In which we hear an alarming allegation concerning a sausage... Piraeus in winter... the critical avoidance of okra... second mates, an irrelevant but heartfelt digression... yearnings… rapt by an historic shore... nationality, musings and angst with regard to... a change of plan... lamentations on the decline of the British Merchant Navy... the deteriorating prospects of British seaman in general with one in particular… ashore but feeling adrift... we meet the portentous sausage at a critical juncture and clear it of all suspicion... a lemming leaps.
THIS IS A TALE ABOUT A RADICAL CHANGE IN MY LIFE. IT WAS AN EVENT OCCASIONED BY UNQUIET TIMES AND A COINCIDENCE OF CIRCUMSTANCES WHICH HAD LED ME, AT THE OPENING OF THE NARRATIVE, TO THE BRINK OF AN ABYSS. THERE I TEETERED FOR A WHILE, BY TURNS PULLED FORWARD BY A LEMMING-LIKE COMPULSION TO JUMP AND DRAWN BACK BY THE INSTINCT OF SELF-PRESERVATION; AND THEN, AT THE CRUCIAL INSTANT, A SAUSAGE PUSHED ME OVER THE EDGE.
Later in this account you will become accustomed to my convoluted taste in metaphors... a-simile-ation, if you will... but for those readers who assume that I have unleashed imagery in the opening paragraph, I must be quite clear: this was no sausage of the mind but rather a real, gleaming, engorged skin straining under the pressure of savoury contents; a sausage sensible to feeling as to sight, which marshalled me along the way that I was going in an entirely corporeal manner; and I encountered it as I lugged my kit-bag through Piraeus docks in search of a ferry-boat one mad March afternoon.
* * *
It was a blazing, brilliant and bitter day, delicately balanced somewhere on the cusp of winter and spring; the sort of day which can often be found in the Mediterranean in the early months of the year. The ice-blue heavens cascaded such radiance upon the drab waterfront that even the grimy concrete of Greece’s utilitarian port-city seemed tinged with the nobility of a greater age, but the coruscating light was accompanied by a wind that sliced like a scalpel.
The air temperature, driven by a brisk, northerly breeze, was as crisp as a wind off the tundra, yet, if you got out of the air-stream and into the sunshine, it was suddenly as warm as the finest of English summer days. The direct sunlight baked like a blow-torch, causing my scalp to perspire a little under the burden of the great canvas sea-bag on my shoulder, so that when a small bead of moisture escaped the hair-line the wind pounced on it, transformed it to ice, and sent it skittering down my cringing neck. Passing through the shadows of awnings and kiosks was like walking from a boiler-room into a fridge. The Greeks call such conditions ‘ilio meh dontia’... ‘sun with teeth’: schizophrenic weather, but so beautiful that even the strident, stinking, savage traffic and the dry, dilapidated, dirty fountains failed to give their customary offence in the effulgence.
I generally don’t like cities much, and Piraeus is not a beautiful one in any case. My aim had been to get onto a ferry to an island with all possible despatch. However, the distance to the required terminal was uncertain and breakfast had been at oh-six-hundred; it was now after three in the afternoon and the combination of an empty belly, a shoulder complaining under the awkward weight of the sea-bag and the cosmetic effect of the light on the grimy city was sufficient to divert my steps into a taverna.
The restaurant was a typical down-town Piraeus eatery; a narrow, echoing, indifferently-lit hall behind jaded metal-framed windows. A counter ran along most of one side of the room, and a single row of square tables stretched down the other side. There was a strong suspicion of cobwebs lurking up in the gloomy rafters; the furniture was painted a jaded grey and covered with check tablecloths from which all joy had long ago been washed out; the swarthy cook leaned his tattooed and hairy forearms on the counter and peered expressionlessly around the dog-end of his cigarette. What light there was emanated from un-shaded fluorescent tubes. Heating was something which happened elsewhere, and the clients retained their coats.
