by John Mole
That evening, after he had finished replenishing the water and grain for his birds in the house opposite, Spiros came to admire his carpentry and congratulate us on moving in. He brought us a plastic water bottle full of wine out of his best barrel. In return, I offered him a glass of Single McSozzle out of my own grande réserve. We carried drinks and bits to the table under the olive tree. The day’s heat lurked in the earth and the stones and the trunks of trees, while the hesitant cool of evening rustled leaves and brassy grass.
The sun was low over the horizon, turning from unbearable incandescence to a ruddy bronze that the eye can stand. The Greek for set is vasilevi, which also means to reign, like a king. Read it in a dictionary and it seems an odd word for decline and dissolution, but in the majesty of reds and purples and golds it makes sense. The beauty even overawed the children, seen but unheard except for the gentle burping of cola and the crackly mastication of crisps.
As the western horizon caught fire, Spiros pointed with his hand and conjured his doves out of the translucent porcelain blue of heaven. They circled and dipped and the sunset turned them into crimson firebirds.
‘So beautiful,’ breathed Arfa as they made a final pass above us before fluttering down into their own house.
‘You like doves?’ he asked. I thought of how they cooed and rustled during the day and wheeled over the house in the evening.
‘Of course,’ we said.
‘Come with me then,’ he said, sucking the last of the whisky from his moustache.
While the children fought over the last crumbs of crisp, Arfa and I followed Spiros to his house. He opened the wire gate into the yard. It was overgrown with thistles and buddleia and littered with old plastic bags, rusted jerry cans and heaps of pigeon manure. He picked up a plastic bag, shook out a few grains of yellow corn and told us to wait while he went up the stone staircase into the house. There were scufflings and flutterings inside.
‘Oh no, he’s giving us pigeons for the house,’ whispered Arfa.
‘Where will we put them?’
‘They’ll have to go in the cellar.’
‘They’ll attract rats.’
‘We’ll have to build a pigeon house like on Mykonos.’
‘As if we didn’t have enough to do.’
‘We can’t refuse them.’
Spiros came out of the house and down the steps and handed Arfa the bulging plastic bag. She peeked inside. It was full of feathers and little pink claws. A beady eye looked up at us. On the end of a little yellow beak was a tiny drop of blood like a ruby. Suddenly the bag jumped. She yelped and dropped it. Spiros cackled, picked it up and banged it hard against the side of his knee. He handed it to me.
‘On the spit if you like. But try stuffing them with hard cheese and roasting them in a pot in the oven.’ He kissed the tips of his fingers. I held the bag away from my body so that I couldn’t feel the warmth of the soft little bodies.
‘Don’t let the children see,’ warned Arfa. But it was too late.
‘Cor.’
‘Can I have the feathers? Can I? Can I?’ insisted Harry.
That night in bed I got the blame for the animal cruelty of Greeks and the callousness of our children and the general malevolence of the universe, but for the time being we went back to the table, refilled the glasses and opened another packet of crisps.
‘My wife’s old grandmother told us stories when we came here in the summer. She sat on the step over there. The garden was different then. It was full of vegetables and flowers,’ mused Spiros.
‘Tell us one.’
‘Eh. It’s so long ago.’
‘Tell us one for the children.’
‘Eh. There’s one I remember.’
Arfa’s Greek was much better than mine, so she did the consecutive translation into English while I frowned and tutted to keep the audience in order. They would rather have had a Fingers Bumcrusty, but learning to listen politely to a bo-ring folk tale would do them good.
‘On his travels, Aghios Ioannes came to an island where they only ate doves. The sea was too rough for fishing and the grass too poor for animals and the soil too thin for good crops. Oil and stones were all they had. The doves were the only plump things in sight. They lived in special stone houses that were bigger and finer than the hovels the people lived in. They were tall and square with battlements round the top and narrow windows in the walls like arrow slits for the birds to fly in and out. The island looked ready for a war of midgets, dotted with tiny castles. On Sunday every person on the island ate a dove in a pie or on the spit or in a stew. For the rest of the week they scratched what they could from the dirt.
