all greek to me

Time for booking next year's holidays.

If you are thinking of Greece you may wish to read this first.

The events of some years ago are all true. The pictures added since.

Samos is a Greek island not far from Turkey. Kokkari is in Samos.

The Hotel Kokkari Beach is on the outskirts of Kokkari.  Dimitrios the proprietor, is big, dark, swarthy in the mould of Anthony Quinn who you can see in old films.

Arriving by air at Samos is exciting - after you have landed: terrifying when you are doing it. The runway does just that: runs away into a mountain at one end, into the sea at the other with a mere hundred yards between the two; or so it seems from the air.          

Aircraft do not always land or take off in very strong wind. It is always fairly strong, which explains some of the pilot's manoeuvres. 
A very strong wind means an extended holiday or a return trip to Athens by boat - if you can get on it.

Go to this utube site https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxnA6ZNrlTY

Reclaiming your baggage at the airport is akin to mass wrestling. Very small old Greek ladies make formidable opponents. They have sharp pointed elbows designed for in­fighting, which if you are tall can be excruciatingly painful.

Leaving the airport by private coach is interesting. The driver, one other couple and a determined lady courier make up the complement. The driver wants to wait for two other passengers. The lady courier says:

 "If they are here and you can’t see them they will already have caught a taxi".

The driver wants to look for them. The lady courier remonstrates:

"You know the taxi-drivers don’t like you dragging fares out of their taxis to fill your bus - it only causes trouble”.

We do not wait for the invisible twosome!

The journey to Kokkari is interesting, after you've done it, petrifying while you are doing it. The road disappears into potholes or possibly bomb craters? every hundred yards. The roadside disappears over the edge of a precipice - all the time.  Everyone drives on the wrong side of the road in the hope they will not meet someone foolish enough to be driving on the correct side.

The coach has seen better days - about thirty years ago. One half of the windscreen is shattered - like the passengers. Surprisingly, there are curtains at the windows. They would be nice to hide behind, but are unaccommodating in this respect because there are more holes than curtain. The lady courier doesn’t talk because, as she admits later, it is difficult to listen and pray at the same time.

Arrival at the hotel is the climax to a fifteen hour journey. We didn’t go to America because it was too far! To be fair, we didn’t know we were going to spend hours in Athens hoping for a connecting flight waiting for the very strong wind to decline to a fairly strong wind.

Bed is what you seek, but you reckon without the welcome of Dimitrios, who is Anthony Quinn. He speaks English to Germans who can’t speak Greek. He speaks French to Englishmen who can’t speak Greek. It seems to work. Dimitrios insists you take breakfast. You can’t refuse.

You couldn’t have refused in any case, because when you have finished breakfast and are ready for bed, Dimitrios says:

“Five minutes”.

This is your first experience of Greek time that, you discover later, equates to six Greek minutes to one English minute.  Half-an-hour later you find that you have had to wait until someone has vacated a room before you can have it.  In the trade it is termed 100% occupancy!

Half-board means bed, breakfast and dinner, or as Dimitrios explains on day two, bed, breakfast, lunch and dinner on day three because the cook has to go to a wedding on the evening of day two and do you mind not having dinner? 

He does not insist, but you would be doing him a favour.

Proof of the effective bandit-like charm of Dimitrios is to be found in the tavernas of Kokkari on the evening of day two; all his residents are there, eating out.

Eating in Greek tavernas is interesting if you like Greek salad, which is English salad with goat’s cheese. If you don’t like Greek salad, eating in Greek tavernas is uninteresting, unless of course you like tomatoes stuffed with minced meat, vine leaves stuffed with rice and minced meat, moussaka which is minced meat stuffed with something akin to egg custard, or just plain minced meat.

The wine of Samos is light, pleasant and cheap.  The beer, Amstel or Fix, is light, pleasant and cheap. Tea is a bag dunked in a cup of hot water and is cheap. Nescafe, Nes Cafe or Nes Coffee, as variably described on menus, is a powder that looks like Nescafé, which you sprinkle into a cup of hot water. It too is cheap.

In fact, everything is cheap. You could have a five course dinner with wine for £5 - if you could find a five course dinner. If you could, two of the five courses would be Greek salad.

The determined lady courier is English-type Roedean fast becoming Greek-type Dimitrios. You meet her in the square of Kokkari at six in the evening of day one - after you have slept for eight hours.

