H. M. Customs, regrettably, took a divergent view on all these issues, and far from exempting us from their attentions they seemed rather to circle like vultures over a wounded buffalo at the first glimpse of a Red Ensign coming up the river. They insisted on treating us... us!... like criminals, and plagued us so zealously that it seemed they hardly bothered with foreign ships at all. Oh, it was enough to make the blood boil! Why couldn’t they spend their valuable time annoying dishonest foreigners, for Pete’s sake? Purely in the spirit of teaching the swine a lesson, sailors considered it a moral duty to put one over The Revenue.
Intense as it was, however, this battle was fought on a narrow front. The relationship between seamen and the customs officials in British airports, for instance, was nothing short of cordial. There, excise-men seemed to have some sympathy for sailors who had been away for months at a time, and in turn the seamen couldn’t get too outrageous as they were limited to what they could physically carry. At airports we made our profession obvious, and many were the tales of generous, lenient treatment.
However, when Jolly Jack turns up on a ship in a British sea-port he has the extravagantly honeycombed bowels of an entire vessel in which to hide his plunder, and cranes to offload it, and there he is greeted not by indulgent, avuncular well-wishers in collars and ties, but rather is confronted by the ‘Black Gang’. Officially known as a Rummage Squad, this is a grim platoon of humourless professional snoops, heavily armed with flashlights, sniffer dogs, bristling tool belts, mirrors-on-sticks and an assortment of electronic wotsits. Frankly, you could find more mercy in a firing-squad.
Ships were dirty places in those days, and those who sought to uphold the command ‘England expects that every man will pay his duty’ wore black overalls to hide the grime they accumulated when fossicking in the crannies of vessels; but there wasn’t a British sailor alive who didn’t devoutly believe that the Black Gang were named not for the colour or their dress, but for that of their hearts. And of all the rummage squads on the British coast, the hearts of the Liverpool Black Gang were, by common consent, considered to be the most Stygian.
Merchant Navy folklore has it that Liverpool is where they train the youngsters; where the most malevolent and remorseless older hands impart their low cunning to, and expunge all vestige of trust or decency from, the recruits. Over dinner I learned that my new shipmates were all members of the Liverpool Black Gang.
* * *
The harbour of Ermioni is only a short walk over the ridge of the town from the South Quay, and here the restaurants have a charming view of the sunset over the mountains of the Peloponnese mainland. To this panorama I led my party, an action which grieved the owner of a hotel and restaurant in the harbour so much that he chased me up the road and tried to remonstrate. The only thing his performance achieved was losing him my custom as a lodger as well, and on the way up the hill I engaged a room at a small pension up in the town... I didn’t even bother to look at the room, having no baggage or toiletries to leave, and the proprietor gave no indication that he found this at all unusual. Without even asking my name he pocketed his modest fee and handed me a key with a grave nod of thanks.
We ate juicy, grilled kalamari, crisp chips and a village salad, washed it down with a few kanatas of decent rosé and skirted playfully around the subject of smuggling as the sun set flaming orange and then blood-red behind the serrated skyline of the Peloponnese.
In the taverna I sat next to Bron by chance, and we chattered away quite happily... she was new to sailing, but loving every minute of it, and full of questions. She was as chirpy as a chaffinch, black haired and dark eyed, and when we moved to the subsequent kafeneion there was nothing chance about my sitting next to her again; I held her chair for her, and claimed the adjacent one with all the tact of a prop forward approaching the bar after a hard game.
By the end of the night Bron was leaning towards me sufficiently that I was regretting not having had time for a shower, smiling a lot and twirling a finger playfully in a strand of hair over her ear. Her tinkling laughter rang like a bicycle-bell through the subdued murmur of the evening. I had the highest of hopes... and the profoundest of falls, because at the witching-hour she gathered her paraphernalia, gave me a sisterly peck on the cheek and, with the other two girls in the crew, she Cinderella’ed into the night. The gents stayed somewhat longer, and over the late-night drinks the talk turned increasingly to our common enmity. We chuckled far into the night at tales of smuggling done, and smuggling dished.
