Under a Croatian Sun (15 page)

B
y the middle of June, we had begun to make some progress with our neighbours. Sometimes we were asked for supper or just to spend the evening with them, drinking and chatting (or rather putting on Oscar-winning sign-language performances when my Croatian failed me). The only drawback was the amount of drink involved. On arrival, I would be plied with something 200 per cent proof – usually
rakija
, their equivalent of vodka, or
Travarica
, another equally deadly gut-rot that they made from grasses, nuts or fruits. The first sip was always wonderful, as if an exquisite nectar had been put into my mouth; but a moment later a burning sensation would zap through my whole being, sending my nervous system into a St Vitus’ dance – thrilling, but at the same time rather alarming. As my last interest in hallucinogenic experimentation had been many years earlier, I tried to side-step the hard stuff and get straight on to the wine, but this wasn’t always easy. Men down here are
expected to take an enthusiastic part in all the manly glass waving and toasting they go in for.

As women in Croatia hardly drink at all, Ivana was safe. She could refuse without offending. I first thought that this might make for a rather slow start to the evening, but I needn’t have worried as the women seemed to devote the first part of their evening to making sure their men weren’t exposed to any life-threatening draughts. Curiously, they didn’t seem worried that the same lethal currents of air might strike down one of their own gender, but I dare say that was yet another of those things I’d get to the bottom of one day.

Most of the neighbours’ houses were dark and Spartan. The main rooms were low and used as living-rooms-cum-kitchens and there was usually a stone cistern in a corner – which was needed. On the island there is little water, and, now that it was summer, it ran out in the late afternoon and we all had to get our water from our cisterns, usually with bucket, until the mains had filled up overnight.

Their interiors were minimal with stark furniture and old sepia family groups or religious pictures on the walls, but there was usually enough jumble of life’s necessities – papers, books, tools, empty bottles, children’s homework and homely collections of broken radios and kettles – that managed to humanise the rooms. The television took pride of place in most the houses; usually an ancient square set sitting Buddha-like on a strip of white lace on top of a heavy-looking chest of drawers. Most of the time this would be tuned into something like
Dynasty
, a Mexican soap opera or an ancient BBC sit-com like
Dad’s Army
or
Are You Being Served?
. Island reception being somewhat sporadic, the colour veered towards an alarmingly purplish end of the spectrum, and I must say, the first time I saw Captain Mainwaring’s bluey face looking at a spadeful of pigs’
manure that Private Pyke had produced for his close inspection, I did find it rather off-putting. But, unlike at home where any variation in the spectrum sends every male in the room into a flurry of knob twiddling behind the set, no one seemed unduly bothered by it. After a while, actually, Clive Dunn’s face tinged purple began to look rather endearing.

Most of what we were given to eat was delicious. The best cook was the postmaster’s wife, an ebullient middle-aged lady, who for important occasions such as these applied her mascara in Dusty Springfield-like proportions. She made the most gob-smackingly delicious dish of cod, fennel and peppers and a triumph of an aubergine stuffed with soft cheese and figs. The next best was Dora, Grandma Klakic’s daughter, who did a perfection of a steamed egg custard (
Rozata
) and a wonderful tomatoey fish stew (
Riblija Brodeta
) out of left-overs from the fish market (though I did find it rather disconcerting that she kept giving the flies buzzing over it hefty blasts from a highly toxic-looking can of insecticide).

The most common dish was grilled fish, and nothing else was ever served at Grandma Klakic’s table, her son-in-law Igor being a fisherman. Igor had the universally bashed-up look of most fishermen and verged on the taciturn, but at least he had a full complement of fingers, and it was from him that I learned how each different fish should be scaled, cut and cleaned. Fish had to be filleted and cooked according to strict protocol, although Igor said he liked to add a small personal touch of his own – sticking a knife into its head to make quite sure it was dead. It might have been out of the water for some hours, he said, but he liked to be sure.

