by John Mole
About the Author
John Mole is the bestselling author of several works of fiction and non-fiction. He and his family still return each year to the stone house they restored on the island of Evia, and when in London he plays the baglama, a miniature bouzouki, with a Greek band.
Also by John Mole
NON-FICTION
Sail or Return
The Monogamist
Thanks, Eddie!
The Hero of Negropont
NON-FICTION
Brits at Work
Mind Your Manners
I Was a Potato Oligarch
The Sultan’s Organ
Ruins, Retsina, a mad Dog … and
an Englishman
www.nicholasbrealey.com
First published in 2016 by Nicholas Brealey Publishing
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © John Mole 2016
First published 2004 by Nicholas Brealey Publishing
The right of John Mole to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
eISBN 9781473644748
Nicholas Brealey Publishing
John Murray Press
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Hachette Book Group
Market Place Center, 53 State St Boston
MA 02109, USA
www.nicholasbrealey.com
www.johnmole.com
For Alexander, son of Greece
Contents
About the Author
Also by John Mole
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
The road to ruins
Family matters
Done
Panic
All Greek to me
Labour of Herakles
Island of dreams
Raising the roof
New beginnings
Hector, scourge of the Greeks
Divine intervention
Sea stories
Bringing back Arcadia
Rites and rituals
Making it up
Lambs to the slaughter
Greek dancing
Et in Arcadia ego
Living in the past
Greeks bearing gifts
Ambrosia and shepherd’s pie
Off to Turkey
Traditional recipes
Exploding myths
Home at last
The simple life
Cast of characters
Acknowledgements
Footnotes
Prologue
We fell in love with Greece decades ago. Like many love affairs it started with lunch – baby squid, suckling pig, fried aubergine, Greek salad and lemony, tart retsina – delicious things, exotic and full of sensual promise. So when I was offered a job based in Greece, we jumped at the chance.
That was more than twenty-five years ago. The currency was the drachma and somehow we lived without mobile phones and laptops and the internet. Greece was rebuilding after seven dark years of dictatorship and applying to join the European Union.
We lived in an olive grove on the outskirts of Athens. An ancient tree grew up through the middle of our balcony. From the kitchen sink we looked out on the mountains of Parnis, from the bathroom sink the mountains of Pendeli. Quinces and medlars grew outside the front door, bitter oranges for marmalade at the back. In season we gathered figs, apricots and grapes. We woke up to thrushes and fell asleep to nightingales. It was sunny most days of the year and wine was cheaper than water. It was a far cry from South London where we lived before.
‘Oh Toad, I dread the thought of leaving here,’ said Arfa once a week. The only consolation I could offer was Ti na kanoume? – what can we do? – an essential Greek phrase in the face of life’s inevitabilities.
Arfa is not my wife’s given name. It is short for ‘just’alf a glass’, which is what she says when offered wine. The impression of moderation is undermined by having to fill her glass twice as often. My nickname, Toad, is short for Fat Slimy Toad, an endearment from our courtship. We have four children, Jack, Jim, Kate and Harry, who were then under ten years old.
Our transfer from Greece was imminent, probably to Frankfurt or Pittsburgh. We talked of staying on or at least owning a place we could come back to. Our dream was a little whitewashed house with a blue door and blue shutters on an unspoiled island in a picturesque village next to the beach with a taverna round the corner. So how did we end up with a tumbledown ruin on a hillside above a village called Horio, with no road, no water, no electricity, no roof, no floor, no doors, no windows and twenty years of goat dung?
The road to ruins
Ajax led me round the corner of his butcher’s shop into a muddy lane. He skipped from dry place to dry place to keep his shiny patent leather shoes clean, arms gracefully outstretched to retain his balance. I took as much care of my new desert boots. It was like an audition for Singing in the Rain. On both sides of the lane were houses in the New Aegean style – single-storey concrete cubes on stilts with rusty steel bars sticking out of the flat roofs so that new floors could be added when the owners had the money.
After fifty yards we left the houses and came to a new concrete road lined with pomegranates and cypresses. Many travellers have taken such a road thinking it must be the way out of town, not knowing that the best road in a village usually leads to the cemetery. With a perfunctory sign of the cross, Ajax hurried past the cemetery gates and carried on uphill along a narrow and winding mule track between blackberry and thorn bushes. He had the ruddy-faced look of slaughterers and his taut belly swelled over the belt of his jeans, but he was fitter than I was.
The dry stone walls and thorn hedges on either side of the path were so high that I couldn’t see where we were going. When I thought Ajax wasn’t looking, I made little two-footed jumps to see over, like a child. The bright April sun broke through the clouds again, bees hummed and bright flies darted over shrinking pools of rainwater. Flowers burst out of every crack and cranny in the walls. Like a bucket of water thrown on an old tiled floor springing the colours back to life, the spring shower stirred up the heady smell of Greece. Wafts of mountain oregano and thyme and pine and cypress, spring flowers, damp grass and all the mineral, composting, meaty savour of freshly wetted earth overpowered even Ajax’s cologne. At last we came to a small plateau with a cluster of old stone houses.
