Arrival

The story begins with my arrival in a small Greek village on the northeast coast of an island in the Dodecanese. Since then I have been coming here for more than a quarter of a century. For half the year I live in my little pink house on the hill. From one window I see the harbour, from another the mountains. I speak a Greek that is unique to the village. We miss out d’s, g's and several other consonants and throw in a scattering of Italian, Doric and Turkish words so that Athenians and educated people find it difficult to follow.

I have a small fishing boat with an outboard motor and I keep bees on the wild island of Saria nearby. I regularly dive to spear fish, lay out my nets or go line fishing. I was taught this work by my friend Georgos, an expert fisherman. Most days I can eat fish, but if the sea is too wild I walk in the forests and the mountains. Our priest, Papa Minas, used to be a shepherd and kept sheep before he took to caring for his human flock. He knows all the paths at this end of the island and showed me them years ago. When I come across an indentation in the pine needles with broken twigs and bent blades of grass I know Papa Minas has lain there to escape from the village and to gain comfort from the trees.

To check my bees or gather honey I take my boat and head north to Saria. I thread in and out of the rocks under the shelter of the cliffs, away from the strong winds and, where possible, away from the big waves. The sea is dangerous here. The weather can change in minutes – direction, strength and temperament. If this happens an hour or more from home it can be lonely. Coming back in the dark it can be very lonely. But the villagers are my friends. If I am going far I tell them. I make sure I am seen. If things get bad they will come in a bigger boat to find me. It has not happened yet. But perhaps...

In the morning I have coffee in Anna’s cafeneion. In the evening I drink ouzo there. I time my excursions to avoid the tourist boat since tourists always ask the same questions: When did you first come here? Where do you eat? Is this the best Greek island? How much does...? Why? The only interesting question is: Why? But, they never listen to my answer. I try to answer it here because it reflects on the purpose of this book.

I was born in England in 1942. There was a war on, our tenement flat had been bombed and we were homeless. My father, an orphan at the age of fourteen, was away in the army. My earliest recollections are of travelling with my mother and a suitcase. I remember buses, trains, lorries, occasional cars, but travelling, always travelling. A few days here, a week there, staying with friends and relatives who did not want us and, even if they did, had no room for us. Poverty in those days was having no food, no money and empty cupboards. Poverty was bad teeth, anger, depression and violence. On D-Day, June 6 1944, my father landed on Gold beach at 11.25 am. His job was to lead the way for the invading armies, clear mines, cut wire, put up signs, kill the enemy - hard, difficult and dangerous work that occupied him until the surrender of Germany in May 1945. After D-Day there were the killing fields of Normandy, Arnhem, the Ardennes, crossing the Rhine under fire, then a victory of sorts: a job done. He was a hero but turned down the offer of a Military Cross saying he had done no more than his comrades.

My father returned home from the war in 1946, but there was no home. Only a small boy frightened by this strange man he had never seen before and a wife scarred by poverty and homelessness. We lived in a one-bedroom slum with a toilet in the scullery and an open fire to cook Spam and dried eggs. I remember stealing wood for the fire from the streets and the bomb sites. I must have been five years old.

I try to imagine my father’s longing for normality after the butchery of the war and his inability to express his feelings at what he had seen and done. And I remember my inarticulate mother clinging to the only piece of love she could understand. That of her only child.

My mother was mentally ill, agoraphobic. She was the youngest of four daughters with a younger brother, brought up in extreme poverty in a slum in Cable Street in the East End of London: one living room and one bedroom for a family of seven. The outside toilet was shared with three other families. Each child grew up with it’s own phobia: Aunt Lil, a large woman, was scared of spiders, with Rose it was dirt, Aunt Dorothy had problems with sex and Uncle Ted was alcoholic. They were nice people and they tried to cope but there was no help. My father dedicated his life to caring for my mother. She made his life a torment. She did not have the words to thank him.

I left home as soon as I could and travelled. As a child I walked in the country, at sixteen and seventeen I went everywhere by bike, at eighteen I was walking and hitchhiking, mainly to England’s West Country. My grandmother lived in Salisbury in Wiltshire before she moved to Cable Street. Using a pony and trap she collected herbs from the forest and sold them at country markets and Sixpenny Fairs. My great grandfather had been a shepherd. These were rural people, romantic and unknown, but touched on and described by Thomas Hardy. For some reason I identified with them and the search for pre-industrial life became my obsession. I had a folk memory of the days before telephones and mass entertainment, easy communication and monotone culture.

