I saw two ’planes dump probably ten loads of water on that mountain in the same fashion that afternoon, and I remember thinking that anyone who treasured images of the Greeks as inept or indolent could learn a lot from the spectacle.
I also remember, very sadly, an occasion when a fire plane crashed at the end of a long day fighting enormous fires in the Peloponnese. The lament for the crew was nationwide, and powerful. Every television channel, every newspaper carried the news as a headline, editorial and feature; everyone knew the names of the dead flyers. It felt as if the entire country had lost a pair of beloved cousins. It was a deeply moving tribute, and I thought it a revealing comment both on the fear of fire and the unity of the nation.
* * *
Pserimos was an island I had not so far visited, so when tasked to bring back a catamaran from thence I went with double willingness: both to discover and also to take a little respite in the rather cooler temperatures of the Aegean.
The voyage there, on a large, old English Channel ferry, was not a lot of fun... it took about fifteen hours for the venerable hulk to make the two-hundred-odd miles from Piraeus to Kos, and at this time of year the overcrowding was starting to get beyond a joke. In addition, the wind had fallen uncharacteristically quiet, and at times the light airs carried the exhaust fumes forward at exactly the same speed as the ship, driving everyone from the decks.
From Kos I caught a day-trip caïque, a rather splendid yellow-and-varnish affair with an enormous, carved eagle in front of the wheel, to Pserimos. I arrived mid-morning, and my catamaran was due in the evening.
Pserimos is a small island lying between Kos and Kalymnos, and barely four miles from the Turkish coast. The caïque deposited me in the main harbour... although calling anything so small a ‘main’ harbour is possibly the worst descriptive phrase since ‘civil servant’... and I can’t say that I was overwhelmed. The beach was, however... in fact, I didn’t even know there was a beach until a large lady went for a swim. The entire tourist population of the Dodecanese appeared to be engaged in a competition to see how many people could fit on one foreshore, and the tavernas were so packed that I had to sit on the wall to drink my beer; so, cursing the Guinness Book of Records, I wandered away from the sea, found a quieter, local kafeneion, and spent the afternoon cat-napping over a book.
Descending to the port again at about six in the evening, I was astounded by the change. The noisy arse of the last day-trip boat was just disappearing round the corner, and the only people on the beach were busily raking it clean for the morrow. The tavernas had a pleasant quota of customers, just enough to give a little atmosphere. The little bay looked south-west to a lowering sun framed between the flanks of Kos and Kalymnos, the odd fishing boat puttered idly, and the place could not have been more tranquil or delightful.
A catamaran, which I presumed to be mine, could be seen miles out to sea, so I took a half-kilo of wine in a taverna and spent an hour thoroughly enjoying this delightful little Aegean backwater. I also absorbed an important lesson which I am happy to share with you now: The lesson is... if you like traditional and peaceful surroundings, stay in Pserimos, and visit Kalymnos and Kos by day, NOT the other way around!
The boat, when she finally arrived, was a rather odd looking craft about thirty feet long with the mast set well aft, and she rejoiced in the name of Mon Goose. My only experience with catamarans to that point had been sailing Hobie Cats in Australia and Honolulu, and I had been hoping for some of the same sort of exhilaration from the current voyage, but I realised as she came to anchor that I was probably going to be disappointed: Mon Goose was privately owned, and she was so loaded with stuff that she sat at the anchorage looking like Steptoe’s yard at high tide. Bicycles, barbeques, spare anchors, dinghies, outboard-motors, fuel-cans and even a shopping-trolley were festooned about her decks, and she sat in the water in a solid, determined way which tended to suggest that her interior was probably much the same.
The aquatic pack-rats who part-owned this raft were a genial couple, he broad Lancashire and she equally profoundly Northern Irish, and they were heading back to England for their daughter’s wedding. My task was to take their pride-and-joy back to Poros, where another set of the boat’s co-owners would expect her in about three days.
