It's All Greek to Me!

by John Mole

  Nervous in case we were disturbing some ancient ritual, we went over to see what they were doing. I recognised some faces from the back of the church or dark corners in village houses where the old lurked and fiddled at strange chores.

  ‘The doctor sent us,’ said a toothless old biddy whom I usually saw in a nook by the baker’s oven, keeping warm. ‘It’s for the rheumatism.’

  ‘Doctor Solomos?’

  ‘Him. He knows things.’

  He gets them out of books, I wanted to say. Our village doctor was fair-haired and gangly and wore round black-rimmed glasses with bottle-bottom lenses. He suffered the professional disadvantage of looking about seventeen years old. Youthful qualities included acne and awkwardness and an adolescent vagueness that made you wonder if he was really paying attention and, if so, what was getting through. He was unusual for a Greek in that he was often seen carrying a book and even reading one on his own in a corner of the café. This was unusual. For many of our Greek friends a book is a final desperate attempt to fill the existential void when there is no one to talk to, nothing to do, no television to view, nothing in the street to watch and even the middle distance holds nothing to stare at. To be seen carrying a book in public, let alone reading one, is a mark of eccentricity or foreignness.

  Like his medical expertise, Doctor Solomos learned his English off by heart from textbooks. He often took both parts of the dialogue. ‘Good morning. Good morning. How are you? I am well, thank you. How are you? Fine, thanks. The weather is very good. Perhaps it will rain later …’

  One of the diseases endemic among the elderly was rheumatism, brought on by hard work and the damp and chill of stone houses before insulated concrete and electric radiators and anti-inflammatory painkillers. Whenever I went to Athens or London, I took orders for the latest pills and lotions that my friends read about but were unable to find on Evia. Youthful Doctor Solomos had evidently read about a burial-in-sand cure. He prescribed five hours every day. His patients sat bolt upright from mid-morning to mid-afternoon under the blazing sun, making conversation, from time to time passing a bottle of water or slices of watermelon down the line. When you swam back to shore after a dip, they looked like ancient statues waiting for some promised god.

  We had to forbid the children to treat them as goal posts or to slalom around them making motorbike noises. After three days, two of the patients took to their beds with sunstroke and the good doctor discontinued the treatment. We had the beach to ourselves again to pollute with rowdiness.

  From time to time, when her mother or his sister could mind the butcher’s, Ajax and Eleni brought the twins to the beach. They came with the two essentials of any Greek expedition: food and parea, company, as many aunts, uncles and cousins as could fit in their two vehicles. They set up camp with parasols, rugs and coolboxes. Ajax anchored melons and bottles of water in the shallows. He blew up an inflatable desert island complete with bright green palm tree and anchored it a few metres offshore. Eleni kept the toddlers out of the water and the sun and chased them around with spoonfuls of food. The relatives huddled under the shade to eat pita and chain smoke. Ajax stood waist deep in water with his hands on his hips.

  We joined them, feeling underdressed as only Ajax was in swimming trunks. Eleni wore a disappointingly unrevealing black swimsuit under a Hawaiian-pattern beach robe, which she only took off when she went in for her dip. She paddled around up to her neck, in the unconvincing manner of swimmers who don’t take their feet off the bottom. You got the feeling that they knew it was European to go to the beach but hadn’t yet cottoned on to what you were supposed to do there.

  Ajax did excel at one aspect of beach life, paddle ball. He had learned to play in Düsseldorf and said it was his favourite sport. It’s not really a game, because there are no rules and no scoring and nobody wins. The principle is to bat a tennis ball to each other without it touching the ground using large wooden bats. The idea is to keep the rally going for as long as possible. If you volley or smash past your opponent, you have both lost. At the same time you test each other with more and more difficult shots to win mutual recognition of one player’s superiority. The combination of having to cooperate, the pleasure of keeping it going and the demonstration of superiority are at the heart of Greek life. You collaborate and compete at the same time. Thanks to badminton I did OK. He was very good. When I told him it was like playing against a wall, he glowed.

  Paddle ball was the only thing I ever saw Ajax or any of the villagers do that didn’t have a practical purpose. Like the fishermen of Limanaki, he was puzzled by the dinghy.