I sought different places and different eras: India, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, East Africa, Mexico, Guatemala, Greece and, time and again, Spain. I was homesick everywhere, but for a home I never had. In Spain I met Socialists, Anarchists, Communists, workers and peasants seething under Franco and his indigenous army of occupation, the Guardia Civil. In the 1960s there were still parts of Spain straight out of Laurie Lee, pockets of life disconnected from the twentieth century, without roads, television or newspapers. I walked the old mule tracks, the paths of the iron hooves. In small villages or isolated inns I was made welcome by simple, innocent but suspicious people.

One scene is with me still: somewhere in Andalusia, a day trekking along a path in the hills, the sun hot and high, a white building across the fields, a cobbled road, horses. There had been no food and little to drink. I entered the inn and they asked if I had a horse. I said I was walking. They fussed and tutted. There was cold water in a clay jar. My room had a wooden bed, a straw mattress, an oil lamp, a nail in the wall and nothing else. The price, with evening meal and breakfast, was about 25 pesetas, say 20 cents. They showed me where to wash, after which I lay on my bed listening to life in the courtyard. I heard horses in the stable below my room. I smelt them as I dozed. A bell summoned me to supper. Fifteen of us sat on wooden benches around a large wooden table, helping ourselves to stew from a pot on the fire. And to wine. Young lads took me to a bar to drink cognac - six of us, three miners from Asturias, two bullfighters and me.

The miners were now jornaleros, day workers in the vast fields of the south earning 100 pesetas a day, or less. The coalfields of Asturias had been closed by strikes for six months or more, leading to pitched battles in the streets in the north with police and miners killed. The bullfighters were not matadors but fifteen-sixteen-year-old apprentices, travelling from one village corrida to the next. They fought steers and difficult, unpredictable bulls that the big names would not touch. They showed me scars on their sides, by the kidneys, ugly, red marks 15 or 20 cm long. They got their money scrabbling in the bloody sand for pesetas thrown by the spectators after each fight. Sometimes they got nothing. After many drinks I said:

I am borracho, drunk.

No, not borracho, only tranquillo.

In the morning they were gone and I had a hangover. The courtyard was empty. I drank cold coffee, put fruit and dry bread in my pocket, filled up my canteen with water and set off across an immense, yellow landscape.

Gradually Spain modernised and joined the twentieth century, tourists arrived, roads were built, Franco died and society changed. I needed to look elsewhere and I came to Greece. Crete attracted me for several years. I made friends in Zakros, a charming, small settlement at the eastern end of the island. I began to understand the Greeks’ temperament, to appreciate their love for life, their hospitality, their faults and virtues. I kept on looking for remote, different places where the elements were important and had to be measured and assessed.

For several years I had wanted to understand the people and customs of northern Karpathos, drawn by photographs of women in traditional clothes and the strange, wild music. But the ferries were always a day early or late, or too expensive, or were cancelled due to bad weather. One day in 1981, with my family, I took the ferry from Pigadia in the south of Karpathos to Diafani in the north. It was late and the children fell asleep on the quayside. They were still asleep when we carried them on board. In those days there was no harbour in the north. The large ferries stopped off-shore and Nikos Orfanos came out in an open boat, six metres long and powered by an outboard motor. We arrived about 2 am in a calm sea. We stared into the blackness. A voice called out:

Throw down the bags.

We lowered our rucksacks to Nikos who threw them to the bottom of his boat:

Give me those others. Throw them down.

They are not bags, they are children.

Oh. Pass them down carefully.

We did. Then we were in the boat, alone at sea in the dark, heading in the gentle swell to a small light on the horizon. The ferry, a floating fairyland, shrank and disappeared. My small son woke up for a second and looked around:

Are we going all the way in this?

Nikos looked carefully at the children:

You can stay with me.

For ten years we did just that. Now I have a house in the village and my granddaughter comes to stay.

We arrived at to molo, the mole. Nikos brought the boat in carefully, tied up, unloaded the rucksacks, handed the children up to us. We carried them, still sleeping, ashore. A woman in the traditional black dress, the kavai, appeared. She balanced one bag on her head and carried the others. We followed her to a little cafeneion. This was Anna. She had been waiting for relatives from the south but they had not come. She made us coffee while Nikos got our rooms ready. She would not accept money for the coffee. Electricity arrived at the village two years before we did and many houses had at least one electric light. But the hour was late, the village slept and, except for one streetlight, all was darkness. Standing patiently in the pool of light, was a donkey.