Over the coming weeks, Peter will serialise his first novel on this website.

Here is a brief synopsis.

Paul Socrates sweated his entire working life in a Turkish bath of his own making. For a Greek-Cypriot this was something of an irony.

A steam presser by trade, Paul discovers one Monday morning he is being made redundant, his daughter has a blood disease called leukaemia, and it is 24 years to the day that he started working in the factory at Loukades Fashions as a steam presser.

The year is 1979.

The story revolves around one day in his life.

It was inspired by the book ‘A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich’, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

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CHAPTER 1

THE LITTLE NUMBA

Thursday 10^th December 1979 7.30am

WHAT’S GOIN’ ON?  – MARVIN GAYE

I swet my life ina Turkish bath I bin makin myself … for a Greek – Cypriot isan irony. Eh? An thas me … an irony. Is what I do. Irony, foa livin! Hah! You si what I do?

Cascades, they say, of stim, iz jet the heat, lika geyser, notta geezer – direc on the dresses I press with my spit – sizzlin industrial ion. I bin surroun by the fierce burning air, envelop I say, in it and by it. I hadda constantly hissing cobra in my han. My right arm, my pressing arm is comin direct from my swollen right hand. When is busy the heat is make me a bath in my own sweat. The back and front of my doc martin shirt, is stick to me, is cling to me, an my ves, like the golden gum glue you can by in the shop. My hard-earned, hones, sweet smellin sweat.

While I work I could balance a tsigarette on my lip. One day I forget I havvan unfinish tsigarette in my mouth and now I gotta a littel scar right in the middle of my bottom lip.

I smoke the Rothmans tsigarettes. I smoke forti a day, maybe more. Some days is 3 packs. I spen abow 30% of my wages on tsigarettes. I add it up and is a lot of lefta – money. Every Cypriot in London, he smoke Rothman tsigarettes. Everyone I met them, they smoke the Rothmans. But now, they smoke the poncy Silk Cut the Cypriots, with the purple colour on the paket.

I am a man who been givin the swet on my back to the work and I bin proud to do so. Because is a noble thing to swet when you bin working. Is like you bin min to bin swet because you bin workin, hard, proper work. This pipol, they sit down with the computas, or they typin, or they makin the books to add, this is no work, not hard, proper work. They call this clerical, ha! Is crimnal this work!

I neva met a fat pressa, they don exís! You show me a fat presser and I show you he is a pattern – cutter standing in because someone his off the work, or he’s scrounger, you know? The pressas they neva fat ‘cos they been working too bloody hard. Proper work.

Am on the 217 bus every day, five, sometimes six days a week, to the factory, because is go all the way down to Old Street from Palmers Green where I bin living for 25 years, since 1954. The bus is stop outsigh the door. Yes outsigh the door with the sign above, the number 27, 27 Old Street, like the GLC is plan it.

Am try to reed the Daily Mirror on the bus on my way to work. But I can get a seat today, is pack. I know a lot of the pipol on the bus and they makin the same journey every day, like me you know. Some of them I know and they been from the same villages in Cyprus I come from.

A lovely, Caribbean fellow, the conducta on the bus. Is Henry and I always say hello to him whenever he ask me for the fare. Sometimes I wait for his 217 bus before I get on. I like to reed the paypa. I like to kip up. Kip up with the times. The news. The new Government, the new pipol taking over. The first woman, she Prime Minista. My God, is modern times we livin in. A woman, she run the country. Thacha. She live above the shop. Now she prime minister.

But today I cooden iven hav a tsigarette on the 217 this Monday morning, ‘cos upstairs is pack anall. The air is stinky smoke up there, but because am smoking too I don notice. I only notice the smoke on the top of the bus when I stop smoking.

Anyway, is no seats today. None.

I cooden concentrate this morning anyway on the paypa becuz I know is the day I have to ring the doctor. Never mind Thacha. Today the Doctor is gonna tell us the results for Eleni, my daughter. The tests she have done.

Eleni is my life. She make my life complee. She is the alpha and omega. You know what I mean? In fact she’s more important than my life. All my swet is for her. Every drop. I din want for her what I have for my life, you know? Am thinking about her all the time, especially since these bloody tests she have.

“Not gwan work today then Mr Paully man?” is Henry. Jesus. Almost miss my stop. I jump off the bus as is pull away from the stop outside 27 Old Street. I jus make it in time. Henry, his belly laughing. “See you tomorrow man!” he shoutin as he pulling the cord for the driver to pull away. I bin thinking about Eleni so much I almost miss the stop eh?

I read somewhere. A book. Somewhere. I like to read, you know. It say, ‘The feet are the most intelligent part of the human body’. I understand this. My feet is telling me to stay on the bus. Don’t go to work today. Eh? What you think? ‘The feet are the most intelligent part of the human body’ Where you feet, is where you want to be. Eh? Is nice.

So I get off an I go down the sidestreet, is Colebroke Road, so I can have some breakfast. I nearly always have my breakfast at The Green Angel Café in Colebrooke Row. A cup of strong tea, an egg and bacon sandwich maybe, a tsigarette, of course and we maybe have an argy bargy before the day is start. Is round the back of the factory and everybody in there know me. I go in, the door is sticky and always make a noise from a coppa bell on top of the door frame when you go in. Like the old antique shops. Is a few punters I know, all stuffing they faces with toast or eggs. The smell of the fried bacon is everywhere.

“Martha, good morning! How you doini?”

“The lovely Mr Paul! Fine thank you darling, nice weekend?”

“Yes thank you. Very nice. Very nice. Quiet.” Am lying, of course.

Martha is Italian. She is very kine but she is tieya all the time. Her eyes have big bags under. She run the place with her husband Tony, who does all the cooking. He has a very thin moustache and is only got one eye. He wears a black patch like a pirate, on his left eye. His son left a frying pan on the stove and the oil is spit into his eye. He never forgive his son. His son was name Tony too.

Martha know how I like my tea.

“Strong enough to stand your teaspoon in, eh Mr Paul?”

“I keep telling you am no mista to you my darlin. Just you callin me Paul.”

“And how is Mrs Paul and Eleni?” Tony asked from the kitchen while he making an Omlette.

“Fine, fine thank you.” Am lying again. I can tell them, can I? I don wanna bring my private business, my family business here eh? We talk about politics instead. Not my personal family life. Is too much.

Tony the son, he got an eye for Eleni. He got two working eyes unlike his Dad. I seen him looking at her with them. She’s fourteen. She’s too young my son. I wanna tell him, but I wanna keep things sweet when I come for breakfast.

“Din you see the paypa?” Am askin when she bring me my tea. I kip to the Politics.

“Soon you not even gonna have a Union, Mr Paul!” Martha was saying.

“They say we had ‘a winter of discontent’. Everything is gonna change now, with this new woman, Mrs Thatcher.” I tell her. “We gonna have a three-day week again just like the bloody Heath, you’ll see Mr Tony. Everybody is gonna be on strike again now. The Unions is not gonna have it. The Unions is finish.” Tony the younger, is come over with my egg and bacon sandwich.

“And don ask for no more wages eh re Tony boy. Otherwise, you fatha is gonna be asking to borrow from the IMF, like Callaghan.”

“Say hello to Eleni for me, will you Mr Paul.” Tony the son, is whisper this when he speak and he leans over to me when he says this. He has eyes for my girl. You see?

Too young for you my boy. I finish my paypa before the bell is ring behind me.

Am walking up the three flights of stairs at the factory as I never use the lift no more. One day I get stuck in it when it brek down. Three hours I was in there, waitin for the bloody fieya brigade pipol to come and open the door. The other owners went spare, ‘cos they have to repair the bloody thing and is cost them a lot of money my friend. Is no my fault it stuck.

But when I am walking up the stairs this Monday I bin thinking. Today is twenty-four years to the day, when I start work here as a presser. I bin workin in this factory for twenty-four years re!

8.30am

I look at my card and reed my name with the time on it. I check the clock. I punch my card and is make me think. Twenty-four years today.

I go to my machine. I check the electricity she’s on. I look to see if the Govna is in the office and I start to make sure the temprature is goin correct by putting up the gage on the cylinda. Is got to pass boiling wata up through the hose, so I have a little time before is hot enuff number on the gauge. I go to the cloakroom.

I don spik to noone yet. I don’t get on with the other pressers anyway. Many of the pipol they are nice in the factory, but these new young pressers they come in recently, I don get on with them. They bin whisperin and making signs behind me, behin my back and making my life more shit thsn it is anyway, so now I don spik to them unless I have to. Most of the pipol in the factory is like me and I like them, but not the other pressers. If fact am very easy to get on with, because am a nice guy. I can tell what signs they doini, when they think am not looking, but I catch them, I see them. Is not my fault I don say hello, you understand?

I finish another tsigarette. The pressure she is ready. The ion is hot. I start my first dress of the day. I pull her from the rail. The new order is come in on Friday. Big order. But is fussy. Is a big problem for all the factory. Is much work on one garment for us, the pressers and the costings is shit for them, the machinists.

I bin work for hour and half and still these rails are fucky fuwl. I can get ahead. Ssss. Is the sound the steam she come out from the iron as am working. This dress has so many fucky butto is really slowin me dow. Normally, ssss, I can get through the pressin of a dress in, ssss, on avrege you understan, ssss, like when the Govna isno aroun, ssss, I really slow up then, unless the mastorisa is getti on my back, ssss, well anyway I could do a dress in abow fifty secon. But these fucky buttons, ssss, are driving me crazy. They nine buttos right down the frun, ssss!!

I to finish these Dorothy Perkins dresses so the young girls can look good when they wearing them. We make a lot for Dorothy Perkins and we make the midi and the maxi, the chevron with the viscose, the polyester or the corduroy, dresses they have the pleats, the ruffs on the sleeves. I know all about the styles. I press them all. So the dress we have on this Monday is got buttos all the way down the fron and all the girls is love them. I hate them. Isa made from Denim. Long dress in denim, with buttos all the way down the fron. Heaven for the girls whjo wear them. Hell for the men who press them.

One thing I like to do when am working is talk. I like to talk to pipol because is many pipol from my lovely Cyprus, is work in the factory. An only five years ago is about the worst thing happen in Cyprus. But we don talk about the invasion.

We have Turkish people working in the factory too, so is not good politics to talk about that, you know, the troubles in Cyprus. Is no no, no – eh? A no go area just like the Ledra Palace Hotel now in our beloved Famagusta. I have to bite my lip when someone they say something in the news about the 1974 invasion, the UN, Kissinger, Makarios, Grivas, Sampson, EOKA, EOKA B, the Green Line, the Lydra Palace, But I was the one who know all about the issues there and the situation and that bastard Ecevit.

Am thinking am not even gonna do even a hundre this fucky mornin. These buttos, sss, these fucky buttos, sss! In my head am say, “You know that bloody Ecevit is gonna be the president of Cyprus if we not careful!” I make sure no one is gonna hear this, ‘cos you know is gonna get you sack. Pipol is very upset about politics at the factory. So nobody is allow to talk anything about that on the shop floor.

An am the fastest presser in Old Street my son. Can be beaten you know. Nobody is quicker that me. I got tekneek. The best tekneek. I tell you my tekneek. Just so you can understand what am talking about.

