Escape to Ikaria Read online

  It was impossible to eat all that Stamati placed before us. A huge moussaka, a bottle of Samos wine, and kataifi, which looked like shredded wheat, the sweetest dessert that had ever passed my lips.

  As we ate, the remains of an orange sun lit the fishing boats within the harbour walls. Lights suspended through the sycamore trees came on in the square. A church bell rang out and, as if summoned, people came from their houses in groups, some with smartly dressed children; others arrived on mopeds, to mingle with their friends. This social gathering is what happens on summer evenings in the Mediterranean and obviously continues in the winter.

  After I’d paid Stamati sixty drachma, he sat down with us.

  ‘Now what brings an English family with such young children to Ikaria on a cold February night?’

  ‘I don’t know. We got on the first boat leaving Piraeus.’

  ‘And how long will you stay with us?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe many months, could be longer than that.’

  I could tell by the astonishment on Stamati’s face that he found this hard to believe. ‘Where will you sleep tonight?’

  ‘Do you know where we can find some rooms?’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe a few days.’

  ‘I have a house here in Aghios Kirikos. It’s small, but you’re welcome to stay there.’

  So ended four days on coach and boat: in Stamati’s little whitewashed house, with its blue-painted windows overlooking the Aegean Sea where I stood and stared, while Ros and the children slept in two iron beds.

  It was a good time to reassure myself that we had done the right thing, although getting here had been clumsy and uncomfortable. I suddenly allowed myself to feel exhausted. I didn’t bother to get undressed, just fell into bed, all of us squeezed in next to each other. I wished I could have drifted off listening to some music. I had a portable cassette player in the suitcase; I’d find it tomorrow.

  2

  Finding Lefkada

  The next day we had our first look around Aghios Kirikos. Despite the thin mattress and broken springs, we had all slept heavily, waking up much later than usual; a cold wind blowing in from the sea did little to revive us. Most of the shops were padlocked, no doubt closed until the summer came. Only the kiosk on the seafront, selling cigarettes and newspapers, was doing any business. In the cobbled back streets and alleyways there were a couple of greengrocers and a butcher, and the smell of newly baked bread coming from a bakery. We stood outside a dress shop with its stripped mannequins, Sam certain he could see their goose pimples.

  But Stamati was always open and happy to cook us a meal, so we went to his restaurant for a late lunch. I looked at my family, thinking, what have I done, dragging them out here on a whim, uprooting their whole lives? I’d had this feeling before, coming over me like a black wave after we’d bought the farm in Wales, not knowing what I had let us all in for.

  ‘Mum, have you noticed what’s not here, but you would find in Penygroes?’ asked Lysta, observant as ever about her surroundings.

  ‘Let Sam guess,’ said Ros.

  ‘A fish and chip shop?’ he suggested.

  ‘Yes, you’re right. Maybe they don’t eat fish and chips here,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not what I was thinking,’ said Lysta. ‘There are no traffic lights. And no zebra crossings either.’

  This game continued as we looked across the harbour, which was crowded with little fishing boats. A donkey passed carrying a woman and child, the mother whipping the animal’s backside with a stick.

  ‘They must be late for school,’ said Lysta. ‘That poor donkey. He can’t go any faster.’

  ‘Dad, can I ask you something that I think is quite interesting?’ said Sam.

  ‘Fire away. What is it?’

  ‘If we had donkeys in Wales would they have to stop at red lights?’

  ‘I’ll have to check the Highway Code, but they probably would.’

  After a slow lunch of minestrone soup and fresh bread straight from the local bakery, the children enjoyed what was now their favourite, vanilla paste in a glass of water. Then Lysta had another bout of homesickness. Stamati brought her a piece of paper and she wrote her second letter home, not to her friend Eleri this time, but to her grandmother Dinah.

  ‘What have you said to Granny?’ I asked.

  ‘Most of it’s a secret so I can’t tell you.’

  ‘What part can you tell me?’

  ‘That I don’t know why we’re here.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sam. ‘Why have we come all the way here, and it’s not even warm and sunny?’