  ‘Johnny, where do you fix the fishing light?’

  ‘It’s not for fishing.’

  ‘Ah. Where’s the motor?’

  ‘There’s no motor. It has sails.’

  ‘Ah, vairy chip. But it takes a long time to get where you’re going.’

  ‘We don’t go anywhere. We sail round and round the bay.’

  ‘Why do you do that?’

  Apart from paddle ball they couldn’t see the point of doing something for its own sake, especially if there was no food involved. Boating without a net, swimming without a spear, hiking without a gun were crazy or foreign, which meant the same thing. In the end we gave in and said that the boat was for fishing and the sails were so you could sneak up on the fish without being heard. They didn’t buy the explanation – we Greeks don’t do it like that – but at least it was within their frame of reference.

  We were not strangers to fishing. Carelessly put your hand into a cupboard and you ran the risk of taking it out with a hook stuck in your finger. If you wanted a pot scourer there was no shortage of matted skeins of fishing line. Bait was a constant topic of conversation. Jim favoured worms, which he could also drop down his sister’s T-shirt. She went for a paste of bread and feta because she liked the taste, so by the time we reached the fishing grounds there wasn’t much left for the fish. Jack went for raw fish guts despite his antipathy to wasps. Harry favoured fish too, but thought that leftovers from his plate, fried with a lemon dressing, would attract the finer piscatorial palate. As usual, Arfa gave advice but would have nothing to do with implementation as she hated seeing the hooks in their mouths. She needn’t have worried. In our whole time in Greece I think we have caught three. My personal tally is a two-inch bottom feeder that had the misfortune to swim over my hook as I pulled it up. It snagged him on the belly.

  Anglers are optimists as well as liars. The time you felt a tiddler wriggling on the end of the line fuels hours and hours of hopeful boredom, treating fish to a free meal. Now we had a boat we could move up a league. On calm days we paddled out to the cliffs or the middle of the bay, dropped anchor, oh so very carefully, and set out the lines. With the same result as on land.

  ‘OK, we’re going to do this properly,’ I said as we tucked into Kyria Sofia’s horse mackerel, grilled and dressed with oil and lemon. ‘You never see Greeks fishing by day. They do it at night with a light in the bow. They don’t catch fish, fish catch them. Don’t worry. This is the last fish we’ll pay for.’

  I still shudder when I remember these words.

  We made careful plans. Blister was too small for all of us and a proper fishing lamp with its gas canister, so I skilfully improvised a pencil torch inside a plastic bottle. In the dead calm of dusk we would paddle out to the middle of the bay. At nightfall we would put the torch in the water, tethered with a length of line. When our creel was full we would hoist the foresail, heave-ho the anchor and hitch a ride on the breeze, which, as any experienced sailor will tell you, blows in every evening from the sea to the land. It’s something to do with differences in temperature as things cool down.

  As it was calm and we were not taking the mainsail, Arfa came along. So she couldn’t get in the way of serious fishing we made her sit in the landlubber’s seat on the little foredeck, facing backwards with her legs astride the mast and her feet dangling in the minestrone of soggy bait and old seaweed that washed around the
bilges. Everything started according to plan. We paddled out into the middle of the bay, halfway between the shore and Camel Island. It was too deep for the anchor. We baited up and resolved the usual crises and tiffs that this produced: tangled lines, hooks in fingers, worm overboard and so on. Arfa gave advice but did not participate, as this would have meant slackening her grip on the mast.

  By now it was dark. I switched on the torch, sealed it in the bottle, tied the string and threw it overboard. It looked pretty but disappointingly feeble. At eye level it looked bright enough, but when you looked down on it … eye level? EYE LEVEL? I felt the all-over tingly feeling that is nice under a duvet with the right company but in other circumstances means only terror. This particular circumstance was a two-metre ocean swell. Arfa telepathically voiced my thoughts.

  ‘Where are we?’

  It’s never dark at sea, as we sailors say, but it can get close. On the crest of the next roller I just made out the reassuring shape of Camel Island. Unreassuringly, it was between us and the scattering of lights on the shore. We were on our way to Turkey.