I quickly pull another dress from the haystack of polyester beside me, give it a quick shake by the collar with both hands (the way you get a whip to crack) and I swivel around with the numba. As I do, the dress she open up in mid – air, fill with the air passing through it, floating towards the ironing board. As the dress is release by my right hand, is guided by my left hand on to and through the front end of the ironing-board. As it come to rest it pass right round the board so it completely covers it like a condom on a dick. This my trademark. You know the trick when someone he pull the tablecloth away and he leave a whole plate full of cutlery? This the reverse. Is like magic and everybody who watches likes to see this. Some of the young apprentice when they start to workin they send them here to watch me do this. They watch and they learn from me and my tekneek. I should be charging them for this you know.

The dress she lay lifeless on the board like a woman who waits for you. I sometimes imagine her to be a lover. And she is restless for me to unbutton her.

I start the inside of the back first, Buttons always takin a litlee bit more time to do. So as the iron she finally rest on the back of the garment is already moving, the steam already pouring into it, making it fresh and is like reviving the material with life-giving steam. But you have to be very careful with an iron who is this hot because you can scald the dress and mark the material. This will mean the numba has to come back or at the worst they have to throw the dress away. Sometimes she has to go all the way to the beginning in the factory to replace the burn section. Is half a days work. No one is want the aggravation.

Very short spurt now on the crease and smooth away from the dress and it disappear. I point the very tip of the iron very delicately on the crease. Over the back and on to the right seam now with a quick flick from my left hand on the bottom hemline, making the garment turn over. Is like she turning position for sex. I whisper to the dress as if to a lover.

“That’s right my darling, jus a littlee bit, move over for me”! Is make me laugh to myself. Am talking to the dress you understan? In my head you understan?

I follow the new line of the seam, and make the dress come to life. Twenty seconds before and the dress is a rag, a piece of material you gonna use as a duster. Now, she has a shape and she’s clean and she’s fresh. Thas me. Thas steam. Thas irony. That’s my tekneek.

And sometimes the finishers, they say. “Oh, perhaps you might have missed this Mr Paul…do you see, a little blemish.” Blemish. Blemish? What is this blemish? I never hear the word. Sometime they bin there five minutes and they tellin you how to do you job. These girls, these young girls, oh mishi mou she bin trained at the college, the fashion college in Eess London.

And one day, Takoui, the senior finisher, she say to me, “Oh my daughter went to the London College of fashion Mr Paul didn’t you know?”

No, I din know and I din care madam.

After the seams, I start the real finishing, the arms. Jesus. Am struggle with this numba. A dress I can finish in less than three minutes?

Is hot today; almost finished the inside. Almost finished the cuffs. Finish the back, finish the next cuff and then look at my watch. Got to phone the doctor. Lunchtime. Eleni’s test.

I hold the dress. Now it’s a dress, not a numba no more, a dress, she has life and body and shape, And I never went to college to say that. I hold her up before me and I take a black plastic hanger from the cardboard box next to my station; is full of them. Sometimes they have a mind of their own. They cause me aggeravation because they get all tangled up with each other. Sometimes is was as if they know how much you need to get the work out so they all got together inside the box and said, ‘Right, if he tries to take one of us right? We stick together!’ Sometimes when production is at the most hard I need someone to separate the hangers from each other. Someone has to stand to one side an’ separate the hangers and put them on to my rail, ready for me to pick them up individually, an’ I gain a few seconds more speed in-between from numba to dress. Is all about speed in the factory; everything depen’ on how fast you can work to get the production out.

Finishers is like vultures waiting for the dress. Speed, see?. Thas the end of the line for dresses in the factory. If you want dresses out, they have to go through the finishers, because if they not finish properly is gonna come back from the wholesalers. And when the work is come back, is no pay for the Govna, is no good for you and is no good for the factory.

Takoui catch my eye as am workin’. I haven seen her all morning till now and I see she is looking at me for the first time, this Monday morning. When everythin’ change.

She bin wearing black for as long as I bin working there and probably, many years before that. She gonna be sixty-five now but she bin there in that factory, as a young woman, and then she became a widow. She bin there all her life as far as I know. You only got to give her a smile an she would have a smile for you too. Armenian family and they bin through a lot, them people. The Turks did some terrible things to their people too. But is too much politics eh? Don’t wanna upset the dust cart eh?

Am get plenty of time to look around me when am working because I can always see how people are working nearby. Behind they hands.

Widow Takoui has very small hands, very delicate. She has a very small pair of special scissor. She make tiny cuts of the thread that’s left over on a seam, or if there is too much thread when one of the machinists left over on the inside of a dress it has to be taken out. Every single dress in that factory come through her. Even the other finishers, they all look on her if they have a problem with a creess or a particular machinist’s work. They all go to her to ask what to do.

She looking at me and I can see her asking a question without saying nothin’, what the hell is she looking at me for? So she says.

“Something wrong Paul? You ok? You look upset.”

I take another dress from the pile at my side and am like a machine sometimes you know. A robow, and I go through the routine again. I start over.

What does this dried up old woman want from me eh? She wants me to be happy every day of my life? Can’t she see am not happy? She asking me if I am upset? Sure am upset, but am not gonna tell you about it.

“Too many fucky buttos,” I tell her and then I say it again to her so she gets the message. Thas the problem, nothing else. Maybe this, she gonna understand. Nothing to do with my daughter, ‘cos is nothing to do with you or anybody…

Every machinist in the factory knows is too many buttos, but this is what is selling.

Because of her I can stop thinking the phone – call, the results. I can even look at my watch properly now because I have to finish the next numba. I bet the govna, he come around soon. Looking at my work. Asking if am ok. Jus leave me alone eh?

“Bastard fucky dress. Bastard seam, bastard buttos. Sod this, I’m going for piss.”

I say this so Andy the other presser next to me can hear, and all he does is laugh but he didn’t look up from his pressin. There is steam coming from him all over. He is quick.

“Nex week, thank God, nex week.”

“What, you goin for a piss nex week, re?” Andy laughing again.

“We finish the order by nex week!” I say.

I pulled my dick out to have piss and am thinking to myself, I mean, God never gave me this jus to hav a piss wiv, eh?

And as am having this piss, am thinking about the phone-call am gonna make at lunch. I look my watch, I get relief from the piss, at last, a release. Aaah, it goes into the bowl and gives me relaxation for a moment.

I don’ notice whose standing nex to me.

10.34am

LONDON CALLING – THE CLASH

“Din you hear, re Pavlo?”

Is the boss Andreas, the Govna. His high squeaky little voice. Like he talk through his nose.

I realise, the Govna, is standing in the nex pissbowl, mouthin off abow sunthin. He caneven see his cock for his belly these days. At least when I go for a piss, I can still find it without looking for half an hour. It makes me happy inside to know that I will live longer. You know why? I’m leaner and meaner my friend. You get me? I bin sweat for a living mate, instead of living off the sweat of others.

He say, “I said, din you hear, we goin to put some hangers in that place in the corner. Nex week.”

“Eh?”

“You din hear a word I said, din you?”

“When?”

“I said we need to have some more hangers aroun in that corner pressing area, we making the changes nex week.”

“Eh?”

“Changes with the layout. I told you last week.”

And the Govna turns, he shakes his cock, some splash is coming in my direction ‘cos we so close to each other, too close to each other if you ask me. Standing there you know. They neva make the men’s toilets far enough apart. An he neva wash his hands. Dirty basta. Am always wash my hands after having a pee and I think is disgusting of the Govna not to wash his. Especially as there was a sign the Govna himself, he put it up. It say that ‘All employees should wash their hands after reliving themselves.’ He spelt relieving wrong, ‘cos I know good English, but am neva gonna say nothin because I like to see he looks foolish. ‘Cos he is a stupid foolish fat man.

I like to lather my hands with soap and when I do this now, am thinking about the Govna and how he sound more and more pissed off with me these days. “He’s always sound piss off with me!” And am talking to the mirror now you understand? Is like if anyone is comin in they not gonna notice because am doing it behind my soapy hands, you see?

In my head am thinking, what does it fucky matter about where a few hangers go in the corner eh? He’s angry with me pano sanemo eh, for no reason. This is what is worry me. Why he so angry with me the hole time? Am begin to think something is going on that I don’ know abow. Something I’m not sure abow. Something the Govna he say about tellin me last week. Thas what he say. When last week? I can remember. Is like people bin talking behind they hands about something, in a voice that I can quite hear, is not quite loud enough. What’s the word. The English word? Audio, something. No, is no audible, inaudible. That’s the word. Is driving me nuts.

Am gonna have words. Am not gonna let it go.

I catch up with the Govna just as he is getting back into his office. He turns to my rail and he is looking.

“You never said nothing to me Govna. I never heard you say nuthin.”

He turns to me…

“Jus ‘cos you neva heard, dosen min I neva said nothin eh?”

The Govna has a dress in his hand and he puts the dress back on my rail and he give me the look of he could murder me. His looking at the dress like something is wrong with it. There is nothing wrong with it. The dress is beautiful. He goes. He pulls the belt of his trousers up to pull his big belly up and he goes to his office.

Am about to begin work when…Stelios, one of the three other younger pressers, he starts. He’s always put his oars in. His voice was very loud.

“The Govna say about the changes.” and suddenly his interrupt because the Govna is come back and his shouting. At me.

“Re gologo, last Friday we had the big meeting to talk about the changes. I bin telling everybody and you the only one re, you the only one who dusen know. Fifty pipol in the factory and you the ONLY ONE!”

Everyone of the fifty people in the factory is watch Andreas humiliatin me. Everybody know sometimes he let fly and can mark someone out, like they marking your card, the English is say. He do this to mark me out for everyone to see. He knows what his doini. He was like a commandant in a concentration camp, shouting at the prisoner before they shoot them in the head. But am not gonna let this go this time. Am not gonna stand there and let him have a go at me this Monday morning. Not this day. I had enough now, right? So I say to him.

“Last Friday, I wasn’ here last Friday, my daughter, you rememba? You gave me the Friday off. Don you rememba? I wasn’ here Govna. How am gonna know what you bin talkin about when am no here do I?”

Andreas din have no ansa and his not gonna apologise like he should. He hasn’t finished. He carries on.

“Well why din you ask somebody? You could ask anybody here and they tell what we bin talkin about my friend.”

His lookin aroun and pipol is stare.

“The show is over everybody, get back to work please, is a big order this week.”

And suddenly the factory start back into life after what happen and everything seem to stop in time you know. All eyes are watching the two fighters at the centre of the ring, now everybody is pretending to ignore the row and they carry on with they work..

10.40 am

CHAPTER 2

ANDREAS – THE GUVNA

STAYIN’ ALIVE -THE BEE GEES

I think many times, he could be me. I could be him. Same village, same background, same school. We grew up together. We played in the same Church Square. We lifted the same skirts. We shared the same dreams; everything the same really. But he has the factory and I have the ion. He has the big car, I have the bus. He got Koulla with the designer clothes and the Pamela Anderson boob job. I got Stella with the crochet needle and the moustache. Ah. Life huh? And I know am the same as every Greek-Cypriot. All wanting what the other fellow have. He’s no better than me.

He just had the chances and I just had the no chance. When you look on the other side of the fence they say, is always greener they say. But I got Eleni. Koulla can have children any more. She have the operation. The, the hysterectomy thing. Barren. Is a good word. He got money, but no happiness. I got no money but I got the joy of Eleni. Even without money, am happier because I got a daughter who loves me an who respeck me. All he has is a worthless son, who burns his money on Hashish and koumari and putanas.