  ‘Because we are on an adventure. You wait and see, lots of exciting things are going to happen,’ I said. ‘Aren’t they, Ros?’

  ‘Of course. We’ll move into a lovely house and you’ll make lots of new friends.’

  ‘And get a television?’ Lysta demanded.

  ‘Yes, and watch Tiswas on Saturdays like we did at home,’ agreed Sam.

  ‘We’ve only been here a day. Give us a chance,’ said Ros.

  I told them that after lunch everyone on the island had a siesta. ‘It’s an old custom. Children are not allowed to talk for an hour.’

  ‘It’s impossible not to talk for an hour if you’re awake,’ said Sam, certain he was correct.

  ‘Why don’t you try it this afternoon? I’ll give you twenty pence each if you manage it.’ Attempting bribery was something I often did.

  ‘But we can’t spend English money here,’ said Sam.

  ‘Well, I’ll give you twenty drachma.’

  Ros thought they would never let us have an hour’s sleep, but they did, and we all slept, and when we woke again the sun had already gone down behind the mountains. In the twilight we walked a little way out of town and gazed at the sea. We were still acclimatising, not feeling sociable, ending up in Stamati’s for a third time. He must have loved us; as far as I could tell we were his only customers wanting food. The others were just drinking coffee or ouzo.

  Yet all he wanted to do was ask about our life in North Wales. He hadn’t bothered to take our order before he sat down with us.

  ‘I want to tell my mother all about where you come from. She loves to hear about faraway places; she has never left Ikaria.’

  ‘Well, where do I begin?’ I said. ‘There are so many stories.’ Before I could get another word out, Sam and Lysta took over, telling Stamati that I spent most of my time chasing pigs and looking for sheep that had strayed.

  ‘Yes, and once Dad had to catch a pig that had run into a shop in Caernarfon.’ It was one of the many incidents that they loved to talk about.

  All the while Stamati sat as if engrossed, but I doubted he understood everything he was hearing. It made us sound like a family living from one mishap to the next.

  ‘We’re not usually like this,’ I said. ‘In fact, we’re very sensible and well balanced.’

  ‘You were a farmer. Yes, I can see that, with your broad shoulders.’ Which he sank his fingers into, causing Ros to raise her eyebrows and give me a wry smile.

  In the evening the people sitting under the sycamore trees in the main square seemed bemused by our presence, giving us quizzical looks which gave way to warm smiles for the children. A huddle of grandmothers, all wearing head scarves, beckoned to us. We weren’t used to all this attention, but it was the children they were drawn to, stretching out their arms, almost pleading with us to join them.

  ‘Let’s go and introduce ourselves,’ said Ros.

  I got out my phrase book and in a few minutes they knew all our names and that we had come from Wales. From what I could gather, we were the first Welsh people to have visited the island. It caused confusion trying to explain that Ros was Welsh and I was English; I gave up any idea of telling them that our children were half English and half Welsh. But everything I said was met by a row of smiling, nodding heads as if they had understood every word.

  ‘Leesta, Saam, Sarth.’ It was close enou
gh, so it was my turn to nod my head. One by one they disappeared and returned with treats: something that looked like Turkish delight, little sachets of coated almonds, cherries dipped in a thick syrup. Sam, Lysta and Seth tried them all, and at about ten o’clock, when normally they would have been ready for sleep, they had the energy to run around the square. Ikarian children didn’t seem to have a bedtime, even when they had to go to school in the morning.

  ‘Why are the cats so thin, Mum?’ asked Lysta, as we eventually walked back to Stamati’s house and to bed.

  ‘I suppose because no one feeds them.’

  ‘It’s cruel; they’re starving.’

  On the second day we woke early. Only Stamati was up, sweeping the pavement in front of his restaurant. There was no one else about, just a stray dog, a few pigeons under the café tables and two donkeys parked outside a hairdresser’s, staring at the photographs of coiffured women.