In most places in the civilised world I would have hurried past with a shudder, but from previous experience in Greece I knew that the appearance of urban restaurants is often in complete contradiction to the quality of their food.1 Peering into the sombre depths I noted that this one was well-stocked with obviously local clientele... nuggety, bronzed men in sailor’s pea-jackets and fisherman’s caps... and decided it was worth taking a chance on. Selecting a table behind the door to avoid the worst of the cool draft, I ordered something called ‘loukaniko’, which sounded familiar; I thought it was probably meatballs, but it didn’t really matter as at least I knew that it wasn’t tripe or bloody okra.†
Having ordered I addressed myself to a beer, and, gazing out of the lack-lustre window at the contrasts of sun and shadow outside, I reflected back over the previous week and the events which had brought me to this smoky, chilly, Spartan, echoing and irretrievably foreign establishment.
* * *
“What the hell’s up with you this morning, Two-Oh?” scowled Captain Andy. “You’re simpering like a tart in a rugby club shower!”
‘Two-Oh’ was me, the second mate, and the Two-Oh of a commercial ship is expected to be a reliable, stoical sort of chap. A fully proficient and experienced navigator, only two promotions away from commanding the vessel, the second mate is a man trusted to be the master’s principle confidant in planning and controlling navigation, and the chief mate’s first resource in handling cargo. Perhaps most tellingly of all, he is entrusted with navigating the ship in the dead of the graveyard watch, when all others sleep soundly under the aegis of his skill and judgement. A proficient second mate, in a nutshell, is ideally a creature of worth, deserving of the world’s approbation.
The world in general, however, rarely concerns itself with second mates. They exist largely below the conscious horizon, or at best as a vague, misconstrued entity, in the same way that swan’s wings are only ever associated with fractured arms. The popular perception seems to be that ships ply the oceans at the behest of omniscient or alcoholic (there is no middle ground) captains, and are manned by superhuman bo’suns, ingenious ship’s boys, deranged cooks, villainous amputees and misanthropic, incomprehensible Glaswegian chief engineers. No second mates. As a shining proof that this is no idle assertion, ask yourself: ‘How many crew does the Love Boat have?’ I think I counted six, and definitely nothing resembling a second mate. In fact, I challenge anyone to tell me the name of a famous second mate in fiction or history... even I can only think of Charles Lightoller and Arthur Hawkins.2
The universal invisibility of second mates, I suggest, is greatly to their credit, because one thing we may be quite clear about is that something is rarely invisible if it is unreliable... the common consciousness never dwells upon the brake that functioned, the parachute that opened or the rhinoceros repellent that worked. By and large, I was comfortable with this anonymity, and contented myself with the smug conceit that, if the world ever did concern itself with second mates, then adjectives such as ‘capable’ and ‘dependable’ would be what it would hear, along with metaphorical links to pillars, rocks, and other images connected with permanence, composure and competence. I found Captain Andy’s accusation hurtful, but only briefly unjustified.
On our port side, between a gently-undulating sheet of silver-spangled azure sea and a sky of flawless sapphire, a hazy olive-grey coastline was hardening and developing detail with every mile the ship advanced. On the starboard bow a long line of cliffs, high and rocky, brightly yellowish-white in the brilliant winter sunlight, rose steadily out of the sea; and beyond them a great, grey hump began to take form on the shimmering horizon. It looked as if the ship was steaming into an enormous closed bay, but a glance at the chart showed that the closest point to port was Cape Tainaron, the cliffs to starboard were the east side of the island of Kythera, and the hump dead ahead none other than the fabled Cape Malea, nemesis of Odysseus. Seatank York was in Greek waters, steaming across the south coast of the Peloponnese, through waters fabled in legend and history from the dawn of memory to the Second World War, and would shortly round Malea to enter the Aegean Sea. And I was becoming more euphoric with every mile, because I was coming home.