I know Andreas always feel guilty for having the money too, the MERCEDES 260 E class and the detached house in Hadley Wood. He got a Georgian House, the Tudor mock or something, I don know what it is. He say to me is all made to look like is three hundred years old. I mean what’s the point? You gonna spend all that money on a house to make it look three hundred years old. I can see the point. We got a house in Berkshire Gardens, in Palmers Green. Is lovely. Small, but lovely. Just off Green Lanes, before the Cock Tavern and the North Circular Road is only a few minutes away. I can be on the motorway in twenty minutes, up to Hadley Wood for when Andreas is invite me for a Souvla. Is not mock anything.

He told me he felt guilty about sending his son to the expensive public school. He said he would never, never be able to explain that to anybody that worked there. They din understand that a good education would change his son’s life and take him away from this shit factory and into another world. He couldn’t explain it to them.

Many times he talks to me on the quiet. To me. Andreas, he don’t like to show off his money, he feels guilty to show his money off, he feels guilty to go to a club and smash the plates. The only way he can show his power is shoutin in the factory at the people like me. And now he’s gonna feel guilty for shouting at me. This is the way the man is. I know him better than he knows himself. When we drunk last Chrismas, we in his office and he tell me…

“Oh re Pavlo, singeni, sometimes it’s such a burden to have all this responsibility, so many people dependin on me to feed their kids, pay their mortgage, the HP. You understan? You don’t know what the pressure is like every day, every week, to bring in the orders, to keep the factory running, so I can keep all these people workin, keep their heads above the water. It’s too much sometimes. I come home and I’m tieya, I wake up and I’m still tieya. What am I gonna do? Every week the costings get smaller from the wholesalers, the work is harder, the dresses get more complicate. The wholesalers don’t give a shit. They say, ‘You make them at this price or I get an Indian factory to make them and you gonna put these people out of work!’ What you gonna do, eh?”

Buy today, he will apologise. I know him.

But I didn’t know then what I know now. But I din know then. I din know and even if I did I couldn’t change what was gonna happen. Andreas was keeping it from me. He knew everything was changing and I din. He tell me layta he din know how to tell me. How to break it to me. Eh? You believe this?

I start to speed my work and I was flying suddenly. I was quicker on the dress with the buttos down the front. I look into the office can see Andreas sitting behind his desk and he look angry. Like a cartoon where the cloud follows the cayote around and just rains on him.

All of us from the old country, we still as Cypriot as the day we arrive. The English we speak, is the kind our kids try to avoid at school, our accent, is like the Berlin wall between us and the English.

Friday 1^st June 1965. Palmers Green.

TONY ORLANDO AND DAWN – KNOCK THREE TIMES

We had a picture of a very dark-skinned Egyptian woman who wore two ridiculously huge earrings, in the centre of the front room above the green tiled mantelpiece, which was adorned with a tiny army of dolls dressed up in national costume. Stella loved these dolls and she thought it was nice to have the colour of their costumes and the decoration of their dresses in the house. To us, the picture of the Egyptian woman, was the three ducks flying along the living room wall, we’d seen in English houses. We had little sea-blue glass ashtrays that looked like upturned shells sitting on the coffee table in front of the brown upholstered leather settee. There was a tiny bureau that went up against the wall and when you opened the lid, I could sit and write at it. I would write sometimes but mostly Eleni did her homework there. It also doubled as a drinks cabinet. There was also a collection of 78RPM records my father had brought back with him to the house one day. He’d been on his first visit to Camden Town one afternoon and there, at one end of the market was a tiny Greek man in a three piece suit, with white hair, selling his collection to raise a little money. The market there blossomed during the sixties. We inherited that collection from my father, and occasionally I would borrow one or two Greek discs from the factory, that became another collection, no questions asked. The Camden collection included, Roza Eskenasi, Noni Dousopoulou, Olga Cavadia, Tetros Demetriades, with some 45rpms from Stratos Dionisiou, George Dalaras, Nana Mouskouri and Poly Panou. The factory collection included, Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, Cathy Kirby and Doris Day, Cliff Richard, Strauss, Beethoven.

Our home was in Palmers Green in North London, off Green Lanes. Green Lanes ran through the middle of Cypriot country. Haringey, Bounds Green, Palmers Green, Wood Green, and Southgate; which is the furthest North in London you can go and still be in London. Along this stretch of road, we Cypriots have come together, in a kind of Babylon. Putting down roots without any soil. How the peasants became the shopkeepers and how the shepherds became the waiters. It took a week for Stella to come here by ship and she came alone. She was one of the extraordinary women who travelled here to make a life, find a husband, make some kids, then go back home. That was always the plan. Everybody knew that. Pretended that. Aspired to that.

Eleni was how much change had happened since Stella was young. Second generation, becoming the almost freshly minted class of Cypriots who knew little or nothing about Cyprus and whose, friends, places of beauty, were part of this country.

Growing up with Eleni was fabulous. And after a while, Eleni realised how to twist us around her little fingers. She always got her way. She began to realise also, that with this new found way of getting things, she could also do the same at school and get her own way with her teachers. Her natural charm and her constantly sharp honesty, made her a match even for the most hardened of hearts.

It was a tiny mid-terraced 1920’s house and l always thought that by owning my house, it meant I owned a little bit of England, that was forever Cypriot. There were two bedrooms upstairs and a bathroom, a living room, dining room, and kitchen downstairs. All the rooms were carpeted except for the kitchen and the bathroom. I told Stella when we moved there, that we would be warmer with a carpet on the floor. The idea of a carpet to Stella, who had never seen anything on a floor in side a house other than a snakes and dirt, was more than a kind of magic.

Stella thought the carpet looked like a bed and laid down on it when she walked into the still empty front room. She made me lie on top of her so we could make love and l obliged, but I did feel very odd doing it there and I told her so. She laughed and we did it on the floor often after that. Until, bit by bit the furniture arrived and we ran out of room to lie down. In the end, the bed became the ‘proper’ place for our lovemaking.

Eleni’s childhood was the happiest time in our life. I think I was a great father. I tried to be. Never to over protect her. So much so, that she got a real sense of independence from me. From a very early age I would talk to her as an equal and let her try to say what she wanted. She was speaking in just over a year after she was born. Not complete sentences, but she was managing to make us understand what she wanted. Amazing. And in two languages. She’d already picked up new words from the television, which we had never spoken to her.

She had learnt to speak two languages by the age of three. Her Cypriot was very good and l took pride in teaching her, so that she would impress everybody who came round. She spoke so well that her accent was perfect, the street accent I had in my youth, when I was running around in shorts. I taught her the best put-downs for boys and the best curses, so that she would always have something to say to anyone who tried to get smart with her. The boys were interested in her from a very early age.

I remember I was driving Eleni home in the blue Triumph Zodiac one day. She’d just had her first day of nursery school. Sitting on her mother’s knee in the front seat, she was having an animated conversation with me.

As we were talking, she was playing with a little toy she had made at her nursery. All the kids had been given bits of the inside of a toilet roll and Sellotape and something to colour it with. Eleni had chosen two bits of card of different colours, one blue and one green and she had very skilfully cut them into circles, one smaller than the other and joined in the middle with a brass pin the teacher had helped put into the centre of the circle for her. She drew the top half of a daddy, a mummy, a teacher, and a milkman on the four points of the compass and where the card overlapped she drew the bottom half of each. When she turned the smaller card she got different top and bottoms, which the teacher gave her, a gold star for. Eleni was also deciding that she must make another people toy and use a pen of the same colour for each of the people next time and she would make sure all the pictures were the same size next time too. She told me she wasn’t sure if she’d put us on the next one. She could put a policeman on one of them. That would be funny she said. She was creating toys for herself and to show the other children in her class.

One day l was feeding the two goldfish we had. They lived in a little bowl I cleaned every weekend and put little bits of plastic looking like seaweed inside. On the bottom there was a thin layer of what looked like red sand I bought. It was like a fake a kind of seabed. Eleni was watching me drop the little bits of food onto the surface of the water. The fish swam up to the surface to feed. Eleni was five. She talked to me in English.

“What are the fishes thinking in the bowl Dad?”

I didn’t have an answer.

“I think they’re saying who is that ugly little girl looking at me and where’s my steak?”

“Dad, you’re funny!”

“Not as funny as the fishes.”

“Why are you so funny Daddy?”

“Because everybody should be funny my darling, everybody. It makes you happy when you’re funny. Life is meant to be happy my darling.”

“Are you happy Daddy?”

I repeated her words in my head because I couldn’t quite believe what I had just heard. Am I happy?

“Yes my darling, yes, I’m happy. I’m happy because I have you. And I tickled her until she screamed with laughter.

“Daddy you’re so funny.”

She laughed too and tried to tickle me back.

l let out a huge roar of laughter for her. My clever little girl talking to me like this and I pretended to her that I had been tickled. It just blew me away and at the same time I wondered how intelligent she must be if she can say things like that at her age.

“It wouldn’t surprise me, if she turned into a doctor or a lawyer.”

I told Stella one day.

“Who can she marry when she can think for herself like this? What man is gonna have her? He is going to have his hands full.”

I laughed.

“So clever, so clever, my God she will be something.”

At seven when she had been rummaging through my record collection, she had managed to work out the stereo system player button and volume control and put on a whole load of Greek music till she found something she really liked.

A few days later, we were in the car and I had the radio on, she heard the same piece of music she had been secretly playing when she was at home the day before, in the front room. There was a quiz programme on Radio Four called, The Brain Of Britain. There was a song playing and the question was, what was the piece of music called and who wrote it?

“Moonlight Serenade by Glenn Miller!” she piped up from the back seat.

One of the contestants then said, “Moonlight Serenade by Glenn Miller.” In response and the radio Quiz master said ‘Correct!’

I actually had to stop the car. l brought the car to a complete stop in the middle of Green lanes and actually skidded as I put the brakes down so fast. We were just outside the Cock Tavern where the North Circular Rd meets Green Lanes. It was not a good place to stop because the traffic lights were green and cars behind me were blowing their horns. I pulled the car to one side of the road.

I was amazed.

“How do you know the answer?”

“I just do”

She didn’t want to admit she had been listening to my records without my permission.

I remembered I had a Glenn Miller record in my collection. In an instant I realised, she must have been playing my records but I didn’t let on. I never let on and even though I knew she was sneaking into the lounge to play my record collection, I never minded. It was her secret and mine.

I found out the collection she was most interested in was the Readers Digest one of ‘classical and popular favourites, through the ages,’ whatever that meant. l had sent off for them thinking they were free because of the wording on the letter and didn’t read the small print about returning them within the twenty-one day trial period. I was stuck with them and I had to pay off the balance in instalments. I could afford it, though and on reflection it was worth the price, as I enjoyed the discs enormously over the years and so did Eleni.

I had everything from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony to Rossini’s Four Seasons. I had Barber Shop Quartets and Mozart Quartets, songs like  Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair and of course, Moonlight Serenade.

Eleni particularly liked the way Benny Goodman played his clarinet. He could really make her feel as if he was singing to her with it. She loved the way Glenn Miller made her feel too. It was a kind of relaxed feeling and made her warm. It felt like she understood something. Like she could play it too she said. She would pretend to hold a clarinet like he did. She loved to read the words that accompanied the sleeve of the records, because it told her more about the people whose lives she liked to hear about. I watched he play her imaginary instruments and listened to her talking about the way the music made her feel.

