The Trojan Walrus Read online

  There is deep, deep water off Akra Malea and, in the gaiety of our hearts, the weather being fine and the traffic light, we passed it less than a mile off. With the aid of binoculars we were able to make out a seal gravely watching us as we went massively by, and we were very much taken with a precipitous flight of whitewashed steps which wound half the height of the cliff from a monastery near the summit to a tiny chapel close to the sea.

  “Must be the monk’s karzi,”6 offered the highly unromantic Andy. “I’ll bet they don’t eat prunes before going to bed!” (It was no very great surprise to find our bold leader immune to the natural, cultural and historical charms of Greece... he was, and remains, a man of narrow academic interests, acknowledging the superiority of the Complete Oxford English Dictionary over the concise version only because you can see further when standing on top of it.)

  As the colossal cape passed astern, the great, square-topped rock of Monemvasia, whose summit I had laboriously ascended a few months before, came into view. I swung the ship to port, the gyro-compass ticking like a cricket as the great, reddish rock slid smoothly around the horizon until it sat broad on our port bow. From that moment, I considered myself upon home ground.

  All afternoon I watched the landmarks (which, on the basis of one brief acquaintance, I unhesitatingly dubbed ‘familiar’) pass by, boring anyone foolish enough to come within earshot with my commentary. Monemvasia stood out proudly, its towering cliffs and even the walls of the citadel visible. Gerakas and Kiparissi were mere smudges on the horizon. Leonidhion I could not make out at all, but I knew they were there... and so did anyone else who came within ten yards of me!

  We passed between the islands of Falconera and Parapola, which we had seen only distantly from Nissos; but then the imperious, precipitous flanks of familiar Hydra began to come into view close to port ahead, and to the west of it the cone of Trikeri. Behind that I could just make out Spetsae. As I handed over the watch to the chief mate at four in the afternoon, the picturesque and well-remembered lighthouse on Akra Zourva at the east end of Hydra was plainly in view. Beyond Tselevinia I could see Poros.

  So near and yet so far... a scant few miles over that short stretch of sea Pan ruled the anarchic Hydra harbour, and Petros served out drinks and sardonic wit in his Poros cafe. A Flying Dolphin hydrofoil carved through the Tselevinia gap on her way to Spetsae, and coming the other way I could clearly see the old day-cruise ship Hermes chugging back to Athens... I instantly recognised her silhouette, knew her name. There were even a couple of sails in sight. Abruptly the proximity of this other world hit me with an almost physical shock; I felt such a pang, such an urgency to be back in these peaceful, pristine surroundings, that all of a sudden the remaining four months of my contract stretched before me like a life-sentence at hard labour. To my consternation, I found myself surreptitiously removing the merest hint of moisture from the corner of a treacherous eye.

  I tried to take a nap after my watch but was too enthused to sleep long, and soon found myself back around the bridge just as dark was falling to see the Temple of Sounion. In the fading light I was just able to make out its tall, slender pillars, and then we slid between Makronisi and the western Cycladic island of Kea. The island loomed, black against the indigo of the eastern sky, crowned with a speckle of lights which marked the position of the chora, or central village, high up on the mountain above the harbour. Possibly due to rose-tinted spectacles, possibly due to the lethargic nature of Greek electricity, the lights had an unusually warming amber tone which radiated hospitality. It was one of those images of a lifetime; land coal-face dark either side of us, the sky still orange over Sounion to the west with the mountains starkly silhouetted, the purple dark overwhelming the east, and the cluster of welcoming lights high on the hill. My mind teemed with images of safe returns... Odysseus patting his dog, HMS Centurion creeping into Spithead, Robinson Crusoe rescued, Apollo XIII splashing down... and the desire to continue my exploration of this enchanting sea waxed into a compulsion, almost into an obsession.

  * * *

  That night we passed through the Cavo Doro strait and up through the Sporades. The next day brought new marvels as we transited the Dardanelles, passing between the almost-modern battlefield of Gallipoli on the port side and the most ancient one of Troy on the starboard.

