Nine Summers Read online

  Back along the coast, we took a bus to Demre (ancient Myra) to see the tombs chiselled into the mountain, the amphitheatre and the church of St Nicholas. Some claimed that St Nicholas was the original Santa Claus, who had insisted that his generosity remain anonymous. That’s why he dropped a bag of gold down the chimney of a poor family whose daughters were drying their stockings by the fire. The gold landed straight into the stockings, and so the myth of the Christmas stocking started. That’s how the story runs in Demre.

  Soon after, it was time for Julie and her friend to leave us. I found it hard to wave them goodbye.

  ‘So,’ Felix said, ‘do we now go to Cappadocia?’

  ‘You bet.’ Cappadocia is known as the Cradle of Civilization in Turkey.

  We flew to Ankara, then made for the bus terminal. A uniformed official helped us find the bus to Urgup, the centre of the Anatolian plains.

  ‘It takes five hours to get there,’ he said.

  We were the only foreigners on the full bus. The rest were Turks travelling to various stops along the way. We passed tumbledown houses that looked unstable, perched on top of each other, built on what looked like mud heaps. It was much poorer than anything we’d seen along the coast. The conductor came around with a bottle of sweet-smelling cologne every hour, as our carpet-tour guide Ahmed had done, pouring it into cupped hands so passengers could apply it to their face and neck. Some people shut their eyes and snoozed, others opened a newspaper or stared out the window as we bumped along. After two hours my neck was excruciatingly painful. I’d forgotten my support collar.

  ‘Remember how Dr Crooks assured me that my neck could stand a force 8 gale?’ I said to Felix. ‘Well, that may be true, but he didn’t warn me about Turkish buses.’

  The countryside was very different from the coast. The landscape was treeless but most was tilled. We flitted past villages with mud houses and minarets, groups of men sitting in small cafés, children waving by the roadside, peasants leading mules and women walking straight as rods with bundles of faggots on their heads. We heard muezzins’ calls to prayer.

  Finally, we arrived in Urgup. The next day we drove by taxi to the Göreme region, known in ancient times as Cappadocia, to see its unique formations. The exotic shapes that cover this landscape are the result of thousands of years of volcanic activity. The scattered ashes and lava, battered by wind and rain, affected by erosion and fluctuations in temperature, formed countless shapes, such as the ‘fairy chimneys’ — pyramidal, pointed, conical with protective caps — variously described as a lunar landscape, a sorcerer’s creation and imaginary fairytale drawings.

  People had lived in these tufa homes, dug into the landscape, until the 1950s, when the area was declared a national park.

  The ‘underground city’ of Derinkuyu was discovered by chance and opened to the public in 1965. Here people lived in eleven underground levels, where they also worshipped in churches and studied in monasteries. I walked down two levels then escaped back to the open air. Felix braved it down as far as he was allowed, to the church at the eighth level. There are said to be hundreds of other such underground cities in Cappadocia. For Christians these were shelters against Arab raiders. The variation of colours added a touch of the fantastical. Depending on the brightness of the light and the hour of day, shades of orange, pink, grey, beige and white enveloped the ochrecoloured structures.

  ‘What an extraordinary place,’ Felix said. ‘Yes, even worth a lousy neck.’

  ****

  Back in Antalya, we now prepared to leave for Cyprus where we intended to leave Galatea for the winter. The gales started on the day we’d planned to set off. Force 7 to 9 winds raged over the entire Aegean, extending as far as Antalya. They raged for five days. On 10 October 1994, I entered in my diary: ‘The worst storm this marina has ever experienced. Hail, wind from southeast. Several fender covers ripped. Closed all hatches. Looks as if we’ll be here at least two more days. Forecasts not hopeful.’

  ‘At least this tests your waterproofing,’ I said to Felix. ‘No leaks. It’s perfect, Puss.’

  We listened to six forecasts a day, starting with the 6.30 am broadcast from Athens. The weather fax transmissions from Offenbach in Germany and Rota in Spain gave us maps on the computer screen. Felix became as addicted to these as some do to pinball machines. On 14 October, the gales and storms were clearly subsiding and the forecast for the 16th was for ‘weather overcast, winds 4 to 5, seas moderate, visibility moderate’.