She said she wanted to play the clarinet but when we found out what the lessons would have costed we realised we couldn’t afford it. l asked at the school, if there was any way she could get lessons, but the school didn’t do musical instrument lessons and they didn’t have a teacher who could teach the clarinet. She took it in her stride and she continued to pretend to play air clarinet whenever she heard anything on the radio she liked the sound of and whenever she recognised a Benny Goodman tune.

CURTIS MAYFIELD – MOVE ON UP

There were also three people in the factory who were directly related to me. I didn’t share too much more with them about Eleni or the rest of our family. Genes was about the only thing we shared. There was Martha, Lia and Ronny, cousins and koumbaros respectively. They all called each other, but didn’t call Stella and me.

Martha worked as an Overlocker and was my cousin from the same village in Cyprus. I witnessed my first chicken being slaughtered for supper in her Mum and Dad’s Garden. I watched it’s headless body running around the yard, blood spurting from the top before it died. I was seven. Cluck cluck cluck.

Martha was nine and saw my fear and my fascination. She recognised the same thing she felt in herself and realised then that boys could be just as soft as girls when it came to headless chickens. She shared the feelings with me, the way she felt when she first saw that sight made her also realise that she loved me. She said she loved me. She let me kiss her later on that afternoon and l first tasted a girls lips at seven, in the shaded veranda of the courtyard of their parents’ house, while my Uncle and Auntie were asleep, out of the afternoon heat.

Cyprus was still the land of my birth, though all around me things were changing, with people talking about going to some other country, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I could hear the adults in talks about how the streets were paved with gold there. All the family were going there. Eventually I found out, we were all going to follow our father to London. To England. My Sister and brothers, relatives, and wives, all going. And that the ‘that other family’ was already a part of the history of Cyprus and England, as far back as Richard the Lionheart.

When Granddad began selling the land we had had in the family for generations, we all turned a blind eye. Not that we knew anything about it, not in detail anyway. But something drove all those immigrants from Cyprus. And of course, not just Cyprus.

l followed my Grandfather Harry around one day, because I couldn’t figure out what he was up to, wandering from one group of men, sat at their backgammon games, to the next. At each table the talk was always ‘my land’. Down the street he would make a long slow journey of stopping to talk and maybe take a coffee with whomsoever would talk to him about buying his land from him. There were plenty interested, but playing hard to get, lest old Harry got the better of them and exacted a price they were going to regret. Some were even shrewder realising the value of what he was selling and offered fair money immediately, not wishing to antagonise the most colourful character in the village. Harry, the old gambler was betting on success in England where they had snow and rain, in the Summer! They would giggle behind his back as he went down the street pointing at him and saying. ‘Look, there he goes, gambling with the future of his family!’

What a leap of imagination to make a man, whose family had been in the village since before any records were made by the Ottoman Turks, to want to sell our birth right and our family’s inheritance? To go to England and start a new life there? What came into the imaginings of men and women that enabled them to make such a leap into the unknown?

The Cypriot diaspora was a disparate and piecemeal affair. It symbolised the draw of England in its most fundamentally flawed way. Yes, the Cypriots came because they thought the streets would be paved with gold; like so many immigrants, but they also came because there was no real prospect of them ever making a living in Cyprus anymore. If only they’d known that the ones who stayed on Cyprus would resent them when they eventually came back to spend their money on the Island, perhaps they wouldn’t have left so readily.

Some made wealth in England and lorded it up when they went back to Cyprus with enough money to buy a beach of their own. Pretending to be somebody they weren’t, in a land where they were no longer who they thought they were. Surrounded by people who didn’t know them anymore anyway. They went back as foreigners in their own country. They made a bad name for the others who wanted to come back to the mother country for a holiday or to see their relatives once or twice a year.

Centuries of being in one place and then, uprooting your family to want to go to some mystic land. A country, which was given away by the Ottoman Turks, after they had finished with it. Given to the grand old Queen Victoria for helping them against the Russians. The Ottomans were so grateful that they let Cyprus go in the way a whore might dispose of an old client she didn’t want to fuck anymore.

The family, that sacred cow of continuation. The myriad Diaspora of a nation’s gold-seeking runaways. Running from the safety of what you know, not because someone is trying to wipe out your race but because you want a better life. Economic migrants. So they left, thinking they would return when they’d made a million or two.

But there were reasons that weren’t so easy to explain. These were the sly, well tested methods of British Imperialism of divide and rule. The Turkish-Cypriots who joined the police force were encouraged to do so, by a policy of the British colonialist government. They relished their jobs and became brutish and malevolent local enforcers. It wasn’t difficult to stir up real or imagined slights within a community, when the vast majority of the population were Greek-Cypriots and those in the minority were running the police service. Differences and arguments, minor infringements of the law became major incidents. So on and so forth. The rioting between the two communities was as frightening as it was inevitable. Many left because they were afraid for both themselves and their families. Some were driven out of their homes.

I am tempted to say something about our family being Cypriot and not Greek. English people never understand the difference between Greeks and Cypriot. Their geographic understanding is poor. The English really have no sense of cultural shame. They are unaware of their pigeon holes and their misunderstanding of the foreigners who make the things they use, clean the shit they leave, wash and clothe their old, wipe the arses of their elderly, doctor their sick. The people’s they don’t see. They are the invisible serving class. The lives and cultures they have sought to dominate and destroy. Cyprus being small example.

But, you know something? I’m only speaking like this to tell this story.

In my head I don’t have the accent, or the inability to express myself. In my head I can talk and use all the words I like and I don’t have an accent.

I speak the ‘sweet bastard’ Cypriot that Byron was so enamoured of. And I bet you weren’t expecting that were you? Because in my head I speak perfect Greek-Cypriot and I don’t struggle for the words that make me sound like a foreigner. Because in my head I’m not a foreigner, am I? But in youa head? Ah…got you!!

In my head are the words of a man whose authenticity and integrity are only legitimised by the reader of this story; in spite of and not because I chose to tell the truth. The truth about his life, his feelings, and his destiny, as I see it and saw it then. With the benefit of hindsight, oversight, foresight. A Holy Trinity of understanding that only an author can genuflect to or worship at the altar of. At any rate, I take the communion of this bread and sanctify it with the life of the man he was, the man he is before and after those events on that Monday. To enable, ennoble and also exorcise, the time, the memory, the people.

I didn’t do it then for him, when I lived it, but I do it now from beyond the grave, because now I am the ghost of Paul that lived his life and his shadow is all there is left. He cast this shadow as the ghost of the man who lived the story. I saw it all. And I want you to, too. The words are buried in the vaults of my ancestors and they are joined with the same thread that made the dresses, the same sweat that steam-pressed them, the same skill that stitched them together. I wrote it in the life I led and the pages of the book which has become the memory made alive again. What’s in a book but memory anyway? Ours and of those of others. Mine is here.

I will strive to tell the truth. To achieve kind of equilibrium. To redress what I feel is a terrible imbalance, a nuisance, a sin.

I’m sensitive to the invisibility of our culture, our ethnicity, identity, almost everything that makes us who we are. So, as I walk alongside the ghost of Socrates, I take pride in knowing I am doing something, giving something back to him. An attempt at redressing the imbalance. He is not Zorba.

I am invisible in the factory and outside it but Eleni will be different eh? My daughter will talk without an accent and be like one of them and she will be the first generation to do that. She will learn the secret ways of the English.

Andreas said one time.

“People they work for you, they just like the stubborn donkey that won’t see the easy way down the mountainside but they try instead to go down the most difficult way. You have to beat them with a stick. No more carrots. No more Mr nice guy.”

All the machinists and the other pressers, the buttonholers, and the over-lockers they all knew. So while I’m working and I’m working the fastest I have all morning. I’m thinking about what I’m gonna to say to the Govna.

So as I’m watching the office carefully, one of the other pressers goes in and the Govna is talking to him and occasionally they’re looking over to me in my direction. And they’re talking and talking. About me, I’ll bet.

“Just because they’re relatives they think you don’t understand when they’re talkin behind their hands about you.” I’m talking more to myself than to the other presser, Stelios, who is a few feet away from me, but Stelios hears me.

“I seen them goin’ to the office, I can see them looking at me. Blah blah blahing.”

“Ungourka!”

Stelios says back to me. This makes me very angry inside but I don’t say anything, nothing. I just swear inside my head how I’m gonna exact my revenge and I imagine that the numba I’m working on, is Stelio’s chest and that he is tied to the ironing board screaming in agony. I’m ironing his bare flesh into a mass of burnt meat. I wanted to cook Stelios’ flesh with the iron, and silently I did and the sound of the steamer drowned his screams.

I can see Andreas shaking his head in the office. He left the blinds up. What was this? He was looking right at me now. ‘Blah blah blah!’

“He’s talking about about me!” and I look at my watch, ‘cos I know it’s close to lunch.

12.54am

Six minutes to one exactly. Now I gotta make the fucking phone-call. Suddenly everything else is of no importance.

“What did he mean, what changes?” I ask Gologo eyes, next to me. He has eyes like the funny man, the comedian fellow, Marty Feldman. He’s on the television and it makes me laugh to myself when I compare the two together.

“They’re putting in a steam pressing machine, which does part of the pressing and it…”

“There isn’t any space for a pressing machine, so how are they gonna put it in here unless they get rid of the pressers?”

Gologo Eyes sighs very deeply and makes an ‘ach’ sound that there is no equivalent to in the English language. The only equivalent is like someone saying, ‘Well there you go shithead’.

I hear him.

“They’re just gonna get rid of the pressers then,  or what?”

“Just the old and the useless.” Marty Feldman eyes says. My head is spinning now.

“Eh?”

“I don’t know what they’re gonna do, why don’t you ask him?”

“Why don’t you shut your Gologo eyes and watch what you’re doing to that dress?”

“OK, Paully old son, don’t get your knickers in a twist. Nothing wrong with my work mate!”

And this is something I hate because it was Gologo eye’s sentence he always said to me. No respect.

“I don’t wear them, you malaga, women’s knickers are for pricks like you who can’t see what they’re doing. You’re marking that dress!”

“Re, don’t you know anything yet? They’re gettin in some bloody machine which is gonna put us all out of work!”

This is when it hit me in the face like someone slapped me in the face with a flannel.

“You can’t get a machine to do buttons or the cuffs, is not possible!”

“Or collars, but they’re still only gonna need one less presser for that. Figure it out mate.”

“Eh?”

“That’s right, you should be looking for other work, my son” and with this he laughed.

Three minutes to lunch. No time for another numba now. Leave it.

“I’m gonna talk to him after lunch. I’ll find out what’s going on. Believe me. 24 years I’ve been here mate.”

“You’re still gonna be out of a job, just like the rest of us soon, old man. They getting a machine to do your job. My job to one day!”

I turn the pressure gauge down to be ready for clocking off. In a minute or so, the steam, started to pour out of the release valve and the iron, began to cool down. Then and only then, can I safely leave the iron alone, without worrying it’s gonna explode from having too much pressure.

I look over by the pay phone at the front door and there wasn’t a queue yet. Finally I have time to make the call I’ve been scared to make all morning. I was the first one by the phone and the bell hadn’t even gone yet. I picked up the receiver and I started to dial.

