The Village: A Novel of Wartime Crete

By Philip Duke

A Cretan village confronts the Nazi juggernaut sweeping across Europe. A village matriarch tries to hold her family together...Her grieving son finds a new life in the Cretan Resistance…A naive English soldier unwillingly finds the warrior in himself…And a fanatical German paratrooper is forced to question everything he thought he believed in. The lives of four ordinary people are irrevocably entwined and their destinies changed forever as each of them confronts the horrors of war and its echoes down the decades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
• Release date: Mar 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781785359118

Philip Duke

Philip Duke is a retired professor of anthropology. He and his wife lived on the island of Crete, Greece for five years before returning to the United States in 2015. Philip now lives in Durango, Colorado, USA.

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action.

March 1941

Chapter 1

Anastasia Manoulakis loved cats. She didn’t tolerate them like the other villagers did just because they ate mice and the rats that attacked their chickens. No, she loved them with all her heart, for cats were her constant reminder that she, Anastasia Manoulakis of the tiny village of Ayios Stefanos, had once been cultured. As she heard her current favourite cat Wawa—she called it so after its distinctive meow—scream at the top of its lungs, in the throes, it seemed, of a permanent mating, the caterwauling took her back to that special time many years ago when her parents had taken her to a concert by a travelling operatic troupe. The group of artists, so far as she could remember, consisted of two singers, a man and a woman, both of them fatter than she could imagine possible, and a young man whose lack of expertise on the accordion was surpassed only by his inability to keep time with the singers. Anastasia had no idea what the two were singing about but they kept clutching each other as if they were afraid the other one would flee the stage. And even though the high notes had reminded her of the village cats fighting over kitchen scraps, the little girl sat there and listened in rapture. Her father had told her that the troupe had travelled all over the world—or at least as far as Iraklion 140 kilometers away—and that she should never forget this moment. At the end of their final piece the crowd stood up and gave the performers round after round of applause. How Anastasia squealed in delight, how everybody shouted bravo, bravo, bravo.

Now, many years after her one and only introduction to high culture, Anastasia was a small and slightly stooped woman, the result of years of unremitting toil. Her grey hair was pulled back into a bun held tight by a small clip and the grease that she was able to wash out far too seldom. In the right—or wrong—light there was a trace of a moustache, a grey colour that matched the solitary hair that sprouted from the mole on her right cheek. She wheezed and gasped for breath at even the slightest exertion, but so far, God willing, she had not been called to meet her beloved parents at the right hand of their Lord.

Anastasia heard Wawa wailing again and smiled at the memory of that wonderful musical evening. But even as her little cat screeched on, now joined by the rest of the Manoulakis feline menagerie, the old woman was forced back to reality by the patter of raindrops outside, as a late winter storm, at first haltingly and then ferociously, blasted in. She sighed. How many times, she asked herself, had she seen this happen, and with the washing still wet and hanging out to dry. She put down the spoon she had been stirring the evening soup with and went outside to her little garden to pull down the laundry from the line. She made a mental note to sew up the hole in her husband’s shirt again, for he was always putting his elbow though it.

She was glad she had come out when she did for the wind was from the south and already the brown sand of the Sahara was beginning to wipe out all of her hard work and even to coat the houses a yellowish brown. The wind slashed through the village, blowing shutters open, ripping shirts, trousers, and skirts off clotheslines to leave them snared on the branches of the trees, and whipping up the dead leaves of last summer into brown vortices that danced through the lanes and across the fields. Taking time to look around her as she hitched up a stocking that was falling to her ankle, Anastasia pulled the last remaining clothes off the line, promising to have Yianni climb the tree in her little garden to recover the rest of her laundry. High clouds were beginning to scud in from the west, still light grey but ominous nonetheless. To the east huge boiling mushrooms of black clouds filled the sky, and to the south the White Mountains rapidly were disappearing in a wreath of mist. And then the rain began in earnest. Anastasia hurried indoors, grateful to be dry but worried that Elpida, her granddaughter, her husband Antoni and son Yianni, would not be so lucky. Now, sheet after sheet of rain, so dense she could scarcely see through them, blasted against the house. Streams of water cascaded off the houses into the alleys and coursed down the streets, cutting deep gullies in their hungry search for the sea, as though the village itself was dying from a thousand slashes. Harsh winds continued to hurl in from the mountains, roaring down the valleys and gullies, and blowing away everything that was not tied down. Sheet lightning flashed over the sea, now barely distinguishable from the pall of clouds embrowning everything. Thunder rocked the very foundations of the house. A violent gust of wind coughed down the chimney and the smoke from the fire petulantly kicked back into the living room for a moment but then, as though remembering where it needed to be, continued on its course up the chimney.