‘Oh, good,’ I thought: ‘So there’s no hurry... just sixty miles a day, on my own, with no wind, in a boat with the hydrodynamics of an ice-berg.’ And then I found out about the engine... a single thirty horse-power unit which acted on a ‘leg’... a propeller which was lifted out of the water when not in use. I had heard that many catamarans are not too good at sailing close to the wind, and I suspected that this one wouldn’t be able to motor to windward either; it was going to be like pushing a haystack through treacle with a cocktail-muddler.
“Yer shoulda sin ‘er in Biscay!” exulted her proud owner. “Eleven knots, she wur deuin’!”
I managed to smother my retort, which was that I didn’t think she could do eleven knots even if she sailed over Niagara Falls.
Blind as the proud owners may have been to the true nature of their boat, however, but they were hospitality personified and made me embarrassingly welcome for the night. Madame laboured mightily in the red-hot galley to produce for us enormous plates of sausage-and-mash with Bisto gravy. The potatoes were further enriched with cheese, onion and butter, a concoction which she called ‘Champ’, and pronounced to be a great favourite in Ulster. Quite possibly it is, with the freshness of the North Atlantic whistling through your letterbox, but in the baking remnants of a windless June day in the Aegean it was like trying to eat an anvil. The couple’s good will, however, was so palpable that I did it the best justice I could, whilst my nose wrinkled under the caress of the delicate scent of fresh fish grilling in the tavernas. Then they made me a bed in a forward cabin. Mrs Mon Goose asked me if I was warm enough, and offered me a blanket, forsooth! I was amazed that she didn’t offer to tuck me in.
I got rid of them late morning, driven almost to violence by their kindly “Oh, Ah know what I ’aven’t shown yer...” and “Feel free t’elp yerself from’t larder.” Finally, they climbed onto the day-tripper, and I raced back to Mon Goose and hoiked the anchor up before they could swim back to tell me how the can-opener worked. It was sixty-odd miles to Katapola in Amorgos, and I had already lost about six hours.
I should have had a good northerly wind on the beam, but there wasn’t a breath of wind to help me. The engine would rev no higher than twenty-two hundred RPM, and Mon Goose barely managed five knots.
It was just getting light again as I came in to Katapola. I had been up all night, and spent two hours of that with my head in the engine compartment, cleaning the fuel filter and bleeding the fuel system. The maximum RPM of the engine had steadily fallen until, at sixteen hundred revs and with the engine beginning to overheat, I knew that I had to do something. The fuel filter looked as if it had last been cleaned shortly after the conversion from coal, and the wildlife I evicted from the water strainer would have stocked a respectable aquarium.
That done, the engine perked up enormously, reaching a little over three thousand revs; but unfortunately, her prop wasn’t deep enough in the water, and all I did at full throttle was aerate the ocean. We compromised at about two thousand eight hundred, when the boat managed about six knots, and that, I figured, was all I could hope for.
In Katapola I had breakfast with the drunks and night-owls at the all-night cafe, and watched the day dawn on that remarkable, high and craggy island. Amorgos is your true Cycladic isle, mountainous and remote, fringed with some incredible beaches and garlanded with tortuous roads which cling to precipices and peaks as they loop and swirl from one white, cubic village to another. I would love to have stayed a day, but the stern duty of a skipper demanded sacrifice. Putting all thought of personal indulgence from me, I managed to button hole the fuel truck nice and early. Then I set off to the ferry office.
On the way, I met Charlie and a lady-friend. Aquaf
rolic was in town, and I stopped for a quick coffee and a catch-up.
“Can’t stay long,” I warned, “I’ve got to get going again.”
“You look loike you’m needin’ some sleep, moi lad!” protested Charlie.
“I’ll get it on the way.”
“You got any crew?” he asked, peering at Mon Goose for any other signs of life.
“Not yet,” I replied, “I’m just going for a tortoise.”
“Tortoise?” Charlie and his lady looked at me with sudden concern, and I hastened to assured them that I hadn’t gone doolalli with the heat. I was not talking about the proverbially slow, reptilian kind of tortoise, the kind which looks like a Cornish pasty with legs. There are plenty of those in Greece too, but the sort of tortoise I was after was a girl with a backpack.