01.00pm

The bell went for lunch. You know the kind of bell we have in the factory. It’s the loudest noise you can imagine. It’s the kind you have at fire stations. 5 seconds of trying to burst your eardrums. And I’m right underneath it, ‘cos it’s above the pay phone by the doors of the factory in the time it takes for the bell to ring for those five seconds. The sewing machines were turned off and people head for the door, the canteen, the toilet. Nearly half go out quickly, noisily. The rest begin to chatter or whisper by their machine. They pull their packed lunches from their bags, this new stuff they call Tupperware, they’ve all got now. Modern inventions eh? You can keep your food fresh for when you take it out to eat. It’s amazing, they make this plastic seal now. It keeps water out and air and your bread stays fresh, the salad is fresh as the second you take it out of the fridge, people bring in pasta and they heat it on the little stove in the canteen.

I put the receiver down. I’m not gonna call from here. I don’t want other people hearing my business. I’ll call from the street phone-box.

CHAPTER 3

OLD STREET EC1

Monday 7^th December 1979.

12.50am

THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD – THE BEATLES

Stella Socrates slowly put the phone in the hall at the foot of the stairs down. She was nervous after speaking to Dr Patel. She looked upstairs to see if Eleni was going to pop her head out of her room and ask her about the call. She didn’t. Her daughter was still listening to Radio 1’s breakfast show. Stella could hear the music as Eleni danced to ABBA up in her bedroom. Stella went into the kitchen, filled the kettle with water from the cold tap and put the kettle on. It was her default, for the next thing to do. Tea. But she really needed a cup of tea this time. Now. Because she knew Paul would be angry when he spoke to her. When she told him what Dr Patel had said.

She sat alone at the kitchen table by the wall, waiting for the kettle’s whistle to do its thing.

She would need to tell Eleni that they had to go to the hospital. Doctor’s orders. Today. They would be waiting for her at the Churchill Ward.

The world had suddenly become a scarier place and the implication of what Dr patel had said made her feel like Eleni was under some sort of threat. She convinced herself that this was just a mother’s intuition. And what about her school? Is she going miss all her classes? She loves her school. What would happen to her classes? She’d have to tell her teacher Miss Fletcher why she’d kept her off school today. She’d call her later. She would have to know.

She was afraid that she couldn’t explain to Paul what had just happened when she spoke to Dr Patel about the results of the tests they’d been waiting for. She was worried she wouldn’t be able to stop him getting upset with her because, she couldn’t explain it to him properly. She didn’t understand some of the English words the doctor was using anyway. But most of all, she was scared of having to go to the hospital. Her thoughts gave her a cramp in the pit of her stomach. She had this terrible thought that her daughter had something awful, but she didn’t know what it was and neither did the doctor, did he? Perhaps they’d find out at the hospital and that’s why they needed to go there today.

She re-lived a car running her daughter over outside her school. The stupid English woman who said she was distracted by one of her children in the car. Eleni had stepped out into the road. But this was worse. Eleni, was twelve then and lucky to be alive. In her head she saw her daughter flying through the air again. The kettle’s whistle made the image disappear.

As she poured a little boiling water into the teapot she remembered the nursing staff, the last time she was in hospital, They all fell in love with Eleni, because she was always so full of laughter and so clever and funny. Stella remembered how the woman responsible for the accident had brought her a chess set. Stella didn’t know what it was, but Paul knew and he taught his daughter how to play. She emptied the pot of water.

“Clever girl, she pick it up din she?”

Stella said to herself in Paul’s voice, as she measured three heaped spoonful’s of typhoo tea into the teapot. It was like that film they’d seen with the shark in the sea. Eleni is swimming on the surface and a big shark was underneath he, following her, threatening her. Watching her splashing on the surface of the water from below. Watching and following her, slowly, silently. She poured the rest of the water into the pot, gave it a stir and as she did, the phone rang.

It was Paul.

1.06pm

I ‘m outside at another phone box this time, so I can talk properly. I don’t want all the people in the factory knowing our business, you understand? This phone box is right outside the factory door,  but it stinks of piss, I make the call, standing in the stink of someone else’s piss.

I dial the number as I pull change from my pocket. I hear the pips. I put the pennies in. I press the button. People going past me all the time as it starts to ring the other end. She picks up the phone.

“I couldn’t use the phone in the factory ra. Too many people. What did he say? Anything?”

“The doctor, said they have to do some more tests. Again…for the blood he said. We’ve got to go down to the hospital today.”

“Eh? More tests. What about the results of the tests they did already?”

“He says it’s for the blood again. The tests. They need more blood. She’s going in today. I’m taking her to Silver Street. The Middlesex.”

“Eh? You’ve got to take her to the hospital?”

“He said maybe she’ll stay there tonight. I’m gonna take her.”

“Next time you tell that bloody bastard doctor to write down on a piece of paypa what’s wrong with my daughter or write us a letter. In English so you and I can understand it. You don’t even know what he said. You can’t even explain it to me? Tell him to write it on a piece of paper in English next time or send us a letter, so when I get home I can read it and see what the bloody hell is going on with her. You tell them down the hospital. Kirieleison, what’s happening to her? So you’re taking her today? You’re taking her? What, now?”

“Yes, my darling yes. Grimas taniada mas Ge berasamenda stin Anglia. I’ll take her to the hospital. The doctor, says she must go there now and maybe stay overnight.”

”What else, quick, before the pips!”

“Get some bread on your way home, from George’s, she likes it from George’s. You know they have the extra crusty loaf and they put more sesame seeds on top, you know the one. You bring it when you come to the hospital, later.”

Before I hang up. I need to comfort her. I have to let her know we are in this together. Reassure her.

“Call me from the hospital, okay? Look after her, ra. And please don’t cry when she is with you ah? It upsets her. I’ve told you this. We have to show her the positive, not the negative. We both have to keep our nerve, you understand?”

The pips start. I put the phone down and immediately get a nose full of the smell of what someone did earlier.

But when we talked about Eleni I get this pain in my chest. It’s so tight, like it’s holding my heart in its hand and squeezing, squeezing. Stella, never talks about her feelings. I’m gonna need something to calm my nerves at this rate and I’m gonna ask the doctor to give me something too so I can sleep properly at night, because that’s becoming a problem.

Bambos, one of the cutters, was outside the phone box in the street.

I open the door and I tell him.

“There’s plenty of other phones in this street you know!”

‘They’re all broken!’ Bambos says and he used the way I speak to make fun of me. He impersonated me.

Bambos, is an arrogant man…early thirties. I looked this word up. He has an ‘offensive attitude of superiority’. Somebody showed me a picture of this guy…they call him the Buddha and Bambos is just like this Buddha guy, because he’s fat, this guy, except he doesn’t understand anything about himself. Just his stomach. This, he’s in love with. The Buddha, well, he was supposed to understand how to meditate or something. This was a new word. Instead maybe, of the pills for my nerves, maybe I will meditate I’m thinking. But it’s useless. How can you lose yourself in your head when your daughter is sick. You ask this Buddha fellow that eh?

Bambos was a young new kind of cutter who think he owned the cloth; so much so that 18 months later Bambos, went to prison for theft. He had been stealing cloth on the quiet and getting it secretly secreted to his own little factory and there he was making his own dresses, selling them under the Govna’s nose.

Bambos needed to make that particular call outside the factory for the very good reasons I have just been outlining, because he was arranging the next pick-up of stolen cloth he had hidden, by arrangement with the wholesale delivery driver of the cloth, on to one of the other unoccupied floors by the goods lift. It wouldn’t be too long before his card was marked believe me. But on this particular day he and we were all blissfully unaware of this viper in our midst.

‘Bambos. You’re a, rude bastard! One day, One day.’ I say, as I walked away from the phone box.

Bambos called me a wanker through the glass, when he was inside the phone-box. I mouthed silent curses as I walked away. One day my son, not long from now you will be standing in a queue to get your lunch and the inmate next to you is gonna use the very same obscene gesture to you behind your back and as you are turning over in your bunk beneath him in your sleep, he is going to wake you by putting his fist halfway into your rectum until you start to squeal like the pig that you are.

I needed to eat and I decided on Valotis café that Monday. I didn’t want to have to go over everything with Martha and Tony. I wanted to put it out of my mind for just an hour or so. Less than an hour now. I look at my Casio. It kept very good time. Better get a move on. I quickened my step as I crossed the road towards Valoti’s, which was halfway down Old Street.

So she was going to hospital? Why? What did they need her to go to hospital for? Maybe I’ll take the bread there instead. Maybe I should go there now. Maybe I should stop work. There things buzzing through my head as I stepped in and out of traffic, realising that I wouldn’t do any of them, pano sanemo.

I reached the other side of the street and a young dark-skinned woman pushing a pram caught my eye and it made me tighter inside. I always made a fuss of children whenever I saw them. It’s a compulsion to father. My view was quickly interrupted by a double-decker bus going by, as I was walking. All I could see now was her afro from behind.

As I turned my back on her, I imagined a life for that mother and her child. I imagined a boy and a girl. I imagined the girl getting married and being very pretty in her wedding dress. I imagined the boy grown into a big youth, full of love for his mother and just as quickly as I imagined all that, I was opening the door into Valotis.

“I can get a pie and chips. They do the nice heavy gravy.” I never fancied Greek food much those days either.

“Esinithises!” Stella would say to me, “You’ve become like the English with their roast beef and steak and kidney pie. That’s all you like now. Englishman!”

I would mostly go to Valotis anyway, unless it was a Friday ‘cos there was a stripper in the The George and Dragon, on the other side of the street. It was only a few hundred yards down. On a Friday it would be packed with a steaming dirty mass of men like me, all with one thing on our mind, all centred on one woman’s flesh.

I had also started to go to the library during my lunch break. About three weeks after we found out Eleni had some sort of a blood problem. I looked it up in a book in the library. It took me a week to find. I remember, there was a very nice young girl who helped me find the right book, Amy.

I found out that Eleni might not have the right amount of white and red blood cells.

“And these doctors always tellin me they don’t know enough yet. They should bloody know enough by now eh? They don’t go to medical school for seven years to learn nothin? I bet I could tell them something now!”

I said this to the sympathetic librarian who helped me get the right book, Amy.

But I’m not ready yet. I didn’t know enough yet. When I found out more about what blood problems there could be, then I would tell them something, eh? Then I’d show them that I knew you had to have six red blood cells to every one white blood cell and that if that wasn’t right you could get infections and not be able to get better, your body can’t stop infections. I’ll tell Dr Patel. “I’ll tell that bloody Patel,” I made a rhyme, like a poem with the words in my head. ‘Tell Patel,’ I say but I said this to myself.

1.15pm

I walk into Valotis. It’s always full at lunchtime but I can normally get a seat. I know the waitress very well. Sarah. A red haired lady. She must be nearly thirty. Always respectful, always asking me how things are but not in an intrusive way. She cares and it’s not about her tip. Her eyes are full of questions. Her mouth is always smiling. She has an accent and when I asked her one day, she said she was from Poland, Gdansk. They got the Communist Government in that country and they all protesting against them now. She had to leave, she said. Too much violence.

As I come through the door, Roast beef…coffee…boiled cabbage…custard…fish pie. All the smells come at once. I go to the nearest seat that isn’t taken. There were eight or nine tables and seating for about thirty people.

“I’ll have the pie please Sarah.” I was always polite and I try to show her the respect that she deserves. I’ve known her twelve years.

“Chips or mash?”

“Mash please.”

“Steak and kidney or chicken and mushroom?”

“Chicken.”

“Nice weekend? Everything alright?”

She already read something in my face maybe.

She was a very sympathetic woman, Sarah, and she said.

