A Saint for the Summer Read online

  A Saint For

  The Summer

  By MARJORY McGINN

  (A novel by the author of

  Things Can Only Get Feta)

  A Saint For The Summer

  Published by Pelagos Press, 2018.

  ISBN: 978-1-9999957-0-6

  Copyright ©Marjory McGinn, 2018.

  The rights of Marjory McGinn to be identified as the Author of this Work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold under the condition that no part of it may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission in writing of the author Marjory McGinn

  ([email protected]).

  This book is a work of fiction, Names, characters, businesses, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events of locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover illustration and design by Tony Hannaford

  (www.anthonyhannaford.co.uk)

  Editing, formatting and author photograph by Jim Bruce (www.ebooklover.co.uk)

  Dedication

  In memory of my parents, John and Mary

  About the author

  Marjory McGinn is a Scottish-born author and journalist, brought up in Australia and now based in England. Her journalism has appeared in leading newspapers in Australia and Britain, including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sun-Herald, The Daily Mail, The Times and Scotland’s The Herald.

  A youthful work/travel year in Athens inspired a lifelong fascination for Greece. In 2010, together with her partner Jim and their Jack Russell dog, Wallace, she set off from Britain on an adventure to the southern Peloponnese that lasted four years and was the basis for her three travel memoirs, available on Amazon. This is her first novel.

  Marjory also writes a blog with a Greek theme on the website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com and she can be followed on Twitter www.twitter.com/@fatgreekodyssey and on Facebook www.facebook.com/ThingsCanOnlyGetFeta

  Other books by the author

  Things Can Only Get Feta

  Homer’s Where The Heart Is

  A Scorpion In The Lemon Tree

  Author’s note

  Some of the narrative in this book is based on real events relating to the Second World War in southern Greece, particularly the little-known Battle of Kalamata and the evacuation, capture and escape of British and allied troops in April 1941, which has been described as the ‘Greek Dunkirk’. Although the two main villages in the book were inspired by real villages in the Mani, their names have been changed and the characters are fictitious.

  Greek language note: Masculine names in Greek that end in ‘os’, ‘as’ or ‘is’ will drop the final ‘s’ in the vocative case (when addressing someone directly). The name Dimitris, for example, will change when you say, “Dimitri, are you there?”

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Marathousa

  Chapter 2: Villa Anemos

  Chapter 3: Greece for beginners

  Chapter 4: The Spartan arrives

  Chapter 5: Myrto and Zeus

  Chapter 6: Lipid lush

  Chapter 7: Mission improbable

  Chapter 8: Ascent to Platanos

  Chapter 9: Crosses to bear

  Chapter 10: The wisdom of the coffee cup

  Chapter 11: Myrto’s lament

  Chapter 12: The custard muse

  Chapter 13: A poltergeist wind

  Chapter 14: Evangelismos

  Chapter 15: Polly, Bronte, Kalamata

  Chapter 16: Happy as Hades

  Chapter 17: Platanos revisited

  Chapter 18: That minx Medusa!

  Chapter 19: What Greek men want

  Chapter 20: The Spartan’s strategy

  Chapter 21: Saint Dimitrios

  Chapter 22: Road map to the past

  Chapter 23: Hearts of fire

  Chapter 24: A friend of Greece

  Chapter 25: Myrto’s landing

  Chapter 26: Destiny goes large

  Chapter 27: A saint rides on

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  The Peloponnese series

  Praise for Marjory McGinn

  Map of the area

  Calamity Bay

  Way down south in Calamity Bay,

  Sat 10,000 men who were trying to get away.

  The Navy came and took away the ill,

  While the rest of us crept back up the hill.

  − Part of a poem by British signalman Fred Bundy, who was captured by the Germans at Kalamata in April 1941

  Chapter 1

  Marathousa

  On the journey to the hillside village of Marathousa, I had an entourage of twelve Greek saints. It was a notable crew and a promising start to an expedition that was otherwise underscored with doubt, not least from the knowledge that Greece, in that late summer of 2012, was sliding into the vortex of economic crisis.

  Fiscal folly, however, was probably a minor scourge to this celestial group I was travelling with. They were in the taxi I hailed at Kalamata Airport, under the watchful gaze of the nervous driver. He was chewing gum and fingering his mobile phone at sporadic intervals. It was clamped, when not in use, between his legs. The saints were arranged across the dashboard of the taxi in images the size of postcards encased in cheap plastic frames. How they were attached exactly was unclear, unless by some ecclesiastical sleight of hand. Occasionally, when the taxi hit a pothole, the frames jiggled and then resumed their beatific calm.

  After I settled myself in the taxi, it didn’t take long to discover the reason for this holy line-up. I chose the front seat because the back had no workable seatbelts and I had been forewarned by those more familiar with Greece about the maverick stunts of its drivers. The front seat felt like it had no springs, as if it had been salvaged from some old wreck, and the seat belt sagged when it was attached. It was also a very hot day − about 90 degrees − and the driver told me the air-con wasn’t working properly.