Anastasia turned to the sound of footsteps followed by a slither as someone slipped in the mud outside. The heavy wooden door was thrown open and her husband, Antoni, stormed inside, water falling in large globules from his clothes. He was followed by the source of the slithering, Yianni, his clothing covered in thick mud. Anastasia stifled a laugh. ‘Take this, Husband, and you, too, Yianni,’ she ordered, and threw two rough cloths at them. The men stripped down in front of the fire, the steam rising from their bodies and the rain dripping onto the hard earthen floor to create little craters of mud. Anastasia averted her gaze as they pulled off their trousers; she had never seen a man naked, not even her husband, and she did not intend to start now. Retrieving dry clothes from the other end of the house, Anastasia handed them over and at last they grunted that she could face back to them.

‘Well, at least the sheep are in the cave, not that they would give a damn,’ Antoni grunted. Like most Cretans, he was a small man. His bald head was compensated by a luxuriant moustache that knitted imperceptibly into a thick field of nose hair. He scratched his weather-beaten face, its bristles a perpetual presence except for Sundays when all the villagers smartened themselves up for church. ‘We got them in, Woman,’ he continued, ‘and we were halfway back when the heavens opened. So, there we were stuck in the open and figured we just had to run like hell, which we did.’ He sat down in front of the fireplace and drank the coffee his wife had given him.

Yianni joined him, luxuriating in the hot drink. He alternately cracked his knuckles, a habit he continued with despite his daughter’s protestations, and rubbed the side of his large, hooked nose. He stared into the fire with a mournful look that never seemed to disappear completely. He shook his head, dragging himself back to the present. ‘Where is the little girl, by the way, Mama?’ he asked.

‘At the church, helping Papa Michali with the cleaning,’ his mother replied.

Yianni shook his head. ‘She spends too much time at that place. She should be playing more with the other children in the sunshine. If we ever get any.’

‘She’s fine, my son.’ She paused. ‘So, tell me,’ she asked the two men. ‘You were at the kafeneio earlier, what are you hearing?’

Yianni and Antoni looked at each other, and their silence worried Anastasia more than if they had spoken. Antoni took three long drags on his cigarette. ‘Woman, it appears that our army up north has been victorious against the Italians. But, and this is only a rumour, if the Italians are truly beaten, then the Germans will have to come to their rescue. And that will be a totally different fight. If that happens I don’t know.’

Anastasia stared at the fire as it crackled in the hearth, playing with a scab on the top of her forehead until it began to bleed.

The sloshing of light footsteps coming up to the house broke the old woman’s spell. ‘It must be Elpida. We’ll talk later,’ Anastasia said.

The rain had already lessened, and when the little girl opened the door, the sweet smell of wet clover and olive trees wafted into the room. Elpida was eight years old with jet black hair and piercing, green eyes. She had never known her own mother, who had died in childbirth. But as she told her family once, with a maturity that shocked them all into silence, ‘How can I miss something I never had?’

Elpida sat down in front of the fire, but Yianni said sharply, ‘Little girl, help Yiayia. Pick up those cloths and rinse them out. I don’t know what you young ones are coming to.’ Elpida opened her mouth to say something, but a furtive shake of Anastasia’s head silenced her.

