Essay

Cretan Idyll

May is Crete

Sea, sky and olive. Eternal Crete. Photo author’s own

This house we are staying in has a garden full of olive trees, oleander and valerian bushes, wine-red berberis and banks of rosemary with tiny lilac flowers and two cypress trees — straight and young as soldiers.

The others have gone to Chania and left me and my burnt scalp in the shade of the garden. A procession of clouds bumble over the blue sky. The sea is striated blue.

Yesterday we drove along a stony road to Balos beach. We passed a shrine draped in goats, all chewing and regarding us with their comical teeth, shaking their bells that clonk. Thyme and wild mint smothered the hills like barnacles. A steep descent took us to Balos, where the sea spread turquoise and small white shells in the sand had rubbed to clean white.

The sky is a soft powder blue and meets the violet blue of the sea. Hills are woolly with olives. Last night, we met two cats at the port and fed them shrimp. One ginger cat had a crooked head, but it did not impede his eating.

A cool morning. The sky—how sea and sky change—smudged blue, white at the horizon, the sea like a sheet of rippled metal. Cockerels crowing, dogs barking, birds singing, throatier than English birds. The shush of traffic on the road to Chania.

There’s a small veranda outside my room with a rail smothered in red pelargoniums, the orange red ones that glow. This morning I wrote there, and the sun was a giant golden penny in a white-blue sky above the chimney of a nearby house.

Now there is only a smudge, a stain of orange around the sun and the horizon is an eyelid painted blue. The sun’s reflection on the sea turns white hot.

I discover more in the garden, lantana and rose-scented geranium, the flowers very pale pink and small, the leaves aromatic and velvet like a cat’s paw.

The first night we drove to the village of Afrata for dinner, past hills of yellow brittlebush. The restaurant was crude and hewn, up high above the road. The waiter wanted to tell us about the specials; I told him we ate no meat, thus predictably saving his breath.

We ate fava beans and Gigantes and a dish of seasonal green — knots of leaf and stalk — and mopped the olive oil with hunks of bread. Meals are finished here with a small bottle of Raki, a local digestive.

More delights in the garden. Clumps of mint and a pink rose where I place a beetle rescued from the plight of his own back. What a clack his carapace makes on the stone.

When I wake in the night and look to the window moths flutter like embers. Mornings the sun casts bars of apricot on the walls of the bedroom.

We took a long drive to Knossos, the road lined with pink oleander and yellow broom. We entered to creamy stone and cedar trees, the surrounding hills pretty and fertile. A tabby cat stretched beneath a cedar in the way of Greek cats, as if they own the sun. Visited the excellent archaeological museum in Heraklion.

In the sea is a solitary white sail like a shark’s tooth or the spine of some sea creature. A cat saunters to the garden with the eternal grace of the feline. The sun is warm overhead and the shadow of my pencil and the knuckle and nail of my hand are sharp on the page.

Sea now iridescent bars of blue. And still the cumulus come, a parade from behind the hills. A tiny bird with gold chest alights on the grass, flies up to the white walls and across the terracotta onion dome of the church in distant Kolymvari. Meanwhile, the sail turns to a curve like a sun-bleached bone.

I read Prospero’s Cell. ‘…out of prehistory lay a little olive grove…’ Greece is a land of eternals: sea, olive, sky, cat…

A prickly pear has produced eggcups of yellow. And here’s a lemon tree full of green lemons and a few yellow lemons. I pick a lemon as hard and yellow as quince, a powdery pillow of fruit. I cut the lemon, and it’s as buttery as a melon.

The sea turns silver at the edge where it meets the ochre hills, before turning the silver of lavender against the cream rocks of a break. Clouds come silent, herded by the breath of an African breeze.

Yet more from the garden: Virginia creeper, silver senecio, and lilac. A bush of lemon verbena and a cascade of sweet honeysuckle. A pomegranate tree with one nascent fruit like a rosehip.

Sea now metal grey, smudged like the nap of fine wool. The curve of white road on the hill like a fingernail, like the shed scimitar sheath of a cat’s claw. Sea is lilac, pompadour mauve. It is a bolt of pleated silk, rippling in blues and violets and steel whites. Sea the soft silver of pewter. Clouds reflected in the ribs of water.

The last day a fierce wind will arrive as brisk and cool as England. We will walk the hill to the cave of St John the Hermit. A singular place of worship, dapper with pots of arum lilies and heaps of pink pelargoniums, each cave furnished as an altar with chairs and icons and candles. Each cave craggy and curled as foam on the sea.

May is fresh and lovely but I miss the heat that presses and stuffs, filling every nook. The cat returns. His testicles are intact. I feed him tuna. He sits on a chair and washes his paws and purrs. At the port in Kolymvari lives a colony of cats, thin and shabby and one small white cat so exquisite it is like a China ornament. How pampered and fat are my Rocky and Coco in London. I shall tell them of Kolymvari, of the port and the scavenging. It’s good to keep your cats in line — as if one can ever keep a cat in line.

I have looked toward this holiday so long it is sad when it is behind me, a memory.

Back in London the alliums will break purple and the iris bloom violet. The chocolate mint will up, heuchera froth pink and even the chives put on pink pompoms. The peonies poise at bud, like eggs about to hatch. Bluebells everywhere. The laburnum tree hangs its yellow lanterns and the lilac trees jostle their cream and purple blooms. A pink horse chestnut clothes the patio with pink confetti. Rocky chews the velvet leaves of nepeta. Ferns unfurl.

My olive trees are puny; one bud on my fig tree.

We are in for a week of good weather.

But this May is eternally Crete.