‘There it is,’ said Ajax.
I suppose he took my stunned silence for speechless admiration. It looked like a forgotten corner of a Balkan war zone. A couple of houses still had roofs. The rest were in various stages of collapse. A few were nothing but piles of stones and broken beams. A wall of one house remained, with a fireplace and windows and cupboards absurdly out of reach above where a floor used to be. Fig trees and thistles grew out of the masonry and goats browsed in the rubble. The only building left intact was a little whitewashed chapel twenty yards down the hill.
Ajax beckoned me to follow him to the house closest to the chapel. It was on two floors with rough stone walls a yard thick and a pitched roof of massive split stone slabs. Half the roof
had fallen in and broken slabs littered the ground. An almond tree grew at the front, its top about level with the second-floor windowsills. The bottom floor, which had one small window, was for stabling animals and storing wine, oil and grain. The living quarters on the second floor were reached at the side by a broad stone staircase grown over by the grey, viny branches of a fig. In front of the steps an ancient olive, as round as it was tall, squatted in the middle of a yard enclosed by a wire fence threaded on rough stakes, the hoof-marked ground grazed bare and smothered in a thick layer of chocolaty dungballs.
‘Schön, nich’?’ Ajax asked.
I couldn’t think what to say. Actually yes, I could: If you think I’m going to buy that tumbledown goat shed you must be raving mad. But I didn’t say it. I was brought up not to say what I think. Instead, I used the classic English expression of disapproval.
‘Very interesting,’ I said.
‘A beautiful house.’
‘Why you not to live here you yourself?’ My Greek was poor, but the meaning was clear. He looked at me as if I were crazy.
‘My house is next to the shop. I have electricity. I have three bathrooms. But here it is so quiet, so peaceful. It is a most beautiful place.’
I wasn’t convinced. We all know that location, location, location are the three most important things in real estate, but walls and a roof come pretty high up the list too. Ajax uprooted a stake, threw back the wire netting so we could tiptoe across the goat dung to the door on the ground floor. I stooped under the massive olive-wood lintel and gagged on the smell of old goat and fermenting straw that buzzed and rustled like a living thing. Breathing through my mouth, I came out and followed Ajax up the outside staircase, struggling through the fig branches that grew over it. I have never liked fig leaves, they rasp like cats’ tongues. Ajax pushed open a rotting door and with an estate agent’s flourish stood to one side.
‘Careful. Don’t fall through the floor.’
There was not much floor to fall through, only a few stumps of joists with a goat-stinking pit below. We stood on the stone threshold like trapezists waiting to jump. It was a long, rectangular room with a crumbling fireplace at one end and two windows at the other. What was left of the roof sagged like a waterlogged awning on fractured beams, held together by a ceiling of smoke-blackened reeds. In some places the plaster had fallen away from the rough stone walls, in others it was fresh and white, washed by rain flooding down the walls.
‘Look. What do you think?’
‘Very nice,’ I replied in English, which was a waste of irony. Ajax dug down into his own English vocabulary.
‘Very naice. Spessial.’
‘It’s special all right.’
‘Here it is quiet and cool. Down in the village there is traffic and television and noise.’
‘And roofs and floors and windows.’
‘It’s old. You foreigners like old things.’
He smoothed his handsome black moustaches. My Greek was not up to explaining that it is not old things we like but things that pretend to be old, that the English sense of tradition is nostalgia for an imagined past and not the discomfort and inconvenience of the real thing.
‘The simple life. Spessial. Nine people lived in that room. Po-po-po.’
I struggled for my Greek. ‘Why not to live here still?’
‘Bah. We are European now.’
The place was a ruin. It would need months of work. There was no mains water, no electricity, no telephone. Where would I plug in the typewriter? The simple life was all very well, but I preferred other people to live it for me and write books about it. Even so, I didn’t know the right words to tell Ajax to get stuffed. To avoid standing tongue-tied, I stepped into the room on a stump of a joist, holding on to the door frame.
I could now see through the front windows. The weathered frames swung open. The glass was shattered and the shutters hung loose. But framed by these imperfect windows was a perfect landscape. The ruins of the old houses and the concrete of the new Horio had disappeared, masked by trees and a fold in the hillside. The rain shower had clarified the air and a golden evening sun lit the scene.
In the foreground were almond blossom and the little chapel set against the shimmering green of olive trees and budding mulberries. Down the hill was a stone cottage with a terracotta roof and a wisp of smoke drifting from the chimney. A knotted vine covered the terrace and a cow grazed in a field at the back. In the middle distance was a round plain chequered with fields and orchards. In the centre sat a conical hill topped with a square stone tower. Around it browsed a flock of sheep. Beyond were green and grey and purple mountains and in their cleavages the sea.