Meeting the determined lady courier is a lottery. If you find the taverna where she holds court, she buys you a bottle of wine. She eats yoghourt and honey - all the time. When you find her, purely by chance, on day two at the taverna where you have gone to have a beer and a Greek salad, she is very angry with Yamis the proprietor because he has run out of yoghourt and honey. She makes do with a large vanilla, chocolate and coffee ice-cream with cherries on top.  She is a big girl.

Yamis, by the way, does not look like Anthony Quinn: he’s the only Greek so far who does not.

The big lady courier has already, on the wall-of-death ride from the airport, given us a wadge of stencilled information on Samos. For example, day three is a bus trip round the island. “Not the normal trip offered by tourist agencies that are unreliable, but a special for my clients only”, of whom, she infers, there are more than just the four of us who were on the bus ride from the airport.

However, when we meet the determined lady courier at the taverna, she has some bad news. The round-island trip has been cancelled due to lack of support. It seems like good news to me because the round-island trip lasts all day, which is a lot further than from the airport to the hotel!

But, travel on your own is no problem because there is a road and a bus service. The timetable is included in the wadge of stencilled information, but “ignore the timetable” instructs the lady courier, “all the times have been changed”.   All you need to do, she advises, is stand by the roadside and wait for the bus that is always full and unlikely to stop unless you act in an agitated manner that is the normal and only way to stop a bus on Samos.

The other couple on the bus from the airport, the wife in what seemed to me to be a very advanced stage of pregnancy, took her advice and caught a bus packed with thousands of Greek schoolchildren. I exaggerate here - there were probably only hundreds.

They went up into the mountains to a small village that turned out to be the end of the bus route. Having spent some time sightseeing, they returned for the bus, only to discover that the bus on which they had arrived had been the school bus, there being no other services to and from the village. They were stranded.

But the people of Samos are kind and helpful. It was explained, with difficulty, that: “a car will come”.

They assumed this was in response to their plea for someone to call a taxi. As time passed, the villagers came out of their houses, with chairs, to sit and look at the stranded couple. In response to their continued queries about the taxi, they were reassured: “a car will come.”

After a long wait, a type of Land Rover appeared, containing German tourists. The villagers ran into the road en masse, bringing the vehicle to a halt. The couple were pushed onto the vehicle and the Germans instructed by the villagers to take them back to Kokkari.   There was no taxi, but the villagers knew that a car was bound to arrive sometime. Fortunately for our friends, it happened to arrive the same day.

On day six we were going on a boat trip to Turkey organised by the lady courier. She arrived late to collect us and we missed the boat. By way of recompense she took us, in company with the other couple, in her minute Fiat to a seaside village and left us there for the day, promising to pick us up in the evening - a journey not anticipated with much pleasure as the Greek style driving she had adopted on the way filled me with apprehension that there was going to be a premature birth inside the car. Where we would have found space for a baby I don’t know.

Came the end of the day - no lady courier. Fortunately she escaped uninjured from her car which had crashed into a tree on the road down to the village. There was no way in which it could be made roadworthy again. By this time, being stranded in out-of-the-way villages was becoming second nature to the other couple. By providence, a taxi appeared with a passenger. We and the lady courier were saved. A car had come!

To get away from it all, including the lady courier, we hired mopeds - damn the dangers of which there are many, including warnings of broken limbs, tetanus and somewhat suspect medical services - and went up into the mountains into idyllic surroundings.

Ignore the swirling avalanches of white powdery dust tumbling across the piece of road you have just about passed - they don't do roadwork signs, traffic-lights or watchmen in Samos.  The mopeds are not this year’s models. That you have to dismount, open up to full throttle and then only find enough power to walk up the hills with them, seems of little consequence. It’s downhill coming back.

Up to villages stuck to the mountain sides: villages that are white, shining, spotlessly clean with pastel-coloured flowers and decorations painted on the pavements. Where every other house seems to be a taverna. Where two litres of beer and Greek salad is unbelievably cheap. Where gnarled-looking people and hosts of small children all smile and speak to you. That you cannot understand a word of Greek has nothing to do with being in Paradise.

On another day we took a walk where countless butterflies, disturbed by our progress, filled the air of the beautiful green countryside. We headed for a mountain village but never found it and became hopelessly lost in a maze of scrub and forest high in the mountains. I was forced to climb trees to seek a way out while my patient but apprehensive wife had to call continuously so that I knew where to find her again. I could see the sea down below, far in the distance. Eventually, we scrambled down the mountainside, climbed down the terraced walls of an old olive orchard, across rough scrubland. Scratched, torn and almost exhausted from the searing midday sun, we stumbled across the beach and threw ourselves into the sea. It would have made a smashing adventure film.

