Where the Durrells and Miller went
Krauth
Mediterranean songs
Where the Durrells and Miller went, we want to follow. We drive towards Kalami, thirty kilometres north of Corfu Town, and at Nissaki we trek down from the hillside road. There’s a dip in the rugged coastline here, Corfu folds on itself to protect a tiny knob, a white-washed little chapel, cypress-held above cleft rocks – the shrine to Saint Arsenius. Walking the cliff track in olive-shade we nearly miss it, but catching sight, scramble a descent for goats to a sun-trap ledge, and deep water.
Larry and Nancy Durrell came here, with Prospero’s Cell a gleam in Larry’s eye. They dropped cherries like blood-spots in turquoise, and Nancy dived naked for them. They brought their friend Henry Miller here too when he visited, to be baptized in Greece.
We’ve arrived with light packs and sunscreen oil to join their cavorting, to write and make love, to replay the privacy and potency. We expect to be alone, but have company straight away. Around the headland two open boats, one tows the other – three Corfiot fishermen. They lean out, tie up at the rock-shelf too near us. It’s their daily routine, it seems. Studiously we’re ignored on our ledge near the shrine. They keep looking away. We imagine these fishermen have a legend of people naked, taking photographs and writing, on this sun-struck, deep-water ledge.
We watch as two of them stroke the net-line in a wide arc out and back again, while the third waits, his back to us, in the rocking anchor boat. Then the motor splutters for the haul-in. The catch in the sea-oozing net is a glisten of jumping sardines – two and a half boxes, it turns out. We came here for a lesson in naked history; the fishing is the lesson now.
The sardines throb in the slippery light. They’re the cherries in Nancy’s mouth, surfacing; they’re the words in Larry’s book, and the specks in Henry’s eye. We see in the gleam of ancient fishing, all we came for.
We put on our clothes and prepare to leave. This place has un-moored us from normal attachment to land. When we climb back up to the car we find we are smiling and seeing differently.
