Since my detractors were already hyperbolic, I decided that was the language to speak. Calling on my (considerable!) flair for over-acting, I affected utter perplexity.
“Your boat?” I asked, as if in wonder, “What would I do with your boat?”
Fotis was really quite fluent.
“You think, just because you tow his boat, you have right to take it? It is the boat of his grandfather!” (I could believe that) “It is the boat that feeds his children!” (I was less inclined to believe that... I had never seen him with any children, and he was the sort of chap, to be frank, that one wouldn’t expect to see in the gene-pool unless the chlorination plant was on the blink) “You think, just because you were passing by, that you have the right to take this from him? He not need your help... he is seaman. Son of seaman. He know.”
I raised my hands, palms outward, in pacification.
“I am not going to take his boat. I don’t want his boat.”
“Ha!” exclaimed Fotis, triumphantly, looking around to ensure that this admission had been registered by witnesses. And then his look changed to consternation.
“What?” he demanded.
“I am not going to take his boat. You are talking about salvage money, yes? I don’t want it.”
Fotis was having trouble with this.
“Why?” he eventually asked, in evident amazement.
My reply was delayed as the Wild Man, comprehending that the conversation had taken an unexpected turn, demanded to be updated in Greek. When I finally got my say, I struck a noble pose and said rather pontifically, “I am a seaman. He is a seaman. We are brothers.”
This was translated, and apparently found to have some value. Pursed lips and shrugs indicated that, yes, this might be so, possibly...
“Our enemy is the sea, not each other. We must fight our enemy together. This time, I was able to help you. I do not need money to make me help my brother.”
This was accepted. This was hyperbole, and it was also touching on their core beliefs. I was almost speaking their language now.
“Next time,” I added wickedly, deciding that I had deflected the worst of the ill-feeling, “Perhaps I will be in danger, and my brother will be as generous to me.”
The reaction of the three men to this made it clear that I could expect no such thing. Fotis and the Wild Man started like horses bitten by a snake at the idea, and then looked shifty. Big Savvas, on the other hand, loved it. He roared with laughter and clapped both of his companions hard on the shoulder. Big, big joke! I took care not to smile, but relief flooded through me. If nothing else, I now had the muscle on my side. By keeping my face straight I had, well, kept my face straight! The three of them departed, Savvas perfectly happily and the other two throwing puzzled look over their shoulders as they went.
As far as I was concerned, the matter was closed; but about three days later I was on a boat all on my own, right at the end of the quay. It was a hot afternoon, everyone else was off the streets, and so I was slightly alarmed to see all three men making straight for me. I began edging my hand close to a winch-handle just in case things got ugly, but stopped when I saw the grins on their faces.
The Wild Man was bobbing and smiling like a chap trying to please a child, and Fotis announced grandly that, to thank me for my help, I was invited to the Wild Man’s family home for dinner. There would be, I was informed, his brother’s famous tsipouro and... all expressed reverence and awe at this point... his mother’s famous fish soup.
They came to get me that evening, all three of them. We took ouzo at the Blue Ouzerie near Petros’ cafe and then walked up into the back streets of the town. Rounding the shoulder of the hill we entered the Brinia neighbourhood, very high up and looking west to the sleeping lady, and here entered a yard above and behind a faded, jaded little house. The yard was untidy, littered here and there with fish-boxes and piled nets, but we lifted a tin table and some chairs out onto the track above and seated ourselves to face towards the setting sun. The rocky peak of Sphaeria behind us was fringed with pines which scented the air, and the view was spectacular.
The tsipouro was an acquired taste, being quite the fieriest and most peppery of its kind that I had yet encountered, but Big Savvas had some pieces of octopus on a small grill, and these tempered the unsophisticated liquor somewhat. I was soon happy enough. I listened gravely as the Wild Man explained, through Fotis, the history and provenance of his boat, and particularly of its treasured single-cylinder engine. He then told me, in detail, how he had never really been in danger off Bourtzi Island, and how he would have handled the matter if I had not arrived. I nodded sagely, as one sea brother to another, whilst he explained the virtues of local knowledge.