‘Aghios Ioannes preached to the people, but they wouldn’t listen. They were too busy in the fields. The only thing that attracted their attention was the gold cross he wore round his neck, which was given him by our Patriarch in Constantinople. It was made for blessed Queen Eleni out of the gold that the three wise men brought for Our Lord. One day, in the middle of his preaching, he took it off his neck and held it above his head. A large black crow swooped out of nowhere and carried it off towards the mountain at the end of the island. The people were frightened and spat at the saint and went back to their labour. But Aghios Ioannes went after the crow. He followed it for forty days and forty nights across salt lakes and through thorn forest and up into the bare mountain, swimming like a fish and running like a hare and climbing like a mountain goat and living off berries and locusts.
‘At last he came to a cave at the top of the island where the queen of the island lived. She was a witch who kept the whole island under an evil spell. In the middle of the cave was a pile of gold and jewels she had stolen from her people and the saint saw his holy cross on top of them.
‘Now, Aghios Ioannes noticed that the witch kept a flock of goats in a field next to the cave. And hanging on a tree to dry were the skins of animals she had slaughtered. So he put one of the skins on his back and joined the flock so that she wouldn’t see him. When she came out of the cave in the evening to milk them, he grabbed her by the throat. Oh what a fight they had! She turned into a pecking crow, but he hung on. She changed into a spitting cat, but he hung on. She changed into a writhing weasel, a roaring lion, a clinging octopus, but he hung on. Finally she changed into a pure white dove, but he was not deceived and wrung her neck and she changed into nothing else. The tyrant was dead and the spell on the wretched people of the island was broken. No longer slaves for the profit of the witch, no longer forced to toil in the stony fields to feed her, they changed back into their rightful shapes, white doves, and spent the rest of their days swooping and wheeling over the island in freedom.’
There were six in the bag, one each. First I boiled a pan of water and poured it over them so that they were easier to pluck. I started at the tail feathers and worked my way up each soft little body to the dislocated neck. The worst part was the smell of warm pigeon shit and damp feathers. When they were naked, I cut off their pretty heads and their wizened little feet. Through the anus I tore out the intestines. From the neck I emptied the crop, which was lumpy with gravel and undigested grains of yellow corn. I stuffed the insides with hard cheese and took them down to Dimitra’s to put in the oven.
The rest of the family didn’t want theirs and watched in silence as I ate all six. There wasn’t much meat on them, but they were very tasty.
While Arfa and I laboured on the house, the children played in the yard and in the fields above. What they got up to we could only guess. Their omerta was impervious to our wheedling and trickery and not even the youngest would grass.
We had occasional glimpses of the world they lived in: Kate stark naked and painted blue, running for her life with reed arrows whistling round her; rope burns on Harry’s wrists and ankles; a barricade of thorn bushes between two mulberry trees across a rocky path; requests for tools and supplies, of whose purpose we suspected the worst; Jim’s pockets full of feathery snake skins; a massive warty toad hidden under the T-shirts
in their bedroom cupboard; a scorpion and a stag beetle fighting it out in a Tupperware box under Jack’s bed; a stash of swords and spears, snake pokers and lizard teasers, fashioned from laths and reeds. They brought bruises, stings and bloody knees for medical attention, tight-lipped about the causes, like criminals in Accident and Emergency.
Their favourite place was an ancient olive tree in a small field above our house. It was at least five hundred years old, a living monument, a golden thread leading us back as surely as a fresco or a carving to the Venetians or the crusaders, perhaps even the Byzantines. Olive trees reach their peak in about two hundred years and then the main trunk dies away. It is replaced by shoots from the base that over the decades grow thick as trunks themselves and twine round each other to make a knotted mass like the drum of a colossal pillar, with a hollow core where the original trunk was. In a forest fire the air inside the hollow explodes, ripping the drum apart and leaving the core exposed. This had happened to the ancient olive tree near us, leaving a gnarled, woody semicircle like a spoon-back chair looking downhill over our new roof to the valley. Old age, disease and the harvesting of generations had left it with a spiky crown of spindly branches, out of scale with the massive base but enough to shade the hollow. It was their camp, their hideout, their tepee, their fort, their den.
