The Trojan Walrus

by Julian Blatchley

  Now, even my mother, I think, would tend to the view that the sight of me enjoying sausages is not one which could inspire anyone (except a hungry dog) to love me; but nevertheless it is a fact that, after lunch, when the crew took the dinghy and buzzed off in search of a beach, Bron decided to remain with me and pass me spanners and cold refreshments whilst I wrested the old windlass out of its tenacious silicon bed and fitted the new one.

  When the rest of the gang returned we were absent without leave in one of the cafes, and by the time Geoff had tracked us down we were suspiciously close together over an aperitif, giggling without due care and attention at each other’s stories. I had been extolling the virtues of the nearby Peloponnesian coast, and a plan was hatching; Bron was intending to ask her compatriots if I could accompany the expedition for another day or so as a ‘guide’ whilst we got to know each other better. It was a proposal of most infinite charm and appeal; but, in a dogged continuance of my ill-fortune in the pursuit of romance, one which never saw the light of day.

  “There you are!” cried Geoff, “I just tried the winch... works fine, thanks!”

  “The Merchant Navy is delighted to be of assistance!”

  “I’ve just spoken to Rory,” continued Geoff; “He’s asked me to settle up with you here... cuts out the middle man, I s’pose. We’ll end up paying it anyway, as we bust the winch.”

  This was a most refreshing and welcome initiative, and I graciously accepted a gratifyingly substantial fistful of thousand drachma notes.

  “Rory also asked if you could give him a call as soon as possible,” added Geoff, and signalled for a waiter.

  I got through on the thirteenth attempt.

  “Thanks very much, the client’s very happy!” enthused Rory, “Now, listen, if you are interested, I have another job for you.”

  I steeled myself to decline. With the prospect of a couple of days with a Welsh enchantress in prospect, I wasn’t about to be deflected by the opportunity to earn five thousand drachmae for fixing someone’s toilet... known in the yachting business as ‘going through the motions’. But it wasn’t a repair job; it was a charter.

  A charter. And not just any charter, but a rescue... a family, caught by strong weather in the Aegean, were in need of a skipper as soon as could be arranged. Make a good job of this one, Rory promised, and more would follow. By going, I would not only be indulging my penchant for helping people but taking a huge leap along the path from being a jobbing boat-bum to a gainfully employed charter skipper. I had to go... but those bloody Gods had me again. Another fascinating woman was about to sail the opposite way out of my life, leaving no more than a whisp of scent and a Wirral phone-number.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EN-DEERING MYSELF

  In which we find Fourni... an upright family... a corrupt official... nefarious negotiations... civic atrocities... Hellenic dance, a critical summary... the debauch of the Righteous... En-Deering myself... who laughs last?

  Fourni is not easy to get to. Having callously deserted my paramour on a distant shore I packed my gear in Poros and endured a fond farewell from Kyria Fotini, who was so enraptured by a house guest for the whole summer who paid monthly in advance that she appeared to have adopted me. Then I caught the old pantouffle Apostolos P up to Piraeus and once again found myself on the creaking old ferry to Samos.

  A strong northerly wind was blowing in the Aegean, as it very often does, and the ageing ship rolled extravagantly as she passed the gaps between the islands, through which the seas rolled down all the way from the Thracian coast.

  Keeping as far as I could from the many unwell tourists, I eventually landed again in Vathi, which I had last seen through a haze of roasting lamb- and goat- fumes on Easter Sunday. From there I went by bus through the resin-scented pine forests on the mountains of Samos to the little south coast port of Milopotamus, and finally on a tiny, 2-car ferry which corkscrewed alarmingly down to Fourni.

  It had taken me a while simply to find Fourni on a chart. It is situated just to the south of the gap between Samos and Ikaria, close to the Turkish coast. A Rorsach blob of an archipelago, it is composed of two principle islands which are so close to each other that, at first glance, they appear to be one fantastically-shaped one. To my eccentric imagination, Fourni appears on a map as having the shape of a lobster, a long central body linked by thin arms to two bulky claws. The port lies approximately in the lobster’s left ear-hole, facing west to see what he has picked up in his left clipper.