  We crept through the Sea of Marmara, around the Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque and into Istanbul itself. The Haliç, the Topkapi Palace and the Bosphorus Bridge slid past our port bridge wing as we picked our way gingerly though a stampede of ancient, suicidal ferryboats into a strait so narrow that even the sounds and smells of Istanbul reached us distinctly... the ululations of the muezzins, ship’s whistles, the drone and honking of traffic, exhaust fumes, spices, pine resin. A train of heavily laden ships passed us, coming the opposite way. As daylight faded we finally entered the Black Sea, exhausted by a day of professional challenge and sensory overload.

  Three days later, as we started loading at a buoy in Novorossiysk under the stern, suspicious eyes of a battalion or so of Soviet officials, I was still preoccupied with the strength of my attachment to a country I hardly knew. I was a little uneasy about it, if the truth be told... I was an Englishman, after all. Objective self-scrutiny... I’ll try anything once... told me that this had to be a passing fondness. There was no diminution in my regard for England. How could I suddenly become so infatuated with a land so utterly, uncompromisingly foreign as Greece? I was hitherto an instinctively patriotic Brit, and I could not quite come to terms with such strength of feeling for another country. The suggestion that my loyalties might be susceptible of division was as unexpected as being hit by a custard pie during a papal audience.

  Then there was the question of lifestyles... I had become greatly enamoured of the way that Greeks lived, granted; but my tastes were English to the point of caricature. I loved bitter beer, roast beef, English mustard, field mushrooms, baked York ham. Sausages. Back bacon. Black pudding. Cheddar and Stilton. Cricket. Pubs. I already knew that these things were all completely unobtainable in Greece. How long could I survive without these staples, the basic essentials of civilised life?

  As I inconclusively ruminated over these incongruities, Captain Andy marched into the control room, looking rather more official than was his wont. At first I assumed this was due to the presence of two Russian functionaries, uniformed men of nameless purpose who were conscientiously kippering themselves in the smoke of extorted cigarettes at the far end of the cargo office; but drawing up a chair, he ran a hand through his hair and gave me a weary look.

  “It looks like I’ve got a bit of bad news, Blatch,” he said; and then, seeing some alarm on my face, he hastily added, “Don’t worry... it’s nothing bad at home, nothing personal. But it looks like they may be selling the ship.”

  “Oh ho!” I replied.

  This, in the eighties, was a constant threat for British seamen… the British Merchant Navy was imploding, crumbling in the face of cut-price competition, and the number of companies willing to pay adequate salaries to British officers was decreasing every day. The advent of satellite navigation had made our vaunted astro-navigation skills worthless almost overnight; our highly practical training was a long-term asset which showed in the condition of a ship after many years, but the new breed of ship-managers, who were replacing the traditional ship-owners, had little interest in anything beyond the budget at the end of the current working day. British officers were suddenly having to compete for work with people from developing economies, most of whose training was much more cursory, but who could live like kings on a fraction of our salaries.

  I took a look around the old control room, with its chipped instrument panel, ancient hydraulic actuators and long defunct draft-gauges; I took in the massive, antiquarian inert gas cabinet, which worked only for those Gnostics who possessed the combination of occult knowledge and the virtuoso fingers of a concert pianist; I gazed at the familiar, scarred linoleum and abused furniture; my eye lingered o
n the tatty, much-amended pipeline diagram, spattered with cryptic reminders and annotations in mismatched dymo-tape and permanent marker. ‘Take the bloody thing and welcome!’ would have been the immediate response in a happier age, but not in these uncertain times.

  The prospect of losing yet another ship… any ship… hit straight to the gut, and most especially for junior officers and ratings. The modus operandi of the new breed of ship-‘managers’ was to retain a ‘top four’ to hold the hands of the new officers; many of the masters, chief mates, chief and second engineers were being retained to lead foreign crews, but no-one wanted to pay a junior officer or seaman a European wage, and in the stampede to reduce costs no-one had the slightest interest in where the next tranche of senior officers was going to come from. This was a particularly bitter pill for me, as I had already sailed as chief mate in another company, but that company had replaced all its European officers and I had been forced to revert to second mate again to get a start with a different outfit. There was a serious chance that this was the scrap-heap for me.