  ‘Couldn’t have better than that,’ was Felix’s response. I could think of ‘better than that’ — ‘weather clear, winds 3 to 4, seas slight, visibility good’.

  After such gales in the Aegean, and storms elsewhere, we expected several days of heavy Mediterranean swell. If this were to become too unpleasant, we decided, we would turn back and make for Kemer. But — and herein lay one virtue in this unscheduled delay — we would have a full moon.

  We thanked the staff of the Antalya marina, waved goodbye to our neighbours, and cast off at 8 am to ensure we would reach Paphos in daylight. The 157-mile crossing would take us 24 to 26 hours. It was a bright, sunny, windless morning as we backed out of our berth.

  We had prepared for all the contingencies of an overnight crossing, and settled back for a relatively lazy day. Felix was at the helm. We breathed in the pristine air, the fresh smell that comes after torrential downpours, heard the chirping of birds after days of gales, felt the warmth of the sun and focused our gaze for one last time on the vast Lycian mountain range that fringed the west side of the Gulf of Antalya. Orange rays pierced the veil of morning mist and a kaleidoscope of colours quivered over the jagged mountains as we sailed on in silence out of the Gulf.

  Then we started our usual routine. We entered our position on the chart every two hours, and made sure the dead reckoning matched the GPS position. We were in a relaxed mood and anticipated a pleasant night. It was not until lunchtime, when we were outside the shelter of the Gulf of Antalya, that we started to feel the swell, although at this stage it wasn’t bad. But what did start to worry us was a clear storm we saw on the radar, about 32 miles ahead. Not long afterwards, we noticed that a large ferry 15 miles ahead, also bound for Cyprus, had changed course. We concluded that they had also seen the storm and wanted to avoid it.

  We changed course several times over the next few hours. At 3.30 pm we saw lightning in the distance and heard thunder. We were well out of the Gulf of Antalya, in a very heavy swell, but it didn’t occur to us to turn back. Galatea was under mizzen, headsail and engine, averaging 7 to 8 knots. Much of the time one of us was at the helm while the other was glued to the radar. We had never seen storms so clearly outlined before. Like blobs of ink in a Rorschach test, the storms were forming and reforming in an arc several miles ahead of us. There was no way we could avoid going through them.

  By 5.30 pm it was pitch dark. Black clouds hid the moon and we were sailing inexorably into the eye of a storm. Galatea was pounded by a turbulent swell that whipped waves and froth onto the decks. The winds, which were now funnelling from all directions and sucking us into the centre of the storms, tore the mizzen and partially unfurled the headsail. We ploughed on under engine, with just enough sail to steady the roll.

  Meanwhile, the westerly swell, which had been tolerable, now curled and frothed and pushed us obliquely. I felt the bow being pushed to port, and the stern to starboard. The motion was so strong it tugged at my safety harness. Then, when the clouds parted, a dazzling, stately moon appeared, encircled by glittering stars. The wind had suddenly died down, and all around was relatively quiet, but the swell continued to pound us.

  Before I started my 8 pm to midnight watch, we checked the radar together, and saw only one storm on the screen, about 16 miles to starboard. Felix then went down to sleep. I was reasonably happy to be on my own in our cosy, enclosed cockpit. Soon after Felix had gone off-watch, however, the lightning and thunder started again. It felt close, and was coming from all sides. The moon and s
tars had disappeared, and on checking the radar I noticed that we were in the centre of a necklace strung with irregular storms.

  I woke Felix. It was hard to know which storm to negotiate; we were being pounded by rain, wind and sea. Thick shafts of lightning, ceaseless explosions of fireworks from all directions, plummeted vertically into the sea and lit up a black sky. One ominous cloud rose like a tree trunk out of the raging sea and spread into a vast mushroom, simulating an atomic blast. The thick shafts of lightning didn’t zigzag but plunged vertically. Occasionally, inside these wide shafts, bright flashes as thin as string zigzagged and plummeted into the water. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner flashed through my mind.

  The thick black cloud was cleft, and still

  The Moon was at its side:

  Like waters shot from some high crag,

  The lightning fell with never a jag,

  A river steep and wide.

