Under a Croatian Sun (3 page)

W
e hadn’t delivered any supplies to Vis on Ivana’s convoys, but it was on one of them that we first saw it.

‘Vis has a magical charm,’ said one of our fellow aid workers as we looked at the island hovering mistily on the horizon. ‘When you are there, you feel as if you’ve stepped inside a fairy-tale. There people still live according to the wisdom of the earth.’

‘Yes,’ said another, wanting to air his knowledge of English literature, ‘Vis is like the island of Caliban in your Shakespeare. “Full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight.”’

Vis had been a secret hidden from the world ever since 1945 when Tito took a liking to its isolated location and made it into an excluded military zone. So, having heard about its beauty and its ‘sweet airs’, as soon as the war ended and the convoys weren’t needed any more, we hired a boat that summer to explore the Croatian coast and stopped at Vis. Entering the
narrow straits flanked by a cannon tower and a fortress that shimmered in the sunlight like armoured sentinels as we found ourselves in a wide horseshoe of calm water with a fishing village at the far end nestling below steeply rising green hills, its stone walls and terracotta roofs picked out by the afternoon sun. It reminded me somewhat of Dawlish in Devon, in that the hills seemed to be tipping it into the sea; only, unlike Dawlish, the hills were lined with vine terraces and the sun was shining. As we motored across the bay towards it, a cracked bell from a monastery on the water tolled five o’clock.

Drenched in the late-afternoon sun, the village looked drowsily delightful in that sleepy way so characteristic of Croatian coastal villages. Except for a solitary figure lobbing a fishing line into the sea from the sea wall, the only moving object was a desultory fishing craft chuntering across the harbour, the smoke from its engine hanging lazily in the air behind it. The siesta was clearly in full swing.

We looked for a space among the fishing boats and, after finding a gap, tied up to the sea wall and climbed ashore. The heat hit us like a hammer. It ricocheted off the flagstones, bounced off the walls, and made the façade of the village flicker like a mirage as we walked along the front. It felt as if we were walking past an abandoned stage set.

The planners seemed to have had little influence on the hotchpotch of housing. It appeared to have grown out of the hillside and meandered down to the water on its own. The houses were mainly Venetian and some were in perfect condition with their original façades and balconies, but some were covered with concrete or had cafés and shops on the ground floor. A large tabby cat strolled languidly out from one of them and stretched itself on a flagstone, balefully eyeing a fat seagull that was sitting on the quay. Too hot to move, the cat just
narrowed its eyes and blinked at it, and the seagull, knowing it was siesta time, stared defiantly back.

Entering the village, we made our way along stone-paved streets worn smooth over the centuries. Most of them were so narrow that the green shuttered houses gave shade to each other and created a welcome eddy of cool air, which wafted over us. The village seemed laid out like a maze to baffle anyone who might stray away from the waterfront, so, taking the slope as our guide, we headed upwards. Households were waking from their siesta as we wound our way along; shutters were being swung open and people were appearing in doorways, rubbing their eyes and blinking owlishly before setting off on their business.

Emerging at the top, we turned to look over the rooftops. A shimmering sliver of moon was already up in the sky and the sinking red sun had turned the surface into a pool of liquid gold, making the monastery and the fort stood out against the purpling sky like two black silhouettes. The green hills cascaded gracefully down to the bay where white sails glided across the glass-like water, and speckled lights were appearing in windows along the shore. Out at sea the lamps of approaching yachts flickered in the blue dusk. We stood there listening to the soft murmur of the village and breathing in the scent of lavender, rosemary and fennel that wafted up to us on the warm evening air.

I think it was then that we first fell in love with the island.

After a supper of grilled fish at one of the waterfront restaurants, we went back to the boat and sat on the deck watching the evening promenade taking place. It was August but it wasn’t crowded and there was a pleasant murmur of voices in the warm night air as the locals and the few
holidaymakers milled around the square or strolled along the waterfront. Groups of teenagers mooched moodily around the church steps, and one or two food shops were still open where some were doing their last-minute shopping, picking up loaves of bread for the morning’s breakfast or stopping to talk and laugh with those they knew. With the Venetian church behind it, the square resembled a scene from an Italian opera, and, as I watched this timeless evening pageant taking place in front of us, I was overwhelmed by a sense of wellbeing – like James Stewart at the end of
It’s a Wonderful Life
when he looks out of the window at life going on in the street and sees that all is well.