I longed to tell the tale of Captain... well, no names, no pack-drill; but anyway, a shipmaster I once sailed with. On the day when he left the ship to go on leave, his wife came to collect him. Entering the dock gates, of course, she was not an object of suspicion... smugglers go away from ships, not towards them, after all... and no-one looked in her handbag. On the way out, she stopped the car at the gate and the back was duly inspected, revealing nothing more than the captain’s suitcase and a normal allowance of duty-frees. A quick look was taken under the bonnet, and a customs officer took the spare tyre off the back door and bounced it a couple of times, to make sure it was not packed with something illicit. Finally a couple of mirrors were waggled under the vehicle briefly before the car was waved through. The captain’s wife pulled the Land Rover expertly out onto the road and disappeared in the general direction of Yorkshire.
If a customs officer had searched her handbag on the way in, he would have found a pair of vehicle registration plates. He might also have noticed that she had arrived in a taxi.
I didn’t tell that one... I might want to use it myself some day; but we did find some tales we could laugh at. I told them of the time we had managed to get four cases of Four Bells navy rum2 ashore and onto the Gladstone Dock quay in their very own bailiwick of Liverpool. At the inopportune arrival of the dreaded blue mini-van with the portcullis emblem on the door, we had swiftly stacked the boxes on a convenient pallet so that it looked like cargo waiting to be loaded. By the time the van cruised suspiciously by, we were innocently having a smoke and a chat. Turning again as it disappeared we were just in time to see our booze being lifted high into the air and swung into number four hatch, where it was duly placed in the bonded locker and sealed. We were about forty quid... a month’s pay for an apprentice... out of pocket, and some lucky swine in Papua New Guinea was roughly two months away from a very pleasant surprise.
Another tale concerned a ‘channel fever’ party. In those days of long contracts on ships, channel fever was the madness which gripped British seamen when the English Channel hove in view and the imminence of family, home and leisure changed people’s natures dramatically. Its effects varied from person to person... some became withdrawn, others effervescent, but few remained unaffected once ‘a dose of the channels’ took hold.
Once upon a time, safely tied up in the King George Dock in Hull after a nine-month trip to the South Pacific and back, a boisterous party had been celebrating the climax of the channel fever outbreak in the Fourth Engineer’s cabin whilst awaiting the bus bringing our reliefs. We were in ebullient mood, and when a customs officer in his Great Escape ‘ferret’ overalls appeared we gave him a good amount of cheerful cheek.
The customs man ignored us stonily, and stepped amongst us, peering thoughtfully at the pipes running through the top of the cabin. Then he departed. We hooted disparagingly at his back but moments later he returned, indicating a pipe about four inches in diameter with his heavy screwdriver.
“What’s this pipe, then?” he demanded. We peered at it, shrugging... it was a bit odd, as it had rings around it at intervals.
“Looks like ventilation,” said the Fourth Engineer unconcernedly.
“Well, it doesn’t go through the bulkhead!” said the now gleeful customs officer. “Funny ventilation trunk, that!”
We filed out into the next cabin, and sure enough... no pipe. The Fourth was looking concerned now... it was his cabin.
“I dunno...” he said; but that cus
toms officer... not lacking, it must be said, in a sense of the theatrical, peeled his lips back in a Hannibal Lecter grin, raised his eyebrows, placed his hands on the suspicious tube, paused a moment for full effect, and gave it a sharp tug. It split in two places and a shower of cigarettes fell to the deck. The ‘pipe’ was a series of circular tins of cigarettes, stuck together lid-to-base, and given several coats of paint.
“Whose are these, then?” enquired the delighted official.
“They’re not mine! I don’t even smoke!” protested the Fourth, who had a ticket for a train home that afternoon and was rapidly becoming aware that the station which figured in his immediate future was more likely to contain policemen than trains.
“Well, sir, I suppose you were meaning to sell them, then? I’m afraid we take an even dimmer view of that.”
He called down the alleyway, “Bob! You got a minute?” and then enjoyed the Fourth’s incoherent and utterly unconvincing protestations for a few moments until a grizzled crew-cut wrapped around a cynical grin appeared in the doorway.
“Ah! What have we here, then?” it growled jovially. “Ahh, I see... a little something we forgot to put on the crew declaration, is it?”
