Under a Croatian Sun (8 page)

Would I have done the same? I always wondered. I’d like to think that an obdurate Anglo-Saxon instinct to dig one’s heels in at the first sign of any coercion would have made me refuse to go along with it – but who knows how they’ll react until the situation occurs?

The war was even less talked about. It had lasted for several years, thousands had been killed and three million had been displaced, but bad memories were swept under the carpet and no one wanted to dwell on it. If not caught up directly in the violence, they had all lived in fear, looking nervously at the skies
every day, watching the news on TV, and waiting while the West made up its mind whether to help them or not.

For me, the war had come as a particular shock. Like many others, I had thought that in Europe this kind of behaviour was now behind us, but it’s extraordinary how easily savagery can be whipped up anywhere in the world.

To find out more, I often tried to bring the war into the conversation, but I’d get blank looks and non-committal murmurs, and, whenever they did discuss it between themselves, they talked in grunts, and there was something fiercely stoic about the short exchanges.

It was as rare for Zoran to talk about it as anyone else, but, after a boozy lunch and when the bar was empty, I brought the subject up again. ‘Those were shitty times,’ he replied with a scowl. ‘An’ all the time those goddamn Serbs were poundin’ away at us, you guys were sittin’ aroun’ not makin’ your goddamn minds up. That John Major of yours spent two years sayin’ “something must be done” and did nothin’. Your Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t have stood aroun’ like that. “We must give them arms to defend themselves,” she said. But you booted her out an’ all we had was John Major and his bunch of wussies!’

Zoran’s view on the reason for the war was equally unequivocal. ‘Even when we had Tito and were Yugoslavia, those Serb bastards ran the show. Despite all that crap he used to give out about “Brotherhood and Unity”, Tito ran the show from Serbia, an’ all his guys were Serbs – military officers in particular. So, when the war started, the bastards just got into our tanks, ships and airplanes and drove them off to Serbia. All we were left with were policemen with pistols and truncheons.’

A
t the beginning of our second month, our days started to fall into a sort of pattern. I began the day on the terrace with my cornflakes, and every day I’d feel the same kind of sensation – that sort of thing Wordsworth was always going on about – an empathy with nature; a mystical union with our surroundings; a sense of life’s continuum, or something along those lines. At first, I tried to brush the feeling away. I shouldn’t be indulging in this kind of whimsy at my age; that was for younger men. But then why not? How often in life do you come across a scene so awe-inspiring that it gives you goose bumps? Why not relax and enjoy a good old mystical experience when you get the chance?

After this brief dalliance with the transcendent, I’d do jobs around the house or go to my desk and work on a book I’d started to write about local history until I heard Ivana’s alarm go off. Then, after taking her a cup of tea, I’d go downstairs, open the courtyard door, dive straight in and swim out as fast as I
could to the middle of the bay. Once there, I’d float exhausted and wallowing in the warm water with the bay spread out at eye level around me. I could see the swallows circling the church tower and the figures moving on the waterfront and over by our house the women who were hanging out their laundry and mopping down their terraces. The familiar sounds of clanking buckets, squeals of playing children and scolding cries of grandmothers drifted across the water to where I floated in my watery rapture.

Once I’d got my breath back, I’d swim back, doing a slow crawl, and then dry off on the flagstones in front of our wall before going in to have a quick shower and join Ivana, who by that time had got a spot of breakfast inside her and was more or less in the land of the living. Then, collecting some baskets, we’d set out for the market.

What a pleasure to be able to walk everywhere you needed to go to. We’d take the same route to the market every day, but it always looked as if someone had rearranged it overnight – the sunlight broke through the gaps in the houses to splash the street with its random shafts of gold, the geraniums on the balconies speckled the stone with their startling colours, and the jasmine, honeysuckle and bright-purple bougainvillea arching up over the alleys seemed higher than when we’d last seen them.

After having coffee at Marko’s, we’d move on to the Hotel café where town officials, mechanics, builders, architects, digger-drivers, fruit-fly exterminators and almost everyone else we had business with took their coffee break – and, as the break was taken as part of the working day, no one was bothered if people sat down and talked business with them.

By now, we had got to know most of the officials at the Town Hall. Because the old regime’s systems were still in place, there were endless papers and permits that we needed to be able to
exist. We already had two filing boxes of licences, resident’s permits, alien documents, citizen identification credentials, tax authorisations, tsetse fly certificates and beriberi inoculation papers – plus all the ten-page documents we’d needed to be allowed electricity, telephone, water, drains, dentists, doctors, car passes, rate cards, post boxes, dustbins and so on. Tito, being a shrewd old fox, hadn’t taken long to realise that the more forms his comrade citizens had to fill in, the easier it would be to keep tabs on them. Even something as simple as having your electricity connected required the same amount of consultations and documents as a Hollywood divorce case. It was so overwhelming that I thought of not complying, but Marko advised me strongly against it. The authorities had made processes of opting out or objecting so onerous, he said, that it discouraged anyone except the suicidal.