* * *
Now, anyone who knows me will cry out at this point that I am spouting complete and utter hogwash. I am a stout (few stouter!) son of the northern English mountains; the issue of a Yorkshire father and a Westmerian mother, weaned on Cumberland sausage and raised on Stilton, beef, Yorkshire pud and Hartley’s bitter from infancy to adultery. I was educated in Shakespeare, Waterloo and cricket at a draughty and venerable pile on a moorland hillside, where blood-sports were played between the inmates and shorts were de rigueur until the Third Form, even in three feet of snow. I have known the words of all five verses of Rule Britannia since the age of ten. If you cut me in half, I would bleed gravy and the words ‘A present from Windermere’ would be found inscribed in my midriff. I am as English as Stratford-upon-Avon, a hundred per cent more English than Winston Churchill and, until October 1984, I would have dealt with anyone who dared to even think otherwise according to the Marquess of Queensbury’s rules. And yet, by the end of February 1985 I was feeling homesick at the sight of a country which, barely half a year previously, I had thought of only as the haunt of dancing waiters, soldiers in ballet-dresses and Anthony Quinn.
What a change a few months can make. It was not even five months previously that three staunchly English chappies... Rex, Malcolm and I... had loaded our somewhat jaundiced preconceptions of Mediterranean mores, means and morals onto an ageing sailing boat called Nissos and sailed out of Alimos Marina for a two-week yacht-charter holiday; fourteen days in which we became Goldsmith’s ‘fools who came to mock and remained to pray.’3 We developed a strangely intense fascination with the country and all fell to some degree under its spell: in my case, the allure was so strong that I had made a last minute decision to stay ‘for a while longer’.
Having formed a very chummy relationship with Spiros Thallasodoros, the agent who had provided our yacht Nissos, I had spent almost a month bringing his boats back to Alimos from all over Greece for the winter; a magical experience, rough on occasion, but deeply satisfying and one which had given me a passing acquaintance with a surprising number of the Greek islands, coasts and waters in so short a time. Then, as the season died completely and Greece succumbed to winter torpor, I had taken up residence on the island of Poros for a few weeks. Here I spent my time in studious pursuits. I familiarised myself with the year’s new wine and the winter cuisine, tried out the results of my two-cassette language course on the tolerant locals, poked around a few of the local antiquities and took the master-class in relaxation which the islands in winter can offer par excellence.
Even in mid-December, when the brightly changeable weather of autumn finally gave way to the duller cloud and rain of winter, my new love affair with the Hellenic lifestyle did not cool and I had little thought of leaving; but beer-vouchers do not grow on trees... not unless you own the trees, at any rate... and when the unwelcome summons back to another world inevitably came just before Christmas, I decided that it ought to be heeded. I went complacently, signing on the Seatank York in Singapore for a six month voyage. Fair enough, I thought... even allowing for the inevitable ‘Sorry, your relief got mauled by a rogue gerbil, could you remain on board another month?’ telex from the Human Remains department, I could still be back in Greece by the end of June with three months off to enjoy the summer. I intended to make a few delivery trips for Spiros, to look for some like-minded female company, and keep an eye out for an affordable small boat of my own on which to spend my leaves.
But, you know, the darned place had got further under my skin than I had realised. As the Seatank York ploughed westwards across the Bay of Bengal with a cargo of Indonesian crude oil for Fos in the south of France I became wistful, and spent the long ocean watches reprising the ports of the Argo-Saronic.
When off-watch, I bored anyone who would listen with tales of the Aegean. As I laid-off the courses from Suez across the Mediterranean I experienced an elevation of my emotions which I unaccountably made no attempt to repress; indeed, I indulged my feelings by edging the parallel rulers as far north as I dared without arousing comment from the Old Man, just to pass that little bit closer to Homer’s islands. I spent long hours perusing the chart catalogue and charts of the Aegean, reading the pilot-books for the area, memorising weather patterns, making lists and planning cruising itineraries. I scrounged any out-of-date Mediterranean charts and pilot-books, and photocopied that which I could not purloin.
