Europe in the Looking Glass (12 page)

We said that we should be very pleased. At three o’clock David drove up to the station to put the car on a railway waggon ready for the morning. Simon and I sat in the street. We bought an illustrated paper, called the
Excelsior
– EΞEΛΣIOΡ. Though published daily, its news photographs consisted entirely of portraits of international stage favourites and views of Japanese tea-gardens in spring. The letterpress we could not decipher. It is one of the fallacies most sedulously fostered by schoolmasters among their pupils, that modern Greek bears no relation to old. Both are precisely the same, though not unnaturally some of the more obscure grammatical forms have been dropped. I much regretted that owing to this deception, I had not attempted to preserve some remnant of a former culture.

Eventually we laid the paper upon our table, whereat the newspaper boys tried to snatch it away, in order to resell it. To Simon’s annoyance, I tore it up, with cold-blooded deliberation, before their eyes. They then went away, but were replaced by a swarm of another genus armed with brushes and
polish with which they were anxious to set about our feet. These in their turn, were followed by men carrying baskets of delicious-looking almonds, dispensed with the naked palm. At length, weary of the attentions of the populace, we went to tea.

The roseleaf jam burst on our palates like the Pacific on Bilbao’s vision. Its taste was as rare as that of Tokay. David arrived before it was finished, hot, bruised and angry. The Germans and he had had to lift Diana bodily on to her truck, as the narrow gauge rolling-stock was only just long and broad enough to take the car at all; and the ends of the truck refused to let down. He finished the jam. Then we sat and talked. Mr Teeling said that his wife was enjoying her summer with the baby at Reigate. He offered us a bath, but as the water supply was limited, we declined to impose on his kindness too much.

He occupied the ground floor of one house. The rooms were small but lofty, and decorated with highly-finished modern Greek pottery and Japanese landscapes of Fuji Yama rising from between storks and irises, painted on rush matting. Strips of brilliant-coloured native cloth patterned in black, blue, red and white diamonds, and a Medici print here and there, completed the effect. On a table an expensively-illustrated edition of Shakespeare and a very beautifully-bound Dante in illuminated vellum proved our host to be a citizen of the Republic of Letters. After looking through some photograph albums, we walked out to see the castle.

The twilight was already deepening as we climbed the hill by a series of steps winding amidst a labyrinth of small houses, which gradually, as we rose higher, gave place to one-roomed mud boxes. Occasionally, as we picked our way, we would stumble over a strand of wire connecting two sticks, where someone had appropriated a piece of land – or more accurately a convenient shelf of hill – on which to build a home. Perhaps the materials were even in the making and the rectangular mud bricks lying out in rows to dry. It was at last possible to appreciate the embarrassment inflicted on the children of Israel by the absence of straw.

At length we reached the castle, David and Simon panting with indignation at being thus dragged to any object of interest, Mr Teeling the while maintaining a flow of interesting conversation. It was almost night. Across the gulf the mountains were just visible. Somewhere in their midst lay Missolonghi. Below, the myriad roofs of the town stretched down to the harbour, now a blaze of twinkling lights duplicated and triplicated in the ripples. A streak of smoky orange gradually faded in the sky. Suddenly a gunshot sounded, boomed and echoed from hill to hill. It was the salute of departure to the first boat of the currant fleet bound for America.

September is the busiest month of the year in Patras, when all the currants are brought down from the country and shipped to England and the United States so as to be in the shops by Christmas. When the first boat from each of the different fleets bound for the different countries sails, a gun celebrates the event. So rich is the land, that many of the currant exporters become drachma-millionaires simply by right of peasant proprietorship. Throughout Greece there is land awaiting ownership, though much has lately been alloted to refugees from Smyrna and Asia Minor. Still, If a man builds a house with a roof over it on unclaimed land, the land becomes his.

The castle of Patras is Roman, Byzantine, Frankish, Saracenic and Venetian, thus epitomising the whole history of Greek dependence. Groping our way in the blackness, we examined the Roman aqueduct, carried across what had formerly been a moat. In the walls the white marble of ancient Greek capitals glistened at random from among the blocks of stone. The lintel posts of one doorway were inscribed with Gothic lettering, and the cross-piece of another with Turkish. A Roman well-head stood in a courtyard, to which a carved Byzantine archway gave entrance. And the whole length of the rampart exhibited a typical pattern of Venetian fortifications, resembling the inverted pelmet of a cardinal’s throne. The building is at present used as a convict prison;
and the forms of sentries motionless and silent, gave an air of reality to the historic traditions. Mr Teeling dealt with them in suave and fluent Greek.