I usually paid decent enough tribute to the cooking, but, if the cook thought I hadn’t eaten enough, a fierce hand would ladle more on to my plate despite my protests. Grandma Gokan
was the fiercest, and she was also pretty fierce about the proper size of a man and the size of his family. Being on the skinny side and with only two children to boast of, I was wanting on both counts, but what shocked Grandma G the most was how few relations I had.

‘Hah! I’ve seen what happens with those small families. When a child is the only thing its parents have to worry about, they think they’ve got a little miracle in their home, and those are the children who are always talking too much. Now it’s all very well if you’re going to be a politician or an actor, but, if you’re going to be anything else, it’s definitely not very well. Children should learn how to listen to others and not to the sound of their own voice. Our Town Hall is full of men like that, and look where that gets us! Pah!’

I raised my eyebrows enquiringly, hoping for more local low-down, but Grandma Gokan wasn’t to be diverted.

‘If you’re born into a large family like I was, you learn to listen. With ten uncles and aunts and three times as many cousins, no one gave me much of a chance to talk. And that’s how it should be!’

‘It was the same when I was little,’ added her daughter. ‘I’ve got so many older cousins I could hardly get a word in. I’ve got so many I don’t even know how many I have, but it’s good to know they’re all out there somewhere, should I ever need them.’

Coming from an average lukewarm Anglo-Saxon family, I found the attention they gave to children rather refreshing. Here, like in Italy, children are thrown into the air, tickled, hugged, kissed and smothered with affection (even though they don’t let them talk too much). Mind you, from what I’d seen so far, it did seem to produce a lot of men with rather mother-inflated opinions of themselves. Being brought up in an English home, of course, my siblings and I were spared that fate –
though I’m sure my mother loved us dearly in that ‘don’t spoil the children’ English way. The attitude has changed over the last few decades, but many still look upon our children in a different way to our Mediterranean counterparts. A male sturgeon, when he finds to his surprise that he has suddenly parented a million children, puts on as cheerful an expression as a sturgeon can summon and resolves to love them all, but the English middle classes have often had difficulty in doing this to the few that they have. Who can forget that newsreel clip of the Queen returning to Southampton after a long tour of the Empire and pushing away a little Prince Charles with an embarrassed hand when he rushed to hug her knees? No wonder the poor chap still looks like a spaniel that could do with some TLC.

I once volunteered to cook the supper. I thought it might be a good opportunity to drum up some advance publicity for English cuisine (and besides, if I was ever going to give
Slapdash Chef
demonstrations on TV along with Gordon, Jamie and Hugh, I needed a lot of people spreading the word about my wonderful slapdash cooking).

So I cooked up three courses, took it with us to Grandma Gokan’s, and it was a terrific success. My cucumber and fennel soup was exquisite, the rosemary and garlic lamb was roasted to perfection and I was particularly pleased at how my dauphinoise potatoes turned out (I’d been worrying about them all day). At the end of the meal, everyone was wonderfully effusive in their praise and I accepted their compliments with suitable modesty, though, like all true artists, I do hanker after just a little bit of public appreciation.

I loved these evenings. What a delight it was to sit round a table with neighbours, eating, drinking and chatting the evening away. It must be one of life’s greatest pleasures, and I can’t think
why I’d taken so long to find this out. Perhaps it says something about my retarded mind that I’d had to wait until I was over fifty and had come out here to realise this.

At the end of the evening, our hosts sometimes sang folk songs. Not knowing the words was a disadvantage, but we’d hum along to the chorus bits and I’m a dab hand at the spoons. Folk songs were very much part of people’s lives, and, although we heard the same songs over and over again, they never seemed to tire of them. It’s odd that one almost never hears folk songs in the West, but then pop music has almost taken over our entire musical heritage and the songs of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Abba are as well known in Beijing and Botswana as they are in Birmingham. Folk music, however, doesn’t seem to travel and, besides which, few ever listen to their own. The only time you hear it in England is at folk festivals or when some clog-dancing beardies come clumping around your village pond in the Merrie Month of May. In Croatia, however, they play it on the radio, sing it while loading their vans, hum it while sorting their fish, whistle it while taking their pigs to market and, as any stroll down the back streets of Vis will confirm, they sing it in their baths. (Has anyone ever tried singing clog-dancing songs in their bath?)