  The approaches to the port form an unusually spacious anchorage by Aegean standards. There is decent shelter, good holding and good depth in the lee of Akra Paleomilos, and this makes the isolated Fourni Islands an unlikely haven for a large fishing fleet... and by that I do not mean the picturesque, gaily-painted little caïques of the part-time fishermen which cannot be kept off the postcards. Fourni is home to serious, open water boats, a mixture of large traditional caïques and modern steel designs, all with powerful, up-to-date deck equipment and massive nets, uniformly scarred and stained by constant confrontation with the elements.

  The appearance of this workaday armada in so rugged, wild and unspoiled an environment was a bit of a shock to me, but the town, behind a charming beach lined with trees, was a pristine delight. Not until I landed did I realise that the shore was lined with large freezer-stores; for they were low, flat-roofed, white-painted structures set about with trees and they fitted in amazingly well with the quaint, traditional village behind.

  There was a single jetty in front of the town, one side of which was reserved for fishing boats to unload, and on the other lay two yachts. One of these was the one I had come to find... a forty-foot Sun Fizz containing the family of one Dr Deering.

  It seemed to me that Dr Deering, a bespectacled, medium sized chap with thinning sandy hair and a light complexion which had been turned classic crayfish-orange by the sun, couldn’t quite make up his mind whether he was pleased to see me or not. Certainly, if I expected to be hailed as a saviour, I was quickly disabused of the idea, for my greeting was a perfunctory, business-like affair; polite but impersonal. His handshake had the softness of a man who goes out of his way to emphasise that he is intellectual planes above alpha male knuckle-crushing contests: civilised, scientific, analytical, remote. I regret to say that it did him little good... skippering and alpha male behaviour are a bit like party political broadcasts and nausea... you rarely get one without the other. By the time I had interpreted the handshake, he was already massaging the blood back into his fingers and looking at me as if I had escaped from the high security wing of a zoo.

  The good doctor (of chemistry, I was quickly informed, presumably in case I was secreting a festering boil about my person) spoke clipped English with a hint of a Midlands accent to it. His good lady had a pleasing, matronly appearance, a soft Scots accent, and was equally reserved. The family was completed by two pretty girls, both in their late-teens, who were so obviously ‘on-their-best-behaviour’ that they could have given deportment lessons to the guards outside Buckingham Palace.

  All of the family were about as formally dressed as anyone can be in the Greek sunshine... pressed khaki shirts and neat shorts, matching sun hats; Dr and Mrs D wore sandals with socks, and the girls were in the same style, but with slightly brighter blouses and track shoes.

  They also all looked fairly fit. This latter was hardly a surprise... it didn’t take much imagination to see this particular socio-economic co-habiting group doing calisthenics together every morning. I had a mental impression of the Von Trapp family crossing the Alps, slapping their lederhosen and singing uplifting songs about sexually-deprived practitioners of animal husbandry.

  We sat down around the cockpit table, and they offered me an orange juice. Now, our destination was Lavrion, which lay on the outside of the Attic peninsula close to Athens, and so the voyage ahead of me involved crossing about a hundred and twenty miles of the Aegean Sea. At first glance, given the prevailing weather and time frame
, it was not a daunting prospect; but when I was offered an orange juice at six in the evening, Lavrion suddenly became Paris, Fourni became Moscow, and I felt like Napoleon!

  My brief from Rory was that there had been a bit of a bad experience somewhere on the holiday, which had resulted in my call up. They were good clients who had chartered several times in the quieter areas and seasons, and had felt ready to try the central Aegean; Rory wanted them back safely and in time, but most of all he wanted me to try to restore a bit of confidence... he didn’t want to lose the custom.