But what was going to happen when I tried to start any of my projects? Was Zoran right – did the Town Hall really sit on the horse’s head? Would they be bogged down from the beginning? And, if that was the case, what was I going to do with myself with nothing to work at?

After we’d done our downtown chores, we’d walk back along the waterfront – the ‘Riva’ as they call it. We passed the fishing boats stirring gently on their moorings and fishermen squatting beside them mending nets, repairing tackle and scrubbing out octopuses, the thick ink-black dye staining the amber stone around them. In front of the church, men were pushing wheelbarrows of bricks, mixing cement and chipping away at blocks of stone, and little girls in gaily coloured pinafores and boys in oversized shorts ran about between them.

Once home, Ivana, who is a novelist, went to her desk in the drawing room and I went off to the Town Hall or the library to
do more research for the book I was writing. There was a wealth of information at both places, but the library was my preferred place of study. The librarian, a delightfully enthusiastic man, was so happy to have an outsider interested in local history that he let me take papers to the comfort of the bar next door and read them there. It seemed to suit him, too, as he would often come and sit beside me to work on his own papers away from the hard seats and the gloom. It was a wonderful arrangement. Every library should have a bar attached to it. Not only can you sit and read in comfort, but it also makes getting a drink so much easier.

The only drawback was the Croatian biros. They leaked, and after an hour’s session I’d end up with splodges on my shirt or my nose and Ivana would get cross. It was all very well for her, though. She only had a laptop to contend with, but those of us up at the sharp end of the business armed with biros can’t avoid getting splodges on our noses. Ask Samuel Pepys, Edward Gibbon or Jeffrey Archer.

Usually, we worked until lunchtime and then had a short siesta. The bliss of an afternoon siesta! Happy hour, once you’re over fifty, is an afternoon nap. Having spent the past thirty years trying to cram as much as I could into a working day, I now revelled in a siesta. Sometimes I wouldn’t even sleep; I’d just lie there, my mind occupied with a dozen little trifles that didn’t need a solution, or simply gaze up at the ceiling following the path of a buzzing fly, my mind a complete blank.

After our snooze, we’d tumble downstairs still half asleep, open the courtyard door and dive in. Plunging into sparkling, clear water in the heat of the day must be one of the most heavenly sensations known to man. The heat and drowsiness is whisked away in an instant, and you rise weightlessly to the surface, sleekly enveloped by water and feeling a blissful
harmony with nature. Having swum over to the monastery, we’d come back to lie in the sun and then, feeling refreshed and ready to go back to our books, we’d be at our desks until it was time for the social highlight of the day.

The evening promenade was definitely the highlight of the day. When the light began to fade and the heat subsided, the waterfront was transformed into a spectacle of festivity and action. The whole village was there, perambulating up and down, chatting, laughing, exchanging courtesies and catching up with the gossip. Every age group was represented; the old, the middle-aged, the young marrieds, snotty-looking youths and gaggles of heavily made-up teenaged girls – and in between the legs of everyone ran little children, squealing and playing games.

By the time the promenade finished, it was time for supper and after that Ivana went back to her desk and I went out to sample the downtown highlife at Zoran’s or Marko’s.

Now that I was spending more time at the bars, I was getting to know some of the regulars. Some had very entrenched views and were difficult to talk to, but others, like Filip the town tax collector, were open-minded and liked to argue the toss. Aged forty-five with an overly high forehead, a lantern jaw and a nose you could hang a hat on, Filip might have had the most lugubrious face on the island, but he was extremely knowledgeable, a prolific reader and played the French horn in the town brass band. He was also a P.G. Wodehouse fan – quite surprising for someone who looked like Boris Karloff without the Frankenstein bolts.

I usually stayed at the bars until ten, and, if Ivana hadn’t finished, I could put in an hour or so’s writing before bed. It was good to be writing again. I’d actually started off in the brave new world of writing when I finished my studies, but, like the
seed that fell upon stony ground in the parable of the seeds, my ambitions had sprung up and withered. As soon as school fees, dentist bills and all the rest of it began to appear, there was a rapid erosion of my ideals and a swift descent into the world of commerce. And it wasn’t until twenty years later when the reminders from the school bursar stopped landing on my breakfast table that I started to think about rising like a phoenix out of the ashes of my bourgeois existence and being reborn as a woolly English liberal scribbler once again.

