The leaving of Pudding Island - Page 3

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Tony Barrell (dec.)

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MOLIVOS IS A PICTURESQUE Greek village on the north-west corner of Lesbos, close to Turkey. I've known a few British expats there, but the eastern edge of the Aegean has never appealed to mass resettlement. Lawrence Durrell went only once. There are a few empty houses – some quite grand, others collapsing hovels, a few ‘dowry houses' waiting for a granddaughter to get married – but they are all overpriced. Homes can be picked up cheaply in less fashionable villages, but these villages are often remote and most likely entirely Greek. There are a few Pudding Islanders, like Jeff and Belinda Paffet, who have bought a cottage in Vafios, high up in the lee of Mt Lepetymnos, but they don't mix with the other English couple in the village and are learning Greek.

Ten years ago they came for a holiday with their sixteen-year-old daughter, Naomi. When they were due to return, she announced she wanted to work on as a waitress. They agreed, but at the end of the summer she told them she wanted to stay – and live with her Greek lover, Vangelis, a restaurant manager seven years her senior. Jeff and Belinda were shocked but trusted her (and him) enough to go along with it. Belinda insists their decision to buy in Vafios was not to ‘follow Naomi' but to leave England, a desire intensified by disenchantment with the Labour government.

Naomi speaks Greek fluently, and with Vangelis (who is equally proficient in English) started a travel business they hoped would survive the slump in tourism. Their relationship did not. Naomi's waiting table again, but the Paffets are not going back to Pudding Island. ‘This,' insists Belinda ‘is home.'

Lesbos is the eastern edge of Europe. The shoreline that runs east of Molivos is backed by scrubby valleys, rocky headlands; the beaches are longer, wider and stonier, less populated, treeless. This is the coast closest to Turkey, which is about eight nautical miles away. There are a few low-rise hotels, studio apartments and single-storey summerhouses. I stayed for a fortnight with my wife, Jane, between the resort and a small market garden farm worked by an Albanian family who can't make enough money and are going home. Back among the trees there's an English couple in a bungalow. They claim to have stayed here every year for three decades, but have no plans to move in permanently. The farm and the hotel are both bordered by a road which runs along the water's edge and a stretch of narrow unshaded shingle with a beachcomber's shack. Adonis has been living there for years, oblivious to sunbakers plodding by.

On the night of 11 August 2008, just before midnight, a storm breaks, thunderheads crackle around the mountains for hours and the gentle hiss of a steady downpour ends just before dawn. By the late afternoon, as we sit drinking tea, gazing at the farm, the beach, the sea and Turkey, there is no sign of the turbulence. The storm has cleared the air, so minarets, villages and small resorts are quite distinct. At around half past five we hear voices calling, a plaintiff aaayyaaayy sound repeated slowly by two or three people, together and separately. It reminds us of a sports chant, but it seems to be coming from Turkey, and there, about a kilometre out, something different is in the water: a group of people standing in an orange inflatable dinghy. About fifteen or twenty of them, crying out in relays for attention. The onshore breeze is bringing them slowly towards us, but without engine power or paddles they are afraid the dinghy might founder and so, I guess, they are calling out to the people on the beach to start up one of the idle runabouts on the shingle and come and rescue them.

We run down to the water's edge but our enterprise is thwarted as the high-powered Molivos coastguard powerboat races around the headland. In about ten minutes it has brought the dinghy alongside, taken the men and women aboard and swiftly set off west around the coast to the main port of Mytilene with the group huddled on the foredeck. Mytilene has a notorious overcrowded detention centre, as do several Greek islands along the coast of Turkey.

Afghanis, Iraqis and even Somalis frequently land here at night – Adonis found a body in his nets a couple of years ago – but rarely do they arrive in broad daylight. I can only guess that this group was held up on the Turkish side by the storm. Nobody will tell you how they make their journeys – across Iran perhaps, or from the Horn of Africa to Yemen and Saudi Arabia – but despite the hardships of the journey they keep on coming. I think of Michael Winterbottom's In This World, about a pair of brothers on the hair-raising journey by truck from Pakistan to London.

In 2008, 150,000 ‘illegals' landed in Greece; around twelve million now live in Europe. Most who arrive on Lesbos have no qualms about Pudding Island. They want to get ‘to England' and on the Turkish side of the strait there's a busy cottage industry selling dinghies – for as much as a few thousand euros – to people looking for landfall a few nautical miles away in the nearest part of the continent.

Needless to say, refugees from the Middle East and Africa who make it are not looking for a Greek island paradise. Their desire to move into Europe is a bit different from my adolescent yearnings for a sybaritic life in the Sud. They want the ‘West', and if that means a job in far north Scotland, so be it. While the International Labour Organization says tens of millions of jobs will disappear worldwide by the end of the year, talk of hard times in ‘the global economy' means nothing in Afghanistan and Somalia.

The ironies are stark. While economic refugees have been clamouring to be let in, three million Britons moved offshore to enjoy the benefits of a strong pound – or to get away from immigrants – in European villages partially deserted by people fleeing poverty. Whatever else the tough times bring, the movement of people will not be deterred by collapsing home prices in Slough.  ♦

REFERENCES:

European migration information: EU MEP report drafted by Italian MEP Giusto Catania see:

http://sofiaecho.com/2009/03/10/687064_european-parliament-debates-common-european-asylum-system

Greece: Kathimerini (Greek daily May 20)

www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_2_20/05/2009_107318