Page 45 of Summer in Greece

‘I’m trying to decide if this is the best birthday I’ve ever had.’

He smiled right into her eyes. ‘Don’t decide yet. The night is still young. What would you like to do next?’

CHAPTER 18

GERTIE

Kea, 1916.

THE SCHOOL ROOM THRONGED WITH nursing staff and crew, yet I could only see two men in coal-blackened vests. I remembered the firemen’s change of shift. That endless tramping of feet on the spiral staircase behind my cabin, down into the belly of the ship. There must have been many stokers to fuel such an enormous vessel. Were they drowned in the bowels of the boiler room, trapped inside as she went down, or picked up by the rescuing battleships?

I remembered the trundling racket of the watertight fire doors opening for the change of shift, but I don’t recall hearing them again. Perhaps in the panic, I’d missed it. Please God don’t let all those poor, coal covered men still be in the boiler room at the bottom of the sea.

I rushed around, searching for Matron to ask. My heart was thumping and my tears queuing up, waiting for the first chance of release. I saw Nurse Josephine across the room and squeezed through the crowd.

‘Please, Nurse Josephine,’ I called.

She stopped and turned around. ‘Gertie, thank goodness you’re safe, I was concerned.’

‘Can you tell me if all the firemen got away safely? It seems there are only two here.’

She shrugged. ‘I think they all escaped. They got into trouble for lowering a boat and rowing away from the ship without orders. The Sergeant ordered them back and made them pick up drowning people. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, I was worried they might be trapped. What happened to the poor engineer who lost his foot, the patient we hauled out of the water? Did he die? I gave him some of my blood.’

‘It was you? Everyone’s talking about it. Why are you crying?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, Josephine . . . I really don’t know. I want to go home.’

I kept myself busy with the other VADs, as we became accustomed to this strange place. We tore a sheet into strips for bandages, helped local women cut up bread and cheese, and washed cups and jars as they became empty. Several of the survivors needed medical attention, like the boy scout who had deep rope-burns on his hands. The surgeon, pale and tired, his long, sensitive fingers scrubbed to within an inch of their lives, was talking to Matron. The local doctor, short and round and brown-skinned, was attending to Perkins, clearly unconscious and stretched across three café tables.

*

By late afternoon, word passed around that we would be collected in a day or two. The local schoolmaster, Mr Pantalies, spoke English. He took charge of the situation, billeting the Britannic’s medical staff and crew with various local families.

I found myself in the care of an elderly woman, wizened yet spritely, with dancing eyes paled by cataracts. Her house, standing directly on the harbour, consisted of a single room, a spacious white cube with small shuttered windows and one door that opened onto the quayside. Leaning against the front of the cottage were an upturned row-boat, heaps of yellow fishing net, and a single chair with a sagging, rush-mat seat. A tall iron anchor stood rusting by the window and, next to that, a donkey with a rope connecting one front leg to a hind leg. A chipped enamel bucket of water stood next to the beast and a hammock of greens hung from a nail in the wall of the house.

The blue front door was in two parts, the top hooked open. The woman in black led me inside, and I was surprised to see the room had a compacted earthen floor, a quarter of which was taken up by the largest raised mezzanine bed I had ever seen. Three wide wooden steps, flanked by polished cupboards and drawers, led up to the sleeping platform. The small space on either side was filled by rough-plank shelves stacked with neatly folded linen.

Two feet below the beamed ceiling, another rough shelf fringed the room crammed with bric-a-brac. Gaudy painted plates, exotic flowers made of starched linen, feathers, and pine cones; china figurines, Jesus pictures complete with bleeding hearts and crowns of thorns, a silver crucifix, and ornate oil lamps that I doubted had ever been lit.

On crocheted doilies that hung, limp as Dali’s clocks, over the edge of the shelf, stood the most bizarre collection of fishing memorabilia. A spider crab, open claws raised towards the ceiling as if waiting to hug God, and a giant clamshell, pale as a dead circus clown, grinned lifelessly towards the door.

Below the shelf, even more out of sync with everything, hung a metre-wide tapestry of a Swiss scene depicting swans on a lake surrounded by snowy mountain peaks. Next to the tapestry, the contents of a dark-wood frame drew my attention. Outlined in chalk and charcoal, on heavy grey paper, was a simple, classical drawing of a naked young man with what appeared to be a pair of real white bird’s wings outstretched from his shoulders.

‘Icarus! ’ the old woman yelled in a squeaky voice when she noticed my interest. ‘Icarus! ’ She wagged a crooked finger at the picture. I recalled my father and his pigeons at home and longed to hear him yelling at me in his loud, bombastic way.

The room smelled of mothballs, bees wax, and basil.

The petite woman, clearly proud of her home, banged a fist against her heart. ‘Yiayá! ’ she cried.

I nodded, made a little bow, and mimicked her, thumping myself in the chest. ‘Gertie!’

She pulled in her chin and frowned. ‘Tee? ’

I smiled and nodded, pleased to connect with the grand lady. ‘Tee . . . yes, all right, that’ll do.’

*