Escape to Ikaria Read online

  The house where I had lived, beside the taverna, was done up and in good condition. We knocked on the door, but nobody answered; they were probably all down on the beach. We stayed for half an hour, Arabella sketching, while I crossed the road to that hidden path down to the hot springs.

  Now, half concealed in a bush, there was a wooden plank, and painted on it the words Hot Springs with an arrow underneath. It would seem the Ikarians were only a little more interested in advertising what the island had to offer than they had been forty years ago.

  What I would find at the monastery filled me with nervous expectation. It looked just the same as we drove up to those large green gates. I rang the bell and heard it ring out behind the walls, its tone just as I remembered. The nun who greeted me with a gentle smile and welcomed me in was Sister Evniki. Time had stood still here, everything just as before. The cypress trees in the courtyard, the old slate table where I used to sit with Sister Ulita, the bougainvillaea by the kitchen window. Sister Evniki spoke good English and was enthralled when I told her about the time I had spent working at the monastery. She asked if I would like to see Sister Ulita. I couldn’t believe that she was still here and I would meet her again. So I followed her through the olive trees, out into the orchard where two goats were still tethered, and then up the steps behind the old outhouse. And there we stood, the two of us, before her grave, a white marble headstone with a Greek inscription which read Now at Peace in the Arms of the Lord. Sister Ulita had died of cancer in 2012, aged eighty years. Those were sombre moments. I could hear her calling me, not once but twice, as she always did. Neeko, Neeko.

  The following morning I met Stelios at six to go fishing. He let me take the tiller as we left the harbour. He told me how much had changed since the 1970s. Fish stocks had plummeted and he caught very few barbunia. Often he would come back with no squid or octopus. The dolphins had become a big problem, stealing fish from the nets.

  ‘Now the dolphins are protected, but no one protects the fishermen,’ he said.

  But it was wonderful to be back there with him.

  Ikaria is still an enigmatic island. It escapes definition, so through metaphor we tried to conjure up who she is. Someone said they thought she is like a badly dressed, beautiful woman, or maybe she just never bothers to put on her make-up. But whoever she is, we lived a life there once and got to know its people.

  On our last evening, we stood on the coast road in front of Lefkada and watched the colours of the sunset fading into the Aegean. The island hadn’t changed as much as we had feared, and the view from the taverna certainly hadn’t changed at all. Staring into the distance, I remembered how Stelios once said to me, ‘I see it in you, the dream of Ikaria.’

  Acknowledgements

  There are many people I would like to thank for helping me complete Escape to Ikaria. Judith Mather, Nathaniel Mobbs, Mike and Jo Saffell. My children, Sam, Lysta, Seth and Belah and of course Jan Perry. Jackie Elvery, Lucia Dhillon, Barbara Hennell and Sarah Gooch whose enthusiasm never wavered, despite all the telephone calls. Heartfelt thanks to Paul Sharpe and Ruth Cleaver.

  Greg van Reil, who came back into our lives and relived the memories of those days forty years ago and joined us recently from Toronto to film the promotional clips for the book. Penny Barnett, who lives in New Zealand and trawled through those distant memories to give her version of events. Sister Evniki from Samos for her listening ear, who told me what happened at the monastery in the intervening years. And several Ikarians who played a part in the story: Father Leonidis, who now tends the garden where I once worked, Stelios, Nikos Avagiani and of course Ilias Moraitis who also helped us with the history of the island.

  Without the creative efforts of editor Nancy Webber and designer Teresa Monachino and, as always, the undying commitment of Neville Moir and Alison Rae at Polygon, the book would never have reached the printed page. And a huge thank you to Arabella, who not only worked tirelessly on the book, but also reminded me of so much about our lives on Ikaria that could easily have been forgotten.