The taxi driver who rescued us from the seaside village was a Greek who had spent some years in Australia and who, as a consequence, spoke Australian with a Greek accent. We hired him to take us round the island to marvel at the natural and man-made wonders of Samos, including an aqueduct that, he told us, had been built by Archimedes - with help of course. The construction began from either side of a mountain and was completed in the middle, only a foot out of true.

At that time, the Turks were in the habit of trying to invade Samos. On one occasion, as a Turkish ship approached the island, the elders gathered the populace in the evening, armed each with a flaming torch, sped them  through one end of the aqueduct and out the other that faced to sea and the Turkish ship. This operation was repeated a number of times until, as the Greek-Australian taxi driver told us, the captain of the Turkish ship cried out:

"Jesus Christ where have all these Greeks come from?"

That Jesus was born a few hundred years after all this happened didn't seem to affect the taxi driver's version of history!

A message of hope for the New Year

If you feel on occasions we are faced with an uncertain world, take comfort from this letter written to my grandson Jack a long time ago, that as we go into a New Year there were worse times.

Dear Jack,

Your Grandma was machine-gunned by the Germans. 

This happened in 1941 on a railway footbridge at Denvilles, which is near Havant in Hampshire. Your Grandma was wheeling her bicycle across the bridge on the way home from Havant railway station. She used to leave her bicycle there when she went by train to Petersfield to school. Denvilles was supposed to be safer than Portsmouth, where your Grandma was born and brought up.

The aircraft crew responsible for this unprovoked and dastardly attack on your Grandma had doubtless overshot Portsmouth and were just being nasty. The aircraft was so low that she had a glimpse of the pilot's face. He must have seen what sort of target he had in his sights.

I am certain that your Grandma could hardly have been mistaken for a military target.

You will be glad to know that your Grandma escaped unscathed from this wartime drama which, as far as I know has not, until now, appeared in any record of our fight against the Germans.

Certainly it did not appear in any of Winston Churchill’s memoirs. But I suppose this is understandable when you consider that he wasn’t born in Portsmouth and consequently did not have an opportunity of meeting your Grandma. At least I don’t think he did: I cannot recall seeing him dancing at the Savoy Ballroom in Southsea where, as I have mentioned in a previous letter, I first met your Grandma.

Naturally, such an incident demonstrates why the Germans lost the war. Not that your Grandma grew up to be a member of any elite fighting unit that waged front-line warfare against the Germans - discounting her service in the Women's Royal Air Force Band of course.

Nor, if her word can be believed, was she a confidante of the German Generals who tried to bump-off their leader Adolf Hitler when they at last realised they were on the losing side. 

You will notice from history books that they didn’t try it when they thought they were winning!

It is just that if they couldn’t hit an unarmed schoolgirl - and your Grandma has always denied being armed - pushing a bicycle over a pedestrian railway footbridge in broad daylight, they were unlikely to hit much else unless it was stationary.

You may wonder why I didn't tell you all this in previous letters concerning your Grandma. 

Well, I only found out about it the other day when we went to Emsworth, which is also near Havant, to see Olive, who was part of your Grandma's adoptive family by marriage.

Your Grandma wanted to visit the scene of this attempted carnage; she said she really set out to see the house to which her family voluntarily evacuated itself from Portsmouth. The house was no longer there, having been demolished to make room for six smaller houses.

You can bet if the Germans couldn't hit a house the local authority would make amends!

It was only when we arrived there that your Grandma, in that nonchalant way the English have when referring to deeds of uncommon valour, said:

“That’s the bridge where I was machine-gunned by the Germans”.

You could have knocked me down with the proverbial feather. 

Here I am, wed to your Grandma for 42 years*, discovering that I have been married to part of Britain’s heritage.

When other children are boasting about their families Jack, you can now chip in with:

“My Grandma was machine-gunned by the Germans! “

Grandad

*68 now!

"She can go on the bus!"

The late ‘forties’, ‘fifties’ and ‘sixties’ were part of the golden age of pubs that were so much a part of many people’s lives.  What they were then, may explain in part why they have gone into decline in recent years.

The aftermath of war was a time of seeking relief from six years of hardship. Thousands of homes had been destroyed by bombing. The great rebuilding and improvement of houses was not under way because of the shortage of building materials. During those early post-war years, we still had food rationing, shortage of coal which was the main form of house heating, none of the comfortable furnishings, cental heating, double glazing of today. Television was unavailable to the majority of people and video recorders, computers, mobile phones and tablets had not been invented. As for cars, few people had one. 'Locals', as pubs were known, were just that, local to where people lived.

