Dynamic inertia and the rigours of cafe society... what not to do when in Greece for Easter... beware of Greeks bearing gifts... an inviting prospect... a visit to the butcher... the sage counsel of Kyrie Manolis... advice on the spitting of pigs... a helpful hint for persons planning armoured invasions of France... a late surge... porkrastination... entroparty... the littoral truth... the monolithic muleteer.
One of the enduring pleasures of living in Poros is doing absolutely anything at all.
If that seems like a fatuous statement, then go there and try it yourself. It doesn’t matter a jot what you do... you might fancy a hair-cut, or a cup of coffee; you might want a light-bulb, some alka-seltzers, or a bottle of gas for your cooker; you might need to take money from the bank, a letter to the post, or an unsatisfactory partner to the ferry. You always end up having fun. Even if you go out to buy flowers for your mum’s funeral, you’ll probably have a smashing time. The reason for this is the waterfront.
Almost everything you want to buy or need to do in Poros is located on the waterfront, known as the paralia. It is a wide street, with nothing but flowerbeds and lampposts on the open quay side. This open aspect ensures that each and every one of the cafes, restaurants, hotels and shops which line the other side of the road enjoy stunning views over the waters of the bay to the surrounding hills. The architecture of the paralia is a charming mixture of classical and traditional buildings, quite grand in some places, quaint in others and everywhere picturesque. Immediately behind the first row of buildings the land rises steeply to become the massive chunk of rock upon which the houses of the town are built. There is very limited motor access to the high part of the town, and few people bother to walk up and over when they can walk around on the flat, so all life circulates around the paralia.
Whatever you do, you end up passing along this waterfront, which means that you will see everyone and everyone will see you. Even if you have only been there two days, you will be greeted by every waiter and merchant who has served you; and as your acquaintance grows you will be hailed with metronomic regularity. As your familiarity increases you will be stopped at regular intervals for a leisurely greeting, a snippet or twenty of gossip, and then gradually you start to receive invitations... to stop and talk, to take coffee, or to join a party at a kafeneion.
As you become even better known you will be offered sweets or cakes by people celebrating their saint’s name-day. People will stop you with news from your home country, or to ask your opinion of news in Greece; you will be advised of apartments for rent, new businesses, impending weather changes. You may be offered things for sale, ranging from fresh fish through hunting puppies to real estate. I have returned from a walk along the front with invitations to barbeques, parties, weddings, christenings, funerals, football matches... and very, very often I have not returned at all. As for sport... show the merest hint of an interest in soccer or basketball, and your progress around the paralia probably wouldn’t match that of an arthritic snail traversing a glue-spill.
If you are at all sociable, this is a very pleasant atmosphere in which to live. You don’t need to plan a day at all... just invent some nebulous reason for leaving your house or boat and venture forth. The chances of you not being diverted... into conversations, cafes, trips to the beach, lunch appointments... simply do not exist.
For holiday purposes, this state of affairs could hardly be improved upon, of course, but if you are living in the town it can make it a little difficult to achieve objectives. Every time you set out with any sort of goal or deadline, you end up hours late, unsure of what you had originally intended, and so full of caffeine that you keep trying to climb the lampposts.
You may, for instance, go out purposefully early in the morning with every intention of getting some money from the bank and buying some screws to fix the wonky shelf above your bed; you return home pleasantly inebriated at about midnight having been inveigled into four cafes, wandered over to Galatas for an ouzo, gone to the beach, started lunch with four friends at three p.m. and finished it at eight-thirty with eleven, and spent the rest of the evening back in the cafe watching the world go by and setting it to rights. You then roll into bed, muzzily wondering who paid for it all, as you never got within two hundred yards of the bank, and wake up cuddling the shelf which fell on your head in the night. So you get dressed and go out for some screws...
Living in Poros is very pleasant, but as your acquaintance grows... and not only with the locals, for many of the visitors return very regularly... it gets harder and harder to get anything done. People for whom this is a tribulation don’t come back; people who enjoy it stay. This, of course, continually purifies the laid-back demographic of the island, the bloodstock being constantly refined and sieved of purposeful elements. Charlie Darwin could have saved himself all those iguanas and got the job done in a fraction of the time it took him to get to the Galapagos if he had only studied the natural selection extant in Poros cafe society... if, that is, he had ever managed to sober up long enough to have a quick think about it!
* * *
From my earliest days in Poros I recognised the siren song of the waterfront, but I never comprehended its true puissance until the Great Inaugural Pig-Roast. It happened like this...
I handed over Mucky Duck in Samos on Easter Sunday and booked myself a night-time ferry ticket back to Piraeus. This was a great mistake... Easter is the largest event in the Greek calendar both spiritually and socially, and you need to hunker down somewhere and enjoy it.
I had a general awareness of this, but I didn’t think much of it at first; partly because my own attitude to Easter was conditioned by the much more muted British celebrations, and partly because the ‘Big Week’ before Greek Easter is one of mourning and deep religious observance... bells toll, melancholy scriptures are read through the church loud-speakers and sombre, candle-bearing processions wind silently beneath half-masted flags: Many people keep the Lenten fast, some businesses close altogether, and no music is played... to the uninitiated, it doesn’t seem much like the precursor to a fun festival.