  Peaks and Troughs: In at the Deep End, High in the Hills

  Find out how it all began in Peaks and Troughs

  As 1970 dawns Jack, brother Nick and his family set off from swinging London to fulfil their dream of living off the land in the wild unforgiving hills of North Wales. They know nothing of farming or what battles lie ahead with the weather and their neighbours, or the ingenuity needed to survive. But armed with the Farmer’s Weekly and protected by their youthful idealism and sense of the ridiculous they begin their adventure.

  1

  The Gift and a Journey

  As we sat in the offices of Huggett, Bellows & Wilde, a firm of solicitors just down from West Hampstead Tube station, I could hear the dull hum of the Underground rumbling through the bowels of the building. It could have been mistaken for a recurring stomach complaint for it came and went every couple of minutes, then settled down until the next train passed beneath us. We had dressed for the occasion: my brother Jack and I were both wearing ties, and had even polished our shoes. This was not a natural look, and neither was Jack’s hair, flattened down with Brylcreem. It was an attempt at smartness that didn’t suit us. No matter how hard we tried, neither of us could ever achieve the appearance of someone well groomed.

  Eventually Mr Bellows came in and sat down: wispy white; unlike us naturally neat. With a tight-lipped smile he looked at us benignly, opened the file, and in ecclesiastical tones told us we had each inherited £6,000. It did feel as if we were receiving a divine gift. We had only met this generous spinster aunt Elsie as children. She had lived on some outer branch of the family tree; I couldn’t remember her name being mentioned, recognising her only in faded photographs in the family album. I suddenly felt a tremendous warmth for her, regretted that I could not express my thanks. For little though we knew it then, she had changed our lives.

  Jack and I didn’t speak about it, not at first, as we walked along the Finchley Road. The money, what we were going to do with it.

  That’s what I was thinking about when we got to the Cosmo, a café run by a rotund Italian called Giuseppe who operatically shouted orders back to the kitchen where his wife and children slaved. He knew us well; since he was still open at midnight, we would often end up there after the late night film in Swiss Cottage. He slid two plates of baked beans across the table in front us.

  ‘Grazie.’

  ‘You boys, you’re so Italian.’

  We buttered our toast without speaking, turning over in our minds the possibilities that now presented themselves.

  For the past year I’d been drifting from job to job. The lowest point had resulted from replying to an advert in the Evening Standard, filling a vacancy to work in the warehouse of a sausage skin factory. I lasted three months.

  I was twenty-three, married to Ros, a Welsh girl, once a children’s nurse, now bringing up our six-month-old twins, Sam and Lysta. Jack, fifteen months younger than me, worked for our uncle, a film producer. I never knew quite what he did apart from running around all over the place picking up people from airports and taking them in taxis to various locations.

  ‘I want to leave London, get out into the countryside. Start a new life. Jack,’ I said, while he seemed to be counting the baked beans on his toast, ‘this is what they call a karmic moment.’

  ‘You sound like a hippy.’

  ‘Can you finish your baked beans? It’s annoying watching you eat them one by one.’

  Since meeting Ros I’d become involved with the followers of Rudolf Steiner: ‘anthroposophists’, they called themselves. They cared about the earth, practising farming methods free of chemicals and pesticides. I started to attend seminars, and the more I heard the more I wanted to know. So in the summer I went to work on a Steiner farm down in Sussex, going home to Ros at weekends. I absorbed it all: phases of the moon, companion planting, the waxing and waning of everything. I lived in a sun-swung zodiac believing I’d found the answer. We even p
layed Beethoven symphonies to a herd of milking cows, convinced it would increase their milk yield.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind being a shepherd,’ said Jack, spearing a couple of baked beans with the end of his fork. ‘But what I’d really like is a dog. A Border collie.’

  ‘Let’s buy a farm . . . Yes, let’s buy a farm!’ I shouted, bringing my fist down on the table. After all, we were country boys at heart, brought up in Dorset. Ten minutes later we realised what a ridiculous idea it was. After all, we only had £12,000. That wasn’t going to buy us a farm.

  ‘It would up in the hills of North Wales,’ Ros told me later.

  Her enthusiasm about it all, and her parents in Caernarfonshire, made it a real possibility.

