Mountain Goat on the road to Mohos, Crete, Summer 1979

As I mentioned in the previous post Maria and I would usually go to the Disco O La La after lingering over a long dinner at a local taverna. The disco would go until the early hours of the morning, and occasionally a group of us would then wander down to the beach and wait for the sun to come up.

About two weeks into our holiday I celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday, which I was generous enough to share with the summer solstice. So the guys decided we should make a party of it by having a barbecue on the beach.

That wasn’t as easy as it sounds, as there is not a lot of firewood lying around on an island that is as mountainous and rocky as Crete, but they managed it. In this photo some may say we look like a bunch of drunken louts – which . . .  come to think of it . . . but hey! I was taking the photo, and it is in focus, so there. I’d prefer to think of us as a bunch of young people simply having a happy time.

Birthday Beach Party, Stalis, Crete, Friday 22nd June 1979

The girl on the right of the photo, the one who looks out of it, was a random Scandinavian tourist who tagged along with us from the disco. More about those tourists in another post. The couple I want to talk about is the girl in the denim blue tank top and her husband – those two on the left of the above photo, and again in the middle in this below photo – taken at the disco before we went to the beach. (The girl she is hugging is a long lost friend).

Disco O La La, Stalis, Crete, Friday 22nd June 1979

Theirs was a tragic star-crossed lovers tale. Some years before, when she arrived as a tourist to Stalis, they met, fell in love and married. I think she came from New York – anyway, somewhere big in the States. He went there with her, maybe drove a taxi or something like that, but couldn’t settle into life in the USA. She, meantime, couldn’t settle into life in Stalis, or maybe it was a job situation; I can’t remember the details. So they separated, even though they cared for each other deeply, and occasionally she journeyed back to Crete to catch up. This was one of those occasions. Sad, huh?

When she left, I often came across her husband at a lonely fishing spot. He caught octopus, which he would slap against a rock to knock out the black ink. Later, the octopus was tenderised in a cement mixer. Ultimately, it would become dinner. He (the husband, not the octopus) always looked in his element, so at home with what he was doing. Such sea to supper habits would be impossible in New York. Perhaps it was the ocean and the solitude he found hard to do without.

By the end of June, Maria, my new-found friend, needed to return to her job as an anaesthetic nurse in Germany. She was taller than me, and one of her occupational hazards was banging her thighs against the edge of the surgical trolleys. It must have seemed to her that the bruises had no sooner disappeared than it was time to return to work.

It was time for me too. Except that I didn’t have a job to return to. Stalis was small then; two hotels, two pensions, one disco, one souvenir shop, one grocery shop and many tavernas. But it also had a very long sandy beach, one of the most beautiful on Crete, and the European summer holiday season was about to start. The place was about to be invaded by Scandinavians and Germans on prepaid holiday packages. I was fresh from waitressing at Michael’s Nook in the Lakes District, and had little trouble getting a job at the hotel that offered half-board to its guests.

I guess there is a statute of limitations, but all the same I won’t name the hotel, as I wasn’t actually supposed to be working. I wore the standard European waiter’s outfit, a black skirt and white blouse, which, like any uniform, kind of marks you out. Yet every so often the boss would receive a tip-off from Heraklion that the police had set off to do a regular check that everything along the coast was on the up and up, and I would get an instruction to drop what I was doing and head for the beach, to make out like I was just a regular tourist. I probably looked more like a washed up penguin, and sometimes, I probably lingered there a bit longer than my boss appreciated. But I didn’t want to run into trouble.

We probably shouldn’t have worried too much, as I looked more Greek than many of the locals. But in a place like Stalis, everyone knew who was who, and of course my language would have been a quick giveaway.

The language wasn’t a problem for the waitressing, because the meal was fixed. I’d serve a table a course at a time so all I had to learn was to count to ten and tell the kitchen whether I needed first, second or third (course) and how many. Get the drift? All the same, my first few attempts were met with gales of laughter from the Greek cooks, even if I thought my pronunciation of próta, défteros and trítos was perfect.

Conversely, my native English was so highly-prized that I was permanently stationed on the terrace at breakfast, which was more free-form. Which tourist doesn’t prefer to take theirs in the open air, sheltered from the sun, with the vista of a clean beach and blue sea spread before them, rather than sit inside in the same room where they will eat dinner? I could run and fetch at their every command, and often the other waiters would have to call me to their tables to clarify what was required. The guests used to ask me how was it that I spoke such good English, and I would tell them I was Australian. They’d look at my almost black hair and dark olive skin and challenge my truthfulness. ‘No really,’ I’d insist. ‘See that tall girl over there with blonde hair and green eyes? She’s Kritikós (Cretan) . . . I’m Australian.’

They never believed me, possibly because they hadn’t read up on Hellenic history before their trip?

(Cue a comment from Lord Beari).