  Earlier on you may have spotted the deliberate mistake. An experienced sailor will not tell you that the breeze blows from sea to shore in the evening – exactly the opposite. At the time the error was not deliberate but entirely unforced. You may wonder how we hadn’t noticed we were scudding out to sea. It was the same as when you ride a bicycle, the wind is always against you – you never feel it when it’s at your back. I did my best to speak slowly and keep panic out of my voice.

  ‘Hey kids, let’s row back a bit. There’ll be more fish closer in.’

  ‘Daad, why are you talking like a Dalek?’

  I stationed Jack on the tiller and took the oars. I pointed to a light I reckoned would guide us into the bay and not onto the cliffs on either side.

  ‘Just steer us in but give Camel Island a wide berth – there’s an underwater reef sticks out.’

  As I turned my back on Arfa, she gave me the long reproachful look of a calf that knows what a stun gun is. Her knuckles glowed in the dark as she clung to the mast. I gave her a reassuring smile that fooled nobody, least of all me. I put the oars in the rowlocks and pulled.

  The minute we turned into the wind we were in its teeth like a gob of spinach. I summoned up every scrap of expertise acquired on the Avon and the Cherwell and the Serpentine. Never before had bank holidays seemed so well spent. But there were other things from Stratford running through my head as my joints cracked and my lungs burned. ‘Full fathom five thy father lies/Of his bones are coral made …’

  The crew was magnificent. They knew what had happened and what we had to do. Jack gripped the tiller and set a determined face to land. He told Harry to keep an eye on the wake phosphorescing behind us and shout if it deviated from a straight line. Jim leaned out to starboard and Kate to port and with unflinching gaze looked out for rocks and landmarks. Arfa played her part. With her eyes closed and her forehead pressed to the mast behind me, she whispered prayers.

  We ploughed on through the gathering seas. The offshore breeze gave way to the Melteme gusting from the north. Rollers began to crest and break. Water sluiced over the foredeck. The prayers behind me turned to throaty, lipclenched moans. Harry was switched to bailing duties with a bait box. The rowlocks, the oars, my back all protested. I prayed that the gear would hold out and tried not to think of Barry Bucknell and his collapsing wardrobes. My glasses salted up so I couldn’t see with or without them. I was disoriented and exhausted. Every oar stroke was agony.

  I drew strength from the children’s calm until it occurred to me that it was founded on trust in their father. He would not let them drown. Little did they know. As the wind dropped and the waves subsided, I dared not tempt fate with hope until the sweet crunch of the hull on sand beneath us. Arfa was first off. She fell out of the boat and threw up on the sand.

  ‘Cor, that was good fun, Dad, can we do it every night?’

  ‘Ask your mother,’ I said weakly.

  Arfa didn’t say a word about our adventure. Nor has she ever set foot in a dinghy again. Leaving sleeping lies doggo, I have never asked about her stories of the Spanish trapeze. It was before we were married, after all, and I told much worse fibs.

  The children were soon sailing on their own. They went out in all weathers, the rougher the better, skipping and planing round Camel Island. When they took me out I was relegated to the foredeck, facing backwards with my legs astride the mast where I couldn’t get in the way. Mostly I was set to painting and varnishing and mending the tackle. It was satisfyingly nautical without the danger and inconvenience of putting out to sea.

  Traditional recipes

  Coming home from our fishing expedition, I was bent double with dangly arms and there were cheeky offers of bananas. When I woke up the next day, I couldn’t move my legs or roll over without agonising pain in the small of the back and down the sciatic nerves through the buttocks. Getting out of bed or sitting up was out of the question. Aspirin and hot flannels throughout the day made no difference. I lay on my back without a pillow and mentally designed a wheelchair ramp up to the front door. With Arfa helping me I could roll on my side to pee over the edge of the bed into the bucket I used to mix whitewash. In preparation for weightier deeds, Arfa washed out the old roasting tin I used for knocking up bits of mortar.