Fotis then regaled me with accounts of his time in Australia, and Big Savvas retold, from his own viewpoint, some anecdotes from my pig-roast. For my part, I told them of the Lake District mountains where I had been brought up... Patrida, or homeland, is always a subject of interest to Greeks... and explained how I had come to Greece. I did this, as far as my ability allowed, in Greek, which evidently pleased them despite my undoubted mangling of the language. We were a companionable bunch.
Finally a bent, aged lady in a once-black dress which had turned grey with sun and washing appeared in an upstairs window of the house below us and uttered a screech like a banshee who has just had a tax-demand. Big Savvas galloped down to the house and returned with an enormous, battered aluminium pan, climbing with infinite care so as not a drop of the cherished soup should be spilled.
He set it down, and an enormous ladle was used to entirely fill my bowl. Everybody watched as I tried it.
To be honest, my eyes had watered as soon as Savvas took the lid off. It smelled, pungently, of fish... not cooked fish, just fish. The sort of smell you get walking through a fish-market when they have just closed for the day but not yet hosed-down. The soup itself looked like a patch of sea in which a shark had just finished lunch, an opaque, greyish, lack-lustre fluid in which suspicious objects floated, and from which things like fins and bones protruded. I had about as much desire to taste it as I would have had to lick a dustbin clean.
Have courage, I thought, it will be delicious. There are lots of things like this in ethnic cooking... they look and smell repulsive, and taste delicious.
Not, unfortunately, in this case. If did not stretch credulity too far, I would assure the reader that it tasted even worse than it looked. Worse even than the Wild Man looked.
Of course, everyone was watching, and so I called again on my aforementioned powers of acting. Yum, yum, congrats to Mum. Delicious. I gradually emptied the bowl, gagging on scales, bones, and things whose texture made me close my usually vivid imagination down with a clang like a tank-hatch slamming shut. Suddenly the toxic tsipouro tasted infinitely better, and I took to imbibing it at a worrisome rate in an attempt to negate the foul, fishy filth.
Finally I managed to finish it, and of course, I said it was delicious, and of course, they gave me more. I’ll tell you one thing... I wouldn’t risk another soup like that to save a passenger liner full of naked, nubile nymphomaniac millionairesses: the next time the Wild Man is stuck on a lee-shore in a gale, and I happen to be the only passerby, he dies!
CHAPTER NINE
TAKING THE HEAT
In which the heat is on... Greeks coping with Dog Days... the eternal flame... and how to put it out... how to enjoy Pserimos... briefly to Amorgos... collecting tortoises... familiar paths... disreputation... a trysting we shall go... and quickly come home again... the sage counsel of Dr Manolis... poor recompense.
The year was beginning to advance into summer by now, and in those days before climate change Greece used to get very, very hot indeed about the middle of June. Temperatures would soar into the low- or even mid-forties, and at the first mention of kavsona, or heat wave, the country took on a siege mentality.
There was very little air conditioning in private houses, most relying on thick walls and window-shutters
to keep the heat out. Even without access to weather forecasts one knew when the sun was coming... the streets filled with people carrying large fans; fans which, with the certainty of people who knew that they had seen the last cloud in May and would not feel rain until at least September, they mounted in the open air with no concern about weatherproofing. Some of the kafeneions erected enormous, oscillating fans with water-nozzles attached, which blasted a fine mist across the clientele... I stayed clear of those; it was cooling, to be sure, but seemed to me the best imaginable way of catching legionnaire’s disease, and it felt like being backed-into by a hovercraft.
Direct sunlight was detested. People walked on the shaded side of the street. If forced into the sun they accelerated and held any impromptu sun protection over their heads... briefcases, shopping-bags, newspapers, cardboard boxes, even buckets. In their gardens, vines which covered many pergolas were not yet sufficiently in bloom to provide complete shadow. To supply the want, the most ingenious sunshades were deployed... bed sheets, old sails, lorry tarpaulins, bamboo fencing... as the normally house-proud Greeks abandoned order and neatness entirely in their fervour to avoid the sun. On the waterfront in Poros there was one house that had a military parachute which hung from a balcony, making the place look like a scene out of The Longest Day. Finally, as the heat began to peak, the authorities would sent the school kids home and open the air-conditioned schools for old folks.
