all I got was an IOU.
This wasn’t entirely my fault. I was doing mostly delivery sailing at the time, which meant that I did not stay in one place very long, and also I often sailed on my own. I was not inhabiting a target-rich environment. However, the fact must also be faced that I was pretty damn feckless when it came to interacting with girls. I blame the circumstances of my childhood for this.
Dad was a classical music aficionado and, at an early and impressionable age, he cunningly took me to a performance of the 1812 Overture which featured the cannon of the Royal Horse Artillery. I would, of course, have roared like Caliban if forced to sit through even five minutes of orchestral music for its own sake, but to see real cannons fired I would have endured The Ring Saga in its entirety. I waited impatiently whilst they got the silly, boring music out of the way before exulting in the smoke
and noise of the guns at the finale, and enjoyed it so much that I begged to be bought the recording of the performance. By the end of the week, Dad wished he had never thought of the idea because I was incessantly humming ‘Pada-pom-pom-paam-paam-paam-paam-PAAAAAMMM-pa-paam’ and crashing saucepan lids together.
Thus a classical monster was begotten, and ever after I found myself unable to derive much satisfaction from popular music. Nothing short of half-an-hour of music registered, and I inhabited a world where Status Quo was a snobbish Roman, and Meatloaf was a school dinner.
Shortly after this my school compounded the musical misdirection I had suffered by organising an outing to Stratford-upon-Avon, there to see a wonderful performance of Julius Caesar. This left me muttering ‘It must be by his death!’ when my peers were quoting Monty Python’s Parrot Sketch. Then my strangely selective memory took a hand by auto-focussing on poetry… or perhaps I should say doggerel. Almost unconsciously, and for no good reason that I can determine, I started to learn great and pointless epics such as Tam O’Shanter, The Ballad of East and West and The Man From Snowy River. Protracted recitations of these occasionally afflict my associates to this very day.
What little room my thinking-muscle had left was very largely sequestered by the two most unconventional and charismatic teachers I encountered at my various schools; the unforgettably-named Mr R. I. Phillips (RIP), who taught history as if he had been at Agincourt himself, and only yesterday morning at that, and an intellectual English master called John Fielding who lurked behind a facade of bewilderment and failing faculties, from which ambush he lambasted the pompous and de-mystified literature. There wasn’t much room left in my attic for more contemporary matters.
The final spectacular cock-up occurred when Dad changed his job and we moved to a Lakeland village where the local secondary school was boys-only. That revered and draughty old slaughterhouse drew half of its pupils ready-muscled from the surrounding hill-farms, and the other half seemed to be the sons of army P.T. instructors. I was so physically inferior to these feral manimals that I could not make the grade in any team sports, and I ended up a solitary protagonist in the esoteric fields of sailing and clay-pigeon shooting.
The Trojan Walrus Page 15