One morning, after shouting at them to stop making a noise and get out from under our feet, we were unnerved by their silence and absence and went to look for them. We found them sitting in the embrace of the ancient tree, telling each other a tale of chivalry concocted out of Achilles and Lancelot, Maid Marian and Helen, Alexander and William Tell, something out of a mediaeval romance or a Disney animation. We crept back to the house feeling envious and smug.
The tree belonged to Barba Fedon, the old man with the chestnut comb-over, whose life’s course had been changed by spying on the ladies-only bacchanalia. He came past the house on his donkey a couple of times a week. I couldn’t work out what he did except scavenge for rubbish on the hillside. He had a keen eye for what he might find useful: a piece of plywood, an old bed frame, an empty cheese tin. He was especially fond of the bent nails that lay in profusion round our house – I was getting better, but I still bent a couple before I managed to hammer one in straight. He reminded me of an ant, the kind who will carry a piece of straw fifty times bigger than itself.
I was going for a walk up the hill when I saw him standing in front of the ancient olive and looking up into the branches. I took the opportunity to get his permission to use it as a playhouse.
‘Beautiful tree,’ I said, hopping down from the stone wall.
‘Bah,’ he said, whacking the wood with his stick, ‘it’s finished. Five years now it hasn’t made fruit. It’s only good for firewood.’
‘What? You can’t cut it down.’ My voice sounded like a stranger’s to me, I was so shocked.
‘You’re right. It’s too big. I don’t know where I’d find a chainsaw big enough.’
‘Please, Barba Fedon, tell me if you decide to cut it down.’
‘It’s OK, thanks. My two great-nephews will help me.’ I scooted back home and told Arfa the news.
‘It’s like everything, animals, friends, relations, people, things, the relationship lasts only as long as they are useful. It’s a crime,’ I said, with a suitably Hellenic gesture.
‘Don’t get excited, Toad. We’ll do something.’
‘What? Go the council for a preservation order?’
‘Why don’t we buy his field? He’s got no use for it.’
‘Light of my life, you are a genius.’
And so began the courtship of Barba Fedon. We had to show that we were serious about buying, but not so keen that he could ask a ridiculous price. We had to give him a reason for buying that he could understand, but not the impression that we had found some hidden treasure. There was no point in telling him it was for love of a beautiful tree – he would simply not understand and assume that it was a smoke screen for something else. We had to think of something that fitted in with his view of the world.
The next time he passed the house on his donkey we invited him in for coffee, which he refused, saying he had drunk one already that day, and for a drop of The Glugmore, which he accepted. He sat down, took off his big straw hat and smoothed the chestnut comb-over down on his chalky skull, missing a bit, which dangled down onto his collar. The industrial tang of cologne and liniment filled the room. While we futtered around with glasses and ice, he appraised our belongings like an auctioneer. We followed the social niceties of clinking glasses and wishing for health and answering questions that in Britain you only expect from your financial adviser. At last we could get to the point.
‘Barba Fedon, if you ever want to sell your field with the big olive tree, please let us know.’
His bright black eyes bored into mine. ‘Why do you want that field?’
‘We want to buy a donkey, but we don’t want it in our yard. We need the space for vegetables.’
‘Why do you want a donkey?’
‘For the children.’
‘Eh. I need that field for my own donkey. And in the autumn I grow beans …’
It was hard to keep a straight face, to avoid Arfa’s eye, to stop punching the air with a triumphant ‘yesss’. He had taken the bait. He had started to list all the reasons he did not want to sell his field, which meant he was going to. If he had said OK, let’s talk about it later, it would have meant we didn’t have a hope. We had started on the arduous process of negotiation, which would culminate in our being the owners of the little field with the ancient olive tree.
And so it turned out. For the price of a meal in a decent restaurant, we owned a living timeline to Byzantium.