The anatomy of a hot day was very precisely regulated. Work began early. Business and trade was well in hand by eight o’clock, and the housewives swept, washed and whitewashed energetically. The afternoon meal was often prepared in a personalised tapsi, or baking tray, and the kids could be seen taking these to the bakery to be cooked in their oven… even the blistering heat of June will not induce most Greeks to forgo a substantial yevma, or midday meal, but only a madman would create heat in his own house.
By about ten o’clock the sun began to bite, and activity slackened. Most deliveries, the re-stocking of shops, bars and restaurants was now complete, and the fishermen had sold the night’s catch, washed down their boats, and were spending the proceeds in the kafeneion. Doors and shutters, opened to admit the cool of the morning, slammed shut as the heat rose. Awnings were rolled down, water was sprayed around the courtyards, and people scuttled along the shady side of the road to complete their business in town as early as possible.
By midday the Greeks were only to be seen at their place of work or under a shady awning, and by two p.m. all indigenous life-forms disappeared. From then until the sun sank in the west, most people stayed inside or retreated around their houses, keeping in the deepest shade.
After the midday meal came the mesimerino, the midday siesta which fell heavily across the land, stopping it like a careless princess’s kingdom in a fairytale. Traffic and all music ceased. Dogs and cats evaporated, livestock stood stone-still under the trees. Only the insects thrived... the chirp of the crickets and the rasp of the cicadas crescendoed as the temperature peaked.
Not until the shadows lengthened did the enchantment break. The first activity would be housewives spraying water around their courtyards and balconies to lay the dust and temper the heat; then the workers returned to their toil and the more fortunate went to the beach, there to float contentedly in the cooling sea under enormous, wide-brimmed sun hats. At the end of the quay in Poros lay a set of steps into the sea were all the old ladies of the town used to cool off in the evening. Utterly impervious to the procession of ferries, hydrofoils, yachts and motor boats passing just metres away from them, they floated contentedly under their prophylactic headgear, looking like large mushrooms growing in a paddy-field.
All this was in the towns, of course... the beaches were hives of activity. Tourists were here for the sun and they indulged to satiety, swimming, water-sporting, eating and drinking, and laying themselves out in the blasting rays, as if attempting to one-up the pork they had just had for lunch.
I was somewhat surprised to find how well I handled this warmth. As a seaman I was tolerant of abnormal heat, and could put up with almost any extreme for however long it took; but I didn’t usually like high temperatures. I found myself, however, positively enjoying this blast-furnace weather in a way that I never had done in, say, Singapore, or the Persian Gulf.
I think it was the dryness of the heat... there was very little humidity, even in the early hours, and the warmth seemed somehow therapeutic. I would borrow a motorbike and go up into the forests of Poros, or Lemonodassos, or Aegina, breathing deep the pervading scent of pine sap and feeling the wholesome blast of heat radiated from the rocks as I passed them. I seemed to feel it reaching my bones. At times I could feel every individual hair in my nose singeing when I inhaled, which I had only ever felt before in a sauna.
I loved to swim, and to feel the salt drying on my body. I never sunbathe... that requires patience and the ability to do nothing, qualities which I have never possessed or aspired to... but I was perfectly happy to work in the heat of the day and feel the sun on my skin that way. The Greeks thought I was deranged. I liked their heat. They didn’t.
* * *
The locals and I may have disagreed about many of the effects of the high temperatures, but on one aspect of it we were in complete accord. Only a loony likes a forest fire.
The land was drying out quickly now, flowers dying and grass bleaching so that, day by day, the greenery was changing to the colour of straw. Baked dry and turned to tinder by the heat of June, the land was ready to blaze at the merest spark and lumbering red-and-yellow firefighting aircraft were now routine features of the otherwise pristine blue sky. Despite the regularity with which their distinctive tractor-engine growl was heard, they never failed to turn the head of every Greek.