  With this in mind I tried to break the ice by being bright and breezy, to instil confidence by downplaying the difficulties, and I outlined a minimum stress, maximum scenery route to get us back to Lavrion as painlessly as possible. I had spent considerable time on the ferry working this out with the aid of the pilot book, and it included as little upwind sailing as possible and lots of white churches with blue domes. And Dr D wasn’t having any of it.

  “We shall go to Patmos tomorrow,” he announced firmly, “I would like to leave early, and be there before noon. I particularly wish to see the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian, and the Cave of the Apocalypse. Then we shall need two nights in Mykonos, in order to have enough time to fully explore Delos. One night in Naxos should be sufficient I think... the harbour is said to be uncomfortable, in any case... and then we need to go to Paros to see the Church of a Hundred Doors.”

  Well, that was five of his eight days, and it would leave him a long way downwind of Lavrion and barely half way home. The thing was perfectly possible, even with the current forecast for the strong northerlies to continue or even strengthen, but it was not easy. Tomorrow’s run to Patmos was twenty miles due south with the wind behind us, but the day after we would have to beat up to Mykonos, a run of over sixty miles through all the sea and wind coming through the gap between Ikaria and Tinos. Then we would surrender all our hard won northing to go down to Naxos and Paros, and have only three days to climb up to Lavrion again... the last day of it crossing the notorious Kavo Doro strait where the sea again runs big between Andros and Evia. In the forecast weather, it wasn’t a trip for faint hearts, or for restoring bruised confidences.

  I tried to moderate expectations, suggesting that Paros could be visited by ferry from Syros without going so far south, but the adult D’s were firmly insistent and the girls had no say, so I smiled sweetly and said ‘OK’.

  “We did want to go to Santorini too,” remarked Mrs D airily, “but one of my secretaries went there last year and she said it was frightfully touristy.”

  Thank all the Gods for one of Mrs D’s secretary, I thought... Santorini is another fifty-odd miles south of Paros... getting back from there in this wind would have made the Anabasis look like taking the Jack Russell to the nearest lamp post.

  There was no spare cabin, so I installed myself in the saloon and got cleaned up after my travel whilst the family went for a swim exactly in the manner I would have expected... all cleaving the water purposefully, no splashing or sky-larking. Then we ambled up the single street of Fourni, which slopes gently up away from the quay, lined with traditional, white-washed, flat-roofed houses and an abundance of fragrant orange trees. Great, hungry gulls eyed us speculatively as we walked, and cicadas rasped like football rattles.

  An excellent and healthy dinner of fresh fish and salad was consumed at a delightful little taverna, and for a moment my spirits rose as Dr D ordered a bottle of wine; but sadly, he was suckered-in by a fancy label, and it wasn’t so much a chateau as a chat eau. Even in my deprived condition I was quite grateful when it turned out that the girls were also indulged with a glass, so my share of it didn’t amount to much. I was uncharacteristically stoical when there was no suggestion of a second bottle.

  After the family went to bed, I found a half kilo of decent Samian table wine to lay the ghost of the dinnertime filth. Then I called Rory and let him know what was going on... I didn’t want him thinking I had led them into evil ways, but he was quite relaxed about it.

  “OK, chum. Do what you can to make it easy for them. ’Preesh the call! Toodle-oo!” Click. I noted that I wasn’t being ‘whomed’ any more, which seemed, on consideration over the last of the wine, to be a good thing... it sounded as if I was already a part of Rory’s team. As I enjoyed that thought, I noticed that people were stringing flags from the trees as if for a festival.

  * * *

  The next morning I walked up the street again to the port police office, a single room set far enough into the town to prevent the occupant from seeing anything in the port which might alarm or disturb him. I had slightly ticklish business to transact... I had to get myself entered on the crew list, but I couldn’t do that as a skipper; foreigners were not officially allowed to skipper in Greece.