  “Air conditioning is having a crisis too,” the driver guffawed. “You lucky, Miss, you did not come in August. Po, po, po!” I took the last bit to be an expression with more pizzazz than real meaning. “August is hell! Too hot, too many people, and every day the traffic is craaazy.”

  I had never been to Greece in August and now I was sure I would never want to. September was frantic enough, and the traffic was barmy as well. The route from the airport to the city was a busy single carriageway, with drivers jockeying for dominance, overtaking on a whim, sometimes forcing other cars onto the dirt edges of the road, bordered on the right by tall ranks of wild bamboo. Along the verges, gypsy families were walking with kids in tow, trailing puffs of dust from their bare feet, and bone-thin dogs. The presence of nearby gypsy camps was explained gustily by the driver with plenty of hand gestures, sometimes two at once, meaning the steering wheel was unmanned for seconds. I found myself imploring the saints a lot, and my forehead was beginning to bead with sweat. The driver noticed my obsession with the dashboard.

  “My beautiful icons. You like, eh?” he said, kissing the fingertips of his right hand. And then he rattled off their names. I caught a Yiorgos, Andreas, Nektarios, Mihalis … on it went. No women in the group. I didn’t bother to ask. Why provoke him when we still had miles of this road to travel apparently.

  “Why so many saints in the car?” I asked, as if I didn’t have an inkling already.

  “Not so many! Twelve out of hundreds. They keep me safe. If they are here, no accidents, no trouble. In the crisis, no money for car i
nsurance,” he said, holding up his right hand and rubbing his index finger and thumb together. While he was doing this, he suddenly swerved the car with his left hand to avoid a dead dog on the road and then straightened up again without missing a beat. He nodded vibrantly towards the line of saints.

  “This is what I have for the Greek car insurance now,” he said, laughing loudly. His black eyes, with small fleshy pillows for eyelids, crinkled at the edges.

  I imagined this was the wind-up he offered all his passengers as an icebreaker on this devil of a highway. But I laughed as well, until further along the road, he had to brake hard when a car pulled out of a dirt track without looking. The seat belt that had seemed useless gripped at my chest and I felt relieved. The saints jostled a lot. The driver let out several rounds of the word ‘gamoto!’ which sounded curiously like some kind of Japanese motor scooter but which I later discovered meant ‘fuck it!’

  Finally, we arrived at the city centre, a bubbling expanse of apartment blocks hunched together along narrow streets. Cafés were plentiful and filled with lively punters. On the surface, at least, there was little sense of crisis. On the roads it was a different story. There were countless intersections through the city and a nervous urge for drivers to gun engines and run red lights, including the taxi driver, with a few more ‘gamotos!’ thrown in. The only other thing that caught my attention were the industrial-sized bins on street corners overflowing with refuse, being picked over by scabrous cats. The council workers were on strike, the driver told me, protesting against a recent round of austerity measures that marked out this economic crisis.

  “Greece under the boot of the European dictatorship now. Always the strikes now. Always trouble. Welcome to our country, to Kalamata, eh?”

  He fell silent for a while, then the mobile rang between his legs. He plucked it out, barked down it for 30 seconds and dropped it back into position.

  “Kids, eh? That was my son, Iraklis. Cannot do anything without first ask the father. Calls me all day for this and that. Twenty-five. No baby, eh?”

  “No, indeed he’s not,” I said, wondering why the son bothered when he only ever got 30 seconds of paternal wrath.

  We sped on through the city. I was starting to feel weary after a dawn flight from Edinburgh to London, then another from London to Kalamata. I was unimpressed by my Greek arrival so far, until we stopped at traffic lights on a T-junction joining Navarino Street. In front of us, a wide gulf was spread out between the Mani peninsula on the left and the Messinian peninsula on the other side, two of the three prongs that hang down from the southern Peloponnese like pulled roots. With small coves along the coast and, high above, the tall peaks of the Mani’s Taygetos mountains, the scene resembled one of those famed highland paintings of Scotland, with lochs and hills wrapped in strange pearly light. It was beautiful. After the chaos of the city, the view ahead of me shimmered with promise, so much so that I hoped I would be proved wrong about the wisdom of this Greek mission.

  The lights changed and the driver gunned the tin can and roared left, leaving a cloud of burning rubber behind us. Navarino Street stretched along the southern edge of the city, parallel to a long strip of beach, the sea bubbling with swimmers at its edge. Further on were small coastal villages that hinted at secret coves. We reached a fork in the road with one branch continuing along the coast, the other was the main road down through the Mani that would zigzag along the lower reaches of the Taygetos mountains for part of the way, though we were apparently not going that far. The higher we climbed, however, past olive and orange groves, the more breathtaking the view of the gulf. I felt we were entering a different kind of Greece, but not without the occasional unsettling image, like the round safety mirrors on switchback roads that were smashed and useless.

  “Cowboys, shoot out mirrors,” said the driver. “Maniots, all cowboys.” Then he roared with laughter.

  Cowboys or not, I felt myself relax for the first time since I’d left Scotland.

  “You here on holiday?”

  I shook my head. “I’m here to see my father. He lives in the hillside village where we’re going. He’s not been well.”