As a result of this atmosphere, combined, no doubt, with a sizable portion of self-pity at Clemmie’s departure, I made no effort to participate in the feast but spent Easter Sunday morning working on Mucky Duck. I handed her over to the clients at midday, and then spent the afternoon wandering around Vathi, the main harbour of Samos, waiting for the ferry and trying not to think of Clemmie, who was still just across the straits in Ephesus and tantalisingly close. I found no restaurants or bars open, as everyone was at private parties, and the air was everywhere scented with roasting lamb, roasting goat, and rosemary. I starved and slavered whilst listening to the merry clink and chatter of ubiquitous celebration.
Quite by chance, in the early evening, I was observed by some revellers and dragged in to a garden for a very pleasant hour. I would happily have stayed longer, but it was already late in the day; the party was succumbing to entropy, the ferry was leaving, and all the brief interlude did was to remind me that Greeks are hospitable and that I was a total pillock for managing to be the only person in the country who had contrived to spend Easter alone. On the empty overnight ferry I dozed in a reclining seat where, plotting to even the score, I determined to host a feast of my own as soon as I got back to Poros. I passed the waking hours of the voyage carefully compiling an eclectic guest list.
In the garden at my room by the clock tower were a large barbeque and a traditional stone oven, of which I had the use on request; and although Poros has any number of idyllic locations for al fresco recreation, I decided to hold my party at the house. It was a delightful setting. The space was just right for a group of perhaps twenty people; a rock-and-earth surface rising unevenly from a slate courtyard which offered numerous convenient places to sit, and was about half-covered by a shady pergola made of brightly painted steel pipe. The pergola, garden railings and the house walls were festooned with climbing plants in spring bloom.1 There was also a budding vine over the courtyard; and throughout the garden, wherever there was overhead support, hung dozens of dried gourds painted kaleidoscopic colours in disparate designs. The backdrop to this riot of colour was the view across the straits to Galatas on the one side and along the bay of Poros to the Sleeping Lady on the other. The water of the bay lay almost sapphire under the high afternoon sun, the hills a patchwork of fawn and olive, the sky a milky blue studded with puffs of pristine cloud. This high on the crest of the town a cooling breeze generally blew in the afternoon which, together with the help of the shady pergola, tempered the fierce sunshine of spring afternoons. The scents of flowers and pine came and went as the wind eddied around.
As attractive as the garden was, there was another reason for holding my event there, instead of at a beach or on an island... my landlady’s family had been so generous that I strongly felt it was time for me to reciprocate. Barely a day went by when I wasn’t offered a coffee or an ouzo-mezé in their courtyard, or given a portion of the day’s dessert, and the British instinct is to give in return. I had, however, managed to master the urge so far... for I had learned that Greeks do not esteem a kindness being promptly returned.
True Greek hospitality... and there is still plenty of it around... is freely given, without the expectation of repayment, so to reciprocate is to negate their generosity. For a Briton, raised in the tradition of standing his round, it can be uncomfortable to receive without reciprocation; but I soon found that people became rather stiff if I returned kindnesses promptly. Fortunately for me, Petros witnessed an early faux-pas on my part and explained it to me.
When Greeks do you a favour, either something asked of them or something which they have taken upon themselves because it will benefit you, it is registered and there is a score-card kept. A reciprocal gesture is expected, and appreciated when performed. But when someone does you a kindness unconnected with benefit... such as buying you a drink, giving you a piece of Mum’s delicious kataïfi2 or a pot of this year’s olives... then it is meant as a gift from the goodness of their hearts. To return it is impolite, as it gives the impression that the giver expected something in return, which devalues the gesture. One must learn to accept graciously, and this can be an uncomfortable thing for a Northern European, as the generosity can sometimes be quite significant. Very large rounds of drinks may suddenly materialise ‘from Kyrios Yiorgios’, and on occasion one may even find that one’s entire meal bill has been paid by someone who hardly knows you, but who has had a good day and just wants to share his happy condition.
Once I understood this, I compromised between Greek and British custom by accepting any generosity as graciously as I could, then waiting a decent time before reciprocating liberally, but in as different a manner as possible. It was in line with this policy, mindful of the many small kindnesses I had received from my landlady, that I decided to feast at my apartment. It would provide a charming, comfortable and well-equipped venue at which it would be entirely natural to include Kyria Fotini and her family... it was their garden, after all... and thus I planned to kill two birds with one hangover.
* * *
The day I got back from Samos I began issuing invitations, regardless of the fact that I hadn’t yet planned the event; and as I have already described, even when one has organised conscientiously, the Poros waterfront is a formidable adversary. Engaging it unprepared is simply to cast any hope of self-determination into the teeth of a gale. The first spanner it threw in the works was the utter destruction of my carefully compiled invitation list.
From a perfunctory survey of the garden and courtyard I had a vague notion of how many people it could accommodate in comfort. I also considered how many bodies it would be acceptable to invite into what was, after all, someone else’s house. To Kyria Fotini I suggested that I might ask twelve people, and her family in addition, which might mean a total of twenty if she happened to be on speaking terms with her siblings on the day in question. She gave this judicious consideration and an eventual grave nod, which I took to mean that this, but not much more, was acceptable. So I selected twelve names from my list, a considered mix of locals and foreigners calculated to provide good conversation, added three or four names as first reserves, and set off into the waterfront to find my victims. This, of course, was somewhat before the advent of mobile telephones, which came surprisingly late in Greece.