Once we passed though Suez and into the Mediterranean, proximity intensified my feelings. I fell into a bizarre humour which I might describe as euphoric melancholia; elated at the mere proximity of Greece barely over our northern horizon, and saddened by its inaccessibility. Then we got to Fos, and towards the end of the discharge Andy came into the control room to announce that our next loading port would be Novorossiysk, on the Black Sea coast of the Soviet Union. We had to pass the length of the Aegean, through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus… the prospect of merely seeing the islands of the Wine-Dark Sea made me feel as if I had won the lottery.
* * *
So thus it was that I came to be accused of simpering like a tart in a rugby club shower as we entered the Aegean on a cloudless, brilliant, almost warm day at the end of February. Although not on watch until midday, I had been around the bridge most of the morning, seeing in my mind’s eye a cavalcade of historic landmarks as they passed by just out of sight to the north.
With nothing in sight but sea and other occasional ships, I greedily eyed the chart as we passed Pylos, the Navarino of antiquity where I knew Admiral Sir Edward Codrington and his fleet had sunk eighty-odd Turkish and Egyptian ships to settle the course of the Greek revolution.4 Just east of Pylos lay the great Venetian renaissance fortresses of Methoni and Koroni. A little further north was Kalamata, scene of the Commonwealth evacuation of Greece during the Second World War, and north of that lay ancient Olympia, where the Games were born.
Next we passed the Mani, fastness of the revolutionary Petrobey Mavromichaelis and, some claim, the home of the Buonapartes. We sailed through the 1941 battleground off Cape Matapan, and in my imagination I saw the hellish blossoms of battleship broadsides flowering out of the inky night, and the shattered hulls of the Italian cruisers plunging to the seabed beneath us.
Shortly after passing Matapan (now called by its Greek name, Tainaron) I took over the watch as we entered the Kythera channel... ancient Sparta now lay just northwards and the lands of those ferocious Lacedaemons reached its southernmost point at the massive, sheer, barren cliffs of Cape Malea, just ahead. This, of course, was the legendary Akra Malea, Cape of Storms, where the Aegean met the Mediterranean and Odysseus took the definitive wrong turn.
Just beyond this celebrated Rubicon, however, waited an enticement even more enthralling than all the history and legend which had inspired me through the morning; for on the east side of Malea lies Monemvasia, a preserved Byzantine walled town clinging to the flank of a towering column of rock known as the Gibraltar of the East. From there northwards I didn’t care a fig for anything Odysseus or anyone else in history might have done, because my own feet had walked those ancient, cobbled alleyways, and my own lungs had collapsed at the top of those cliffs. Monemvasia had been our most southerly port on the cruise of the Nissos. I was now entering familiar territory.
There is deep, deep water off Akra Malea and, in the gaiety of our hearts, the weather being fine and the traffic light, we passed it less than a mile off. With the aid of binoculars we were able to make out a seal gravely watching us as we went massively by, and we were very much taken with a precipitous flight of whitewashed steps which wound half the height of the cliff from a monastery near the summit to a tiny chapel close to the sea.
“Must be the monk’s karzi,”6 offered the highly unromantic Andy. “I’ll bet they don’t eat prunes before going to bed!” (It was no very great surprise to find our bold leader immune to the natural, cultural and historical charms of Greece... he was, and remains, a man of narrow academic interests, acknowledging the superiority of the Complete Oxford English Dictionary over the concise version only because you can see further when standing on top of it.)
As the colossal cape passed astern, the great, square-topped rock of Monemvasia, whose summit I had laboriously ascended a few months before, came into view. I swung the ship to port, the gyro-compass ticking like a cricket as the great, reddish rock slid smoothly around the horizon until it sat broad on our port bow. From that moment, I considered myself upon home ground.
All afternoon I watched the landmarks (which, on the basis of one brief acquaintance, I unhesitatingly dubbed ‘familiar’) pass by, boring anyone foolish enough to come within earshot with my commentary. Monemvasia stood out proudly, its towering cliffs and even the walls of the citadel visible. Gerakas and Kiparissi were mere smudges on the horizon. Leonidhion I could not make out at all, but I knew they were there... and so did anyone else who came within ten yards of me!