  A few days later, Jack and I made a pact to put our money together and get out of London. We washed it down with a bottle of Niersteiner, a cheap German wine. Ros was delighted; she would be returning home, and Sam and Lysta would be growing up close to their grandparents.

  Jack bought books on sheep farming, absorbing himself in the shepherd’s way of life.

  ‘What have you discovered, Jack?’ I asked.

  ‘Looks like it’s seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.’

  ‘You can say goodbye to your weekend lie-ins, then?’

  Not once did it occur to us that knowing the theory is one thing, putting it into practice quite another.

  Gwyn, Ros’s father, rather than saying, ‘You don’t know anything about farming,’ was right behind the idea. A consultant paediatrician at Bangor hospital, he was a kind-hearted Quaker whose generosity showed itself in every act. Estate agents’ leaflets of hill farms and smallholdings began arriving in the post. Every day Gwyn was out in his VW Beetle to take a look.

  A month later we drove to North Wales to stay with my in-laws in Caernarfon for the weekend. By Saturday afternoon we had put in an offer on Dyffryn, a remote hill farm of forty-eight acres above the village of Penygroes, exchanging contracts within a month. We had bought it for six thousand quid!

  Through the weeks that followed we talked about nothing else. Ros wanted to grow vegetables, Jack was going to have a flock of sheep, I would look after pigs. Gwyn bought us a Morris Traveller, and I started to learn to drive around the streets of London. I said to Jack that as soon as I passed my driving test we should buy a Land Rover. ‘We’re farmers now. Straw bales in the back, a sheep dog sitting between us on the front seat.’

  ‘Yes, wearing braces and a flat cap.’

  ‘What, the dog?’

  ‘No, us.’

  Jack watched One Man and His Dog every Sunday. I had to endure his endless attempts at getting the whistle just right, the one where you stick two fingers in your mouth and a piercing shrill rips through the air. He couldn’t master it, but unfortunately never stopped trying.

  Jack grew a beard, wore collarless shirts and combat jackets. He got rid of his denim cap. We both bought waistcoats in the Portobello Road, and those old leather braces, the sort farmers wear. Shirt-sleeves rolled up, we were dressed to fill the part.

  We counted down the days, making plans, and decided to make the move on the first of January 1970. What better time to begin a new phase in your life?

  Every night after the twins had gone to sleep I told Ros what we were going to achieve in that first year. I couldn’t wait for it to be haymaking time, me driving a tractor and trailer and stacking the bales in the barn. It was left to Ros to put a spoonful of reality into the mix. ‘You’re flying too high, the both of you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said, aghast.

  Ros gave us her assessment of the practicalities involved in beginning a new life. She turned our attention to the not insignificant fact that the farmhouse at Dyffryn needed to be made habitable. Had we not noticed that it was no place for the twins to live? Had we not considered that she would probably not be moving in for several weeks?

  ‘You two are actually going to be camping in the house. Why do you think we got the place for just six thousand pounds?’

  Jack and I looked at each other as if to say well of course we’d thought of all that. We hadn’t, not for a single moment.

  ‘There’s a lot of work to do,’ she said. ‘It’s more than just painting and putting up wallpaper.’

  I gave her a kiss then, a reassuring one. ‘Don’t worry, Ros,’ I said. ‘I realise you haven’t seen it yet, but I’m a practical man around the house.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Jack. ‘We can turn our hands to most things.’

  ‘Or if we can’t we can pick them up pretty damn quickly.’

  ‘You’re going to need to.’

  I’d never put up a roll of wallpaper, though I had painted a friend’s back door once. I wasn’t going to tell Ros that.

  ‘Everything is in the planning,’ she said, ‘and I’m leaving in two days.’ That’s what was worrying her. She was going to be staying with her parents in Caernarfon seven miles north of Dyffryn while Jack and I got on with turning the house into a home.

  Then Ros let it be known that she didn’t like the idea of me driving the Traveller to North Wales. We had a bit of a row about it but I was determined it was a risk worth taking.