* * *
‘Tortoises’ crawled all over Greece, and in those days they were predominantly female. Enormous packs, which eclipsed their owners so effectively that, from behind, they looked like nylon bags with shapely legs, were to be seen queuing for ferries and busses, tramping in and out of towns, and waiting at airports. For breakfast they congregated around the cheapest bakeries, and for other meals they sought out souvlaki-joints. In the afternoon they slept under trees at the beach. In the evening they looked for shower facilities, often making do with the beach wash-offs, or bathed in streams. At night they often sat around in the parks, the town squares, or returned to the beaches, where they drank retsina and played guitars. Sometimes they took the cheaper pension accommodations on offer, frequently they slept on over-night ferries to the next island, and in high summer many slept rough. On popular islands, like Santorini, Mykonos and Paros, there were people who had given up drinking after seeing a stampede of luggage sweeping majestically across the harbour front.
According to my fairly thorough observations, there were three grades of tortoise. The lowest was a Grade Three, and this was a part-time tortoise, a ‘wannabe’. The first characteristic of a Grade Three was the newness of the pack... it would be still bright, with few scuff-marks. In many cases a Grade Three might not even be a real backpack at all, merely a suitcase or grip with shoulder-straps. Grade Threes were only capable of short periods disconnected from society, and they clinked as they walked because their packs were full of cosmetics and labour-saving devices which needed plugging-in to civilisation frequently. Grade Threes had hairdos, and only roughed it between hostels or pensions. They wore trainers, carried stereos, called their parents twice a week, and possessed dated return airline tickets. They generally didn’t tortoise for more than a month at a time.
Grade Twos were sterner stuff. A Grade Two tortoise was an independent beast, capable of washing its hair in the sea and roughing it for up to a fortnight at a time. The pack told its own story, faded, scuffed and stained, and often spattered with brag-flags and badges advertising where it had been and where it came from. These bags did not clink, unless they had cooking utensils strapped to the outside. They had useful attachments such as rain-covers, or sleeping mats.
Grade Twos brushed their hair straight and tied it back in a pony-tail. They wore hiking boots, some carried musical instruments, and they might stay out most of the summer; but their stay was finite; they eked out their pennies skilfully, and went home when the money ran out. They acknowledged the existence of family by sending a postcard once a week, and usually only called home for birthdays; but they knew that somewhere, if they really needed it, there was a credit card which would fly them home.
Grade Two Tortoises could sleep rough, but they looked for a laundrette once a fortnight, and you could still see the outline of a hair-dryer somewhere in the pack.
No such effeminacies... if that is a real word... were to be found on a Grade One Tortoise, however. Grade Ones were hard women. Boadicea would have minded her P’s and Q’s around a Grade One.
A Grade One Tortoise was a resolute, self-sufficient, self-assured and self-sustaining professional traveller of experience and resource. The Grade One pack was tough and utilitarian, with locks on every pocket, waterproofed and worn high on the back. It was not adorned with boastful stickers or national symbols... the pack itself proclaimed its provenance, and the prime-mover usually considered herself a Citizen of the World. Grade Ones bathed in the sea, rinsed off with a bottle of water, and dripped dry; they washed clothes in streams or whenever a kindly soul offered facilities; they acknowledged no support system, slept rough without a thought, and when the weather became intolerable they simply moved on to somewhere more clement.
Many Grade Ones cultivated skills with which they could earn a living on the road, and some of these were predictably feminine... hair dressing, jewellery making, bar tending, fortune telling, music making, fruit picking; but Grade Ones didn’t go much on stereotypes and I also met mechanics, paramedics, offshore-workers, a helicopter pilot, dog trainers, and a good few capable boat crew. I think quite a few of them taught survival techniques to the SAS.