  For some reason she took exception to my helpful comments on her nursing and after siesta, with wholly unwarranted remarks about not being able to stand my snapping and moaning any more, she said she was going down to the village to fetch Doctor Solomos. I sped her on her way with a categorical refusal to let any barefoot doctor, Balkan quack or spotty Hippocrat near my person and promised that by the time she got back I would be dancing the Hokey Cokey.

  I summoned the children and told them to push this limb and pull that foot while I puffed and blowed according to the natural childbirth methods I had picked up from their mother when they were born. I managed to half sit up on the edge of the bed, but the pain was too much and we were all in tears. I collapsed back on the sweaty mattress.

  Arfa was back within the hour. Youthful Doctor Solomos sidled in after her, lugging a shiny new black bag with hardly a scuff on it, probably a graduation present. He sat down nervously on the bed, goggled at me through bottle-bottom lenses and took my pulse while Arfa described my symptoms. He gazed into my eyes and tickled my feet. Together we rolled me on my stomach and he poked gingerly at the affected part. He sat with his arms folded, picking at a spot on his chin.

  ‘High do not thingit meningheetis,’ he said in English. ‘High do not thingit teetanos. High do not thingit poliomeealeetis.’

  ‘That’s good news. What is it?’

  ‘High thingit bad back.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘High ’ave medicine for this.’

  He bent down and struggled with the stiff new locks on his black bag. He rummaged inside and pulled out a syringe like a cake icer. The needle! My earliest memory of primary school was the rumour that fired wildly round the class at the first glimpse of the school nurse’s white coat – it’s the needle, it’s the needle – and girls screamed and boys peed down their legs (their own, not the girls’). Usually we queued up and they did no more than look at our tongues and rummage in our hair for lice.

  Once it really was the needle and the mothers of cissies like me stayed at school instead of dropping us off at the gate, while tough little Irish kids faced the ordeal on their own. One of them, a freckle-faced, red-haired hooligan called Rory, forfeited forever his post of school bully by fainting in front of me.

  Since then I turn my head away from the needle as soon as it comes out of the packet and wait to feel dizzy afterwards. If anyone was going to jab a needle into my spine, it was not going to be a recent graduate doing a rural stint before continuing his training.

  ‘I’m allergic.’

  ‘Oh no you’re not,’ said Arfa, happy to be getting her own back for the day’s
abuse.

  ‘Oh yes I am!’

  ‘Oh no you’re not!’

  ‘I’m a rare blood group.’

  ‘Oh no you’re not!’

  ‘I’m a Jehovah’s witness.’

  ‘What do you want? An injection or a suppository?’

  I was saved from this terrible dilemma by the slamming of car doors and the kerfuffle of visitors outside. News had spread fast. First up the steps was Elpida, carrying a dish of meatballs and a stone hot water bottle. Behind hovered Ajax, who had brought her up, clicking his car keys like worry beads. Elpida put down her dish, threw her arms wide and began a lament.

  ‘O Blessed Virgin. What have they done to you? Why are you laid low? What evil eye has struck you down?’

  ‘See. About time I got some sympathy.’

  ‘Poor child. Show me. Where does it hurt?’

  Doctor Solomos meekly moved out of the way to let Elpida stand over me. She pulled the sheet down to the top of my buttocks. With strong, waxy fingers she poked and prodded. Everyone crowded round the bed to see the fun. It felt like a ward round and Elpida was the consultant. Somewhere to the right of my spine she touched a spot that sent a shooting pain from my toes to my skull and a scream from my cracked lips.

  ‘There we are,’ she said to Doctor Solomos, one professional to another. ‘Please give me an egg,’ she said to Arfa.

  ‘A what? What for?’

  ‘GIVE HER AN EGG!’ I shouted.

  Arfa went to the fridge and came back with the smallest egg she could find. Elpida cracked it onto the small of my back and handed the shell to Arfa. Muttering under her breath, she rocked my back from side to side and up and down so that the egg white was spread all over the area. I bit my lip with the pain. She finished her incantation and asked Doctor Solomos for a bandage out of his case. She tied it round me, the egg still in the small of my back. I felt the yolk burst. It was slippery and wet and warm against my skin. She wound the bandage tightly round me several times, pushing the roll under my stomach and making me wince.