  ‘If the police stop you, you’ll have to pay a huge fine.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my driving,’ I told her. ‘I drive the Traveller around London every day.’

  ‘That’s not the point, is it?’ We never resolved the matter.

  I was awake most of the night before Ros was leaving with the twins. Those slow-moving hours when the magnitude of what I had done raised its head and stared at me, the dark shadow of myself. And I couldn’t shift it, the enormity of what I had committed us to, and how we were going to cope with what lay ahead. But in the morning, Ros would never have guessed, waking next to me, smiling and whispering ‘Today’s the day’.

  I drove them, of course, to Euston station with L plates, which Ros insisted on. Rain swirled along the wind-tunnel streets, everybody struggling with umbrellas, eyes looking downwards. We hardly spoke a word. We would be seeing each other again in a week. ‘Won’t be long, Ros,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll survive without me.’

  ‘Let’s hope you can without me.’

  As Euston came into view she came out with a long list of reminders, last minute things that must on no account be overlooked. Each job had to be ticked off in a notebook.

  At the ticket barrier I knelt down beside the twins, who were looking up at me from their buggy. It felt strange to be saying goodbye to them. Then I held Ros in a long embrace, staring into her hazel eyes, stroking her wild frizzy hair.

  ‘I will miss you,’ I whispered in her ear.

  That night Jack and I ate at the bistro in Ladbroke Grove. We met up with a couple of friends, musicians who were forming a pop group, and spent the evening listening to them talking about chord riffs and great guitar solos with the same enthusiasm that Jack and I felt for our venture out into the wilds of Wales. It’s funny how things that once absorbed you gradually wane, no longer hold your interest. London in the sixties, those summers of love, couples swaying dreamily at pop festivals, tripping out in a psychedelic world. All that ‘love and peace, man’ was wearing a bit thin. It was time to move on. That’s how it struck me, sitting there, getting bored. These people were our friends, involved in our lives; now all this was passing away. I wondered who we would still be in touch with a year from now.

  So the day came. We were leaving on the stroke of midnight, the moment the new decade arrived. We had survived the swinging sixties and a new life lay ahead. We had indulged in all the excesses, lying in flats in a purple haze listening to Hendrix, being cool; there was nothing more to discover.

  Fireworks exploded around us, sky rockets bursting into an array of colours, cascading droplets of light. Everyone cheering, arms around each other. It was midnight, 31 December 1969. I looked at my brother. ‘Happy New Year, Jack. Who knows what it will hold for us.’
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  I turned on the ignition, put the Traveller into first gear, flicked out the orange indicator: we were on our way. Jack opened the AA map; he was going to navigate. We crawled in first gear between the revellers crowding around us. They blew kisses at us while a girl pressed her wet lips against my window, a symbolic reminder of what we were leaving behind.

  On Jack’s lap I could see clearly marked in fluorescent yellow ink the route we were going to follow, snaking its way across the page. We had a portable tape player, and as we drove we sang along to the Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’.

  We drove on through the night, heading out into the dark countryside. No street lights here, Jack pouring coffee from a thermos, changing tapes, making roll-ups of Golden Virginia that he lit and passed to me. We talked or hummed along to whatever we were listening to.

  Out of the blue Jack asked me how I got on with Eryl, my mother-in-law. He had only met her once, at the wedding.

  ‘What did you think of her?’ I asked.

  She had given him the impression of being full of her own importance. He described her as a force to be reckoned with.

  ‘You’re right there,’ I told him.

  She had been against the marriage, not wanting her daughter to marry an Englishman. I remember the morning Ros opened the letter expressing her extreme disappointment. She was an international golfer, and in an emotional plea said that if Ros didn’t reconsider her decision, in other words dump me, she feared for the effect it would have on her game. That’s when Ros told her she was pregnant, and not another word was said about it.

  ‘It doesn’t concern you that she doesn’t like you?’Jack asked.