We passed between the islands of Falconera and Parapola, which we had seen only distantly from Nissos; but then the imperious, precipitous flanks of familiar Hydra began to come into view close to port ahead, and to the west of it the cone of Trikeri. Behind that I could just make out Spetsae. As I handed over the watch to the chief mate at four in the afternoon, the picturesque and well-remembered lighthouse on Akra Zourva at the east end of Hydra was plainly in view. Beyond Tselevinia I could see Poros.
So near and yet so far... a scant few miles over that short stretch of sea Pan ruled the anarchic Hydra harbour, and Petros served out drinks and sardonic wit in his Poros cafe. A Flying Dolphin hydrofoil carved through the Tselevinia gap on her way to Spetsae, and coming the other way I could clearly see the old day-cruise ship Hermes chugging back to Athens... I instantly recognised her silhouette, knew her name. There were even a couple of sails in sight. Abruptly the proximity of this other world hit me with an almost physical shock; I felt such a pang, such an urgency to be back in these peaceful, pristine surroundings, that all of a sudden the remaining four months of my contract stretched before me like a life-sentence at hard labour. To my consternation, I found myself surreptitiously removing the merest hint of moisture from the corner of a treacherous eye.
I tried to take a nap after my watch but was too enthused to sleep long, and soon found myself back around the bridge just as dark was falling to see the Temple of Sounion. In the fading light I was just able to make out its tall, slender pillars, and then we slid between Makronisi and the western Cycladic island of Kea. The island loomed, black against the indigo of the eastern sky, crowned with a speckle of lights which marked the position of the chora, or central village, high up on the mountain above the harbour. Possibly due to rose-tinted spectacles, possibly due to the lethargic nature of Greek electricity, the lights had an unusually warming amber tone which radiated hospitality. It was one of those images of a lifetime; land coal-face dark either side of us, the sky still orange over Sounion to the west with the mountains starkly silhouetted, the purple dark overwhelming the east, and the cluster of welcoming lights high on the hill. My mind teemed with images of safe returns... Odysseus patting his dog, HMS Centurion creeping into Spithead, Robinson Crusoe rescued, Apollo XIII splashing down... and the desire to continue my exploration of this enchanting sea waxed into a compulsion, almost into an obsession.
* * *
That night we passed through the Cavo Doro strait and up through the Sporades. The next day brought new marvels as we transited the Dardanelles, passing between the almost-modern battlefield of Gallipoli on the port side and the most ancient one of Troy on the starboard.
We crept through the Sea of Marmara, around the Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque and into Istanbul itself. The Haliç, the Topkapi Palace and the Bosphorus Bridge slid past our port bridge wing as we picked our way gingerly though a stampede of ancient, suicidal ferryboats into a strait so narrow that even the sounds and smells of Istanbul reached us distinctly... the ululations of the muezzins, ship’s whistles, the drone and honking of traffic, exhaust fumes, spices, pine resin. A train of heavily laden ships passed us, coming the opposite way. As daylight faded we finally entered the Black Sea, exhausted by a day of professional challenge and sensory overload.
Three days later, as we started loading at a buoy in Novorossiysk under the stern, suspicious eyes of a battalion or so of Soviet officials, I was still preoccupied with the strength of my attachment to a country I hardly knew. I was a little uneasy about it, if the truth be told... I was an Englishman, after all. Objective self-scrutiny... I’ll try anything once... told me that this had to be a passing fondness. There was no diminution in my regard for England. How could I suddenly become so infatuated with a land so utterly, uncompromisingly foreign as Greece? I was hitherto an instinctively patriotic Brit, and I could not quite come to terms with such strength of feeling for another country. The suggestion that my loyalties might be susceptible of division was as unexpected as being hit by a custard pie during a papal audience.