Ambrosia and shepherd’s pie
‘Daad, what’s ambrosia?’ asked Kate, tucking in to her favourite breakfast of mashed-up feta and olive oil, the savoury version of yoghurt and honey.
‘Tinned rice pudding, sweetheart. It’s not bad but it doesn’t have any skin. The skin’s the best part. It sticks to the roof of your mouth and you suck it.’
‘I like the skin on the top of cocoa. Trouble is you don’t get enough with Greek milk.’
‘When I was a monitor in a colonie de vacances in France, our breakfast treat was the skin off the boiled milk for the kids’ hot chocolate. You heaped it on your bread all warm and slimy. Délicieux.’
‘Sounds luvverly,’ said Kate. ‘Can we have that, Mummy?’
‘Beugh. If you two don’t stop I’ll be sick,’ said the Guardian of Taste.
‘Dad was only telling me about ambrosia.’
‘Ambrosia was what the gods ate. It has nothing to do with rice pudding skin.’
‘What was it then?’ asked Kate.
‘Dunno,’ she said. ‘Whatever they liked best, I suppose.’
‘Tapioca pudding with condensed milk? Stewed tripe with parsnips? Poached calf’s brain on toast?’ I suggested.
Arfa tried to change the subject with a rambling description of how the twelve most important gods lived on Olympus, even Hades, the god of the underworld, and were served ambrosia and nectar by Ganymede, a pretty young Trojan boy snatched away for the job by Zeus’s eagle. The real purpose of this epicurean discussion was to decide on a menu for our first dinner party. It was the only way we could think of to reciprocate our neighbours’ hospitality.
‘What shall we have? We can’t give them back what they’ve just given us,’ said Arfa.
‘When we’ve finished they won’t recognise it as food.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Don’t get touchy, darling. I mean we’ll cook it differently from them. It will still be food for the gods.’ Phew, I got out of that one.
‘It’ll just be a sub-standard version of what they give us.’
‘Nooo. They’ve never had anything like The Dish and Biscuit.’
This had been our regular dinner party offering in London. In its original form it might have been
boeuf bourgignon or coq au vin, but it was now any kind of chopped-up supermarket meat stewed in a tin of tomatoes and graced with roundels of what purported to be puff pastry. This was the biscuit, in the potter’s sense of porcelain, which has been fired but not glazed.
‘We’ve only got two gas rings.’
‘I’ll dig out Cooking in a Bedsitter,’ I said.
‘We’ll have to use the fourno.’
We didn’t use the bakery oven very often, as we felt embarrassed when Dimitra peered into our dishes with disdain. Eventually we noticed that she looked like that at everyone’s, as she worked out in which part of the oven to put it and how much extra water to add.
‘How about shepherd’s pie? We’ll tell them it’s our national dish.’
‘It’s not very exciting.’
‘Here it’s exotic. And if it goes wrong they’ll think that’s what it’s meant to taste like.’
‘I suppose I can’t go wrong with shepherd’s pie,’ Arfa said and I kept a diplomatic silence.
‘Can we have rhubarb crumble for pudding?’ asked Kate.
‘Where do we get rhubarb in Greece in August?’ I said, always ready to pour cold water on ideas that weren’t mine.
Although we should have invited the whole village, we only had a limited number of chairs. We started with Ajax the butcher and Eleni, Haralambos the builder’s merchant and his young bride Antigone. Antigone’s father Spiros the carpenter would come alone, as his wife was in Athens looking after the grandchildren. Barba Vasilis accepted for himself and his wife, but we knew she wouldn’t come as she had agoraphobia and never left the house. Elpida and Barba Mitsos made up the guest list.
We decided to treat them to traditional English cuisine. We plumped for Hawaiian prawn cocktail followed by shepherd’s pie followed by nectarine crumble and ice cream. We searched Aliveri for Bird’s custard powder, because what is a pudding without custard lumps to squidge between the teeth? But it hadn’t caught on yet, along with Bisto gravy powder, Daddy’s brown sauce, Heinz salad cream and other Great British delicacies. All the other ingredients were easy to come by, including a tin of pineapple chunks for the cocktail sauce.