Sometimes, sitting at my desk and looking out of the window at the panorama of the bay, I almost had to pinch myself. What a joy to be able to sit in such beautiful surroundings and write with no deadline. I’d quite forgotten what a pleasure it was to wade through pages of fascinating material and then try to make sense of it all – in my case to find some pattern to the frightful strife and grinding hardship of the people who have lived in this part of the world for over two millennia. I’d also forgotten what a privilege it was to work with the English language. It gives you such exquisite tools of beauty and precision to play with. I could quite happily fiddle around all day trying to weave my words into a beautiful, delicate and steely web of telling commentary or captivate the reader with my wry appreciation of the world we live in (I wish!).

For the past few weeks, I had been looking at the back garden with despair. It had traces of being well tended sometime in the distant past, but it looked as if no one had taken a fork to it since the death of Franz Joseph. Even Alan Titchmarsh would have scratched his curly locks at the sight of it – a thick arboreal dreadlock stretching from the house to the fortress tower at the end. The top floor and most of the battlements were missing, but a fringe of honeysuckle and capers hung attractively from
the ramparts and its dilapidation lent a decorative touch of rakishness to the scene. Most of the garden was covered by the
mattogrosso
, but outside the kitchen was a flagstoned area shaded by mandarin, orange and lemon trees and in the middle sat a large stone table where we ate most of our meals. With the trees now in blossom, coming into the area was like walking into the Harrods perfume department.

After watching football, gardening is apparently an Englishman’s most popular pastime, but, not having had a garden since leaving home, I’d rather stuck with the football and wasn’t quite sure where to start. There ought to be some gardeners in the village I could ask, and what could be a better way of breaking the local ice than garden talk. I could see myself leaning over gates on balmy summer evenings, chatting about greenfly, black spot and bindweed, and, anyway, the role of gardener would be a definite improvement on that of guinea pig for the ongoing medical experimentation of the grannies.

A large part of the jungle looked as if it must have been a lawn in the nineteenth century, so why not get it going again? They would probably have had a scullion in britches cutting it for sixpence with a pair of scissors back then, but, although I knew it would take up a lot of time, what the heck. Time was something I had a lot of.

The lawn area was liberally endowed with a national collection of thorn bushes, so I pulled them up, removed a few hundredweight of stones and started to level the ground. That was the hardest part. The baked dry earth had the density of concrete and getting a fork into it gave me a reminder that there was no osteopath on the island. But then recalling a scene in
Manon des Sources
(that jolly French film about a grumpy old man with a large moustache who gets killed by the combined onslaught of his neighbours and his own garden), I remembered
Yves Montand’s technique of spitting on his hands and whacking the fork down with a vigorous thump. I tried it out and it worked. I felt a tingle of primitive satisfaction as I began to turn over the sod. Digging is a deeply primal action, I thought. We’ve been tillers of the soil since time began, and this was probably the sort of man I’d be if I hadn’t started reading too much Russian literature, paying school fees and pretending to be a Captain of Industry. So here I was at last taking my place in a long line of tillers – a pleasingly virile concept. I progressed across the garden in a systematic manner as passers-by looked over the wall and acknowledged my manly labour with their smiles. No doubt neighbourly gardening conversations about topsoils, mulches and leaf-droop would soon follow. For a man who had forsworn the sin and shame of the commercial world and turned his back on ambition, stress and credit card debt to return to his roots as a doughty digger, how could my newly adopted community of fellow tillers fail to embrace me?

Two days later, I was seeding the lawn when a couple leaned over the wall and asked what vegetables I was planting.

Here we go. My first horticultural exchange. I put down my rake and called up: ‘It’s grass.’

From their stunned expressions, I might have said chewing gum plants or marijuana. They shook their heads and walked on.

To tell the truth, I didn’t get a lot of positive feedback on the home front, either. Ivana has never been able to understand the affection we English have for our gardens. I’d thought she might come round to it, now that we had our own (and I must say, a little enthusiasm would not have gone amiss), but, when I came into the kitchen with mud-covered hands and my face covered in mannish sweat to tell her about what I’d done, I was told that
it was only the English who took such an interest in green and leafy things. ‘Who else would spend their weekends kneeling in borders ruining their hands like your mother or doing their backs in mowing, raking and throwing sand all over the place like your father?’

‘But ploughmen and woodcutters have always been held up as a sort of masculine archetype in children’s books all over the world, I’ll have you know,’ I retorted, but the iron had entered her soul.