Why was it that we always felt so comfortable in places like this? I said to Ivana. Was it simply the lack of neon lights and signs of consumerism, was it the comforting sense of life’s continuity, or was it simply that we always felt at home in places like this?

‘It’s what happens when you stop rushing around the world like a madman and stay still for a moment,’ Ivana replied.

We sat in silence as if we were in a world with its own sense of contentment.

The strollers thinned out, waiters folded up chairs and turned off lights, and soon only the soft glow of the moon lit the sleeping harbour. Sitting on the deck in the balmy night air, listening to the soft lapping of the water and the muffled creaking of mooring ropes, I felt in complete harmony with everything around me. We looked at each other. We really had fallen in love with it and this was where we were going to find the life I’d been dreaming about. In the morning, we would look for a house we decided, and with a certain sense of finality we went down to our bunks.

Knowing that estate agents hadn’t really existed under communism, we went into the nearest café for breakfast and asked the owner where we could find out about houses for sale.

‘Houses?’ he responded. ‘But no one wants to buy a house here!’

When we assured him that we really did, he scratched his head. ‘Well, I suppose there might be some Serbian houses for sale.
They
won’t be coming back here in a hurry. Maybe you should ask Tonko. He insures most houses, so maybe he might know.’

It didn’t sound too promising, but off we went. As direction-giving is an imprecise art in a small village where no one needs directions, it took us some time to find the place, but, eventually, above the old fire station, we found the office and opened the door. A prematurely grey-haired man sitting at a heavy forties desk jumped as if startled. He can’t have had many visitors. After we told him what we were looking for, he fished around in a drawer for some keys and told us that there were three houses belonging to Serbians who had left when the war started. They were referred to as ‘absentee owners’ as the word ‘Serbian’ now stuck in people’s throats, he said.

He was surprised by our visit. ‘You’re the first people wanting to live here since World War II. After Tito made the island a military zone in 1945, no one, not even our own people, could come to the island without permission. ‘But at least it saved us from all the development that happened along our coast. That’s why we’re the most beautiful island in the Adriatic.’ He smiled. ‘I knew that one day the world would find us again.’

The first house he took us to was tiny, but, at a price of £15,000, it had an immediate attraction.

‘Look!’ I enthused to Ivana. ‘Three bedrooms and a kitchen big enough to be a living room.’

‘All you’d get into these bedrooms is a bed. No room for any cupboards or chests of drawers. No space for clothes at all!’

‘But we won’t be needing much in the way of clothes out here, will we?’

I got a look which said: ‘If you think you’re going to keep me holed up on a distant island with nowhere for clothes, you’ve got another think coming.’

I’d pictured our life here in terms of sandals and shorts, but I should have known my wife better.

Tonko didn’t speak English, but Ivana’s look crossed language barriers and he clearly got the drift of it.

Once back on the street, Tonko enthused about the second house. He was sure Ivana would like it. Spacious, modernised and well maintained, he assured her. But it was dismal. The communist vogue for concrete had turned what might once have been a charming house into something that had all the appeal of a dental clinic. We shook our heads and, feeling like Goldilocks running out of options, we followed Tonko in silence. Emerging into the square at the end of the village, he stopped and gestured to a derelict building on the water, almost falling into the sea. We stopped in our tracks. There in front of us stood the most magnificent tumbledown affair I had ever seen. Ramshackle and unkempt, it stretched from the water to the next street; an entire block of magnificently dilapidated sixteenth-century Venetian architecture. The shutters hung lopsided on their hinges, the roof sagged and parts of the balconies had fallen off, but, as I looked up at the crumbling façade with the afternoon sunlight bouncing off the weathered stone, I wanted it to be mine.

We went through the derelict courtyard and found a complete mess inside. The plumbing hadn’t been touched since the thirties, there was one bathroom for the six bedrooms and in the kitchen was a single dribbling tap, a cracked lino floor and some
terrifying electric cables with wire sticking out of the crumbling cord casing. The place needed complete renovation – roof, floors, plumbing, electrics – and it certainly needed a few more bathrooms – but there was an air of magic about it that made all other considerations immaterial.

