Perry Escape to Ikaria

All at Sea in the Aegean
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-0-85790-940-4
Verlag: Polygon
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Leaving their Welsh hill farm behind, Nick, Ros and their children arrive on the little-known island of Ikaria in 1978, having impulsively boarded the first ferry leaving Athens. Escape to Ikaria tells the story of how they become involved with the islanders and their way of life. Nick tries his hand at anything to get by: night fishing out in the Aegean, unloading the potato boats from Samos, mixing cement for wayward house-builder Datsun Jim, and tending the gardens of the old monastery where a solitary nun, Sister Ulita, controls the village's water supply.

Nick Perry spent his childhood in Dorset, out in the countryside daydreaming most of the time. He was educated at Parkstone Sea Training School before leaving for London where he worked for ATV Television. He travelled around Europe moving from job to job until he came into money. On impulse he bought a hill farm in North Wales. He lives with his wife Arabella in the Wiltshire countryside where he spends his time writing, walking and listening to classical music.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Perry, Nick

Leseproben

1

End of a Journey

If there’s such a thing as ‘coach lag’ then I had it, leaning slightly to the right, having resisted the tight turns of the bus for two thousand miles. I was revved up and exhausted, a part of me still on the journey. I kept seeing sheep blocking roads, shepherd boys walking behind, waving sticks. Not on the Welsh roads where our journey began, but through Yugoslavia and into Greece. We wouldn’t try that back home, moving sheep without a dog. The boys just stood and stared, watching us inch our way through the flock, the driver continuously sounding his horn.

And now here I was, wide awake, walking along the quayside of Piraeus harbour, trying to decipher the Greek alphabet. One letter resembled a cactus plant, another a half-eaten sandwich; my favourite was similar to a hump-backed bridge. It was impossible to even guess the names of these boats, but some stood out in English, , , , poetically named expensive yachts, all swaying gently in the swell.

The seagulls were wide awake too, or perhaps they just couldn’t sleep because of the street lamps throwing a fluorescent light over the harbour. The smell here was very different from the mountains of North Wales: a mix of bilge water, diesel and fresh sea air.

I didn’t know what I was looking for, maybe a sign to show me the direction we should be taking. It was nearly midnight in February and I’d left Ros and the children sleeping in a room we’d rented above a café, weary from three days of travelling. Ros and I had managed to walk the children up the stairs and watched them collapse on to the unmade bed, already half asleep, food barely touched. We removed their shoes and threw an eiderdown over them. Ros too was soon fast asleep, still wearing her head scarf.

And here I was, twenty-nine years old with calloused hands, staring at life while it stared back at me. That’s how it felt out here in a displaced night, searching for a new adventure. It seemed the only changes I was capable of were dramatic ones.

There was no one about; stars quivering, water lapping, ropes slackening, restless seagulls hopping from boat to boat. But I was not alone. Suddenly someone shone a torch straight at me, the light strong enough to make me put both hands over my face.

‘’ someone shouted.

Whatever he was saying, I replied, ‘I’m English. I’m looking for a ferry, the next boat going to one of the islands.’

‘.’ Not now.

‘When?’

‘, tomorrow morning at nine o’clock.’

‘Going where?’

‘Ikaria.’

‘,’ I said, thank you, one of the few words I knew.

I’d never heard of Ikaria. Maybe it was just a small island, with only a few people living on it. That would suit us, rather than somewhere overrun with tourists in the summer.

It was too late to try to get any sleep, I’d be the worse for it, so I found an empty bench and dozed, clouds smudging out the white lozenge of a faint moon. My hands were stuffed in the pockets of a woollen overcoat, the same coat I’d worn walking the hills looking for stray sheep. I closed my eyes and shut out the remains of the night, smelling the harbour, listening to the gentle slosh of the water.

Some time after dawn I woke Ros and the children from a deep sleep, all of them huddled together in a single bed.

‘There’s a boat leaving at nine,’ I told them as I opened the curtains to a blurred sun rising in a watery sky. In the window opposite, a man in a vest was shaving, two pigeons on the roof above him fighting over a scrap of bread. Nearly every TV aerial had a resident seagull scanning the waterfront.

We walked to the harbour, all of us, apart from Seth, with rucksacks on our backs, me carrying two suitcases. We sat in a café perfectly positioned to see the closed ticket office with the Greek flag fluttering on its roof.

None of us had managed a good night’s sleep, but the emaciated cats under our table looking for food distracted the children from their tiredness. Already dock workers were unloading boats, boxes of fish piled high on their trolleys.