Then there was the question of lifestyles... I had become greatly enamoured of the way that Greeks lived, granted; but my tastes were English to the point of caricature. I loved bitter beer, roast beef, English mustard, field mushrooms, baked York ham. Sausages. Back bacon. Black pudding. Cheddar and Stilton. Cricket. Pubs. I already knew that these things were all completely unobtainable in Greece. How long could I survive without these staples, the basic essentials of civilised life?
As I inconclusively ruminated over these incongruities, Captain Andy marched into the control room, looking rather more official than was his wont. At first I assumed this was due to the presence of two Russian functionaries, uniformed men of nameless purpose who were conscientiously kippering themselves in the smoke of extorted cigarettes at the far end of the cargo office; but drawing up a chair, he ran a hand through his hair and gave me a weary look.
“It looks like I’ve got a bit of bad news, Blatch,” he said; and then, seeing some alarm on my face, he hastily added, “Don’t worry... it’s nothing bad at home, nothing personal. But it looks like they may be selling the ship.”
“Oh ho!” I replied.
This, in the eighties, was a constant threat for British seamen… the British Merchant Navy was imploding, crumbling in the face of cut-price competition, and the number of companies willing to pay adequate salaries to British officers was decreasing every day. The advent of satellite navigation had made our vaunted astro-navigation skills worthless almost overnight; our highly practical training was a long-term asset which showed in the condition of a ship after many years, but the new breed of ship-managers, who were replacing the traditional ship-owners, had little interest in anything beyond the budget at the end of the current working day. British officers were suddenly having to compete for work with people from developing economies, most of whose training was much more cursory, but who could live like kings on a fraction of our salaries.
I took a look around the old control room, with its chipped instrument panel, ancient hydraulic actuators and long defunct draft-gauges; I took in the massive, antiquarian inert gas cabinet, which worked only for those Gnostics who possessed the combination of occult knowledge and the virtuoso fingers of a concert pianist; I gazed at the familiar, scarred linoleum and abused furniture; my eye lingered on the tatty, much-amended pipeline diagram, spattered with cryptic reminders and annotations in mismatched dymo-tape and permanent marker. ‘Take the bloody thing and welcome!’ would have been the immediate response in a happier age, but not in these uncertain times.
The prospect of losing yet another ship… any ship… hit straight to the gut, and most especially for junior officers and ratings. The modus operandi of the new breed of ship-‘managers’ was to retain a ‘top four’ to hold the hands of the new officers; many of the masters, chief mates, chief and second engineers were being retained to lead foreign crews, but no-one wanted to pay a junior officer or seaman a European wage, and in the stampede to reduce costs no-one had the slightest interest in where the next tranche of senior officers was going to come from. This was a particularly bitter pill for me, as I had already sailed as chief mate in another company, but that company had replaced all its European officers and I had been forced to revert to second mate again to get a start with a different outfit. There was a serious chance that this was the scrap-heap for me.
“How long have we got?” I asked. Andy shrugged.
“Not long, by the looks of it. They’ve changed the dis-port. We’re to discharge at...” he frowned at a telex slip, “Ag-ee-os Theo-dorros, in Greece...”
“Áyios Theóthoros.” My correction was quite involuntary and equally unappreciated, because Andy fixed me with a baleful eye and repeated firmly, “No, it says here Ag-ee-os Theo-dorros. And then we have to go to the anchorage at Piraeus for surveys. And we’ve got the new owner’s superintendent coming on board in Istanbul, to travel down with us.”
Piraeus! My heart, moments before on the floor at the news of our impending severance, rebounded joyously and whacked me under the chin. To Andy’s mystification, and to the consternation of the suspicious Soviets, I gave a great bellow of delighted laughter.