“They ain’t bloody mine!” muttered the Fourth disconsolately, but he was running out of conviction... or, more likely, running into one.
“No, no, of course not... someone just put them up in your cabin, gave them three or four coats of paint... coats of smelly paint... without you knowing a thing about it, didn’t they?” said Grizzly, sympathetically. “Could happen to anyone, that could.”
He paused a moment, and then scooped up one of the tins and a handful of the cigarettes. He peered intelligently into the former, sniffed the latter, and then gently crumbled one of the gaspers between thumb and forefinger. It disintegrated into dry dust.
“Tins of fifty Gold Flake,” he announced, confidently. “They haven’t made them for almost twenty years, I should think. They’ve probably been there since the ship was new... this isn’t smuggling, it’s bloody tomb-robbing! You have a good leave, son.”
They both disappeared, looking unbearably smug and displaying an intolerable jollity in the swing of their torches.
We all, of course, knew the matches story. It is a bit of an old classic. Back in those days, ship’s engine-rooms still often had water swilling around in the bilges. No-one wanted to get involved with that... very nasty business, all kinds of muck and sharp edges lurked in there... so the ship’s engineers liked to use the bilge to conceal bottles of spirits. They would wrap a piece of lead around the bottle to make sure it sank, and then attach a match to the neck using fishing line. A customs man looking into the bilge would see only an innocent match floating, if he saw anything at all, and the bottle could easily be retrieved by picking up the match and pulling the fishing line. The problem was, this had been going on for quite a while, and the trick wasn’t as novel as it had once been. Customs men like a joke as much as anyone else, so whenever they saw a sliver of wood floating in a bilge they emptied in another two or three packs of Swan Vestas and wandered off grinning, leaving a blaspheming tribe of furious engineers wading around in knee-deep filth picking up hundreds of matches one after another to save their investments.
A good night was had by all, and many risible tales were told of victories and defeats in the interminable war. And the guard was never completely lowered, and notes were being taken.
* * *
The next morning we breakfasted on board... a further trial to the grumpy restaurateur, who now looked as if he was fixing my face indelibly in his memory and consigning it to his personal seventh level of Hell. Then we departed early with a modest northerly wind.
We bubbled steadily through the narrow passage between the mainland and the island of Dokos and lost the wind half way to Spetses. Bron was again very attentive, and she and the other two girls took the opportunity to learn a bit of sailing until the breeze failed; then we continued with navigation... lessons which the men also attended to, but in a slantendicular manner, whilst earnestly giving the impression of being engrossed in something far away. Through all this, Bron was very close by my side and frequently laid her hand on my arm... all very promising stuff, and despite her lamented early departure the night before my hopes rekindled that she was not indifferent to me. My own partiality could, of course, be taken for granted; I have a sociable nature and quite often develop a liking for girls, even those who have not massaged my belly with their breasts.
We had a quick swim in one of the lovely, fir-scented, sylvan bays which line the entrance to Porto Xeli, and were tied up by lunchtime.
I had never been in Porto Xeli3 before. It is set in low, rolling hills on the mainland of the Peloponnese, facing south across the straits to Spetses; and although it has neither the charming Mediterranean architecture of that island nor the grandeur of the nearby coast, it quickly revealed itself to be a homely place.
Little could be seen of the port from seaward, as it is entered by a deep channel whose edges are scalloped with a number of gorgeous bays set in vibrantly green woodland. The coast in the approaches to the entrance was liberally adorned with villas, many of them palatial affairs boasting helipads and berths for enormous yachts, from which the great and wealthy of many nations enjoyed, doubtlessly with extreme comfort and complaisance, the view over Spetses and down the Arcadian coast. This set our expectations for Porto Xeli to be a chic, Saint Tropez-style bijou-sort of a place like Hydra or Spetses... expectations which couldn’t have been more wrong.