For pleasure, we went in our hundreds and thousands to football matches, kept the cinemas and pubs full night after night because they were more comfortable than home for many who, because of the shortage of housing, lived with in-laws, or rented one room or two, sharing a lavatory and bathroom - if there was one - with other people.

Most pubs were not like they are today. They too had been neglected in terms of repair and modernisation for the same reasons that applied to all buildings. Many had outside ‘loos’ and country pubs often had the most primitive facilities without even flush toilets.

But, the interiors were warm, helped by the number of people in them; even though the furnishings were still of the pitch-pine seating variety fixed round the walls. The game of pool would not be imported from America for many years to come and our interests, depending on whereabouts in the country you lived, were in darts, dominoes, shoveha’penny, bar-billiards and the many forms of skittles.
Surprisingly as it may seem today, more pubs had pianos than those without: there always seemed to be someone who could play them to a reasonable and often professional standard.

Food was generally restricted to pickled eggs and Smith’s Crisps. The Berni brothers had not yet invented the steak-house.  The beer in all but a few ‘Free Houses’ was supplied by local brewers at prices fixed by the brewer. Strangely enough, these prices were maintained at quite low levels: as were rents, where £26 a year was normal for a small country pub.

The big national brewers were only on the fringes of expanding their empires. The quality and character of beer was often the principal reason people drank in a particular pub. By far the greatest influence was the quality of the publican, recruited by breweries through their Area Managers. Wally Emery and I were Area Managers with Ushers Wiltshire Brewery, a pretty impoverished and family controlled outfit with headquarters in Trowbridge in Wiltshire and hundreds of locals throughout much of the West Country.

Our job was to visit pubs on a monthly basis to ensure that ‘our’ beer was being sold in good condition; that the publican, who was a tenant of the brewery company and appointed by us, paid his or her rent and bills on time and kept ‘our’ pub in a clean condition.

It all sounds pretty feudal, which it was in its way. But it had advantages. In our role as the guardians of the brewer’s assets, we still became, by and large, friends and ‘fathers confessor’ to the publicans under our control, despite the fact that we had little to offer other than admonishment or advice, so bereft of funds was Ushers. 

Some of us were better at it than others. Wally Emery in particular was the best and most human Area Manager that I ever knew in all the 37 years I spent in ‘The Trade’. This was because he lived the job, as many of us did, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks of the year.

We were invited to weddings, births and funerals. If we were not the first people publicans called when they had problems, we felt that somewhere we had failed.

A distraught publican rang Wally early one morning:

“I'm going to end it all Mr Emery, she's gone off with one of my customers”, referring to his wife.

This was not an unusual occurrence in pub circles: particularly upsetting if he was a good customer!

“I haven't had my breakfast yet. You put the kettle on - I’ll be there shortly”.

If you knew Wally Emery’s appetite you would realise his agony at the thought of going out without breakfast - or any other meal for that matter.
The publican never did commit suicide. Wally explained all the other problems he had at that time and how difficult it would be to find another publican as good. The publican ended up apologising, realising what an affront it would have been to the way Wally Emery cared for his pubs and publicans.

The Burdett Arms in Ramsbury near Marlborough in Wiltshire was typical of the country pubs we owned. The publican was Nellie Liddiard - she had been a widow there for thirty years. Nobody knew the pub by it’s rightful name - it was always known as “Nellie’s”.

The first time I called there was like going inside an old teapot. The floor, walls, ceiling - and even the customers - were all of a like colour - stained rich brown over the years with the smoke of a million 'Woodbines'. From out of this gloom appeared an elderly lady, grey hair tied in a bun, a couple of whiskers and a tooth missing. She heaved her ample bosom onto the counter, folded her arms and looked.

“Good morning Mrs. Liddiard “.

“Morning”.

“I’m your new Area Manager”.

“Yes?”

“I've called to introduce myself”.

“Yes?”

Stuck for words in the face of this sparkling dialogue, I could only offer something that no self-respecting Area Manager from an impoverished brewery should ever do:

“I have called to see if there is anything I can do for you”.

 For what seemed forever, she looked at me without expression:

“Young man - you’re thirty years too late!”

I never asked the question again, but made a jolly friend of Nellie. I took her some sweet-peas, the first I ever grew. They were a bit wilted in the heat of the car by the time I arrived.

“I’ve brought you some sweet peas from my garden”.

I should have remembered that Ramsbury was a village of gardeners.

“You don't call they bloody things sweet peas”, declared one local, to the amusement of all the others and my discomfort.

 “You won’t call yourself a bloody customer if you're not careful” warned Nellie.

