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o’clock and he would take me to his own home to get the key and then down to the house on the beach. His own home turned out to be a substantial farm on which he had his own olive-pressing plant. He pointed to the word BLACKSTONE on the side of the stationary engine with some pride and said: “Engleesh, Engleesh”, and to the tractor which was a Massey-Ferguson. We drove down to the beach over what I was happy to see was an appalling road. The house was at the centre of acrescent stretch of sand against which the waves lapped gently.
    At either end was a rocky postcard peninsula. Behind the beach lay a fertile flat valley of orange, lemon and fig trees with cotton bushes still dotted whitely with left-over puffs of cotton wool. A rippling river carved a channel through the sand not one hundred yards from the house.
    Beyond the valley, the hills accumulated into an upheaval of near peaks escalating to the grandeur of the main range and the high snows. In front of the house, the deep blue of the Aegean filled the distance between the beach and the shores of Epidaurus; far to the south the mountains of the island of Kythira lifted over an indigo horizon.
    It was a visual experience to lift the heart and the spirit. The house itself, alas, did not sublimate the experience. It must have been a grand place in its heyday but when I saw it I couldn’t help thinking of the Parthenon with all the pillars collapsed. It was a gaunt though dignified skeleton. However, one room in the front was habitable – provided some pretty rapid repair work was done to the roof and ceiling, through which water was still dripping from the previous day’s rain and which looked in imminent danger of collapsing. The main living room was open to the sky, and a fine crop of nettles coming through the concrete floor reminded me that nettle-tops are reputed to make a palatable soup. And it was just under thirty metres from the sea.
    â€œAre there any fish in there?” I asked using every gesture in the fisherman’s vocabulary. He nodded enthusiastically and for good measure went down to the edge of the tide and scooped around in the wet sand untilhe scraped out a small shellfish, which, he indicated, would make good bait.
    I had no means of explaining my happiness or gratitude but he must have seen it in my face for he beckoned me to follow him back through the oranges and lemons (which he owned and large numbers of which he picked for me).
    We walked for 600 yards to a road at the foot of a steep hill. Halfway up it was a small square building with a flat roof. A disused path, guarded by thickets and carpets of extremely vicious weeds, led to a little platform before the house.
    He opened a padlock on the door and ushered me in. The clutter of rubbish on the floors of the two rooms and the smoke-blackened walls and ceilings did not conceal that this was a well-built place in good condition.
    He told me that this also belonged to him but this did not prepare me for his next gesture, in which he made it quite clear that I could have this too.
    I burst out laughing from sheer pleasure and incredulity. I wished that I could speak Greek to tell him of my feelings but doubted whether I ever could. Instead, I clasped his hand in both of mine. I think he understood.
    Before we went down to the car I climbed up on the roof and looked round my sunset domain. There were again no words available. I felt like a king. A penniless king but rich beyond the potency of wealth.

Chapter 3
An Enormous Contentment
    I knew what it meant to be out of this world.
    The first I knew of the upheaval in Greece was when I went up to the wine-shop one lunchtime for a threepenny glass of wine. Stavros told me that for two days the country had been under military dictatorship. He also warned me that I had to be indoors by six o’clock that evening or else “Boom-boom, you’re dead.”
    The same curfew deadline had apparently been in force the