* * *
I found my tortoises sitting by the ferry ticket office, waiting for it to open. Three of them, Grade Two-C’s by my estimation... newly promoted from Grade Three, with slightly faded genuine back packs and still displaying traces of styling in their hair. Their stickers proclaimed them to be Swiss, and their brag-flags suggested that they had travelled thus far via France, Italy, Yugoslavia and Turkey.
The process of engaging my crew was expeditious, to say the least. I asked where they were going; they said Piraeus, because they wanted to go to Epidavros. I asked how much the ferry ticket was; they said three thousand drachs. I told them that I could take them as far as Poros on a boat for free, and from there they could get a bus to Epidavros for a hundred drachs; they shouldered their packs and fell in line behind me.
I suppose that it was about five minutes after leaving Charlie’s boat that I passed it going the other way with my three chelonians. The look on his face made my week. I bought some grub at the supermarket and we left straight away.
I was a bit grimy after my night in the engine room, so I motored out of the harbour, stopped to jump over the side and scrubbed up a bit, and then I headed Mon Goose for the distant shape of Irakleia. I set the auto-pilot.
“Just before we hit that island, or if any other boat comes close, or if the engine alarm sounds, wake me up. Don’t touch anything”, I said, and with that I collapsed on the saloon couch and l instantly fell unconscious.
I awoke in some confusion on an unfamiliar couch, with a hand on my shoulder, and a strange, smiling and rather lovely face bending over me. There was singing. There were also bare breasts, large ones. I had been very deeply asleep, and it took me rather longer than it should have to orientate myself.
“Ve are almost at ze island,” said the large, naked breasts. Or possibly it was the smiling face.
I emerged into the sunlight to a cheerful rendition of ‘Michael Row The Boat Ashore’. My crew were very comfortably installed, it seemed. They had stripped down to bikini bottoms, found a few beers and one had a guitar fired-up. The sea about us was still flat and benign, the engine purred smoothly, Skinnousa was to starboard and the wedge-shape of Irakleia was close ahead, just where I had hoped it would be. I have woken up in worse circumstances.
They were called Herta, Gerta and Berta... well, actually, they probably weren’t, but it was something like that... and they were an attractive bunch, each in a very different way. Herta was slim, fair and could drive a guitar. Gerta, plump and dark, had an angelic voice. Berta was statuesque. And, of course, had talking breasts. They offered me a cold beer, and all of a sudden I couldn’t quite see why I was in such a hurry to get to Poros.
“Let’s go into Irakleia for lunch” I suggested. So we did.
I was welcomed back at the goat and spaghetti restaurant with open arms, and the fact that I had left with one girl and come back with three was the subject of many raised eyebrows and ‘Po, po, PO’s’. I felt quite the king, sitting like a local under the huge tree in
the restaurant forecourt, holding forth to my old acquaintances and my new acolytes.
They didn’t have any goat-spaghetti on the go this time, so we just had a meat poikilia and a few cans of wine. After a couple of hours we simply moved on again.
We cleared the harbour and headed west-north-west towards Sifnos with a fresh stock of cold beer, and I thought, as Gerta put some sun-block on my shoulders and asked me to do the same for her, what a wonderful life this was: dropping in at familiar islands, meeting friends old and new, lunch here, dinner there, a tortoise or two, a guitar to sing along with, and I was actually being paid for this. Even without being surrounded by naked breasts, I would have had few complaints.
By early evening, I had, however, noticed one thing about my nereids; all their songs seemed to be spiritual ones. At first I barely noticed, and then I supposed that they were simply popular guitar melodies, but as ‘Michael Row The Boat Ashore was followed by Oh You’ll Never Go To Heaven, Morning Has Broken, Amazing Grace and the like, it eventually dawned on me that there was a religious thread. As far as I could understand their Switzerdeutsch, their German songs were spiritual too. Even the secular songs they knew were hearty, healthy wholesome numbers like The Happy Wanderer, and nothing even slightly risqué. Eventually, emboldened by the evening beers, I mentioned this, and those three pretty girls, sitting almost naked with their beers, informed me that this was a valedictory holiday, as they were going to enter a holy order together when they returned home.
The Trojan Walrus Page 21