  At last we all felt wide awake. Sam and Lysta skipped along, Seth running behind them, Ros with a brightness back in her face, smiling, her wild, frizzy hair buffeted in the gusts of wind. She had packed a picnic of sorts: not sandwiches, but food from the chef on the ferry, leftovers from Stamati’s generous portions, and sweets from the friendly grannies in the square.

  For the first time we had the energy to explore. We climbed the hills above Aghios Kirikos and looked out over the Aegean, vast and empty without a vessel to be seen, the distant shape of the island of Fourni like a spined dinosaur sleeping in a deep blue sea.

  That morning we walked for over an hour and saw no one, passing only half-built houses perched on the steep slopes. Who were they waiting for, these deserted dwellings that seemed abandoned even before being completed? It was only as we were returning that we met an old peasant pushing his bike, the carcass of a goat strapped around his back. Such had been the effort of his climb he could not even raise a smile. I told Ros the place seemed quieter than a ghost town; even the ghosts had left.

  ‘Maybe we should see if we can find an island with a bit more life,’ she suggested.

  ‘No, it’s too soon. Let’s give it a month.’

  That night in the Casino café, where the locals were playing backgammon – tavli as they called it – an old priest who had been sitting with them came over to us. I was about to try my first glass of ouzo; it was cold and getting colder, and I needed to warm myself up. Ros was trying a Metaxa brandy.

  He spoke English and knew exactly who we were.

  ‘It will snow tomorrow. I have some blankets I can bring you,’ he said in the benevolent voice that seemed to go with his calling.

  ‘The children need to be warm. It is not right for you to be in Stamati’s house. It is for summer, not now, the middle of winter.’

  And sure enough, in the morning the snow was falling, not the large wind-driven flakes of Wales but much more gentle than that, lightly covering the main square. The winter sun was trying to break through the snow-filled clouds. It snowed on the fishing boats and out into the sea, which was not a sight I had expected to see on a Greek island.

  Father Antonis brought us blankets and, although he didn’t say it, I could tell he couldn’t understand why we were here. He was forever stroking the children’s heads, no doubt pitying them for having such irresponsible parents.

  A week later we moved. It was one of those chance meetings: we were exploring the island, hitching on the coastal road, even though cars were few and far between. Sam and Lysta continuously held out their thumbs, despite my telling them it was only necessary when we could hear a vehicle coming. I think they persisted because they thought it would magically make one appear. We had walked at least a couple of miles, Seth sitting on my shoulders picking at my hair like a baby gorilla searching for fleas.

  An out-of-control old Renault swerved to avoid us and stopped just a few feet from the edge, narrowly avoiding crashing on to the rocks below. One of its tyres had exploded.

  The driver did not emerge, and when I knocked on his window to check whether he was injured I could see that he was, but not from the incident we had just witnessed. His right arm was in a sling; it made me wonder how he could have been driving in the first place. I opened the door and helped him out. He had that look I was getting used to: unkempt, stubble not far from being a beard. It appeared Ikarian men fell out of bed and straight into their clothes. Dishevelment was definitely the fashion.

  When he saw the shreds of rubber strewn across the road, he exhaled a lot of Greek bad language into the morning air. After fumbling in his jacket for a cigarette, he sat on a boulder smoking, taking long deep drags, completely ignoring us. With his arm in a sling, dealing with the tyre was beyond him, so that’s when I stepped in. After getting the spare from the boot, I jacked up the car and changed the wheel. Even Ros was impressed by how I had taken charge.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said nonchalantly. ‘God, how many times did I do that on the farm?’

  ‘Dad, don’t forget you couldn’t change the tyre on my Tonka truck once,’ said Sam. I remembered that toy of his, the one he used to fill with earth and push up and down the drive.

  But we’d made Dimitri a happy man, and after we got talking I told him we were looking for somewhere to live that had views across the sea and wasn’t too far from Aghios Kirikos. He said his brother owned a house nearby at Lefkada, so we walked on while he went ahead in the car, the Renault 4 too small to carry us all. Besides, I didn’t want to put our lives at risk being driven by a one-armed driver in what was no more than a tin can. From what I could gather, he had broken his arm when his donkey had reared up while he was strapping a fridge on its back. It was a bit confusing, but I think a ferry had blasted its horn and terrified the poor beast.