“Eléni again?” And she pronounced it right.

I make a gesture with my head. It’s a Greek gesture and it’s like telling Sarah she was asleep. I close my eyes and lean my head to one side. She understands.

“Still? Oh, sorry darlin.”

She made a little ‘t’ and ‘ah’ sound together like a tut which turned into an ahh and then she nodded her head back just like Cypriots do to say ‘no’. As she said this, she is already turning and walking towards the counter to call out her order. It’s the busiest time of the day and I know she can’t talk properly to me now. Too many big hungry working men waiting for their hot food.

She got to the little curtain on the hatch between the kitchen and the restaurant. She shouted her order through the curtain.

“One Chicken and Mushroom with extra gravy, special for lovely Paully chef!”

Normally I would delight at what was put before here. To me eating was part of what made life enjoyable and worthwhile. I never had to worry about what I ate and to my dying day, I never knew what a diet was or counted anything as stupid as calories. I loathed people who said they had to watch what they ate. I thought vegetarians were from another planet and whenever I heard the word on the news I shouted at the announcer and once when I encountered one during my lunch hour, I made a point of eating my meat in a way that left the unfortunate fellow in no doubt how I felt. It suddenly came flashing back.

Sarah was taking an order at another table in and. l heard this fragile voice saying,

“Have you got anything vegetarian on the menu please?”

I turned round with a horrified expression on my face, to the pasty-faced youth sitting on the next table.

“Vegetarian, vegetarian? You wanna go up bloody Covent Garden mate, where they got the vegetable market. This is a bloody restaurant not a bloody poxy bistro for vegetáirhrrians.”

I stressed the third syllable like the word was a huge ‘air’ that I couldn’t get my mouth wide enough open for. The shamefaced youngster said,

“Egg, and chips please.” He whispered and l laughed out loud.

“Well, at least they got something for the vegetarian!”

Sarah giggled raised her apron to her her mnouth to conceal a stifled laugh and reprimanded me with an icy look.

“I’ll have a bloody huge bit of beef, no potatoes, no vegetables, just beef and gravy alright? I got a better idea. Just find me a dead cow, wipe its arse and stick it on a plate!”

I laughed and Sarah knew I was joking, but the young lad next to me sank further into his seat as all around me the men sided with me and smiled and laughed out loud. It was the only time I ever saw this boy and I bet he doesn’t come back. l half wanted to share my plate of meat with him or at least offer him something off my own plate, but I decided to leave the matter there and let it end without making him suffer any further humiliation.

Just now Sarah knew what was in my beligerence and left me alone. She might have a word later, and anyway she was really busy right now. Her mad hour time. I can see that.

And as I stopped thinking about the boy at the next table along I began thinking about everything going downhill after the Govna brought in the new rates for the girls. The new costings. It doesn’t affect me but it’s only a matter of time before the girls are gonna start looking somewhere else for work eh? I know all the tricks in the book. I know about the short money in your packet because Andreas didn’t pay all the extra overtime you worked. So then you had to speak to him about it and remind him you came in three evenings not the two he put you down for. It was always on the clock anyway so why he ever made mistakes with money I never knew. Probably pulling a fast one with everyone. I’ll bet some of the girls wouldn’t realise they were short until it was too late, eh?

Short money, hah? In my head I’m turning this over, “What a bastard thing to do to someone who’s workin their bollocks off for you all week. Making you profits and on top of that you still stealing some of their wages from them. Shit bag, what a bastard shit bag was the boss who stealing from his workers this way. Some of them they don’t know what is what and they don’t suspect nothing I’ll bet. But they could be they losing hundreds of pounds”, hah. “Anyway, Andreas is not gonna try this with me. I’m wise to the tricks.” This was the conversation etched into my memory from a wedding, where I sat opposite two of the wealthiest factory owners in London, who happened to be on the same table as me. I was too drunk to care who heard me.

My food came. The gravy was just how I like it, thick and all over the pie. There were mushy peas underneath the gravy too and they always go down well with the pie. As I cut my knife deep into the top of the pie I imagined it was Patel’s head and that I was carving a piece of meat from his scalp. I ate without saying another word. I burnt my tongue on the pie. I was trying to eat too quickly and I wasn’t concentrating. I endured the pain as a penance for the murder of Patel in my head. Serves me right I thought. Then I remembered…

George’s, I must get bread from there before the end of lunch. I looked at my watch, it was twenty to two so I didn’t have much time left if I was going to get to the library as well and back in to work before the bell. It was a seven minute walk to the library and I knew Monday was Amy’s day off so the snotty one was in, the one who made me pay for the books I kept for too long. Imagine, there are people dying everywhere, being tortured, murdered, cut up into little pieces, eaten and she still had to make me pay sixty-four poxy pence for the overdue on those poxy medical books that I couldn’t understand anyway. The only reason I had them so long anyway was because I needed more time to understand what the bloody words meant; to translate them. Mrs bloody Flowers her name was. The nearest she came to a flower was one of them cactus plants, Harry my neighbour had in his garden shed to cover up the other plants he had in there. She was a cactus, Mrs Flowers. Amy was the Rose.

Steve, one of the apprentice cutters, came in through the door and strode right over to where I was sitting. He was seventeen, like a heroin addict, very thin, too thin if you ask me, thick black curly hair down to his shoulders, and a handsome boy with an honest face and a big Roman nose.

Steve was like a young handsome Greek God. He wore stylish jeans and a T shirt with the name of a group he liked called ‘The Doors’ on it. He liked to make sure the clothes he was wearing were matching, that they were clean and that they didn’t look cheap. He liked fashion and had a pair of flared jeans on too. He had a small crucifix earring dangling from his left ear.

“Mr Paul, there’s a message for you to ring some doctor; the govna wanted me to tell you. Okay, is it?”

“Yeah, yeah, did he leave a name this doctor?”

“Patel. Dr Patel.”

“Thank you, re boy.”

I’m screaming, you know what I mean? Inside me when I hear this…deep inside where he can’t see..

“Anything I can do, pick you up some cigs?”

“No, thanks. Unless you’ve got a little spare time?”

“It depends on what it is.”

“Well, don’t bother then!” I snapped and then I regretted it straight away. He’s a good kid. Why was I having a go at him?

“I’m kidding, man, I know things are a bit tough for you and all.” the kid replied.

“Eh, who told you this?”

“Look, everyone knows your daughter’s not well.”

“Everyone?”

“Well, you know what it’s like in there, everybody gossips, you know?”

“Do I?”

“Eh?”

“Do I know? No, I don’t know. It’s none of their fucking business. Bloody gossip, in the factory. I just want my privacy you understand?”

The boy looked away, trying to see if he could get a glimpse of Sarah to order his food or to look at her brassiere more like. She wears these big chiffon blouses. He just wanted a little glimpse eh? A little sight of her black bra. In fact once or twice she had a few of the off-cuts from big Ronny the senior cutter. I wonder what sort of helpings she gave him for those eh? Eh? Oh Christ, my head is so full of crap I can think straight. The bread…what am gonna do?

“Can you go to that delicatessent George’s on the corner, to pick up some bread for tonight? It has to be from George’s you understand? A sesame seed loaf?”

“Sure, but you gotta press a couple of trousers for me okay?”

He makes me laugh, for the first time that day.

“Of course.”

He goes to leave.

‘You’re good lad you know. I like you. You remind me of me when I was the same age as you.”

“Thanks, Granddad. George’s you say?”

“It’s on the corner of Old Street and Farringdon. The Greek deli.”

Steve turned to leave, and as he did an extraordinary thing happened. Sarah was turning to go to the hatch and bumped into him with a tray, but amazingly it didn’t go all over the place because with lightning agility the three of us, me, Steve, and Sarah, in the split second it happened, saved the situation. It was like the gymnastics in the Olympics. A Gold medal for us to save the tray of food.

Steve always use come in to Valotis for the odd look around. To him it was full of old men and overcooked boiled vegetables, which he hated. He preferred a Wimpy for his lunch or a quick sandwich. Either that, or a swift couple of pints and a joint in the alleyway behind The Bald Faced Stag. To Steve however, Sarah was a very beautiful woman in her sexual prime, going to waste in a smelly job surrounded by smelly old men. He found out she was actually forty-two and not in her thirties at all, and he worked out she had a thirty-six DD bust. This was really the only thing on Steve’s mind when he came into Valotis. To Steve she was the epitome of sex. The luxuriousness of her décolletage drove him to drop by Valotis for sandwiches he never ate and tea he never drank.

Steve forgot to go to George’s because he had a terrible short-term memory. It was all the dope that did it. Too many evenings getting smashed because that was the only way he could get through the next fucking day. He told me he only remembered to buy it on his way back from The Bald Faced Stag, because he happened to see an old biddy putting a loaf of bread into a carrier bag as he was walking by the deli.

He went into the Co-op and bought the bread and brought it back to me and he says, “George says hello”. As soon as he says this to me I knew. George would always say, “Come on you Spurs!” If I had sent a boy with a message. It’s not the same kind of bread either. It’s not as nice. And they didn’t put sesame seeds on the top like Greek Koulouri. He should have known this.

There was something in the air that day that made me feel there was bad news waiting for me. I didn’t like the way this Monday was shaping up already. Someone should write a song about Mondays. I hated this one.

“Why does Patel want me to call him? What the bloody hell is it now?” is going through my head.

I go over to the counter. Sarah already had the bill ready for me. I paid her the £3.75 quietly. I looked down at the plate I brought over from the table to give them for the washing up, so she don’t have to go back to the table. I hadn’t finished everything on the plate.

“Not much of an appetite today Paully, not like you, is it?’” She was kind. She was a very good waitress and wanted to check everything was ok with the food. I’d only left a little bit of mash potato but that was unusual for me.

“It’s Eleni. Everything is happening today.”

“I hate Mondays.” She said.

I knew that Sarah was a good person. She had a way with people that very few people had. She was a light shining kindness on me. A real human being. An honestly compassionate person, who didn’t want anything from me or expect anything in return. This meant a lot to me. I think it means a lot to the world. These people are gold.

“Yeah me too. Thanks. The pie was lovely, tell Louis eh?”

I put fifty pence into her apron and walked out of the door quite quickly. I had to make another call, no. I wasn’t really looking where I was going and I ended up in the centre of Old Street and I didn’t see this bloody car. A loud car horn pull me up short.

“You tired of livin’ or summing?” It was a taxi driver having a go at me with his window wound down.

I didn’t hear the rest. Too busy doing dodgems trying to get to the phone box on the other side of the street.

The nearest phone box was on the corner of Domingo Street but there was someone in it, so I had to wait outside and then it start to rain. I was getting very impatient, getting wet and waiting for this bugger to finish on his phone-call, so I decided to go all the way back to the factory and use the phone inside instead. I was running short of time and I didn’t want to miss speaking to the doctor before the afternoon shift. The library would have to wait.

Old street is full of traffic delivering cloth or taking dresses to the wholesalers. Little vans, with angry taxi drivers. The delivery drivers park up on the pavement, loading the dresses and they load up the Parking meters to add on to their time. They smoke even more than me. Players finest Virginia, untipped. The packet, that had the sailor on the front.

I smoked a cigarette before I went up the stairs. I looked at my watch and I realised I only had four minutes left of my lunch break. I’m gonna have to call in office hours. This is not good, not good at all. So now I don’t even have time to finish my fag before I have to go up because some skinhead was on the phone outside. Probably talking to the DSS, because he hadn’t got his giro. Or he didn’t sign on that week because he couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed, lazy bastard. They know all the tricks, these people on the dole.