We descended by the road. As there was a moon, the town was not lighted. Gas is too precious to waste. Since, however, the moon did not rise until after midnight, we were obliged to feel our way as best we could over the irregular surface of the road. We came eventually to an open square. On the opposite side of it rose the face of a substantial oblong building, punctuated by two tiers of barred and lighted windows, behind which black figures were moving in spasmodic groups. At a door in the centre, and at the lower windows, crowds of women were swarming and talking in low, even voices. This was the debtor’s prison, a subject for a modern Hogarth. There is no bankruptcy law for the poor in Greece.

Mr Teeling then honoured us with his company at dinner – not upon the pavement but in the road. The Germans had taken advantage of our absence to write some postcards home – the first for months. We ordered a bottle of syrupy brown wine, named Malvasia, first manufactured at Monemvasia in Sparta. This wine, which we had also tasted at Ferrara, was the original Malmsey, exported to our then notoriously drunken island, in which the Duke of Clarence, whose bones now hang in a glass case on the walls of the crypt of Tewkesbury Abbey, met his unfortunate end. It is a strange coincidence that not only did the wine of Malmsey have its birthplace in Greece, but also the Dukedom of Clarence. One of the oldest titles of the English monarchy takes its name from a small town on the West coast of the Peloponnese.

Glarentza, as it is properly called, first assumed its position as a ducal appendage, in the peerage of the principality of Achaia, under the rule of Geoffrey de Villehardouin, the second of the Frankish princes of that province. Later it became the chief port of the Morea and the seat of the Achaian royal mint. By the marriage of Count Florence of Hainault with Isabella de Villehardouin, the title eventually descended to the counts of
Hainault; and was arbitrarily revived by Edward III and his queen, Philippa of that family, in favour of their second son, Lionel. The town itself was destroyed in 1430 by order of the then Exarch of Mistra, Constantine Dragases, future and last Emperor of the East.

As our dinner progressed, enough Malmsey to have drowned a hundred Dukes of Clarence seemed to disappear. Mr Teeling’s complexion assumed the tints of a duck’s egg, and he began to chortle out a series of naughty stories. I retired to bed early. The others sought adventure on the pier, where a jazz-band was playing, though no one would dance to it.

On our way to dinner, an English youth of about our own age had come running up to ask if we would play tennis tomorrow. He had heard of our arrival. His name was Sullivan, and his family had lived in Patras for over a hundred years. He himself had rowed for London University, and his elder brothers were also familiar with the Henley course. We replied that, unfortunately, our game was football.

THE NEXT DAY WAS SUNDAY.
We had been careful to move the beds away from the walls of the single bedroom which we were all three obliged to share, and had also strewn little rings of Keating’s powder round each of the castors of the bedsteads. We were therefore sleeping soundly when aroused by the porter holding a hand-candlestick, at half-past five. Dressing by the light of one gas mantle, set in the furthest corner of the room, we caught the seven o’clock express to Athens, the car, accompanied by the Germans, having preceded us two hours earlier. Mr Constantinopoulos came down to see us off, his gnarled brown hands twitching and washing in a manner that showed he had retained the English Saturday night tradition of his youth.

‘Don’t kiss too many pretty girls in Athens,’ he croaked. ‘Bye-bye – be good!’

The train moved off. We were ensconced in a first-class carriage, so small that it was unable to contain even our suitcases; a square box with one seat in each corner, upholstered in faded green casement cloth, upon which hung antimacassars browned with the contact of successive generations of heads. The ceiling was painted in a design of acanthus leaves radiating from the gas globe in brown and ochre relief. Above one seat was inlet a coloured photograph of Olympia. The old narrow gauge rails were no wider than tramlines. After every station or stray cottage at which the express thought fit to stop, a different ticket-collector, each more Anglo-Indian in appearance than the last, would insist upon examining our tickets. They came in couples; one down the central corridor, the other along
the dashboard on the outside of the train. So that if one had wished to hurl oneself from them, opportunity would not have been forthcoming.