Finding them took no time at all; they were, naturally, on the paralia, but the problem was, of course, that they weren’t all sitting together. They were sitting with other people, and I am not the sort of chap who can walk into a group of five people and invite just two of them to a party. And since they spent most of the day on the waterfront, it wasn’t much use trying to catch them alone elsewhere.
First of all, I joined groups where my intended guests were sitting and stayed until people went to the lavatory, when I finished my drink hurriedly and followed them to accost them alone; but people seemed to have bladders like buckets that day, and by the time I had managed to have a tête-a-tête with even half of my targets I was hours late, on the outside of about two pints of wine, and probably beginning to acquire a reputation as a stalker with exceedingly indiscriminate tastes.
About half way through the morning I managed to isolate Charlie this way, and as I delivered my invitation just outside the toilet the rather insubstantial door was almost torn from its frame to reveal PeePee, hurriedly re-tensioning her nether garment and squealing delightedly, “Oh! A Partee! Zat vood be vunderfool. Vot shoot I pring?” Okay, then, thirteen.
Next I found Monique sitting on her own in the Blue Ouzerie, so I sent an ouzo down to see how the wine was getting on inside me whilst I invited her. She accepted, and so did Willy and Ilsa whom I had not noticed at a nearby table. Well, thirteen is unlucky anyway.
I slogged on to Petros’ cafe and there, over a free nip of tsipouro,3 I invited my mentor; then I spotted Joe Burke in a corner... I hadn’t realised his boat was back in town, but I couldn’t not invite him. He gleefully accepted... and introduced his niece who was sailing with him.
At the Mouragio restaurant I was pressed to try a glass of retsina whilst Dimitris thanked me very effusively for the invitation and said that his mother also loved a party; then I was inveigled into the adjoining Lagoudera with another glass on the house, which could not be refused as I had been seen to accept next door. Passing George’s Cafe, I invited Gina and Andrea, two girls who worked in one of the bars. They hadn’t been on my initial list, but they looked so gorgeous sitting in the sun that no heterosexual male... not even a sober, respectable one... could possibly have omitted them. In any case I thought I was safe... they were nocturnal animals who generally slept on a beach in the afternoon before working until dawn. I was wrong. The police had closed their bar for a week for making too much noise, so they were not only free but also unemployed and hungry. They were more than happy to accept a free meal, and kindly promised to bring two other girls who had just arrived looking for summer work and would be agreeable to looking attractive in return for a few calories.
The reader will, by this point, have got the picture. By the time the sun crossed the meridian, I had firmly invited about twenty-five people, suspected I had been overheard by many more, and my breakfast was dissolving gaseously in about a gallon of exceedingly miscellaneous intoxicants.
Then I weaved off looking for a butcher.
Up to this point, I hadn’t really made friends with a butcher in Poros. Eating out in Greece was so ridiculously inexpensive that there was no temptation for a bachelor of even modest means to cook. I didn’t want to be alone, to do washing up, or to carry a load of stuff up a steep hill, so my fridge contained only some cheese, olives and salami in case I got the midnight munchies... I don’t believe I even knew how the cooker at the house worked. Even on boats I only cooked if there wasn’t a taverna in sight when my belly started looking for a union official. I didn’t really know where to buy anything, apart from cheese pies, ice and cold drinks. I was choosing my butcher entirely blind... never a smart thing to do.
The meat market in Poros is a sort of arcade between the waterfront and a narrow alleyway behind, and in this alley was a very fine restaurant called Pandelis. Several nautical ne’er-do-wells were taking an early glass of tsipouro and I was inveigled to join them and add a tincture or two of this fire-water to my as yet lunchless tripes.
I eventually swayed into the meat market as they began to close up for mesimeri... the afternoon break, or siesta. One of the singular and enchanting features of this market is the rather ingenious use of a ceiling-fan to keep flies off the meat... a sloped display table is sited below the fan, to the blades of which are attached frayed rope’s ends which almost reach the produce below. The fan runs at low speed, whisking the frayed ends just above the meat and effectively deterring the flies. In that simplicity of mind which tends to accompany a whole morning of drinking mixed wines and spirits, I swayed and communed with the fly whisk for a quiet, contemplative moment or two; and then I went completely mad.
In the glass refrigerated case was a pig’s head, regarding me critically through half closed eyes, and it gave my befuddled thinking-muscle an idea. I had always wanted to spit-roast a pig, and it occurred to me that Kyria Fotini’s barbeque was equipped with a business-like looking souvla, or spit; so, on the spur of the moment, I decided to give it a go... without, of course, the least idea how to go about the business, nor a moment’s consideration of how silly I would look if I got it wrong in front of a crowd of people. Without any consideration of how this was to be achieved, I engaged with the butcher and stated my intention. And, on an island as gregarious as Poros, every action is a public one and there’s no honourable way of going back from that point.
My butcher listened gravely to my expectations of twenty-five people, and advised that I needed a piglet of about twelve kilos. I had just enough wit still about me to check how long that would take to cook... three to four hours, I was told... and I put in my order. The pig would be ready for collection the next morning from seven thirty onwards.
Collecting the impoverished and hungry Gina and Andrea for company, I made a half-hearted effort to sober myself up with a steak lunch away from the infernal waterfront; but the owner of the butcher’s taverna up in the town was grateful for a recent party of tourists I had sent his way and insisted on giving me a free kilo of retsina, so that didn’t work. It did, though, help me persuade the girls to take care of preparing the salads for the following day.