Fire was a universal fear, and when the fire planes were seen or heard all conversation would cease as everyone made his own assessment... were they alone, and thus hopefully just patrolling, or were they in company, which usually meant they were heading for a fire? If together, were they heading upwind? This might mean that the fire could be moving towards the watcher. Or were they going downwind, where the fire would move away? Could smoke be seen?
All too frequently the ’planes could be seen working nearby. They were Canadair seaplanes which loaded firefighting water by scooping from the sea, and very often the calm waters of the Bay of Poros would be used for loading the aircraft. The port police boat would clear vessels out of the area whilst the ungainly aircraft banked in over the Methana isthmus and lowered themselves gingerly to the surface.
One quickly learned to spot the veteran crews, who remained fully in flight and merely skimmed the sea with their loading scoops, lifting smoothly back into the air again after about thirty seconds half-enveloped in spray. The less experienced landed completely, their aircraft settling deep in the water and throwing up a great moustache of bow wave; then they taxied fast to fill their tanks before opening their engines with an angry bellow and waddling awkwardly back into the air. Even someone who knew nothing of aircraft could discern the difference in their performance between the almost insouciant banking as they came in empty and the earnest, straightforward effort of heaving their heavy bellies aloft.
Sometimes I was close enough to the fire to watch the aircraft at the point of release, and here too one got a stark reminder of the weight they were carrying. There was usually high ground which served as a height reference, and it was clear to see how the ’planes leapt higher as the cloud of water spewed out behind them.
There was a fascination in watching them work, of course, and many of the foreign visitors treated the spectacle of aircraft skimming the water to load up and then dropping their loads as an entertainment, and at times even expressed disappointment when the fire was out and the ‘show’ ended. It said a lot for the forbearance of the Greeks, whose houses, families, communities, orchards and livelihood were at risk, that I never saw any of them react negatively to this thoughtless behaviour.
One day that summer I was passing Methana when the fire planes were working a fire perilously close to the harbour at the southern edge of the town. The flatter land close to the sea had been mostly extinguished, and one could see that the fire engines had moved in to deal with the last scattered areas of flame; but Methana is a volcano, so the slopes quickly become sheer but are also fertile. There was a lot of greenery even on the steepest surfaces, and the fire was still going strongly in areas where the aircraft could not pass close enough above to water-bomb it effectively, and where no fire-engine could go. I thought there was no way to prevent it burning the whole face of the mountain, until I saw a fire plane bumbling in from seaward towards the filthy, orange face of the fire.
The aircraft clattered close over my head, trailing faint twin tails of dirty-blue exhaust from its engines, so slow that it seemed to hang in the air and so close that I could see lines of rivets in the hull and a few leaking traces of water from its scoop. Its red-and-yellow colour scheme was muted, grimed with dust and smoke; patches of bare aluminium showed here and there, the engines were stained with streaks of exhaust. The air shuddered to the clatter of bizarrely industrial sounding engines... these always remind me more of a bulldozer with a dodgy silencer than aero engines. The aircraft looked and sounded like a flying tractor; battered, over-worked, about as aeronautical as a blacksmith’s back yard, but it also looked earnest, implacable and indestructible. I was irresistibly reminded of Henry V and his ‘warriors for the working day’
I watched where the ’plane was going in puzzlement at first, and then with a growing sense of alarm, for it seemed to be flying obliquely towards the cliff, rising slowly as it went. It was almost the same height as the fire and, as it got closer and closer to the roiling smoke and clutching flames, I had a dreadful thought that the controls had failed, and that the aircraft was going to smash into that blazing rock-face. Then, at the last moment, it banked steeply and began to turn, and seconds later, in amazement, I watched as the cloud of water exploded out of the ’plane’s belly and flew sideways under the impetus of the turn to spread out over the face of the rock. I saw the flames recoil, the dirty smoke turn to grey steam, and the aircraft, still banking steeply as it cleared the mountain, sink back to the sea to collect another load.
The Trojan Walrus Page 20