  Thunder, lightning, torrential rain. We were in the midst of a convulsion of the elements. Odysseus would have attributed this to the wrath of the gods. Was this our baptism of fire? Our initiation into what awaited us? Or our grand finale?

  When Felix came up for his watch, I stayed with him till 1 am, then crawled into my bunk. But unlike Felix, who could sleep through anything, I couldn’t sleep. The lightning and thunder, the downpour, continued relentlessly. We ploughed out of one storm and moved into the next. With dead reckoning and the GPS, we knew our position at all times, and we were fortunate the radar didn’t pack up.

  We changed watches at 4 am. When I came up, a ring of stars surrounded the moon in a pitch black sky. But when the moon moved behind a dark cloud, I was enveloped by an unimaginable blackness. I couldn’t see the seat or the rail on the other side of the cockpit. I heard the sea rage, the froth pour onto the deck, the wind, the thunder. I felt water run down my face, my neck and my hands. I tasted salt. I was worried that claustrophobia would overwhelm me, but I didn’t want to wake Felix again, so I moved close to the gangway and glued my eyes on the mini globe, a spec of red light on the radar. Instead of being terrified, as I always had been when caught in a storm, I was stunned into disbelief. This was so fantastical, so surreal that instead of being gripped with fear, I was fascinated.

  Here I was, alone in the cockpit in a horrendous storm. It was black, still a long time till dawn. Why wasn’t I quaking? Why wasn’t I cold?

  It was then that I felt myself float above the cockpit and look down onto my head. I felt I’d entered another world. The waves kept pounding. Galatea was tossing and I wasn’t afraid.

  Was this preparation for death? A message that I shouldn’t fear death? Or was it a way to make a non-believer believe?

  Then the clouds parted. A shaft of moonlight shone down the hatch and lit up Felix’s sleeping face. It glowed like an eerie painting. And all around that face was blackness. As I gazed down, a strange, unearthly love for him welled inside me, and I licked salty tears.

  I had no idea how long this lasted. Then I was back in the cockpit once more, my face streaming with tears and sea spray. How could I explain why, when sailing through previous storms far less violent than this, I was invariably terrified, and now I felt no fear? I kept my eyes glued on the tiny red globe on the radar as Galatea battled on gallantly.

  Eventually, a pale pink haze appeared on the eastern horizon, followed by an orange disc rising from the sea. Then blackness faded to grey, and the day had begun. When Felix came on deck, I found it hard to speak. Exhausted and confused, I left him to it.

  The rain, lightning and thunder had stopped, but the wild winds continued. As we neared Paphos, a notoriously difficult harbour to enter, I came up on deck. The visibility was bad.

  ‘We may have to go on to Limassol. But that’s 50 miles away, and we wouldn’t get there in daylight.’ Felix looked worried.

  Then one of the many gods of the Eastern Mediterranean had pity on us. Twenty minutes before we were due to enter Paphos harbour, the visibility improved and we motored in.

  ‘The mizzen’s in shreds,’ I said. ‘She’s given us a lot of use, we’ll consign her as she deserves, ceremoniously to the sea.’

  Tired and on edge, I was backing Galatea into the marina while Felix dropped the anchor, when a loud urgent WEEEEEEEE! wailed from the depths of Galatea.

  Felix shouted, ‘Keep backing for Chrissake!’

  ‘I am!’ I yelled.

  When we switched off the engine, Felix diagnosed a broken regulator, which was overcharging the batteries. I patted our Galatea. ‘Isn’t she the most amazing wonder? Imagine if she’d broken down during the night?’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ****

  Cyprus evokes vivid, deep-seated, memories for me. I was 7 years old, and on my way to Italy. We had set sail in the Lloyd Triestino ship Galileo from Haifa on the previous day, and arrived in Cyprus early the following morning. After the shock of finding out I was leaving my family and home for good, I’d been awake most of the night, in a state of panic.

  At dawn I crawled out of my bunk and, although I wasn’t hungry, I followed the smell of Arab food, which I loved. I sniffed my way to an outside deck where a group of Arabs, sitting cross-legged on the floor, were scooping food with pita bread from a plate. When they motioned me to join them I fled.