Whilst waiting for the shops to re-open I tried a couple of strong coffees in a cafe, but if I did in fact sober up at last, it wasn’t the caffeine that did the trick; it was the sudden realisation that half the waterfront was by now aware that I was roasting a pig in my garden the next day. An astounding number of people managed to find themselves in front of me, some openly hopeful, some (predominantly those I had met earlier in the day and not invited) mildly reproachful. By the time I had engaged Apostolis from the Kava4 to deliver wine and beer, asked Petros to send up some ice, and bought a bin-bag full of paper plates and plastic cutlery, I was vaguely aware that I had weakly admitted another imprecise number of people to the guest list.
* * *
The day of Piggy’s passion dawned bright and clear, and I legged it down to the butchers in optimistic mood, a spring in my heels and rosy with anticipation. True it was, I had a nagging concern about what Kyria Fotini would say when a battalion of hunger pig-chompers swarmed into her garden, but there was no longer anything I could do about that; so apart from hoping mildly for an outbreak of a debilitating pork allergy, I ignored it. The butcher had been true to his word, and there was Piggy, in all his glory in the glass case. As I took delivery a moustachioed, bespectacled Groucho Marx look-alike, whom I recognised as the chef from one of the beach tavernas, was attempting to conceal a half-dismantled scooter under a heap of pork chops.
“About three to four hours to cook, you say?” I asked the butcher; but with the deal done and the cash in his pocket, his answer had none of the assurance of the previous day. He shrugged, then waved his hand at Groucho and said, “Kyrie Manolis cook pig. Many pig he cook. You ask him.”
I raised my eyebrows towards the bristling moustache, which switched rapidly left and right a time or two. Then he fixed me with intense black eyes, and lifted one finger of his left hand and two fingers of his right.
“Two kilos, 1 hour,” he said, “No less. Two kilos, one hour”
“Eh?”
As the implications of this hit me, Groucho marched round to the back of the cabinet, opened it, and hefted the piglet.
“Dhódheka kilá! Twelve!” he announced. “Six, seven hour.”
“Seven hours!!!” I cried in anguish... I had invited everyone for drinks at midday and food at about two o’clock. I didn’t even have the fire hot yet.
“Not less!” admonished the moustache. “Maybe more, not less. Anybody he say something another, no you listen nothing. Two kilos, 1 hour. Káli órexi!”
He straddled the only remaining visible part of his scooter and, trailing several dogs and a music-hall raspberry, he wobbled off along the waterfront. I screamed for Shergar, and moments later we were legging it up the hill to my house, piggy slung between us, looking like Burke and Hare doing a quickie.
Putting out fires in Greece is often exceedingly difficult, but starting them rarely presents a problem. A handful of last year’s dry vine-twigs, a match and we were away. Any Greek garden will yield some kindling... there is always a bit of collapsed pergola, an old window-shutter, a failed attempt at a plate rack, or a moribund chair somewhere. The flames were soon thrusting keenly up through the charcoal, and Shergar and I set about spitting our pig. Simplest thing in the world, you would think. Big spike, insert in bottom, vigorous thrust, job done. Not so. It is a grim business, involving repeated efforts, indignities that Egyptian mummy embalmers would have quailed at, and, in extremis, resort to the non-too-delicate application of a hefty hammer. By the time the guest of honour was installed another forty-five precious minutes had fled into the cerulean sky.
It was by now almost ten o’clock, and a disaster confronted us. The garden was not prepared, the fire still not hot enough for cooking, we had as yet no ice, no salads, no cutlery or crockery, and no help. You can’t face debacles of this magnitude sober, so we popped the first beer-cans, toasted ineptitude, and cracked up laughing.
Gina and Andrea arrived at about eleven to find Shergar and I, already in a very rosy frame of mind, poking and peering experimentally at the pig. We had it low down over the coals with some vague notion of making the skin crisp before cooking the meat at a higher level.5 Being men, of course, we wouldn’t have read how to do the job before attempting it, even if we had known where to find the instructions; and the girls were unable to help, as it appeared that they had been playing truant the day their domestic science class addressed the dos and don’ts of ramming an eight-foot spike up a pigs bum and bunging it on a bonfire. Nonetheless, appropriate things seemed to be happening... the first, fleeting savoury wafts began to taint the air, and the skin was starting to whiten and blister in a way that brought crackling to mind. Our innate optimism, assisted by some liquid accelerant, allowed us to believe that we had the job nicely under control. We adopted a policy of turning Piggy about sixty degrees every five minutes or so, and started arranging tables and chairs.
Apostolis arrived with the drinks, and we were trying to get them all into the kitchen fridge, when Joe Burke’s brogue outside bellowed “Mary, Mother of Jesus! What’re ye doing to that poor pig?”
I trotted outside to find a roaring inferno entirely engulfing our lunch. Shergar and I galloped up to the flames, seized an end of the spit each, plucked the beast out, then dropped it as the metal seared our hands. As we plunged our own roasted flesh into the yard-bucket, Gina and Joe gallantly put out the fires on the pig’s skin with a towel. Then we all stood looking at the smouldering, blackened remains whilst the barbeque, which so recently had been a respectable, well-behaved bed of hot, grey coals, raged like a rocket-engine.