* * *
A week or so later I was leaning on the bridge wing in the spring sunshine when Andy came out of the chartroom to join me, a foolscap pad in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. For a moment we stood together, taking in the scene... the sterile rock of Salamis Island to port, the concrete mass of Piraeus and Athens to starboard, and astern of us the fertile slopes and olive-scrub peaks of Aegina. Within this natural amphitheatre bustled the thriving anchorage of Piraeus. Ships of all types and sizes swung to their anchors or churned in and out; tugs, bunker barges, provisions- and crew-boats milled; the edge of the anchorage was a perfect chain of ferries headed for the islands; the VHF radio crackled with staccato exchanges as pilots, agents and service-boats sought their clients. We took it all in somewhat grimly... a mere five years before, a good proportion of the ships and voices in any major port of the world would have been British. Now flags-of-convenience and Asian or east European accents held sway, and I won’t pretend it didn’t hurt. Greeks, who had previously bought up all our old ships, were now the proud incumbents of modern, newly-built vessels whilst we ran the clunkers; and the teeming Piraeus anchorage had all the indicators of a global maritime empire coming into its own as ours sank into the mists of history.
Eventually, Andy broke the silence.
“You’ve seen the telex from Human Remains, I take it?”
I nodded. John, the chief mate, had brought a copy up after lunch. The crewing agency had given the junior officers one month’s pay, exclusive of guaranteed overtime, in lieu of notice, and told us that they would ‘retain us on their files in case of future requirements: however, at the present time...’ Tra la, etcetera.
“I’m sorry. I did what I could, and I reminded them you’ve already done a trip as mate. But you know how it is.”
“Are you staying on?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Aye, just for a while. Me and Chiefy are going to do a month’s handover with the new crowd. Then they’ve offered me a bulk-carrier.” He grimaced. “A ruddy bulkie. Eight months on, four off, paid in US dollars, the ship’s twenty years old and only two Brits on board. I don’t think I’ll bother.”
“Well, good luck with that I.G. panel!” I grinned. He grimaced back, and brandished his writing pad.
“You’ll be going off on Tuesday. I need to know where you want to fly to... Manchester, is it?”
I shook my head. Down our starboard side foamed a Flying Dolphin hydrofoil, a dashing gold and blue cylinder at the tip of an arrowhead of champagne bubbles as it roared past on its way to Aegina, Methana and Poros. I gestured towards it with my coffee mug and told him, “Don’t worry, I’ll take the bus.”
* * *
So that was how I came to be sitting in the restaurant in Piraeus, but the view through the grimy window wasn’t quite so bright as it had been from the anchorage. At breakfast I had been employed on a ship, in very familiar surroundings and hierarchy, with colleagues and countrymen. Now I was a jobless itinerant on land, alone and surrounded by indifferent strangers... and however friendly I had found rural Greeks, I was quickly learning that the urban species can redefine indifference. My couple of attempts to use the Greek I thought I had learned had failed rather abysmally, directions had been harder to extract than dragon tonsils, and I had a strong suspicion I had been swindled at the currency exchange. I suddenly had none of the sense of belonging here that had been so manifest on the ship. It dawned on me that breakfast belonged in another world entirely, and despite my recent euphoria I suddenly had a fluttering in my guts, a touch of nervousness, and a strong sense that I was in a very foreign country indeed. I began for the first time to vacillate about my decision to stay, and to wonder how much a ticket home would cost. Then, just at the nadir of my thoughts, just as I began to succumb to doubt, the waiter sidled up and deposited in front of me a plate containing a mound of chips and two gleaming, turgid, glorious sausages.
The relief of meeting, at this point of crisis, so familiar an old staple, delivered a relief similar to the first swallow of cool beer after a day’s hiking; for here were no effete European sausages, no pale, boiled würstchen or lumpy andouilles, but rather good, honest, gently-curved bangers of recognisable form, hue and magnitude. The skin crackled and yielded under my knife just like an English snag and I bit into a moist, savoury filling. It was like finding air on Mars, like turning over the examination paper and finding that you’ve already answered the first question six times in revision, like the ‘snap’ of the parachute opening. It was a lifeline, a life support system, it was confirmation that I could exist in this environment. With renewed confidence overflowing from my breast, and juice dribbling out of the corner of my mouth, I embraced my destiny.
That sausage was, you might say, a link between worlds.