It was much bigger than we needed, but, according to Tonko, all this could be ours for the cost of a garage in Fulham. I totted up the rough cost of the works and it came to as much again, but I’d already made my decision. This was the one for us.

Tonko went off to get the papers and left us on the terrace. It was that magical hour somewhere between teatime and drink time when nature slips into torpor. The late-afternoon sun was streaming down, the bees were humming in the mimosa and the sweet, heavy scent of jasmine floated up from the courtyard. Ivana put her arm around me.

‘Well, here you are at last with your own tumbledown house on a distant island. Isn’t this what you always dreamed of?’

‘But there’s a hell of a lot of work to do, and we can’t possibly afford to do it all in one go. We’ll have to do it up in stages, and you know what that means. Living with the builders; like after we got married. Remember?’

There was a slight hesitation as she recalled the first months of newly wedded bliss that we’d shared with half a dozen Irish builders and a lot of rubble.

I willed her to say yes.

‘Well, I suppose we’ll have to do it again.’

‘Are you sure? We can still tell Tonko we’ve changed our minds…’

I was flashed a heart-stopping smile. ‘I’ve got a feeling that we’re going to be very happy here. Particularly you.’

I hugged her.

Standing there, drenched in the late sunshine and listening
to Ivana enthusing about what we’d do to the house, my whole being drooped with happiness like one of the mimosa branches in the courtyard weighed down by the weight of its soft pink flowers.

O
nce we were back in London, I wondered if this urge of mine to go and live on a distant island was something deep-seated in me or only just part of the new-found travel preoccupation that now affects the middle classes. It used to be the young and intrepid who went off to far-distant places, but it seemed to have become the prerogative of the middle-aged. Our local Waterstones was full of those ‘A Hundred and One Things to Do Before You Die’ kind of books, and on my way home I’d sometimes have a browse, but after a hard day at the office they only served as a rather depressing reminder that yet another day had gone by and I still hadn’t climbed Mont Blanc, gambled in Las Vegas, swum with a shark, hang-glided over the Himalayas or dated Liz Hurley.

Ivana had begun to tell me I sounded like Victor Meldrew.

After a few false starts, I sold the company to an old competitor in the business – a Mr Scaglione from Detroit, a man
of great flair, vision and energy – and within two months everything had gone off to America. That done, I started to learn Croatian and threw myself into the move.

It was around that time that I started to have my first nagging doubts. Was island life really going to work for me? Would I find enough to do? I had some projects in mind – a restaurant, a delicatessen, a boat charter business, house renovation – but, if they didn’t succeed, would I feel frustrated? If all there was to do was lie in the sun sipping chilled wine, would I turn to drink in the time-honoured manner of white men in far-off stations or take to whisky and leering at local talent, like that failed Colonial Police Chief in the Graham Greene novel?

There were a lot of things I was going to miss, particularly our two children, and also my friends and my cricket. I told myself that these were the kinds of worries to be expected by anyone remoulding their entire existence, but it still didn’t stop the worries having the same 3 a.m. wake-up effect on me as letters from the Inland Revenue. Sometimes in the middle of the night, plagued by thoughts of being the only outsider in a close-knit island community, I’d slip out of bed to sit at my desk looking at pictures and maps of the island and tell myself for the umpteenth time that we really
had
made the right decision.

For Ivana, I wasn’t so worried. Whereas I’ve never been able to shake off an innate hesitance to befriend complete strangers, she’s the kind who collects new best friends wherever she goes. Anyway, she’d be living in the land of her forefathers, and I’d seen how similar her features were to those we met on the convoys. With her straight dark hair, almond eyes, olive-shaped face and gymnast’s figure, she could have been anyone’s sister. So much so that, despite the ethnic diversity of London, no one had ever taken her for English in our thirty years together. (Although that might have had something to do with her exotic
way of dressing, her expansive way of gesturing and her habit of approaching everything with enthusiasm, fury or implacable feminine logic.) But life had been rich with colour and our marriage had prospered.