We soon worked out what the problem was. The skin of the pig had been starting to weep some fat, which made the fire smoke and flare a little, although not enough to be a problem; but just before we had gone inside, we had turned the spit belly-down... anxious to appear as if I knew what I was doing, I recalled having made some completely fabricated but plausible remark about ‘getting some heat into his hams’... and obviously the fats which had been created inside his belly cavity, captive when he was on his back, had run into the fire with a rush when he was turned; and there they had ignited.
A plan ‘B’ was obviously required. Experimenting feverishly, we sprinkled water on the fire just sufficiently to quench the flames and then raked the coals to each side of the barbeque, leaving a bare space immediately below the spit. The girls washed the worst of the soot off Piggy, as nonchalantly as if self-immolating porkers were ten-a-penny in their native Lancashire.* Then we put the sorry-looking pig back on his pyre, and stationed a fire-watchman with a water-bottle.
It was plain by now that we didn’t have a hope in hell of serving lunch much before dinner time, so I sent Shergar down to town to buy some sausages to keep people going. We also didn’t have enough room in the fridge for all the drinks, so Gina was sent to her bar to try to borrow an ice-box. Also, the girl’s efforts at a salad... potato salad in one bowl, coleslaw in another... were quite charmingly presented, but probably only enough for a dozen people at most, so Andrea was despatched with Joe’s niece Morna to buy veggies to make a big horiatiki salad. Joe and I remained to battle the flames, which still periodically flared when fat pooled under the spit and threatened to turn a culinary event into an auto-da-fe.
By one o’clock, despite the constant battle with the flames, the guest of honour was starting to brown nicely and a very appetizing smell was eddying around the garden. A second, small, portable barbeque had been started and sausages were beginning to sizzle.
Cold beer and wine was now in abundance. Unable to find her boss, Gina had used her initiative and bought a plastic dustbin... plastic-ware in Greece was ludicrously cheap... and the bottom half was now our ice-box. We filled it with ice which Petros had sent up with the garbage mules, mules which were now contentedly consuming the neighbour’s window-boxes and turning the street outside into a midden whilst the muleteer seated himself by the barbeque. Helping himself to a glass of ouzo, he contentedly set about telling us what we were doing wrong, and looked about as likely to move as the Western Front in 1917.
The lid of the dustbin also came in handy... propped upside-down on three bricks, it became a man-sized salad-bowl, full of the traditional horiatiki salad... olives, sweet little reddish onions, tomatoes, cucumbers and feta, all drenched with olive oil and vinegar. Kyria Fotini now made an appearance and inspected the salad critically. She sniffed in a non-committal manner and brought some capers to add to the mix, which instantly turned a competent salad into a speciality.
We were ready. The beer was cold, the first tranche of sausages were hot. The salad glistened, packets of picnic utensils gaped, and the gentle strains of Dhirlada and Frangosyriani oozed out of my old cassette-player. Over the rebellious fire the pig glistened, spat and steamed. Charlie arrived, florid from his climb, but no-one else apart from him. My wishes for a pork allergy appeared to have been granted; people stayed away in their thousands.
So, there we sat: Joe and Morna, Charlie, Shergar, Gina, Andrea, the garbage muleteer and I, making small talk and contemplating having to eat a twelve kilo pig and a dustbin lid-full of salad. As one o’clock faded and two o’clock loomed, I grimly distracted my thoughts by addressing myself to the problem of the flaring of the fire, and came up with a solution... I borrowed two narrow baking-tins from Kyria Fotini, and placed them below the spit. Now all the fat was collected in the tins, preventing the fire from flaring, and we could also use it to baste the beast. I was quickly finding out that the skin wasn’t as crisp as I had expected, but it looked pretty scrumptious all the same. Not that anyone would ever know, I thought in a resigned way.
The muleteer watched my efforts with mild approval, and seemed to be turning over a matter of some weight in his mind. Eventually, he approached the spit and gestured to me to take the pig off the fire. He used a large clasp-knife to quarter some lemons and oranges, which he plucked without so much as a by-your-leave from trees in the neighbouring gardens, and then did the same with three onions left over from the salad. All of these he ladled into the stomach cavity of the pig. Then he twisted a piece of rusty wire out of the fencing, used it to deftly close up the belly, and gestured for us to put it back over the fire.
I instantly understood that this was a wonderful tip... the fruit, of course, would steam as the heat increased and the juices would be infused into the meat. The muleteer nodded gravely at my thanks, refilled his glass, and returned to his seat. It was quite evident that his secretary had cancelled his appointments for the rest of the afternoon.
Charlie too settled in very readily. He quenched the inner fires ignited by labouring up the hill with a couple of rapid-fire beers, and then settled down with a mug full of wine to tell us a story. I was ready enough to listen to anything at all, to distract me from the apparent snub which my absent guests were delivering, but as it happened it was a wonderful tale and remains one of my favourites.
* * *
Charlie sailed an old Westerly centre-cockpit boat called Aquafrolic and was a rotund, jolly, mischievous chap with twinkling blue eyes, a bald patch like a monk’s tonsure, and a carbuncular nose that looked like one of those animal shapes made out of twisted balloons. I knew that he was retired, that he was a widower, and that he lived year-round on his boat, roaming the Eastern Mediterranean from Cyprus to Italy. Other than that, I really only knew that he was immensely likeable and a walking databank of entertaining stories which he told in a lazy, liquid, warming Devonshire burr.