  After fifteen minutes or so, several houses came into view. This had to be Lefkada, for I could see Dimitri’s car parked outside a small, single-storey house. He showed us around it, two rooms with two front doors, so you had to leave by one door to enter the other bedroom. We didn’t really like it, but we would have some privacy and it was quiet, unlike Stamati’s place where through the walls you could hear people going to the lavatory. It certainly had lovely views over the Aegean. There was no bathroom; we had to do the business in a hole in the ground, some twenty yards behind the house. Ros grimaced at the thought.

  ‘Look, we didn’t come here expecting a five-star hotel.’ That didn’t go down too well.

  ‘I doubt very much this would get one star,’ she retorted.

  We took it because it was cheap: a hundred drachma (around £1.50) a week.

  Dimitri helped us out by putting three beds for the children in one room, and Ros and I had a double in the other. It was a real luxury for us to be sleeping in our own bed again, and far better to be here than in Aghios Kirikos. We were given too much attention there; we needed to be alone as a family.

  There was no electricity, just a Calor gas stove in the kitchen area which began three feet from our bed. The most annoying thing was the cold water tap that dripped into a cracked basin. Every night I had to stick a sock up it, to stop it getting on Ros’s nerves. We had candles and plenty of blankets; I was sure we could survive here until the warmer weather came.

  Dimitri visited only once to see how we were settling in. I gave him a month’s rent in advance, and then he was off to Athens where he sold olive oil to the smart hotels. From then on I was to give the rent to his ageing mother who lived on the waterfront in Therma, a village the other side of Aghios Kirikos. We would see him again in July when the weather, as he put it, would be ‘poli zesti’, very hot.

  What a transformation had taken place. It was quite remarkable how quickly the children adapted to their sparse surroundings. In the candlelight, they were happy to play a game of shadow-dancing, creating creatures that pranced about on the walls above their beds. Not once, despite their earlier moaning, did they complain about not having a television. Nor did they demand toys or sweets when we went shopping. They expected nothing and seemed content
to draw, or invent their own games to play outside the house.

  As for me, I felt we had arrived, that the holiday was over. I was ready to look for work and it was time for Ros to start teaching the children. It was March and our third week here. I wished the spring would hurry up and we could feel a bit of warmth in the wind. Not that this was anything like the harsh winters in North Wales, but at least at home I could smoke a joint in front of a roaring log fire and watch Match of the Day on a Saturday night. I didn’t tell Ros that was the only thing I missed, though it was a question I knew would come up one day.

  I had a coffee with Stamati; I wanted to thank him again for all his help when we first arrived and also to find out whether he had the answer to something on my mind. Ever since we’d been here I’d felt drawn to the sea; I wanted to be a fisherman, out on the Aegean under a huge sky. I asked him if he knew anyone who needed help on their boat. He did, of course, ‘but you are so thin, you will be blown overboard. Then what will your wife say? She will blame me for becoming a widow.’

  ‘I need to work. I need to make some money,’ I said.

  ‘There is little work to be found here in the winter,’ said Stamati. ‘But I have liked you since that first day, and I will help you.’

  He said this with a look in his eyes I wasn’t sure about. Was there a price I was going to have to pay? For a while he stirred his Nescafé in gentle circles; I could see things fizzing through his mind.

  ‘Wait, I will return.’ And he disappeared, leaving me sitting there, staring down at my worn-out shoes. Something else we would have to buy, unless I could glue the sole to the upper, but footwear didn’t last long walking up and down the coast road to Lefkada.

  Across the main square I could see the Poste Restante where we collected our occasional mail and posted our letters, mostly from Lysta to her school friends. She had sent at least half a dozen to Eleri and received not a single reply, which had upset her deeply. It only took a week for a letter to get back to the United Kingdom, so surely she should have heard back by now. But it was always Lysta who went to see if there was any post and returned disappointed. I knew our PO Box was 57 and, as there was no sign of Stamati, I went and enquired for myself.