Nonetheless, I could see that even she was beginning to worry about giving up all that our metropolitan life had to offer – Planet Organic, Harvey Nichols, Zara, her girlfriends, bridge clubs, fitness clubs, yoga clubs, book clubs, dental hygienists, theatres, exhibitions; not to mention dry-cleaning, 24-hour shopping, fashion magazines, sliced bread, full cream milk, oven ready food and all those other terrific little inventions that make the world such a jolly place to live in.

Most of our friends and family had the bizarrest notions of how we were going to live. Some asked if malaria pills were needed, and just before Christmas my brother rang to ask if I’d like the new survival book that had just come out.

‘Come off it,’ I said. ‘I’m not going out there for adventure. I’m after a quiet life these days.’

‘You don’t fool me, A. If you were asked what you wanted to do most of all in the world, I bet it’d be something like winning a DSO leading a squadron of Marines into Tobruk or something equally daftly Biggles-like.’

‘You’ve just never got over me getting the Frensham Pond Boy Scout of the Year badge instead of you.’

The next week, someone gave me a book entitled
Living on an Untamed Island,
and other books authored by writers with a thing about khaki were to follow. Most were pretty drear, but there was one that was un-put-downable –
The Life of Ragnar Hairybreeks
, a Viking who discovered the Orkneys and Iceland. What a man! If there was any derring-do to be done, he was the man to do it. What a role model! Perhaps rape and pillage were
a trifle high on his agenda for my taste, but I’d take him with me to Tobruk any day. Once I had my boat, he was the man to model myself on.

I took all the books out with us, but except for the Hairybreeks one, the others we never read again. Although two weeks after our arrival, I remembered that in one of them I had read the old adage that, when you move home, the first thing to do is to join a club. That sounded like a good idea. I’d make some friends and ask advice on the projects I’d been thinking about.

It didn’t take long to find one. There was only one – the Old Men’s Club.

Like all good clubs, it was well tucked away down a side street, and, arriving at a battered green door, I stopped to peer inside. A shaft of light cut through the wreath of blue-grey smoke revealing a bare high-ceilinged room with men in hats sitting around heavy-looking tables. Some with impassive faces were picking up and discarding cards, some were talking in low voices and slapping down dominoes, and at the back a discussion was going on that seemed to involve a lot of table thumping. This was a man’s world. No wife or daughter would dare venture in here and order them home for lunch in a bossy tone as I’d seen them do when the men were on the benches.

The moment I stepped inside, the talking stopped and all heads turned towards me. I was as if I’d stepped into a superannuated spaghetti western scene. Near the door were three wizened honchos with the sort of faces you see on those Red Indian totem poles in the British Museum, so I turned to the nearest and said hesitantly, ‘I’d very much like to join your club if that’s possible. What do I have to do to join?’

There was a rather chilly silence and the oldest of the totem
poles cleared his throat. Managing to capitalise his words phonically, he said, ‘This is… THE OLD MAN’S CLUB.’

‘Yes I know. But how do I join it?’

‘You must wait.’

How silly of me. Of course, any club worth joining had a waiting list.

‘Well, I belong to two clubs in London,’ I said cheerily to show I was a clubbable sort of fellow. ‘How do I get my name on to the waiting list?’

‘The what?’

I tried to think of a better translation while the totem poles looked at each other as if to say ‘Where did this dope come from?’

Then in a slow voice, as if addressing a child, one of them said: ‘YOU MUST WAIT UNTIL YOU ARE OLD.’

With the eyes of half the Vis demographic aged seventy to ninety fixed on me, I backed towards the door and hurried off. If this was a spaghetti western, the telegraph operator with the visor and shirt-sleeve bands would be tapping out:
English middle-aged moron at large stop trying to join old man’s club stop.

I had made a fool of myself and the word would soon be around the village. I needed Karmela to do some emergency PR, and quickly.

Actually Karmela had already taken on the role of Greek Chorus. The village was kept regularly informed about everything to do with us, and we, in turn, were filled in on all village goings-on. Of course, true to universal village custom, the news was never a simple nugget of information. Karmela had a belt and braces attitude to news. We were fully briefed; there’s no other word for it. So for an engagement, we were first given three generations’ worth of history of the families concerned
and then by daily updates on how each side was coaching the one in their corner to respond to the latest move from the opposing corner. And this included the all-important commercial side of the match that involved plots of land, vineyards, sheep, goats, olive trees, fishing boats, second-hand trucks and part shares of pizzerias.