I had always had a feeling that Charlie was an ex-serviceman... he had never said as much, but he had a Royal British Legion sticker on his boat, and on the rare occasions when I saw him actually doing something he was decisive and authoritative in a way which had ‘N.C.O.’ stamped all over it. It now turned out that I had been right, for he confided that, during World War Two, he had served in a tank regiment in the desert campaign. By the time of the D-Day invasion, Charlie had been a sergeant in charge of a Sherman tank.
Charlie’s squadron, it appeared, had been selected to land in the very first wave of landings on D-Day. Their unenviable task was to follow mine-clearing tanks across the beach, flatten the wire for the infantry, and then get off the beach and attack the defenders from behind: But, as Charlie graphically described, no-one had the least expectation of getting as far as the road. They all expected to be knocked out on the beach, and the cynical opinion of the crews was that the planners knew that perfectly well, and really intended to use the disabled tanks as shelter for the foot soldiers.
“Soo, y’see,” Charlie said, “...We never bo-othered much with reme-emberin’ all the stuff we wuz surppozed to do after we got off that ole’ beach. It worn’t gon’ t’appen. We just pra-acticed gettin’ out o’ that ole’ tank as quick as possible, an’ troid to thi-ink about other thi-ings.”
One of the other things they thought about was driving through a house.
Apparently, all of the crews had rather a thing about driving through houses. It looked very good on the films, but in the desert they hadn’t had the chance... houses tended to be scarce. Also, their tanks were earlier models, too light and underpowered. They might have got stuck, and, as Charlie somewhat superfluously pointed out, getting stuck half way out of a house with a ton of masonry on top of your gun in the middle of a battle was not a situation people relished being in. He added that a few of the lads had found a tent to flatten, but it wasn’t the same.
In training for D-Day back in England, of course, driving through houses was frowned upon. A few of the more adventurous souls had flattened a hen-coop or an old sheep-pen, but the deep and enduring satisfaction of going right through Number Seven, Magnolia Gardens, emerging in a shower of bricks from the other side with curtains across the turret and Granny in her bath on the engine-cover, eluded them. No such restrictions were expected to apply in France, however, and the Sherman, a very much heavier and more powerful tank than their desert equipment, was clearly just what a chap needed for indulging in the ultimate gate-crashing. To divert their minds from what was likely to happen to them on the beaches, the crews talked long and hard about how to drive through a house, what would happen when they did, and took bets on who would be the first to do it.
Along came the great day and, to his utter amazement, Charlie’s tank churned across a Normandy beach with no worse harm than a few annoyingly loud noises as things bounced off the outside. In tip-top form the tank crested the dune, skidded sideways from behind a mine-clearing tank and roared away up a tarmac road. Then, just as Charlie was desperately trying to find out where he was and recall where he was supposed to go, he found slap in front of his snarling steel steed a smallish house with a machine-gun blazing out of a window.
“Oi’m ha-avin’ that!” roared Charlie and, slamming his hatch closed over his head, he directed his driver to drive straight through the building.
He described how the garden wall went down, the frantic patter of bullets on the outside of the tank, the exhilaration and adrenaline rush as the house came closer and closer until the roof could no longer be seen through the narrow viewing slits. As they crossed the garden, Charlie fired the main gun into the building and swung the turret backwards, to protect the barrel; then, at full throttle, they crashed into the brick wall.
Charlie paused at this point in his story, looked thoughtful for a minute, and took a deep, reflective draught of his wine. Then he looked directly at me.
“’Ave you ever driven though a ’ouse in a ta-ank?” He enquired brightly.
“Not recently,” I admitted.
“We-ell, son, whe-en you do,” he said, and shook his head with a look of weary martyrdom, “When you do, try an’ pick one without a bloody cellar!”
* * *
The clock tower struck four and the clock itself said six-thirty, by which I knew that it was a quarter to three,7 and at that instant, a chattering started and gradually grew louder. Moments later, it seemed to me, half the village arrived.
Expanding from the chicane of the gateway like the opening of a peacock’s tail, they filled the garden with noise and colour in what seemed like a matter of seconds. From a solemn gathering of self-conscious people spreading themselves expansively in an attempt to make the garden look busy, the party was abruptly transformed into a roil of jostling, bubbling humanity questing for a place to sit or even stand. I greeted as many as I could, all the time religiously avoiding the incredulous eyes of Kyria Fotini which I could feel lasering the crowd from the relative safety of an upstairs window.
It was amusing to watch how the crowd sorted themselves out. The Greek women took no prisoners, single-mindedly appropriating all the chairs and moving them into the shadiest areas of the garden. That done, they assured themselves of a supply of drinking water, subjected the salads to a judicious inspection, and resumed their avid daily examination of village affairs. The Greek men congregated around the fire, lit cigarettes, and proceeded to offer advice and criticism of my cooking.
The Europeans8 made a fairly orderly circuit, formally greeting people with whom they must have just walked up the hill, and all of them took the earliest possible opportunity to make the acquaintance of Piggy, intrigued no doubt to find out what atrocities the much maligned English cuisine was in the process of committing. It seemed that, on balance, they just approved. Men pursed their lips and nodded sagely, women shrugged and tilted their heads in vague acknowledgement. Then they made for the bar, and of course found the Brits and Paddies already in residence.