The railway crept along between the mountains and the sea, keeping the Gulf of Corinth in sight during the whole journey. We experienced at last the satisfaction of seeing for ourselves that the road would not only have been impassable, but was non-existent. It was not merely that the bridges were down. This would have been immaterial, with the rivers all dry. But in most places there was no more than a track three feet in width with a precipice up and down on either side. For all her agility Diana could never have negotiated ledges that were too narrow to support her wheels. However she would be waiting for us at Corinth…

Thus complacent we drew into a small station surrounded by fig-trees, under which stood one or two tin tables. There, in a siding, lay Diana, on her truck, motionless and forlorn. We waved at the Germans, who said that they had already been delayed an hour. Though she was timed to arrive at Corinth two hours before us, there was nothing to do but continue. We reached Corinth at midday, having averaged sixteen miles an hour. There we waited until six o’clock.

First we had lunch. This consisted of fish that tasted suspiciously unwholesome, followed by the proverbial mutton of the English public school, tough beyond belief, with globules of whitish fat crystallizing on its surface, and garnished with the inevitable and tasteless French beans. We held body to soul with a bottle of Mavrodaphne; though even this was hot. Mr Constantinopoulos and Mr Teeling had both concurred in telling us that outside Athens, this was one of the few good restaurants to be found in Greece.

After sitting erect on wooden-seated Windsor chairs for two hours, we decided that the longer we remained in anxious expectation, jumping to our feet at every whistle, the less likely was the car ever to arrive. We therefore marched out of the station along a siding and descended by a slag-heap to
the beach, the condition of which spoke little for the sanitary arrangements of the neighbouring town. After setting the whole gulf awash with our ducks and drakes, we returned to the waiting-room. The atmosphere was insupportable. Each breath was like drinking from an empty glass. I gathered myself together and set off to ascend a hill above the town.

The Grecian landscape in August and September, but for the vines, currants, olives, and salad-green pine-bushes, consists either of bleached earth, merging into surface dust of as many shades as the egg-shell of the common fowl; or rock of the same hue; or expanses of matted brown scrub six inches deep, that was once vegetation. As I topped the hill, the view disclosed a brown plateau stretching away to a field of vines not more than two feet high. To one side rose the dark outlines of a cypress and a group of poplars. On the horizon the ever-present succession of mountain peaks stood out from the sky. Below the cliff, itself a dazzling puttied white, with a man seated sideways on a donkey riding up it in a cloud of dust, the mud-coloured houses of New Corinth fell away to the sea in rectangular blocks. And beyond them glittered the indescribable scarab-blue of the water, a blue that threw the remainder of the landscape into a sepia aquatint, and the sky into the pallor of a new sheet of foolscap. On the right the gulf ended in the Isthmus, slit somewhere by its canal. Old Corinth was not visible. Choking with dust, I descended into New. But that strange ill-defined smell that pertains to Greece was too overpowering – the hot dry smell of dust, combined with the more pungent, hotter odour of untended chickens. I betook myself once more to the waiting-room.

Another two hours we waited. Simon sat upright as ever on his hard chair, watching the lines. David and I slept full length on the sofas that flanked the doorway. Above us hung still lives in bloodless shiny oils, of the school of the master who decorated the dining-room of the Paddington Hotel. Casual men and women sauntering in for a drink, were surprised to find two Europeans fast asleep, and a third gazing with the fixity of despair at the burnished metals.

After six, I insisted that David should come and paddle. We had no sooner taken off our shoes and stockings and wetted our feet, when a cry of triumph from Simon, perched on the slag-heap, proclaimed the arrival of Diana. Her truck was, of course, placed carefully in the middle of the train which was going on to Athens. And it required half-an-hour’s elaborate shunting in which to release it, each of the hinder trucks having to be moved by a separate engine and deposited elsewhere. Eventually, with the eye of the whole station fixed upon her, Diana was manoeuvred up to a small stone platform, covered with conical baskets of grapes. Then, by the use of every dram of our joint strength, assisted by the entire station staff and an iron bar, which the Germans had stolen from Patras for the purpose, we levered the car on to the platform. Fleischmann and Schwert by their efficiency delayed the proceedings as far as possible. Despite them, Diana eventually arrived at the cloakroom door, and once more was filled with our six pieces of luggage. The Germans, in order to make room for themselves, took half-an-hour affixing a trunk to the grid at the back. They had some thirty feet of rope with which to perform the operation, and were determined to make use of it all – until the box was invisible beneath a ruthless network of knots.