Lady publicans, especially widows, were always the toughest disciplinarians.

If you have ever seen the film Band of Brothers, you may be surprised to learn that Nellie was a favourite publican of many of the Americans who were stationed in and around Ramsbury before they went to Europe. 

The Rose and Crown was also in Ramsbury. The beer there was sold from wooden casks that stood on a wood frame, known as stillage or horsing, at the back of the bar servery. The beer was ‘vented’ by means of a ‘spile peg’ in the top of the cask that allowed the air in and beer out through a tap at the bottom. I put an ex-policeman in there as publican. The first night at 10.25 - there was no drinking-up time permitted in those days - tenant Elliott called:

“Time Gentleman please!”

There was a deathly hush from his customers, who were ranged along the pitch-pine seating round three sides of the bar. One stood, walked slowly to the counter, looked Elliott in the eye and said:

"When you want us to go home master, just you knock your little pegs in your barrels. We can tell the bloody time in this village!"

He never called ’Time’ again!

When Wally Emery moved from Berkshire to Somerset I took over his old area. It was my first call at the Coopers Arms, Woolton Hill, near Newbury, where our publican was one Ron Dodd. You didn’t need to ask where the pub was; you could smell it almost from Newbury. It was one of those old country pubs with a smallholding attached on which Ron Dodd kept pigs and chickens and grew vegetables.

“He’s down the back”, said Mrs. Dodd on my first visit. 

I walked to where Ron Dodd was planting onion sets. He gave no sign that he knew I was there.

“Good morning Mr. Dodd, my name is Goodwin, I’m your new Area Manager “.

Without looking up he acknowledged my presence:

“I heard you were about brother. If you’re half as good as the last one you’ll be alright If you’re not, you won’t!” Which was about the best reference Wally could have had.

On a subsequent visit, well after closing time in the afternoon, I walked into the bar looking left and right, to find it crowded with customers.

"What are all these people doing here at this time of the day?”

     “I’ll give you a bit of advice brother. When you walk into a bar, you keep your eyes to the front otherwise you are likely to fa11 over and break your leg”.

On my departure, Ron Dodd produced a bag of eggs.

“I’m sorry Mr. Dodd, but we are not allowed to accept gifts from our publicans”.

“They’re not for you, they’re for your wife”.

“But you don't know my wife”.

"You don‘t know that brother!”  There's no answer to that!

Ron Dodd was generous to a fault, but expected loyalty in return. When he saw a wines and spirits delivery van parked in the vicarage drive, he stomped up the path and rang the bell. The Vicar answered the door.

“When you want a pound Vicar, I’m always top of the list. When you want something to drink lets keep it in the village!”.

Denis was another of our Area Managers - a little younger than Wally and I. When we recounted these tales of pub happenings he would enquire:

“How is it these things happen to you and Wally Emery and nobody else?”

“Of course they happen to you” said Wally: “it's just that you don’t realise that they are all part of the job if you treat people like people instead of just publicans”.

Some time later, Denis, breathless with excitement, caught me up as I was walking into the brewery one morning. “It's happened!”: he laughed,

“One of those things that’s always happening to you and Wally Emery”.

He had gone into one of his pubs early one morning, The Butt of Sherry in Mere in Somerset, to find the bar littered with empty glasses, full ashtrays and crisp packets.

“What's this Mrs Milner, all this mess at this time of the day?”

“Ah! It was Fair Day yesterday and we had an extension until half-past eleven. We didn't get them out until two this morning.

“Didn't get them out until two this morning Mrs. Milner; what about the Police?”

“Don't you worry about the Police, Mr. Keohane; there's no favouritism in this pub - they went the same time as everybody else! ”

It is said, following a poor performer will give you a chance to shine in life. I think this must be said by average achievers who have little to do to improve on poverty. Following a Wally Emery means that to make a mark you have to try that much harder. I followed one Area Manager into the Greyhound in Swindon, where publican Stanley Matthews held sway.

“I hope you are better than the last one”, he said.

“In what way?”

“He used to walk in backwards”.

“Why was that?”

“So that if you asked him for anything, he was always on his way out!”

“If you can wait until I have finished business with your husband 1 will give you a lift into Newbury”, I promised one publican's wife who was already dressed for shopping.

“Oh no you won’t”, retorted Bridgewater, “I know you bloody Area Managers, she can go on the bus”.

And, on the bus she went!

One Area Manager's ambition was to be chased down the road by a jealous husband when he was 84. He never made it - he died in 1990 in his seventies.

If he had lived, he would have still been trying!