  “How long have we got?” I asked. Andy shrugged.

  “Not long, by the looks of it. They’ve changed the dis-port. We’re to discharge at...” he frowned at a telex slip, “Ag-ee-os Theo-dorros, in Greece...”

  “Áyios Theóthoros.” My correction was quite involuntary and equally unappreciated, because Andy fixed me with a baleful eye and repeated firmly, “No, it says here Ag-ee-os Theo-dorros. And then we have to go to the anchorage at Piraeus for surveys. And we’ve got the new owner’s superintendent coming on board in Istanbul, to travel down with us.”

  Piraeus! My heart, moments before on the floor at the news of our impending severance, rebounded joyously and whacked me under the chin. To Andy’s mystification, and to the consternation of the suspicious Soviets, I gave a great bellow of delighted laughter.

  * * *

  A week or so later I was leaning on the bridge wing in the spring sunshine when Andy came out of the chartroom to join me, a foolscap pad in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. For a moment we stood together, taking in the scene... the sterile rock of Salamis Island to port, the concrete mass of Piraeus and Athens to starboard, and astern of us the fertile slopes and olive-scrub peaks of Aegina. Within this natural amphitheatre bustled the thriving anchorage of Piraeus. Ships of all types and sizes swung to their anchors or churned in and out; tugs, bunker barges, provisions- and crew-boats milled; the edge of the anchorage was a perfect chain of ferries headed for the islands; the VHF radio crackled with staccato exchanges as pilots, agents and service-boats sought their clients. We took it all in somewhat grimly... a mere five years before, a good proportion of the ships and voices in any major port of the world would have been British. Now flags-of-convenience and Asian or east European accents held sway, and I won’t pretend it didn’t hurt. Greeks, who had previously bought up all our old ships, were now the proud incumbents of modern, newly-built vessels whilst we ran the clunkers; and the teeming Piraeus anchorage had all the indicators of a global maritime empire coming into its own as ours sank into the mists of history.

  Eventually, Andy broke the silence.

  “You’ve seen the telex from Human Remains, I take it?”

  I nodded. John, the chief mate, had brought a copy up after lunch. The crewing agency had given the junior officers one month’s pay, exclusive of guaranteed overtime, in lieu of notice, and told us that they would ‘retain us on their files in case of future requirements: however, at the present time...’ Tra la, etcetera.

  “I’m sorry. I did what I could, and I reminded them you’ve already done a trip as mate. But you know how it is.”

  “Are you staying on?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “Aye, just for a while. Me and Chiefy are going to do a month’s handover with the new crowd. Then they’ve offered me a bulk-carrier.” He grimaced. “A ruddy bulkie. Eight months on, four off, paid in US dollars, the ship’s twenty years old and only two Brits on board. I don’t think I’ll bother.”

  “Well, good luck with that I.G. panel!” I grinned. He grimaced back, and brandished his writing pad.

  “You’ll be going off on Tuesday. I need to know where you want to fly to... Manchester, is it?”

  I shook my head. Down our starboard side foamed a Flying Dolphin hydrofoil, a dashing gold and blue cylinder at the tip of an arrowhead of champagne bubbles as it roared past on its way to Aegina, Methana and Poros. I gestured towards it with my coffee mug and told him, “Don’t worry, I’ll take the bus.”

  * * *

  So that was how I came to be sitting in the restaurant in Piraeus, but the view through the grimy window wasn’t quite so bright as it had been from the anchorage. At breakfast I had been employed on a ship, in very familiar surroundings and hierarchy, with colleagues and countrymen. Now I was a jobless itinerant on land, alone and surrounded by indifferent strangers... and however friendly I had found rural Greeks, I was quickly learning that the urban species can redefine indifference. My couple of attempts to use the Greek I thought I had learned had failed rather abysmally, directions had been harder to extract than dragon tonsils, and I had a strong suspicion I had been swindled at the currency exchange. I suddenly had none of the sense of belonging here that had been so manifest on the ship. It dawned on me that breakfast belonged in another world entirely, and despite my recent euphoria I suddenly had a fluttering in my guts, a touch of nervousness, and a strong sense that I was in a very foreign country indeed. I began for the first time to vacillate about my decision to stay, and to wonder how much a ticket home would cost. Then, just at the nadir of my thoughts, just as I began to succumb to doubt, the waiter sidled up and deposited in front of me a plate containing a mound of chips and two gleaming, turgid, glorious sausages.