The landscape looked empty and pregnant at the same time. I was drawn into it like a tiny human figure in paintings of classical landscapes, overwhelmed by the grandeur of their setting but at the same time necessary to give it scale and narrative. Teetering over the gloom and goat stink, I felt light headed. I ached for that idyllic world. I longed to get closer to the windows to prove that the vision was true, but the gulf was too wide.
I was born and brought up in Birmingham. My earliest memories are a daisy lawn in front of a Yardley semi on the Coventry Road, cream double-decker buses, scraping Jack Frost patterns off the inside of bedroom windows to see smoking chimneypots, the old Birmingham Bull Ring. Later on the fussy gardens, closes and cul-de-sacs of Solihull, with escapes to the flat green fields and hedges and towpaths of Warwickshire, with little houses of old red brick. Like Odysseus making his legendary way home to Ithaca from Troy, the goal of my life’s journey should have been Acocks Green.
Nevertheless, inside me was a Birmingham-shaped hole in the place of home. How it was filled by a view out of a Greek window I still can’t explain. Perhaps it was the visions of Arcadia in Birmingham Art Gallery, where my Dad took me when we went into town. Who knows?
Half an hour later, by the chapel, watched by the goats, I surrendered to my fate with a token struggle and deteriorating Greek.
‘So, Mr John, what do you say?’ Ajax switched from the polite plural to the familiar singular. We were friends. We were accomplices. ‘The house is yours. I know foreigners in Düsseldorf who would give their back teeth for a little house on a Greek island. It is their dream. Whitewashed walls, red tiles, blue shutters, an olive tree, a vine around door, a geranium on the steps, mountains in the distance, the dark blue sea. Smell the mountain oregano and the pine.’
‘Walls not white. Roof kaputt. Shutters broken.’
‘That’s nothing. A month’s work and you can move in.’
He reached up and put an arm round my shoulder. I was surprised at myself for not recoiling at the touch as I would in England. Although I was taller than him, I felt embraced by a bigger man.
‘Soon I go back to England.’
‘Take a piece of Greece with you, here in your heart.’ His free hand slapped the wallet pocket of my Marks and Spencer’s linen jacket. ‘And leave a piece of yourself here in Greece. You’re a foreigner, you know things. I am a simple man, but I know you will not be sorry.’
‘I have no money. How can I buy?’
‘Who cares about money? You are my friend.’
You are my friend. Nobody had said that to me since I left primary school.
‘Vairy chip. Vairy chip.’
‘I said I have little money.’
‘How much do you have?’
‘Not enough.’
‘How much?’
‘Two hundred thousand.’
‘OK. I accept your offer. You strike a hard bargain, Johnny.’
‘How to know the price is good? The house. Too cheap. Too dear.’ I struggled for haggling words, but the few I knew had evaporated along with my common sense. Ajax lapsed into injured pride, his brown eyes reproachful, the corners of his mouth turned down and his arms outstretched with open palms.
‘My friend, you can’t buy a used car for that much. Ask anybody. Ask if Ajax ever cheated anybody.’ This time
he thumped his breast where his own wallet would be.
‘Wait …’ My brain was scooped out and my tongue cut off. Nothing was left except emptiness and light. His arm was around my shoulders again.
‘You will not regret this. We will be neighbours. We will be compatriots. We will be friends.’
‘Eff-harry-stow,’ is all I managed to say. ‘Thank you.’
Family matters
At that time we lived in Kifissia, a suburb of Athens. Until recently it had been a sleepy summer resort for upper-class Athenians escaping the heat of the city in the breezes and pines of the foothills of Mount Pendeli. A Roman tomb in the main street set the tone for this Kifissia, funereal mansions and mausoleum hotels haunted in the day-time by ancient ladies in twinsets and gentlemen in barathea suits.
Another Kifissia came alive at night. All through the year people came up by car or the little metro, the elektriko, to indulge in the Greek national pastime, eating. After a perfunctory stroll to get the digestion going, they descended on some of the best tavernas you could find anywhere in Athens. At midnight or so they could then take another little stroll to Varsos, whose yoghurt and milk puddings were famous all over Attica. Food went fork in hand with conversation, which was not always social. Politicians, bankers and businessmen were often to be seen stitching up deals or each other over the tsatsiki.
When we got there in the mid-1970s the old mansions were being pulled down and their gardens ploughed up to make way for apartments. Development was fuelled by the invasion of expatriates like us, whose business was in the Middle East and would have based themselves in Beirut if that tragic city had not been self-destructing.
Greeks and foreigners lived in parallel universes separated by language and custom. Greeks started work at seven, foreigners at nine. Greeks finished at three and came home for lunch. Foreigners finished at six and came home for dinner. Greeks went to bed for the afternoon and got up for coffee when the foreigners were having drinks. Greeks went out to dinner when the foreigners were coming out of the taverna to go home to bed. The American Club was for those who preferred to have dinner at six and brunch on a Sunday and avoid the stress of dealing with Greeks and their language. The rest of the expatriate community was Balkanised around its various national schools. Ours was St Catherine’s British Embassy School, a model primary and a corner of Greece that was forever England.