The storm blew through quickly, as they so often did on the island. The clouds dissipated and the sky turned first a washed-out and then a deeper, almost luminous blue. Yianni went back to the kafeneio for coffee. Anastasia and Elpida cut vegetables at the kitchen table, made from a roughly hewn single plank of olive wood, while Antoni sat outside smoking his cigarettes.

When Elpida had gone to bed for the night, Anastasia joined her husband. They had been married for more years than either of them could remember. Although the marriage had not been arranged in any formal sense, their two families had gently nudged them together so that his proposal and her acceptance seemed part of the natural order of things. Anastasia had long ago realized that they would never achieve the type of love the poets wrote about, with white doves flying and gentle music playing, but they had reached a level of affection and tolerance that many others of their age could only wish for. They were, she knew, in a word, happy, or as happy as an old couple had a right to be. Now she turned to her husband for reassuring words about the war on the mainland. But for once, Antoni could find none, and the two of them held hands in silence, each trying to dispel their fears for the future.

Chapter 2

Paul Cuthbertson, eighteen years old and unemployed since he had left school four years ago, was grateful for his local library, for here he could find refuge from his house and the solitude—and books—he craved. The library was a small brick and stone structure in a working-class section of Liverpool, made possible by an American benefactor many years earlier. Its main hall boasted a huge glass ceiling dome where light flooded in even on dark winter days. Paul’s favourite room was the small annex to the main hall, for this housed the history section. Why he liked reading about the past so much he never could quite fully figure out, beyond its being a lot better than his present. He liked to think that he was fairly smart—at least if the other boys in his class were to be believed—but why he did not know. His parents didn’t seem particularly bright to him, and it certainly wasn’t because of his schooling, for Paul had realized years before that the school’s only purpose was to prepare him and his mates for a life of unremitting drudgery in one of the many factories that surrounded his house.

The library clock struck five and told him it was time to go, for the library closed as soon as the blackout was observed. He put on his thin raincoat and cap and walked back to his home a few streets away. The terraced houses of his neighbourhood had already borne the brunt of the Luftwaffe and no doubt, Paul was certain, would suffer more. He passed the greengrocer’s shop where his mother worked. The plate glass had been blown out, and she had spent a cold week selling the fruit and vegetables through the shop front as the women stood in line with their ration books. A gap in the row of houses was all that was left of where the McGinleys had lived. A landmine had made a direct hit on their home and taken it out in one earth-shattering explosion that had rocked the foundations of the surrounding houses and even made a huge crack in the concrete roof of the air-raid shelter where Paul and his family were hiding. Paul had dug through the debris the next morning with the other neighbourhood men. The concrete and bricks made an almost impenetrable tangle and Paul breathed heavily and had to stop often to catch his breath, the result of years of eating too little food and living in a city where all the buildings were black from the soot that thousands of chimneys daily belched into the air. It was Paul who had found Mary McGinley. He had gently uncovered her face, but as he moved the debris around it he realised that the head was all there was. He still remembered the bitter taste of the bile that he had vomited up. It took another three hours of sifting through the unstable debris before they found the rest of her, together with her husband and two daughters, each of them in one piece, but dead all the same.

Paul hurried on through the early evening, drawing his coat in tight as a fog began to seep in from the Mersey. With no streetlights and the fog getting worse by the minute, Paul needed to rely on recognizing the individual housefronts to keep his bearings. There was the Rossiters’ house, identifiable by the heavily sandstoned front step that Lizzie scrubbed every morning without fail. Then past the elm tree that he and Billy Boyd used to swing from until the rope snapped and poor old Billy fell down and broke his leg. Finally, his own front door, painted a sickly lime-green colour. His father had said he’d got the paint cheaply from a pal in the pub, but Paul suspected that it had fallen off the back of a lorry, to use one of his father’s favourite phrases.