  The relief of meeting, at this point of crisis, so familiar an old staple, delivered a relief similar to the first swallow of cool beer after a day’s hiking; for here were no effete European sausages, no pale, boiled würstchen or lumpy andouilles, but rather good, honest, gently-curved bangers of recognisable form, hue and magnitude. The skin crackled and yielded under my knife just like an English snag and I bit into a moist, savoury filling. It was like finding air on Mars, like turning over the examination paper and finding that you’ve already answered the first question six times in revision, like the ‘snap’ of the parachute opening. It was a lifeline, a life support system, it was confirmation that I could exist in this environment. With renewed confidence overflowing from my breast, and juice dribbling out of the corner of my mouth, I embraced my destiny.

  That sausage was, you might say, a link between worlds.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  A gentleman’s lodging... Poros in winter... how to snare a sailor… Société très Anonyme... Spiros impartially considered... anatomy of a flotilla... Dramatis Personae... Dramatis Naviae... the Armada assembles... scratch appointments... taking it advisedly.

  On leaving the ship I decided to base… and debase… myself in Poros, a brilliantly white, terracotta-roofed town. It lay on the lovely, pine-wooded island of the same name, positioned hard against the Peloponnesian shore of the Saronic Gulf, and possessed almost everything a young, single adventurer with a nautical bent and a tendency to worship his belly could desire… a beautiful natural harbour, beaches, excellent restaurants and bars, nightlife, and a plentiful supply of lady visitors.

  Poros was really two islands; the large, forested island of Kalavria, which had resort developments around the beaches on its south side, and the much smaller, boot-shaped Sphaeria, where the town of Poros was situated. They sat so close to the coast of the Peloponnese that they formed a large, almost totally enclosed bay which provided excellent shelter. The town lay at the closest point to the mainland… indeed, the word ‘Poros’ actually means a ford or crossing-point… and was bordered on three sides by an enormously long quay with good depths of water alongside. The various crenulations of the two islands offere
d a number of other delightful anchorages besides, and all this was situated an easy day’s sail from Athens in a strategic position at the junction of the Saronic and Argolic gulfs. The happy combination of location, characteristics and charm made it an ideal hub for cruising the islands.

  Poros was not only a yachtsman’s haunt but also a thriving tourist destination. The charming warren of lanes between the close-packed traditional houses were richly endowed with splendid eateries offering tasty grills, the best fish the Mediterranean could offer, and every variety of traditional Greek cookery. There were beaches, night-spots and water sports centres. Over the narrow channel on the Peloponnesian shore lay the more agrarian and rather less picturesque mainland town of Galatas, and between there and Navplion were many sunny slopes covered with vineyards, which maintained a copious supply of fresh, young wine. In addition to these perfections, at the time I arrived, Greece as a whole was ridiculously cheap for a Northern European and also attracted a startlingly high proportion of female tourists.

  Nothing could have been better suited for my purposes. Poros was a hive of maritime activity and a place from which I could easily keep a keen ear to the ground for opportunities to do some sailing. It was a vibrant and beautiful place to live, and well connected... a very easy commute to Piraeus, from where I could catch ferries, visit Athens or get to the airport if required, and, lying just a five-minute boat-ride across the narrow strait from the Peloponnese mainland, the island also boasted easy access by road or sea to Navplion and Corinth, Epidavros and Ermioni.

  * * *

  I took lodgings in a guest-house high up in the main town of Poros, very close to the clock tower and sitting on the spine of the hill where it afforded a view of both the Bay of Poros and the Stenon Porou, the narrow but navigable passage between the town and the mainland.