Ros and I tried to wake up on cups of Greek coffee, those small ones with an inch of sediment in the bottom. A couple of sips and you’d finished it. Bleary eyed, we watched the port of Piraeus coming to life. Despite a breakfast of yoghurt and honey, Sam and Lysta, our seven-year-old twins, made it perfectly clear they would rather be back in Wales. Already, whilst on the bus, Lysta had written a letter to her best friend Eleri telling her how unhappy she was. Seth, meanwhile at the ripe old age of two, was happy to be on his mother’s lap chewing a piece of rock-hard dry toast, something I later learnt was called .

As we sat there, fishermen and porters smiled at us warmly. They seemed bemused to find a foreign family huddled together in the early morning having breakfast in a workers’ café. Some came out of their way to ruffle the children’s hair, accompanied by a strong smell of the sea . . . or was it the scent of the morning’s catch that wafted over us? I wasn’t sure whether it was curiosity or a genuine sympathy they felt; we were plainly out of place on a dockside in the middle of February, looking like refugees in transit.

I had a thousand drachma in cash and five hundred pounds in travellers’ cheques stuffed into the money belt round my waist. I preferred not to plan ahead, but wanted to be prepared for the unexpected and hoped it was enough to keep us going for a while, until I found some work and we could make a life for ourselves.

As I paid the bill, I asked the café owner if he could tell us anything about Ikaria. He seemed astonished and, in what little English he could muster, said, ‘You go to Ikaria? You no go there. Nothing in Ikaria,’ shaking his head in disbelief.

‘Dad,’ said Lysta, and I could tell straight away that one of her acute observations was coming. ‘What haven’t you noticed yet, but when you do will make you cross?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Look at the suitcase and rucksacks.’

‘Oh, bollocks!’ They were covered in seagull droppings.

‘Dad, you promised you wouldn’t swear in Greece.’

‘Sorry.’

‘We don’t have to take the first boat that’s leaving,’ said Ros, fearing we were going to end up on a deserted island with no electricity or running water.

‘I’ve got a good feeling about the place,’ I said, although I hadn’t. I just wanted to get the journey behind us. ‘Besides, we can’t walk around Piraeus harbour all day avoiding seagulls and trying to keep the children occupied.’ I could imagine nothing but frayed tempers.

So I went to the booking office, which had just opened, and bought the tickets for Ikaria. It wasn’t until I had handed over the money that the heavily mascaraed woman with bright red lipstick and neatly tied neck scarf told me the journey was going to take eight hours. She reminded me of a glamorous nineteen-fifties air stewardess, like those on the old travel posters. When I told Ros we’d be on board until five in the afternoon it didn’t go down too well.

‘What’s the weather forecast?’

‘Force eight gale.’ I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t funny.

The children had never been on a boat before. ‘You know they’ll get seasick.’

They didn’t, not for the first six hours. We had the whole upper deck to ourselves, apart from a couple of priests whose grey beards swung in the breeze. Unfortunately, every time Sam and Lysta ran past they offered them sweets from a paper bag. At this time of year, the ferries carried mostly cargo, all the necessities the islands had to import from the mainland. There were more crew than passengers, and they broke the monotonous journey by constantly fussing over us and taking turns to practise their language skills. A lot of them had relatives scattered around the world, especially in America and Australia.

It was the petty officer who painted a picture of Ikaria for me in perfect English, describing it as a remote, out-of-the-way place, not on the tourist route, close to the much larger island of Samos near the Turkish mainland. He told us that during the civil war the government had exiled thousands of communists to Ikaria and many still lived there. Apparently, a lot of Ikarians flourished well into their nineties. He wasn’t sure why; perhaps it was the fish diet, or the islanders’ custom of lining their stomachs each morning with an egg-cup of olive oil.

The crew, when they weren’t hovering around us, seemed to spend most of their time smoking and leaning over the side flicking their cigarette butts into the sea, so the children were a welcome distraction. They took photographs of each other holding them, and gave Sam and Lysta a tour of the whole boat.

‘Your children are blond like the original Greeks.’

I said to Ros, ‘I hope it’s not always going to be like this, everyone treating our offspring as if they were young gods.’

The captain, too, must have been at a loose end and invited us onto the bridge. ‘British built,’ he said, fondly patting the dashboard in front of him. ‘Solid and secure.’ Then he proudly announced, ‘I left my wife for this ship. I fell in love with the engineering.’ He was another one who couldn’t understand why we were going to Ikaria.

‘What will you do there? It is cold in the wintertime. No people, no...