  At that time, probably seventy-five per cent of the skippers in Greece were foreigners, and the authorities knew it perfectly well. The mainland ports of Alimos and Lavrion were chock-a-block with men... and a few women... of all nationalities; some highly regarded and retained by large charter companies, some working from contract to contract, and very, very many trying to break in to the market. I had been fortunate to slide in as serendipitously as I did. There were a good few Greek skippers too, of course, but the majority were xeni.*

  Some thought the industry would have collapsed without the incomers, others thought not; but there certainly was plenty of work for the established skippers, and it did seem that they were filling a need and bringing a lot of money in to the country. The authorities ignored the rules or not, as it best suited them... and since inactivity was always an attractive prospect in a hot country, it usually best suited them to do nothing; but some lip-service still had to be granted.

  The way this was managed was simply to put the skipper on a bareboat charter crew list as one of the charterers, even if it meant a Kalahari Bushman sailing with a family of Eskimos; and if, for example, a port police official in Alimos Marina happened to notice that he had just signed the same skipper out for the twentieth time in one season... well, coincidences happen. Many people ridiculed the bureaucracy for stupidity, but anyone who thought they were pulling the wool over the authorities’ eyes was very much mistaken: those port policemen never seemed to do very much, but I was often in the port police offices, and as I started to learn the language I quickly became aware that they were well attuned to waterfront gossip. They generally knew who was who... as those characters who carried any dubious activities beyond reasonable limits were apt to find out.

  Getting the skipper on the charter crew list at the beginning of the charter was done by the boat’s owner or agent, and was never a problem; but joining the vessel as skipper half way through the charter might make an official suspicious. Greek civil servants didn’t do much, but then they didn’t get paid much either; their lifetime goal was early retirement on a secure pension, which could be seriously affected by missing promotions. They didn’t like irregularities... they then had to make decisions, for which they could be held accountable; so I was being a little cautious as I approached the very young port policeman in the flag-decked Fourni office with a concocted story about being a family friend joining the party and a notarised letter from the boat’s owner.

  The port policeman was not only very young; he was also very smart in his pristine white uniform, very merry and very cheerful. At his elbow was a carafe of something which looked like, but certainly wasn’t, water, and he had his feet up on the desk, holding forth volubly to a couple of girls and two or three other men who looked like fishermen.

  As I was posing as a family friend joining the holiday I thought it best not to speak any Greek, but the policeman spoke (for those days) unusually good English. He regarded me speculatively, gestured me to a chair, and then sucked his teeth thoughtfully as he flipped through the papers. After a moment or two he filled a small glass from the carafe and pushed it across the desk to me with a friendly smile.

  “Drink!” He invited me. “Tod
ay is our saint’s day. The church, and also my girlfriend.”

  He gestured towards the two girls without distinguishing one from the other... maybe he couldn’t, because they appeared to be sisters and neither could I... and I cheerfully toasted his apparent polygamy. As I had expected, the drink was tsipouro. He nodded his appreciation as I drank it off in one, and refilled it; then he went back to the papers. Whether it was the booze or just natural ability, he had unusual presence for such a young and junior chap.

  I could see a frown developing as he flipped the papers back and forth, and did my best to appear unconcerned. Then abruptly, he said to me in Greek, “When you are leaving?”

  I almost answered, but just managed to stifle the reply in time. I raised my eyebrows, cocked my head and rotated my palms up to indicate non-comprehension. He smiled slightly. Then it occurred that I had responded like a Greek... a genuinely misunderstanding Brit would have said “I beg your pardon?” or “Oh! Were you talking to me?” Despite my subterfuge, I decided that he had me bang to rights.

  The bright, promising future of the port police lowered his feet to the uneven flagged floor, languorously unfolded himself to an impressive height, and handed me back the papers.

  “No problem, but tomorrow, Captain. Today, no sailing- too much wind. Not permitted. Please come to the party... and bring your...” he paused for a significant instant; “...Friends”.