1.56pm

As soon as I walk in through the door the Govna was coming out of his office and he calls me over. It wasn’t even the end of the lunch break for Christ sake. There were still three minutes left before the bell.

“Pavlo, ella mesa re thelo se.” It was Andreas’ way of saying, ‘come in’ politely. It was an unnecessarily harsh turn of phrase and an unkind tone in his voice that I didn’t like at all. Hang about, this isn’t right at all. He shouldn’t be talking to me this way. I’m not having this. I have to call the bloody doctor anyway. I can’t do this now. Can’t it wait?

I walked into the office, and nearly all the staff who were back from lunch were watching or anyone still eating in the staff canteen could see as well, cos they were still there talking and smoking in those last few precious minutes of the lunch break. The hush sometimes was beautiful. It reminds me of the atmosphere in the library. Everybody keeps their voices lower than normal to respect the silence of the space. But when the bell went the shouting begins.

So as I’m going into the office with everyone watching I’m thinking to myself, how am I gonna make the bloody call to the Dr Patel person? The bell would be ringing in about two minutes for the end of lunch..

Didn’t Steve say the Govna gave him the message?

I went in.

CHAPTER 4 THE NEWS

2.15pm

HEART OF GLASS – BLONDIE

Stella sat on the end of Eleni’s bed as she zipped up the little shoulder bag she was taking with her to the hospital. She made sure that her daughter had a change of underwear for her and a spare pair of pyjamas. Eleni told her Mum she was quite looking forward to it, but she wasn’t. She was just saying that so her mother wouldn’t be any more upset and scared than she was already. Eleni could see her Mum was agitated so she told her to leave her on her own for a bit while she packed. Stella went next door into their bedroom to have a think. Everything seemed to be in whirl today and since speaking to Paul she’d become more tense. It made him angry to talk about Eleni and especially at work when everybody could hear their business. She normally knew how to steer the conversation so it was less awkward, less focused on his angertand more on what they needed to talk about, but he was up and down, so temperamental. So much so, that it was difficult to judge their conversations and guide him somewhere with the right form of words.

Eleni, now alone, knew her Mum and dad well enough to know that they could become emotional at the drop of a hat. Maybe mum less so but she didn’t want to get into that. Not today. She wanted to go to the hospital quietly. In her mind, she was in a movie that she was playing out in front of her mum, so that she wouldn’t guess what was really going on in her mind. Eleni was a girl, far more mature than her fourteen years and in everything she did, there was always her way of doing it. Other girls at school gathered round her because she had that essential quality about her which made her born to be followed by adoring fans. Endless streams of laughter filled her days. School never once gave her cause for concern, nor did she ever feel threatened by anything. If ever there was anybody who ever led a charmed life, it was Eleni Socrates. So she had to make work in the movie in her mind.

Eleni knew now at this moment for her Mum, she needed to be Ali McGraw in Love Story, which she’d only had just seen. She wanted to meet a doctor at the hospital who looked like Ryan O’Neil and fall madly in love with him. Stepven was her Ryan O’Neil and instead of Ice Hockey, he played soccer, that worked for her. Dad was just like that actor who played Jennifer’s father in the movie she thought. Yeah, what was his name, Phil Cavalleri, the baker, and Dad was a steam-presser, yerah that worked too, but what was the actor’s name, yeah, John Marley. Everything was a film to Eleni and she was the leading lady. She cast every role with the people in her life. She thought through the scenes as she remembered them. And in the film though, she dies, but it’s only a film isn’t it? I mean it’s all make believe. They’re only actors. All this hospital stuff was gonna be part of this a huge film she was in and she was playing the main role in it. It would be really exciting to be in the ghospital with all those hard working nurses who she loved, looking after her. She wondered if any of the ones she knew from the last time would still be there. Not bad. Not bad. She’d be the tragic heroine and she’d love every minute of it. She could hear the theme music in her head as she put the last book she wanted t have with her into the blue rucksack she nornmally took to school. Where Do I begin? That’s how it started. “Where Do I begin? Da da da da da of how great a Love Can Be….or something. The sweet Love Story that is older than the sea. She loved that line. What could possibly be older than the sea, but love?

Stella wasn’t going to take her daughter on two buses and the tube to get all the way to The North Middlesex Hospital on Silver Street and what did it matter if was going to cost money they didn’t really have? What did it matter? She sat on their bed now. The marital bed. Waiting for Eleni to finish packing. She would call Micky’s the mini cab place on the corner at the end of Berkshire Gardens and Green Lanes. He’d be there in less than a minute. But whilst she sat on the bed, she thought about how to process the trip to the hospital, talking to Eleni about it and talking to Paul about it. She needed to understand enough of the English to be able to have at least some input. He always took over any conversation they were having anyway and it was always just less trouble to go along with things until she needed to put her foot down and maybe now was the time to do that. This phone call or that phone call didn’t make a difference. The moment wasn’t right. As she was looking around the room she saw the Stefania, the wedding crown, they called it, above the bed on the wall in its wood and glass container. The Orthodox reminder of their union and worn as they were married. A ribbon connecting each crown to the other, on which all the best men and best women wrote their names and paid a fee to be so honoured. She thought of their lovemaking and how much she missed him there. How much she still wanted him. How much they had drifted apart. And the guilt of feeling like that at that moment struck her between the eyes and shamed her for allowing the thought to develop.

She would say something. Now was the time. She wouldn’t allow his anger to get the better of every conversation. She needed to come out of the shell she had withdrawn into these last few weeks. Enough being the dutiful wife who takes everything on the chin. It was her time now. She would say something. She would.

She went downstairs and made another cup of tea and by the time the kettle started whistling Eleni had come bounding down the stairs two at a time, with her rucksack ready.

“You want another cup of tea before we go sweetheart?”

“Not sure I want a cuppa now Mum.”

“A cinnamon one?”

“Ooh yeah, go on then, if there’s any left?”

“Call the number in the phone book. The mini-cabs.”

“Ooo, we’re going by mini-cab!”

“Tell him 15 minutes, otherwise he’ll be here before we’ve finished our tea. Chocolate Bourbon?”

“Is the Pope a Catholic mum? Does a bear…?”

“Don’t you dare!”

And they both laughed

Eleni picked up the phone and began to dial the number that was in the little flip up phone book by the onyx side table in the hall. A few minutes later, the driver was sounding his horn out in the street because he couldn’t park in the road. They left, making sure the front door was locked and all the windows were bolted. Shut.

The factory bell rings – 2.00pm

Everybody could see me going into the office. Like Boxer the horse walking himself wearily into the back of the lorry headed for the abattoir, they were the sheep being led by Napoleon.

There was record playing on the stereo system. It was Devil Woman sung by Cliff, the one with the two first names.

“Ooh, that Cliff, you’ve got to hand it to him”.

“I would!” Cackles from the machinists.

“If I could only have him for one night I’d show him the Devil Woman.” More laughter and more of the women joining in.

Stelios chips in with “Why don you let me be youa devil, eh?”

“Ooh, Mr Stelios, I didn’t think you had any devil in you.”

“No, I be the devil in you!”

Ron the senior cutter could hear the commotion from the other end of the factory and as the boss was occupied, he thought he should at least try to bring the factory back to some sense of order. He knew, they could see the boss was busy in his office. He wasn’t having this. He strode down towards the machinist’s end of the factory and spoke in his most foreman like voice.

“Come along now ladies, come along, you spend more time talking about it than doing it!”

One of the overlockers sang, “It’s so funny how we don’t to talk anymore!” and that was it.

All those that heard it above the commotion burst into laughter. A huge wave of laughter ripped around the machinists and even Ron had to see the funny side of it. Ivy quietened down because she liked Ronny and as a senior sample machinist she thought she should show a little restraint now too. They’d had a laugh and what was going on was serious, so she carried on her work without another word. She gave those who looked at her the evil eye and everyone quickly settled back into their work.

Rene, who was Ivy’s best friend and who sat next to her, needed  finish her bundle, but before she did, Paul had crossed her mind, in there talking to the Govna. All the machinists liked Paul. He was polite and always asked after them. Who didn’t like Paul? She sighed to herself, as she as she took up some more material to pass under another to make a cuff. She was gathering the material up in little pleats as she went around the circle of the pattern, snipping excess blue cotton quickly away from her as she passed one way and then the next to make a circle with the machine.

Rene continued to work on her bundle as she told Ivy that she’d seen Paul go into the office with the boss. Ivy nodded sagely as she took a long draw on her cigarette through her yellowed nicotine-covered index and forefingers. They talked nearly all day at their machines. It was endless during breaks and when the boss wasn’t around, well anything went. Ivy was fifty-four, Rene was thirty, but the two of them were inseparable. Ivy listened to Rene telling her that she had known the boss was gonna call Paully in because Steve the apprentice cutter was talking to Ronnie, the senior cutter who said they were getting a new steam-press machine and that there was talk about people being sacked or made redundant.

I sat down opposite Andreas and took a cigarette from my packet. I noticed there seemed to be less in it than usual. I knew I had another packet by my place so I didn’t think too much more about it. There was a silver-plated lighter on the table and Andreas picked it up, reached over toward me, and lit my cigarette. I was more than a little surprised by this, as that had never happened before. In twenty-four years the Govna had never lit a cigarette for me. Not even when they were drunk together.

“You get the message?” asked Andreas

“Eh?” I was too busy thinking about the fact that Andreas light my cigarette.

“I sent the boy, Steve. Make your phone-call. Call the doctor. We can speak afterwards.”

2.50pm Berkshire Gardens

Eleni was talking to the driver driving them to the hospital. He was a very cheerful Gambian fellow from just outside Banjul and he had Christian symbols on the dashboard, which Stella liked enormously. They were safe with him she thought. He had a St Christopher and a St Peter which he referred to as his ‘paytran sayns’. Eleni was saying,

“Don’t take the North Circular because they’re widening the A1 where it meets the A406 and we got stuck there on Sunday, had to delay kick off. Best go down Green Lanes and hop onto it from Bourne Hill, up through Enfield and pick it up just before Silver street.”

“Well you dawta know the London very very well. I’m certainly himpress wiv ha madam.”

“I looked it up in the A-Z! I have to find all the pitches when we’re not playing at home.” she said proudly.

The discussion turned to the latest eleven Tottenham were fielding against Liverpool at the weekend. Her knowledge of the tactics she thought Keith Burkinshaw should employ, were equally impressive and he listened intently to her ideas about the formation. The Lillywhites were doing extremely well and she was impressed with Bukinshaw’s selections and his style of play for the team.

He followed her instructions and they were there in about twenty-five minutes. Stella never spoke a word in the cab and gave Eleni her purse so she could pay the young driver. He laughed as she put her hands into the wallet her mother had given her and gave him the fare.

“I should be paying you for the entertainment!”

2.15pm Old Street

Paul was on hold. Dr Patel was, at that precise moment, telling a man in his late thirties that he was now diabetic. Given his weight and his sweet tooth he was nearly at the point where he might go into a coma if he were to carry on eating the same diet of chocolate, cream cakes and crisps every night. But Dr Deepak Patel cared enormously for the well-being of every sentient being, even if this one was determined to have no karmic value worth taking into his next life.

He knew Paul Socrates was on hold and Deepak needed to talk to him but he would have to finish with this patient first.