  “Oh! I hope he gets better soon.”

  “Thanks. We’ll see.”

  “So, you going to look after him, like a good Greek daughter?” he said, his pillow eyes flickering towards me.

  I said nothing.

  “So how long you stay?”

  “No longer than I have to,” I said, sounding nippier than I intended.

  I kept my eyes on the passing scenery. I couldn’t see the expression on his face, but I could sense it. My comment was something a Greek daughter probably wouldn’t say. But I wasn’t a Greek daughter. I was barely any kind of daughter. And Angus was hardly the perfect father, if the truth be told, and someone I’d hardly seen in the past 10 years and had irregular communication with, apart from birthday and Christmas cards. A letter had arrived from Greece a few weeks earlier, however, asking me to come over to help him as he had a health problem. He would explain in more detail when I got there. I guessed he’d asked me because I was the only one in the family available. My sister Shona had kids to look after, and my mother had recently remarried, so that ruled her out.

  “Think of it as a late summer holiday,” Shona had urged me. “I mean, I wish I could go myself.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “But it’s Greece. It will be fabulous, apart from Dad being unwell.”

  A holiday in Greece. That didn’t appeal either. I had only been here once before, not long after Angus first arrived. I didn’t remember much about that visit but it wasn’t Greece in crisis at least. It was a simpler time but I recalled not liking the food much, or the beach, or the sunburn on my pale Celtic skin. And it was only spring. I wasn’t built for hot climates. Maybe that was the main reason I didn’t care for the place and had never bothered to return. The other reason was more complicated, not something I wanted to analyse on the way up a steep mountainside with a saint-toting taxi driver whose son might ring again at any second, necessitating another perilous one-handed manoeuvre.

  “What’s wrong with your father?” asked the driver.

  “Something to do with his heart, I think.”

  The driver nodded sagely and lapsed into his own thoughts as we drove ever higher into the hills. It was a fraction cooler up here and I wound down the window. The turn-off to the village had a near-obscured sign and the road was narrow, cut into the side of a steep hill. It swung round a sharp bend, where the view opened up again, with thick swathes of olive orchards right down to the coast. It was easy to see how Kalamata was the olive oil capital of Greece. The city was now visible, spread out along the head of the gulf. The apartment blocks from this distance looked squat and cubist, sparkling in the intense sunshine.

  By the time we reached the centre of Marathousa, I knew we had come too far, according to the sketchy instructions Angus had given me. We were in front of a square that sat in the crook of a low hillside, where much of the village was built in tiers above. On the left of the square was a large white church with an imposing bell tower. At the back was a taverna with tables placed outside under a tall tree, and on the right a café. Small groups of people dressed in black were huddled around the café’s outdoor tables, talking quietly. The church bell was tolling, a heavy single note that carried easily in the warm air.

  “Must be a funeral today, Miss. Sounds like a service.”

  Twelve saints − and now a funeral! But I had more mundane things to worry about.

  “We’ve come too far,” I said. “We have to turn and go back. We’ve passed the house.”

  The driver manoeuvred the car slowly and we set off back the way we’d come, past a graveyard, another small church and more olive groves and, here and there, a modern villa half-hidden behind the trees. From this approach, rather than the other, we could finally see the sign for Villa Anemos, nothing more than a ragged bit of wood nailed to an olive tree by the roadsid
e. The word ‘villa’ offered some rural humour perhaps because the property, at the end of a long pathway, was an old stone house with a scuffed blue door and a roof that from a distance looked like a badly assembled jigsaw made from ancient pantiles.

  “This it?” asked the driver, his eyes strafing the front of the property with an unguarded, critical look.

  “I guess so.”

  I sat for a moment, staring at the house. I had the sudden urge to just drive on, but then the front door opened slowly and a man, dressed in what looked like a long black robe, stood in the shadowy doorway, looking out, his long hair tied back at the nape of his neck. He held up his hand in a kind of greeting and retreated inside, leaving the door ajar.

  The driver turned his big eyes towards me and scratched his chin. “Looks like papas, Greek priest, Miss.”

  That’s exactly what I thought. Like one of the old guys on the dashboard display.

  “I get your things. I hope we are not too late,” he said, swinging himself out the driver’s side and unlocking the boot to fetch my suitcase.

  Too late? But I knew what he meant. A funeral bell. A priest at the house. I hadn’t spoken to Angus for a couple of days. I’d called him on the mobile number he’d given me but he’d already warned me he wasn’t good with mobiles, or emails either, which is why we heard from him intermittently by ordinary mail.

  I paid the driver and told him to leave my case at the front gate. I’d manage from there. He shook my hand vibrantly.

  “Good luck, Miss. But do you need me to stay? See that everything is okay here?”

  I was touched by his thoughtfulness. “No, whatever happens, I’ll be fine. Thank you,” I said, trying to sound calm, but I was far from that.

  He drove away slowly, watching the house for a while, then sped off, the wheels throwing up dirt from the side of the road. I took my case and walked slowly down the long path, almost wishing I was anywhere but Greece.