I never at any time found out how many people were there, but I doubt if even the excessive number I had invited accounted for more than a third of them. Piggy wasn’t looking quite so plentiful now, with this herd of amiable carnivores drooling over his obsequies, and when I saw the speed at which the sausages were vanishing I sent the girls back down the hill for some more grub. Even the dustbin lid was starting to show through the salad at an alarming rate.
The retsina was going down very well, too. I had early on found that the retsina from the adjacent island of Aegina was a wonderful, heavy, oily wine of gravity with a smooth, resin tang. Many retsinas, especially the bottled ones, were rather too tart, but the Aegina farmers had the true secret. They didn’t grow the grapes, but they imported the must and completed it themselves, and the farmer’s market on the Aegina waterfront was where they sold it. Charlie had been happy to bring down a few ‘gallonia’ for the party, and I was relieved to note that the locals obviously approved.
I circulated for a while, and to begin with I beat my breast and said my mea-culpa’s for the lateness of the feast; but the answer I received was always the same... an unconcerned shrug, and ‘Oh, everyone in the cafe knew you were a bit late. That’s why we didn’t come earlier.’
The roast was starting to concern me. By the time the crowd arrived, the pig had been cooking for over four hours; the animal had shrunk somewhat and was loosening up on the souvla. A succession of men were turning the handle slowly but constantly now, and with each rotation the backbone was starting to come away from the spit and then fall back again. It didn’t take an expert to see that this could end in disaster, for if the back broke the best of the pig might fall into the fire. Almost every one of the Greek men present sought a private interview with me, at which they kindly drew my attention to this. As five hours passed and six approached, and as the bar stocks declined, advice turned to warnings; then to pleas.
“Time to take it off!” they advised, and “It’s ready now”... “You’ll dry it out”... “It’ll fall to pieces!”
As steadfastly as I could, I ignored them. In my heart I thought the meat was done too, but the persuasive mantra of Kyrios Manolis had me in thrall: “Anybody he say something another, no you listen nothing. Two kilos, 1 hour. No less. Maybe more.”
In my time, I have conned some of the world’s largest ships in some of its busiest and narrowest waterways. I have been shot at a time or two. I have tackled fires at sea, and had occasion to tell a Prime Minister to sit down and shut up. I have, to cap it all, thrice faced those immutable, dispassionate, disdainful dispensers of judgement, the Department of Transport Examiners of Masters and Mates. The degree of tension I experienced on any of those occasions was as nothing compared to the anxiety I now felt, isolated in opinion from everyone else at the party still sober enough to make an informed judgement, and quite a few others besides. The opportunity to look exceedingly silly here gaped like a shark at a shipwreck.
For the last hour of cooking, the tension knotted my guts in the manner of a model aeroplane’s rubber band and my heart leapt into my mouth every time the backbone of the pig moved. Fissures opened in the skin, and anyone could see how tender and loose the meat was becoming. I took over turning the spit myself, in an attempt to be sure that it was turned as gently as possible, but this was a terrible mistake, for every time the pig moved on the spit I could now physically feel it, and each gentle jolt wound my inner spring a notch tighter.
As I refused steadfastly to do anything, the pleas to take the pig off became demands, and then to something close to anger. Hands were raised to the heavens, Greek pejoratives took to the air like a rookery disturbed by a gunshot, eyes rolled. And then, as we passed the sixth hour, the mood changed entirely. Everyone gave up, and sank back in defeat. It was reminiscent of that moment in the submarine films when the boat passes crush depth, and the crew stop turning valves, fall silent, and accept their fate.
“I told him!” ran the litany now.
“It’s ruined!”
“Ti na kaanoume?... what can we do?”
“Foreigners! They don’t know.”
“Well, I told him!”
“You did! I heard you! I told him too. Yiannis told him!”
“Ah, well, at least the sausages were good.”
Hopelessly they refilled their glasses and lit cigarettes, glanced sadly back at the spit from time to time and generally assumed the air of mourners outside a church waiting for a funeral to begin.
Seven hours. By this time, Piggy was almost bent double and lolloping around on his spit in the manner of a burst tyre on a speeding lorry. Turning him on his back, I used a long, thin knife to probe into the ham. Every fibre in my being yearned for the juice to be clear, but there was still a trace of red. Stoically, I returned to cooking. Equally stoically, the audience extinguished any final embers of hope in their breasts and forced themselves to speak gaily of other things.
Seven and a half hours. The juice was clear. With extreme caution, Joe and I lifted the spit from the fire and placed it on the table. Holding my breath, I carefully carved a piece of shoulder, and sudden hope kindled in me. My heart began to glow as I felt how easily the knife went through the meat, saw the juice bubbling up below the surface.
I made a bit of a ceremony about presenting the first cut to Kyria Fotini, who certainly deserved no less recognition for putting up with the annexation of her garden by a barbarian horde. The party fell silent as she speared an unctuous gobbet with her fork. She closed her eyes as she popped it into her mouth. A moment later they sprang open again, and a look of wonder passed across her face.
“Loukoumi!” she cried, “Loukoumi iné!”
Was that good or bad?
Good, it seemed... the Greek women present surged forward, brandishing paper plates, and as fast as I put meat on the serving-plate it vanished. When a piece of skin hit the porcelain, it was frequently pinned immobile for an instant by two or three forks, and then rent asunder. By the time I had stripped and served all the easy meat, a good few people were already ambling innocently back to the table casting sidelong, hopeful and enquiring looks at the carcass. They cast in vain. Piggy was sped.
