48 - The Last of Family Holidays

Our penultimate holidays in the camping of Skotina was the one of the turbulent for the Greek nation summer of 1974. The tranquillity of the seaside resort was interrupted abruptly on a late July morning, with our beach holidays in full swing, by the news of the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey. Our dumb friend Takis deluded into the victory of an ill-prepared Greek-Cypriot army and its incompetent leadership, after every radio announcement emanating from Cyprus of the military losses that the ramshackle Greek-Cypriot forces inflicted to the invading hordes, went into a rapture shouting: "Yeah, Another Turkish plane was brought down. Come on, Androutsopoulos [the recently appointed by the latter junta prime-minister]! Teach them Turks a lesson! Kick them out of Cyprus!" But the breakout of the war triggered a more measured approached, defused by genuine concerns, in the now less clandestine conversations amongst the grown-ups in the evening gatherings around the Akrivides’ tent. The dictatorial regime was clearly in its final death throes.

My family worries were exacerbated when Father was called up as a reservist lieutenant and dispatched to an artillery unit in Porto Lagos, not far from the Greece-Turkish land border. Not surprisingly, the shock from Father’s call-up brought a few tears to Mother. Nikos, the ever reliable and genuine friend, after embracing her on the news of the call-up he reassured her, in his usual political style, that he would stand by her under any adverse situations that might arise. He will be there for her a phone call away in any eventuality. But there was nothing to worry about or be afraid of and life will sort itself out. Father’s call-up and the spectre of an escalated conflict closer to home also marked my own soul. After his departure, Nikos helped us to disassembled our tent, before my uncle came to drive us and our holiday gear back to Thessaloniki. Our holiday prematurely over before the end of July, a couple of weeks after it started. From that summer, the photo of the Mother with her short, blond dyed hair posing next to Father, in his military fatigue decorated by the two silver stars of a lieutenant fatigue, at the seafront of the town of Kavala, was left as family memorabilia from those months of Greco-Turkey skirmishes, which after the invasion of Cyprus achieved its objectives, it was reduced to endless negotiations and an ineffectual to date political theater.  

The last chapter of our joint holidays with our family friends and Billy was written in the next summer, that of 1975, at the same campsite. It was the last of family holidays in that place. Our vacations were preceded by unnecessarily stressful for young boys and exhausting exams for entry to the so called ‘Experimental High School of Thessaloniki’, which allegedly had higher standards and provided a better educational environment, than the public schools intended to the hoi polloi. That made the holiday break at the end of my primary school years even more desirable. Billy and I, with performance grades and intelligence presumable above average were urged by our confident and proud parents to take the exam for two of a limited number of available first year places in that high-rated model school. I felt that success in the rather demanding exams for admission, given our young ages, was taken for granted in the case of Billy at least. His family was prominent in the educational, as well as political circles of the city. They had good connections to the exam board and the teaching staff of the new high school. Strangely perhaps, it was assumed that I would breeze through the exams as well. But then, I stumbled upon the maths paper, solving a problem using numerical data taken from another question. Simply put, I committed a blunder. The initial shock from the discovery of my error quickly faded into mere disappointment, which, however, did not last long. At lunch with the two families in a tavern to celebrate the end of the exams and the beginning of our holidays, Nikos consoled us: he would ‘have a word’ with X in the exam committee, a teacher and close family friend of theirs, so that the examiner of the Maths paper would overlook my schoolboy error, take into account the method I used and the exposition and neatness of the solution, which anyway should have been reflected by my written answer to the questions, rather than the end numerical result of a single question, and they would accordingly show some due leniency in grading the paper. ‘There was no reason [for me and my parents] to worry…’, Nikos said with a well-meant smile.  

The final grade in Maths of 13/20, however, as unexpected it was after Nikos’ reassurances, ruled my admission out of that school. Thereafter, Father's ‘Pay attention to the input data!’ became a recurring advice before each of the numerous exams I had to sit in for the rest of my student life and beyond. Billy was effortlessly admitted to the model high school of the city for gifted children. After counterfeiting the electricity bill of a Father’s colleague as a proof of address, I was admitted in the ‘1^st High School of Thessaloniki for Boys’, instead of the less respectable 9^th in the catchment area of which our street belonged, and where children like Kostakis and others from the lower strata of the eastern districts of city and our neighborhood ended up attending.

My life paths after the failure in those exams would de facto deviate from Billy’s. After the illicit intervention of Father to falsify our home address, my teenage years path diverged from that of my neighborhood friend Kostakis, too!  Our last vacation at the campsite, where the Akrivides’ family now stayed in their luxurious caravan they had recently purchased instead of the tent, passed indifferently, largely outside Billy’s circle of friends and his ever-present shadow. With the ominous teenage years right in front of us, he had been already steps ahead in every respect.