The most usual form of Croatian folk music is ‘Klapa’ which means ‘group of friends’. A Klapa can start up anywhere – in a bar, in a street, in a square, by someone’s boat. The first time we heard it was outside the post office one night. A group of men were on the steps – a large bearded fellow in dungarees, an old man in a baseball hat and two stringy youths – and they were singing the same phrases over and over again and breaking off to huddle together like football players with a coach to discuss where they were going wrong.

‘You’re much too low!’

‘You keep trailing behind me!’

‘Your voice was better last week.’

The bearded one held up his hand. ‘It’ll never work with only the four of us. Let’s get Davor. He’ll make the difference.’

The thin one promptly disappeared into the nearby restaurant and came back pulling a waiter by the arm.

‘For Christ’s sake! I’ll lose my job!’ the young man was protesting.

‘Come on, Davor – just a few minutes. You can’t let us down. We all came and sang at your table-tennis final. Remember?’

Davor grudgingly joined the circle, the bearded one started with a phrase, and the others extemporised around it. The added voice worked immediately and the five voices melded into a close harmony. With no soloists, the voices conversed as equals. Occasionally, one of the voices dominated for a few bars, but then merged back into the general harmony.

Other passers-by stopped and gathered round, but no one dreamed of joining in. This was not a singsong. This was a
duende
; a moment of truth; a work of art, and the sound was deep, raw and ethnic. It swirled around the waterfront and out across the water, and we stood entranced as song followed song – about the sea, the girls they loved, their families, their lost youth, their love of their homeland. We wanted it to go on forever, but a harassed-looking restaurant owner appeared half an hour later and hauled the waiter away. The session now over, the four singers said goodnight to each other and went off in different directions.

Later that week, we heard another kind of music. We were passing one of the restaurants and the owner, Asija, a vivacious, sporty-looking woman called out, ‘I am having party with my
friends from Dubrovnik. They have brought musicians from the mountains. We have too much food. You come eat with us and then you sing. Yes?’

My innate Anglo-Saxon reserve twitched within. ‘Well, it’s awfully kind of you Asija… but we really shouldn’t… and neither of us sings very well…’

‘Oh, do stop being so English!’ said Ivana crossly, before turning to Asija and saying in her most Sybil Fawltyish voice, ‘Please excuse my husband, Asija. He’s just being typically English, but we’d love to come and join you.’

Asija came out and took hold of my arm.

‘But we really can’t sing very well…’

‘Nonsense! Everyone can sing!’ Laughing, she pulled me inside. ‘Come! First you eat and then we sing English football song!’

She sat us down at the end beside the musicians’ table and plied us with a dish of small artichokes, fish soup, roasted lamb and flagons of wine. The musician next to us finished eating first, and, impatient to start playing, he took a bouzouki-style instrument from the case behind him and unwrapped it lovingly as if it was a ticking clock. This made the other players wolf down what was on their plates and take up their instruments, too. They formed up on a podium at the end of the room, and, with a flourish of fingers, the mandolin player sent out a fountain of notes that spiralled around the room like a plaintive coda until the others followed in and filled the room with wild, jagged, gypsy sounds. The music bounced off the walls and out through the windows. They played with their eyes shut as if transported by the music, and when they finished there were shouts of applause and calls for other songs. The next song was ‘Volga, Volga’, which in my wine-induced haze I mistook for ‘She was Poor but She was Honest’, and I stood up to lend my
enthusiastic vocal support. I don’t think anyone understood a word and I was singing slower and slower towards the end, but there was great applause when I finished, and, in tribute, the band played a creaky version of ‘Tipperary’ (often taken as our National Anthem in these parts). Mercifully they then reverted to their own music and played the old Croatian National Anthem, but once again I mistook it for one of ours (‘The Dawn is Breaking’ by the Seekers, that sixties, long-haired, Beatnik lot), and lurched to my feet, with Ivana hissing, ‘Do sit down, darling! You’re being embarrassing!’ and pulling on my arm. But I had drunk enough to have a sense of invincibility and the bit was between my teeth.