Loukoumi, it turns out, is the word for Turkish Delight,9 and is a term used to describe something soft, sweet and juicy; I could hardly have wished a finer accolade. My heart soared to see the fruit of my labours so keenly devoured, but my back felt as if it had been broken with a sledge-hammer... I supposed this to have been the result of a day on my feet, combined with the posture I had used whilst carving, but muscular tension caused by stress was probably also a significant factor. I shamelessly stole Gina’s chair as she went for another drink, and compounded this un-gentlemanly behaviour by instructing her to get me one too. Then I sat with a pint mug of icy retsina in my paw, tension draining out of my feet. I felt like the amateur who has just landed the airliner after both of the pilots had the Chicken Tartare for dinner.
As I sat there limply, people congratulated me on the way Piggy had turned out. Several of the Greeks said, “Poli orea! Ver’ nice, Tzoulian!”
I got a little of my energy back and expostulated keenly, “Sas ipa! I told you... two kilos, one hour; maybe more, not less. And if I had listened to you, we would have taken it off two hours ago, and it would have been raw!”
Entirely unabashed, they looked at each other in an enquiring manner for a moment, several of them shrugging and others tossing their heads and making the little tutting noise as Greeks do in negation. Petros roared with laughter.
“Nobody here ever cooked a pig before!” he crowed.
But then, when did a little thing like complete ignorance ever stop a Greek from giving advice?
* * *
The sun was declining, the temperature was dropping, and the pig was a memory. The remains, picked so clean that they looked as pristine as a skeleton in a medical school, had finally been tossed over the wall to a couple of street-dogs. The muleteer and Petro had appropriated the head and skilfully stripped that before questing after the brains with the assistance of a log-axe. I had eaten very little pork for myself, contriving to secure only a piece of leg by way of tasting whilst carving. There hadn’t even been an un-gnawed bone to regale myself on after my labours at the carving-table... that would annoy me on the morrow, but for now I was basking with contentment at the success of the day.
A few people had drifted away to sleep it off, but many remained, and some more people even arrived. Two of them were policemen, who came to investigate reports of a disturbance during mesimeri, or siesta time; however, they had evidently completed their own afternoon nap before investigating. Arriving, therefore, after the end of the official siesta, they naturally found no crime in progress, so there was no legal or moral reason they could not stay for a drink.
Similarly, three firemen wandered in claiming that some concerned citizen had reported smoke. Since I recognised one of them as the owner of a house just down the lane, it didn’t take much of an intellect to work out who the concerned citizen had been.
Another late arrival was Big Savvas, a colleague of our eternal and stalwart muleteer; tall, rangy, dark and moustachioed, he was possibly the most Greek-looking Greek I ever saw; and he was one of the best Greek dancers too.
Morna and Ilse were in the lane feeding the remains of the salad to the donkeys whilst their inexhaustible owner continued disposing of wine by the embers of the fire. Every now and then one of the Greeks... generally Big Savvas... would start dancing, and we would all clap in time. Chatter filled the evening. The police and fire service vied for the attention of the girls. I sat, so relaxed in my chair that I moulded myself to it like a chocolate on a radiator, and chatted quietly with Joe and Charlie. Sunset turned the west to cerise, then to ice-flecked indigo.
The ebb-tide started when the policemen took their leave. Their example was catching, and the party began to die. The garden emptied quite rapidly, people calling out to each other to pass their adieus or making new assignations to reconvene in the waterfront cafes. They swirled around the garden gate before disappearing, rather like the last of the bath-water gurgling down the plug-hole, and as they ebbed the magnitude of the morrow’s clean-up hit solidly home.
Almost the last to leave were Joe, Morna and Charlie, who made their farewells, collided in the gateway, and then linked their arms for support. They weaved down the lane, kept upright by judicious contact with the walls, singing an Irish goodnight song.
Kyria Fotini and her husband went tipsily to bed, climbing unsteadily but uncomplainingly over the slumbering Shergar on their steps, with no evident ill-will at the carnage I had wrought in their garden. I headed for my bed, only to find that it had been appropriated by Gina and Andrea. I fashioned a makeshift couch from a blanket, a repaired sail and some waterproofs in the lower part of the room and lay down on that.
In the moment or two before slumber overran my senses, it dawned upon me that this hadn’t been my party at all... I had been merely the hapless mouse running on the laboratory treadmill; the commanding force, from start to finish, had been the whimsical Poros waterfront. Like some Olympian God meddling in the affairs of man to pass an idle hour, it had completely ignored my own intentions and wishes to create a party entirely to its own satisfaction. It had dictated the guest list, the menu, and the schedule. By constantly informing the guests of my progress... or lack of it... it had prevented people arriving early. When I needed extra supplies, it had provided them. When I needed people, it had made it easy to find it. When it was time for people to leave, it lured them away again. All I had to do was add money. Indeed, when I reflected on the deft and thoughtful manner in which the waterfront had managed things, I concluded that I could hardly have done better myself.
Smiling at that last thought, I made myself as comfortable as possible on the impromptu bed and closed my eyes. The last thing I heard was the cough of a donkey, the clink of a bottle on a glass, and the gentle crooning of the muleteer as he watched the last of the embers.