Another excerpt from The Lemon Tree Forest
Thought I’d put up another snippet from my new novel The Lemon Tree Forest while I’m waiting for the cover to be finished - just a little taster of the parts written and based in Greece. We used to live there, a long time ago - and some of it is based on my own memories of that beautiful and distant place…
…Often Hercules the shepherd will be nearby in the afternoon and you do not want to give him ideas. And sometimes the old man whose name I never know comes down with his donkeys or mules for the water that gushes from under the carved rock. It is just a minute's stroll up the hill from the house, and they say the water is good for aches and pains. It is certainly wonderful to drink, but I cannot vouch for its healing quality. Happily, I have nothing but a hangover to heal. The older village folk believe in it though, and they send the old man with his mules and donkeys to fill his panniers. Just above the spring there is an ancient, worn, carving that they say was done a long time before Christ was born - and if you sit and stare at it for long enough, you can see it depicts a man on a horse. Who he was, and what the old folk know of him, I have never been able to find out. But every once in a while a group of them come and kneel at the spring and kiss their fingers so they can touch the carving and mutter some mantra that I cannot understand.
They are unlikely to be here today. Not in this heat. But it is better not to go about unclothed. I knew two English girls who sunbathed naked once on the remote half-moon beach, despite us telling them it would upset the villagers. On the second day a crowd gathered on the clifftop and started pelting them with stones. They had to swim away to escape, and were not welcome back to the village after that. I make it my business never to upset the villagers, so put on a robe in case someone has come to our secret place.
There is a tree in the grove that produces a strange, bitter, hybrid fruit that is ideal for crushing. The juice tastes like a kind of cross between lemon, orange and tangerine, and it is so sharp it can take the lining off your teeth. You wouldn't want to eat the fruit, not only because it’s so sour, but because it is full of pips. Crushed and mixed with a little sugar and water, though, the fruit provides a refreshing drink. If you take an aspirin and drink a pint of the stuff, even an ouzo and beer hangover will pass, especially if you follow it with a dish of pasta, wild herbs and eggs.
A long, slow, lazy lunch. A little writing. And before I know it, the afternoon has passed and the heat is beginning to moderate as the first breeze of the day stirs among the groves. So regular is the afternoon wind, you could set your watch by it. Another swim, and it is time to climb to where we keep the car. There is a shortcut through the bush and it crosses some big black rocks where the jumping snakes live. They bask in the heat that is more intense on the rocks, and when you disturb them they leap along escape routes like coiled springs.
“They will never bite you, but they are poisonous,” Thanassis the fisherman once told me. “They are jumping for their escape routes and as long as you let them go. No problem.”
I asked him what happened if you were to get between one and its escape route.
“Don’t,” said my fisherman friend.
I could drive up and down the wider track that has been cut into the mountain, and sometimes do, but it is rough and my car would never return to England if I made a habit of it. Sometimes, when we clamber down over the big black rocks in the cool of night, the surface has collected so much heat during the day that you can feel it radiating up into your face. It is the only place I know where the rocks are still hot in the early hours of the morning. And always, by the big black slabs, there are the rustlings of night creatures that have come there for warmth.
At the car you have to open all the windows and doors and wait five minutes before you can get in, and even then the steering wheel can be too hot to touch. But this is rural Greece - a place where waiting five minutes is regarded as an act of haste. The V4 starts with a clatter and soon, after the hot walk up and the wait, I can enjoy the breeze blowing through the open windows. It is wonderful and cool and it is tempting to drive fast to create more breeze. It’s a good road on which to drive. The bends are good - you can take them at speed when you know them and the tyres squeal a lot when I drive down to Kalloni. All the way the car is filled with the aromas of mountain thyme and rosemary, supplemented by the sharp scent of lemon when you reach the outskirts of the village.
There is one main street with a couple of tavernas, three shops, an agricultural equipment dealer and a kafeneon. In the mornings just after dawn we drink tea laced with brandy at the latter, and late in the afternoon we go to Jorgo's Taverna. Jorgo is a strangely aloof young man, with a nice smile and an inexhaustible enthusiasm for card games. He seems indifferent to everything and anything that occurs in the village. He serves drinks, plays cards, eats the food his aged mother provides. And that is all he does.