The only drawback was that Karmela’s reports could reschedule a day and sometimes we found ourselves pinned down for half the morning. With her prodigious talent for non-sequential thought process, we could have entered her for a James Joyce stream of consciousness competition. Although, come to think about it, Joyce can’t have invented stream of consciousness. All self-respecting mothers in Ireland and the Mediterranean must have been practising the art of it for centuries before Joyce ever came up with the idea.

Having failed to join a club, I thought that lending a hand might be a good way of making friends, so, when I saw a neighbour’s wife unloading some crates of wine, I went out to help. It was an infuriating job, but, after ten minutes of scraping my knuckles in an infernally cramped cellar, I had got them all stacked up nicely. Then thinking she might appreciate a neighbourly chat about how we were getting on in our new home, I hovered with a ‘Yes, I’d love a coffee’ expression. But she just said thank you and waited by the door for me to leave.

‘Maybe it wouldn’t have looked right to invite you upstairs if her husband wasn’t there,’ said Ivana when I returned. ‘They’re still a bit old-fashioned about things like that.’

The next day, I saw two men unloading some wood and tried again. This time, the job took a lot longer, but once again, despite my boyishly expectant expression, all I got was a curt ‘thank you’ and they drove off. Rather Anglo-Saxon of me, I
suppose, to have expected a chummy invitation for a beer, but I felt slighted.

‘I know what,’ said Ivana seeing my long face. ‘Why don’t you go and help the fishermen to tie up when it’s rough? I’m sure they’d appreciate that.’

So the next time a stiffish early-morning breeze was blowing in, I paced the quay pretending to be admiring the scenery, and waved cheerily at the first boat that came bobbing in. And yes, my friendly indication was accepted and they threw a line. The wet rope slapped me in the face and got tar all over my trousers before I managed to get hold of it, but I did a fairly seaman-like job of a half-hitch round a bollard and they came alongside. But not a flicker of human interchange crossed their craggy faces. All I got was a perfunctory grunt of thanks and they went about their business as if I wasn’t there. No mention of a beer one evening – or even a free pilchard.

‘Try and look on the bright side,’ said Ivana when I got home. ‘They must have always treated all outsiders in the same way – Romans, Greeks, Turks, Italians. They’re not just picking on us.’

It never ceases to amaze me how Ivana manages to find a sunny side to most things. I’ve tried to do the same, but I just don’t have the knack, it seems. Mind you, if there were any courses on it and this rejection therapy dished out by our neighbours was going to continue, maybe I should sign up.

I cheered myself with the thought of Roman centurions desperately trying to ingratiate themselves. ‘Please feel free to borrow my pilum any time you want, my good fellow – no, really!’

The first rude awakening to the actual local hostility was not long in coming. One morning, Karmela press-ganged a solemn-faced fisherman into helping me carry a table upstairs, and once
we’d done the job, thinking that he might like to see what we’d done to the house, I offered him a coffee and to show him around. The fellow looked at me as if he’d bitten into a bad apple and, with an expression on his face that reminded me of Norman Tebbit, he said he was busy and left.

I sat down on the sofa with Ivana and we looked at each other in despair. This was what we had feared the most – rejection. Were our doubting friends and family going to be proven right? Would we be returning to the white cliffs of Dover with our tails between our legs before the year was over? It was the scenario of our nightmares. I looked out of the windows at the sparkling bay feeling like Piglet up the oak tree with the water rising and throwing down a bottle with a message in it saying: ‘HELP! PIGLET (ME)’.

Karmela had heard my exchange with the fisherman and came in from the garden. ‘You mustn’t take it badly,’ she said. ‘This is how we are – suspicious of everyone. It’s small wonder, though. The only visitors we’ve had for as long as I can remember have been the military, and as we say: “You can’t prevent the birds of ill-fortune flying over you, but you can stop them nesting in your hair.”’

We looked at each other in dumb despair, and seeing our faces growing even longer, Karmela added, ‘Well it’s no good you sitting there goggling at each other like two dead halibuts. You’re both so friendly I’m sure they’ll get to like you in good time.’

Cold comfort.