  Later that morning, I saw them disembark and heard a woman tell the person next to her, ‘They come here to buy wives. They pay for them by the kilo. The heavier they are, the better they like them, and the more they cost. They’re cheaper here than in Palestine.’ I still recall the relief I felt that they wouldn’t want to buy me, because my grandmother had always said that I was much too thin.

  I often wonder about conversations children overhear.

  We spent some days in Paphos, then sailed on to Larnaca in search of a winter berth for Galatea. We were lucky.

  ‘It’s all fixed,’ Felix said. ‘They found a spot on the dry. She’ll be well looked after. A lot of Brits live on their boats here during winter. They have all the facilities they need. They’ve organised clubs, even a bridge club.’

  ‘That’s great.’

  ‘By the way, I’ve booked our flight to London. I’m looking forward to it.’

  ‘Me too. And we’ll be back here in April, then off to Israel.’

  ****

  For me, the idea of entering Haifa harbour under sail in our own boat was an emotional rite of passage, different from the many other occasions I’d flown in to visit my brother (with whom I hadn’t lived since I was 7) and his family. Felix had no relatives there, but for me it was a return to my earliest roots.

  It was a clear morning as we pulled out of Larnaca harbour the following summer and hoisted all the sails. With a steady 20- to 30-knot wind, froth curled and hissed at the bow, needles of spray pricked our faces and the wind whistled in the stays. The waves had built up and by lunchtime I was hanging over the rails. I swallowed more antinausea tablets.

  ‘Go down, honey. I can manage on my own.’ I crawled onto the bunk and lay flat on my back. From below I saw Felix’s face. It was a shade of green. Soon after I heard him heave. He came down, took two tablets himself, and went back up. Galatea climbed up and rolled down waves.

  By 8 it was dark and moonless, but the sky glittered with stars. The wind was steady; the only sound was our bow sweeping through the water, and an occasional shudder of sails. I climbed back into the cockpit, and we both stayed on deck all night.

  In the morning, mist shrouded a pink dawn and hid the coastline. An Israeli patrol boat came alongside, accompanied us some of the way, and later waved us into port. The view of Haifa from the entrance to the harbour was unfamiliar. It didn’t smell of hommus and falafel, my childhood recollection of seashore aromas.

  Our arrival in port was not at all like the scenario I had so often imagined. We’d taken so many antinausea tablets we were close to collapse. Instead of brimming with enthusiasm when the family greeted us on the marina, we were zombies. The
only consolation was that this was going to be a much longer stay than any previous one. We intended to spend time with family, and see friends we hadn’t seen for many years.

  One day I took a bus and walked on my own along the street where I’d lived with my parents and brother. My earliest memories were of a time when the street had been a new dirt road carved out of the side of the mountain. There were no gardens, and children congregated on the street — dusty in summer, muddy in winter — to play hopscotch, hiding, chasing, skipping, leapfrog, marbles…The atmosphere was one of warmth, togetherness and a shared sense of community.

  Most houses were temporary wooden structures that took only a few days to construct. There was no electricity, and people used paraffin lamps and primus cookers. I can still recall the smell, and hear the ‘paraffin man’ calling out ‘Neft! Paraffin!’, ringing his bell as he led a shaggy horse and cart down the street — always in the same loose shirt, dusty trousers and torn cap, always a grey sadness about his face. Later, when people started to build concrete houses and install electricity, he stopped coming. I wasn’t as thrilled with electric light as everyone else. I loved the glow of a paraffin lamp, the flickering of the wick, the amber circle on the table, the shadow it threw onto the ceiling, the shapes that let my imagination run wild.

  My parents and the parents of my friends had come to Palestine from Poland in the 1920s. They were all secular socialists, idealists with a mission to build a new country.

  Materially, it was a frugal life, but for children it was rich and warm. If, on a rare occasion, a car drove down the street, we stopped to stare and see who was inside. Later, when the riots started, the vehicles usually belonged to the British police.

  As I walked down the street some 60 years later, it was hard to impose those memories — of a time when everything was basic, new and clean — on the state of the street as it now was. It resembled a Third World country. Those clean, whitewashed houses of the 1930s were a dirty patchwork of splintering plaster, bare concrete, broken shutters and cracked balconies. The small yards were filled with household flotsam. My nostalgia was for long ago.