Emerging from the verdant, rural charm of the channel, Porto Xeli opened out as a large, almost circular bay around which the town sprawled; a hotchpotch of construction styles ranging from substantial, square hotel-blocks to traditional ceramic-tiled cottages. The anarchic architecture was accentuated by a number of rooftop advertising hoardings which would have looked more at home in Athens, or even Times Square, than in a Greek port. The surrounding land was not high and sloped gently, so once the delightful wooded entrance channel was behind us there was little green or spectacular to be seen, just buildings on every side. It was a very far cry from the distinctly Mediterranean styles of the adjacent islands, and possibly even a disappointment at first sight; but a church here, a Greek flag there and a scattering of tiled roofs gave it a sufficiently local, if rather urban, flavour.
Despite the utilitarian nature of the place, however, a yachtsman entering Porto Xeli quickly developed a sense of belonging, for the bay obviously offered perfect shelter and it seemed to be almost filled with pleasure craft. There were many boats in the anchorage, butterfly-bright sailing dinghies scissored the surface of the bay, speed-boats fizzed in and out, and the immensely long quay was well-populated with everything from fishing boats through massive luxury yachts to charter -boats. And Porto Xeli also has ‘good holding’. Very good holding. In fact, if Ermioni’s mud may be termed possessive, then that of Porto Xeli is obsessive-compulsive.
The waterfront was a substantial open park area, with cut grass and a good number of mature trees, and was inhabited by a boisterous pack of large stray dogs who happily adopted us as we explored and foraged for lunch. The town appeared, above all, to be alive, and once we tied up and got ashore a few more characteristics of Porto Xeli become evident.
Our first impression was of bakeries, supermarkets, fishing tackle shops, modern styled kafeneions and, above all, estate agents. Property sales showrooms and architects offices seemed to be everywhere. The wide street was a perfect sun-trap which amplified the power of the sunshine until it baked a man’s bones, and all traffic along the waterfront took place in the shade of the trees at the edge of the grassy park. In this shade there lurked a series of hulking peripteros, kiosks with a yearning for lebensraum, which had flung out awnings, magazine racks and refrigerators in all directions until they more resembled Bedouin encampments than mere booths.
Porto Xeli was something of a service centre, it seemed: it lay at the heart o
f a rolling, rural olive-farming district which had become a booming holiday home area, and here Greeks and foreigners alike had built their dreams and other people’s nightmares amongst olive groves with spectacular views across Spetses, Ermioni or the Peloponnesian coast. Builders buzzed like bees, electricians and plumbers swarmed. Hardware shops thrived, water- and septic-tank trucks roared around the paralia day and night, and every second shop seemed to house either an architect or an estate agent.
A very wide range of offcomers had made their homes around the bays, and one consequence of this cosmopolitan populace was that the rather ordinary looking supermarkets were found to contain some rather extraordinary fare... Krug, Dom Perignon, Veuve Cliquot; some very decent Bordeaux carefully racked in temperature controlled cabinets; Brie and Camembert; prosciutto; Havana cigars. These were unheard of luxuries in the normal Greek supermarkets of the time, and I emerged deliriously from one emporium clutching two bottles of Bechevelle, a door-step of mature Cheddar, four tins of English mustard powder and a carrier bag full of tinned baked beans.4
Coupled with the holiday home trade, Porto Xeli also had some decent beaches suitable for resorts and, of course, an almost perfect harbour. This made it a natural terminus for the Argo-Saronic ferries bringing people from Piraeus, an almost ideal water sports centre, and a fabulous base for a yachtsman at the heart of a magnificent cruising ground. A boat yard and several chandleries prospered, and what they didn’t have could usually arrive from Athens by ferry or taxi the same day, if ordered before lunch. Porto Xeli, slightly scruffy, unpretentious, infinitely obliging and noticeably cheaper than the islands, appeared to us to be onto a very good thing.
There were a number of respectable looking eateries about the town. We finally settled for an ovelistirio... a restaurant which specialises in cooking on a charcoal grill... slightly raised up above the north end of the quay with a shady tree to sit under and a pleasant view across the bustling harbour. By night, it seemed, they had fine things to offer. A whole roast sucking pig was turning dreamily on the grill, and we were enthusiastically shown joints of lamb roasting in the ovens; but the lunch fare was cooked-to-order. The sight of the word loukaniko on the menu prompted a grateful memory of that reassuring meal on the Piraeus waterfront some months earlier, and on a whim I chose sausages.
The Trojan Walrus Page 24