Paul let himself in, catching the familiar smells of coal and cigarette smoke and his mother’s own unique blend of cooking, which now had to rely mostly on a chip pan, potatoes and large quantities of lard. He hung up his coat and hat in the hallway but kept the scarf round his neck. In the living room his parents were sitting in front of the coal fire, drawing from it as much heat as they could, for coal was expensive and the Liverpool weather always seemed to create an inescapable dampness. The house was draughty and the blackout paper and curtains stirred in the breeze. Paul coughed; the air was thick with smoke from the coal fire and the cigarettes that Paul’s father lit up like clockwork. As usual they did not say much, the three of them, but after Paul had warmed his hands in front of the small fire, his mother said softly, ‘Paul, over there, on the sideboard, there’s a letter for you. It looks government, like.’ Paul knew, they all knew, what was in it.

Paul picked it up, looked at the front, turned it over to look at the back and then inspected its front again, as though he had never before seen such a wondrous object as a letter. He pushed back the hair from over his eyes. His parents remained silent, but in deference to the occasion his father put down his cigarette in the ashtray, a heavy, bright orange ceramic dish, a souvenir of a pre-war Whit Monday excursion to Southport, just up the coast. In her own concession to the solemnity of the occasion, his mother turned down the radio, though not so far as to make it inaudible. Paul opened the envelope and read the letter. ‘Dear Mr Cuthbertson, blah, blah, blah, you are requested, blah, blah, blah…’

‘Well, love?’ his mother asked him.

‘Saighton Camp, Chester. Royal Artillery,’ Paul replied.

‘It could be worse, son," his father spoke up. ‘Coulda’ been infantry. I was with the Fusiliers last time the balloon went up, Lewis gunner. Bloody artillery were so far back they might as well have been in England. Come on, son, it’s time you had a drink with your old man. Ivy, we’re off to the Prince Alfred.’

Paul settled himself into a corner of the pub and waited for his father to return with the beer. His father put Paul’s drink on the table and looked around the pub’s smoky bar. ‘Son,’ his father’s tobacco-gravelled voice could hardly be heard above the talking, ‘I just need a word with Harry about next week’s darts match.’ Paul nodded, surprised but grateful for his father’s perceptiveness in allowing him to be alone. Paul continued to nurse his drink, rubbing his hand over what passed for a beard—his father called it ‘bum fluff’ and wondered why his son even bothered to shave. Paul reflected on what lay ahead. He harboured no illusions that his generation of Englishmen would be spared war, but it was still difficult for him to come to terms with the possibility that he might very well die, and die very soon, and perhaps die quite gruesomely, too. He had read once, in the library, a memoir from the Great War, the one his father had fought in. The writer had said that youth offers a shield of invincibility to a soldier: the conviction that while everybody else might die, he himself would survive. In the coldly logical atmosphere of the library, Paul had agreed with the sentiment; he himself might go to war but he would with certainty emerge unscathed from it. Now, as he drained the last of the beer and moved to the bar for another pint, he was not so sure. Still, as his father had reminded him, at least he would be in the artillery and with luck might never even see the enemy let alone face any danger.

Paul’s Uncle Arthur came in. He had missed the Great War because of poor eyesight and now he worked on the docks, although the nightly pounding by the Luftwaffe hardly made his job a cushy one. Paul waved him over, and his father rejoined them in a second round. ‘Your mam just told me, Paul. About gettin’ called up.’ He turned to his brother-in-law. ‘Well, ’ere we go again, eh, Alf. Whatever happened to a land fit for heroes? That’s what I wanna know. This country’s a bleedin’ joke, and that Chamberlain. Mind you, I don’t think this feller Churchill’s any better, for all his struttin’ and talkin’. They’re all bloody swine if you ask me.’

Paul’s father shrugged. ‘So what’s new? The politicians always mess things up and it’s the likes of us who’ve got to sort it out for ’em. Mind you, that bloody Hitler does need sortin’ out and no mistake. And if we don’t do it, who will? The French? Don’t make me laugh. They didn’t last five bloody minutes. Anyway, Paul, you’ll be in the artillery. You’ll be fine.’

Paul gave a half smile and their talk drifted to other, more immediate topics, like the weekend’s football results and the upcoming darts match against the Black Horse.