At last we started. We crossed the Corinth Canal, a narrow cut in the earth, with sharp smooth sides falling perpendicularly to the water beneath. The bridge seemed of no great size, and one might have mistaken the cutting for nothing more than an ordinary ravine, but for the extraordinary spectacle of a minute toy-boat steaming along beneath our wheels, which was in reality rather bigger than an ordinary cross-channel steamer. Immediately afterwards it began to grow dark.

For the first part of the journey the road, as is usual with all paths of communication in Greece, wound along the face of the mountains, the sea, now the Aegean, glittering sheer below. Greek officials in London had described it as a ‘verry good road, but tveesty’. It was an
abominable
road. In one place we pulled up within three inches of a missing bridge. In another,
a gulley some hundred feet deep, was crossed by a few boards flung casually from one side to the other, some of which were not in place. Diana, impulsive as ever, shot over on two wheels before any of her passengers had realised what was happening. The Germans were terrified and full of advice.

Our map marked the distance as thirty miles. When we had gone well over fifty, a glow in the sky warned us of our approach to the city, and we were overjoyed to catch our first glimpse of Athens – a glitter of distant electricity radiating over a large acreage of sloping hill. With an intuition that had become a second nature, David, guided by the ever-recurrent tramlines, drove straight to the centre of the city and drew up outside the Hotel Grande Bretagne Lampsa, attended as usual by an angry policeman asking questions about the back light. Very tired, we hurriedly washed the dust of Corinth from our pores and walked up the street to the Petit Palais Hotel to dinner. The Petit Palais is in reality Prince Nicholas’s town house and has the distinction of being nearly twice as expensive as the Ritz. To our delight and astonishment the first person to be seen was Michael, seated with a party of diplomats, and eating a plate of ham with an expression of sardonic dignity. We descended on him with effusion and bore him away, ham and all, to another table. He seemed slightly embarrassed. Simon’s pearl pin, however, saved the situation to some extent. Michael said that he had been dreading this moment for six weeks, ever since David had written to say that we were on the point of starting. We replied that we had known that, and had been saving up for it. Michael, it was divulged later, had never really expected us to arrive, but had known that we had actually left England because he had seen in the
Times
that Mr David Henniker had failed to answer a summons for mutilating an ice-cream barrow in Ludgate Circus during a treasure-hunt. David explained that there was already a warrant out for his arrest when we left, as he had forgotten to pay a previous fine. He supposed they would not bother to extradite. In any case,
Michael with his influence, could smooth things over. Michael is in the diplomatic service. His surname is Trower.

The food was excellent, and we appreciated the forethought of the Greek royal family in having laid down the excellent hock that was obtainable. It transpired that Michael was also staying at the Grande Bretagne, as he had been obliged to give up his flat. The water supply had run out. And his servant had found means of terminating the lease by inviting, in Michael’s absence, all the most disreputable women of the town to a gramophone party, which was so noisy and lasted so late, that the landlord, who lived next door, could bear with his tenant no longer.

In the middle of our conversation there appeared upon the scene a small man with finely-cut features and a neat, white, military moustache. His name was John Lennox Howe – a name celebrated throughout the Near East for its owner’s business capability. He said that he had already been informed that Kyrios Troover (Mr Trower) was dining with Lordos Viron (Lord Byron) at the Petit Palais. David he knew, as David’s family have interests in an obscure bank with various roots in the Balkans. One of these Howe was engaged in winding-up. He was concerned lest David should attempt to borrow money off him on the strength of it. He invited us all to go round to his flat, where we discovered that he was the author of the only existing book on Heliogabalus.

His apartment was on the ground floor, opening on to a walled garden shaded by a tree. He gave us Raki, a native absinthe, to drink, and also Cretan wine. David, who insisted on staying till three, paid for his energy next day with a fit of depression that almost drove him to take the first train home.