The next week was a blur for Paul; not because he was busy preparing to leave but once he’d decided on what few clothes he could take with him, there was nothing to do but wait. Each day was a blur of sameness. His mother told him to go to the library, but reading seemed pointless, and so he just hung around the house, as though he wanted to wrap himself in its familiarity for future reference. On the night before he left, he packed his small suitcase and went to bed early. Early the next morning — an hour before the time his parents had agreed to send him off — Paul slipped out of the house, leaving his parents asleep upstairs. He walked along the main road for thirty minutes before he was able to catch an early tram that took him to the ferry to Birkenhead. Seagulls wheeled around the masthead of the dumpy little boat as it battled against the tide and the wakes of the myriad vessels that made Liverpool the most important seaport in the British Isles. Up and down the river, merchant ships were unloading their goods after their Atlantic crossing and destroyers whoop-whooped in circles as they and the tiny corvettes finished their shepherding. Paul sniffed the familiar mix of river, oil and smoke and wondered when he’d smell it again. The ferry bumped against the Birkenhead landing stage and Paul waited with the other passengers until he could disembark. A short walk took him to the railway station where he bought a ticket for Chester. Three hours later he stood, alone and rather forlorn, on the platform at Chester’s railway station, and after asking a porter for directions, Paul walked the few miles south to Saighton Camp. An icy rain had begun to fall and the wind cut through his thin coat. Paul felt his stomach rumble and he remembered the carrying-out his mother had made for him the night before. Like an idiot, he’d left the cheese sandwich on the kitchen table and he hoped that food was waiting for him at the camp. He was not optimistic.

At the entrance to the camp a tall, immaculately uniformed corporal, complete with blancoed belt and holster, checked Paul’s papers and opened up the gates to let him through. Paul felt small, for reasons he could not explain; perhaps surrounded by all the military uniforms and air of general efficiency his cheap brown suit and small cardboard suitcase simply made him feel as insignificant as he had ever felt in his life.

Paul was assigned to a billet in a hastily constructed Nissen hut, its end windows moving in time to the violent gusts of wind that blew through the camp. His bed was a thin mattress covered with threadbare sheets and blankets. Paul sensed the other recruits were as nervous as he was, their banter barely masking their fear of the unknown. They waited, not knowing what to do, until a sergeant appeared and led them off to the mess hall for dinner.

Paul found the meal better than he expected. The mashed potatoes were runny but the corned beef was edible at least. Another young recruit sat down next to him. Paul learnt he was from Birmingham and like him a rabid football fan.

‘My name’s Terry Hendricks, by the way,’ his nasal accent even worse, to Paul’s ears, than his own thick Liverpudlian.

Paul introduced himself. They found little else to say and contented themselves with trying to smooth out the lumps in the custard.

That night, lying in his bed, Paul stared at the ceiling, listening to the snores and heavy breathing of the other recruits and wondering if they all felt the same way. He was alone—that he did not mind so much—but the loneliness led him to a place of fear. A fear of whether he could survive, not just the next few weeks of training, but—most of all—the indefinable future ahead of him.

The weeks of basic training passed, each day starting with the ritual cleaning of an already spotless latrine, then an inspection of hair length and a quick march to the barber’s if it offended the sergeant’s overly developed sensibilities, and endless uniform inspections—Paul’s uniform did not fit him, though nor did anybody else’s—and hours of drill on the parade ground. The repetition, before the recruits were even allowed to fire an artillery piece with live ammunition, turned his mind—temporarily he hoped—into a sponge that absorbed little else but how to work the gun. Yet some things did impress him even if he could recall some of them fully only after he had left the camp. He was given rifle and bayonet training and learnt how to stick, twist, pull; stick, twist, pull; stick, twist, pull. He wondered if a German would be quite as compliant as the straw figure he now could efficiently skewer. And all through his training, he never got over the inordinate attention his drill sergeant, an almost incomprehensible Cockney, paid to the creases of Paul’s trousers or the shininess of his boots.

One morning, Paul and his squad lined up for the morning inspection. The sergeant moved along the line, swinging his swagger stick. He stopped in front of Paul.

‘Cuthbertson,’ he shouted, peering down at Paul’s