As I waited for Dr Patel I looked into Andreas eyes and he looked right back at me. I wondered what the hell was going on. Letting me use the office phone to make personal calls, lighting my fags for me. It was unprecedented. He was looking me in the eyes too. Something different in the way he was looking at me, made me think there was something strange going on. Something I didn’t know. Has he spoken to someone I didn’t know about? Does he know something I don’t know?

I think while I’m waiting for Dr Patel, that things were good at the factory until the Govna started to turn things upside down with compulsory overtime for the machinists in the evenings and on Saturday’s and then the shitty costings, so their wages started to go dowm for the same amount of work. They had to work more hours just to earn the same pay they were getting before. I’d decided I wasn’t going to be harassed into working at weekends and I told him straight that I wouldn’t be able to come in. If he’d just been a little more respectful and asked me if it was ok. Would I mind coming in, kind of thing. I’m one of the longest serving workers here. I’m a senior here, I was the one they asked to do the Christmas raffle for the rest of the staff. That has to mean something doesn’t it? You trust the guy whose pulling the raffle tickets eh?

“I’m just gonna pop down to Ronnie. Call me on the internal when you’re done on the phone ok? I’ll come straight back! We need to talk”

Andreas called back as he was leaving the office. I couldn’t remember a time when I was in here alone. My mind was wandering again as I waited for the doctor to come on the phone. The receptionist, she put me on hold, on the phone. As I was holding on, my mind was drifting off, thinking about the people in the factory I liked. I was looking through the glass window from the office. Looking ionto the factry, A view I’d never seen from inside the office. The view Andreras has when he sits behind his desk.

I could see Periklis who I liked enormously. He was someone you couldn’t tire of, except when he was very drunk. Mildly drunk, he was ok, but when he’d had one more than that, he was a different guy.

At Christmas, I said they asked me to pull the little yellow raffle tickets. I made a cloth bag from different bits of material that Ivy had joined together with five different-coloured threads. To the younger people and in particular those who had been there less than five years, I was a bit of a joke because of my shirt always being white. I knew that they made fun of it, but that was ok, because I shared in the joke. It wasn’t a behind-my-back sort of a joke. Ivy said my pressing was ‘a ballet that some people even liked to watch.’ Because, you see, in the years I worked there, my work had always been immaculate. This was the word they used, not me. ‘Immaculate work Mr Paul’, Andreas used to say.

The younger workers at the factory, the pressers mainly, except for Steve, who was the exception that proved the rule, didn’t like me. I knew that. Steve says they thought I was a show-off when I displayed my skills. What can you expect eh, from young people? They can’t even string two words together. I mean you expect a grunt from a pig eh? They’re only interested in football and getting out the dresses. They didn’t make conversation with me. They wouldn’t know how.

But Periklis was the kind of man people liked in spite of themselves. Even the people who didn’t like Periklis at least admired his honesty. He had a mouth on him the size of the Blackwall Tunnel (which he drove through every day to get to work). He had an opinion on everything and read ‘the Daily Mirror’, every day assiduously just like me. It became part of his ritual to read each part of it at certain times during the day, just like me. Whenever he got to something that made him angry or he wanted to say something about, he would shout out in the middle of the sacred silences during the breaks (he was the only one with either the bottle or the authority to do this) and make his point, this was, however, one of the way we differed. I would never do that. In the morning break, he would read all the news there was to read and during the lunch break he would catch up on all the sports pages.

As I was looking out of the office window, I could see all the other people from ethnic minorities in the factory. Mainly they were of Cypriot extraction, but we had Sri Lankans, Bengali’s, Armenian, Carribean, all working togeyher, like the United nations we were. The Greeks or Turks, together  and never once, even during the ‘74 invasion, was there any real friction. In fact the Cypriots and the Turks of London, we have always got on together in the workplace and outside.  I bet nearly 80 per cent of the staff was either Greek or Turkish-Cypriots, who had settled here since the 50’s. Some came over because of the riots and the troubles in Cyprus. They were called ‘the betrayers of Cyprus’, by those back on the island. They had a name for them, the Cypriots did. They called us Cypriots who left Cyprus ‘Char-li-ehs’ (with three syllables) which meant just what it sounded like. The traitors, we were.

2.24pm

“Mr Socrates are you there?”

“I’m here. Doctor.”

“I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. It’s Dr Patel. Now we need to talk about Eleni.. I spoke with your wife earlier today and advised her we needed Eleni at the hospital. I’ve also got the results of the tests in front of me.”

“What do they say?”

“Well, I think it would be a good idea if you were to be able to come and speak to me personally, again, like we did the last time, here at the surgery. Now do you think you can take some time off your job to do this?”

“You can’t you tell me ova the phone? I’m at work now you know. Is serious?”

“Well, it could be yes and that’s why I telephoned this morning and asked for Eleni to be admitted today. I think we need to make a treatment plan for her straight away.”

“Was the problem Doctor Patel?”

“Well, now I think it would really be better to discuss this face to face, here at the surgery and you please come with your wife, so we can have a chat together about this?”

“I make an appointment?”

“I will make an appointment for you now, but I wondered if you could come in either later today or this evening, I will be here until late for you so we can talk.”

“Is serious eh…eh?”

“Do you think you could make it here to the surgery later on today with your wife?”

“I call her. She’s going to the hospital.”

“Well, perhaps you could speak to my lovely receptionist Maureen, and let them know when you will be coming in and I will be here waiting for you both Mr Socrates.”

And then it was a blur. A fog. I couldn’t hear it. I was deaf. I don’t remember putting the phone down. And I couldn’t stay in the office after the conversation ended. I had to get away. I couldn’t breathe properly. My eyes started to play tricks on me. I thought I was seeing Eleni screaming in pain after she was run over. I was feeling her brow, as she had a temperature of 102. She was burning up. I lit another cigarette and my hand was actually trembling. This wasn’t happening was it? This wasn’t actually happening? It was like a dream I was in. An actual dream.

I thought about leaving the factory right there and then. I was gonna walk out and just go, I didn’t know where. Just leave, maybe go to the hospital. I just didn’t know. My mind was confused, muddled with all the words he had just spoken, pressing in on me. I need to go the surgery with Stella to talk about Eleni because Doctor Patel couldn’t tell me over the phone or he, Patel, didn’t want to, because it was, what? Too serious? What? Didn’t want to upset me, what? Jesus it was like being in a prison cell and each way I turned there was another wall made of iron bars keeping me inside this tiny room of confusion in my head.

I could literally feel the walls closing in on me. The whole of the office had shrunk so much that there surely isn’t enough air left in here, I thought. I couldn’t breathe any more. My shirt was sticking to me as the sweat started to drip from my forehead. My underarms were damp. I was so scared I thought I was going to piss myself.

The door opened and Andreas stood there, grim faced.

“Bad news? Was it bad news? Paul? Are you ok? Do you need a drink or something?”

He called out in Greek to Takoui who at that moment was just passing the door outside with some work for an Overlocker.

‘”Mrs Takoui, a glass of water please for Mr Paul.”

“At once!” and she turned on her heels for the canteen to get me a cold drink of water in a proper cup.

I could see the Govna was upset too. Probably because he’s never seen me like this before. I’d never been like this before. I was wheezing I think. Like I was fighting to breathe.

I was in shock. I didn’t know if she was gonna die. I wasn’t prepared for the emotions jumping into my head. I was trying to use a size ticket to fan my face with.

“Take you time re. You wanna lie down somewhere? I take you to the canteen.”

 Mrs Takoui walked in with a very cold mug of water, which she helped me to drink from. I was actually unable to get up from the chair. She fussed around me saying I should see a doctor, because I looked pale and that she had some aspirin if I needed it or had a headache.

“You feelin dizzy Mr Paul? Somethin you eat lunchtime maybe? I have the Rennie tablets as well, because I get the heartburn you know.”

“Thank you Mrs Takoui. I just need to take some air maybe. Can’t breathe in here! Andreas, why do you never get any air conditioning in this bloody factory, eh?”

I got up and walked out through the doors of the office and through the double-doors of the factory to the floor landing outside, without saying another word. Andreas just stood in the office with my empty mug in his hand, as I left. Takoui whispered to him.

“He’s right Mr Andreas we should get some air conditioning in this place.”

I stood at the top of the stairs outside the double doors of the factory and felt something welling up inside me. I wanted to express something I couldn’t put into words and I could feel something building up inside me. I held on to the railings of the stairs and looked down the central lift shaft. At the lift that had been my constant fear for my whole working life.

And then I started screaming down the stairs. It came from somewhere as deep as the lift-shaft itself and it filled the space inside me. I screamed again and my voice boomed down the central shaft to the basement floor. I needed to let my emotion out, otherwise I might have had a heart attack, right there and then in the office. No one was listening thank God; the noise from the factory’s machines drowned out my scream. t was a piercing scream full of my heart and full of me. I listened to the echo of my voice and it made me relieved to let it out. I needed to gather myself to face what was next. And I wasn’t sure what that was going to be.

CHAPTER 5

MUPPA

WAR – WAR AND PEACE

3.12.pm

The Churchill Ward, North London Middlesex Hospital

Eleni Socrates was talking to a little girl half her age, who was wearing a Tottenham Hotspur home kit as pyjamas.

Eleni and her Mum had checked in already and were told she would be seeing see a Dr Keller who would be overseeing her first session of chemotherapy later that day with one of the senior nurses. Dr Keller was occupied elsewhere when they arrived and he had already been told that Eleni and Mrs Socrates were on the ward. Stella Socrates sat in the chair by the side of Eleni’s bed as Eleni chatted to the little girl in the ‘Tottingham’ shirt a little way down the ward. She’d brought her Tottenham Jim Jams, her toothbrush, her big brush for her hair, an apple, a milky bar and the book she was re-reading, Love Story by Erich Segal.

Just a little later she was explaining the benefits of the Italian sweeper system to one of the Portuguese hospital porters who had been fascinated by how knowledgeable she was about the beautiful game. He stood watching her, learning new things about football from this patient.

“I mean it’s only a matter of time before managers in this country start playing that way. If you want to get to the finals of the European Cup like Notts Forest or the World Cup, you gotta be able to play the European style. Cloughie’s got the right idea.”

“Just ‘cos the Argentinian’s won doesn’t mean we have to play like that!” He pitched in.

Bernardo Da Cruz was loving it. This young girl, she couldn’t have been more than, maybe 12, no even not 13 surely, sitting there, talking about football! Amazing! He had to get a bed to E wing and couldn’t stay. On leaving her he said,

“The best team got knocked out. Brazil!”

“Maybe in ’70 they were the best team. I don’t know, I‘m too young to remember! The French were the better side. More imagination. And the Italians, what a side! They play great football and if you want a prediction Mr Da Cruz, I’ll bet the Italians win in 1982. They’ve won it twice already.”

Eleni loved football. In fact, she was in love with a footballer. He played in a Sunday League side and she never missed a match he played in. His name was Steven Loukades and he was the boy whom Paul had asked to buy the bread from George’s at lunchtime. She thought he was Johan Cruyff, the Dutch centre forward who played on the losing side of the 1974 world cup final. He had the same shoulder-length hair and a long thin body. She admired his skill but most of all she loved him because he was, ‘Out of sight, radical and slamming!’

Steve played in the side that Tony Phillipou, the senior cutter in the factory played in and Eleni went to watch the matches, all the matches, wherever they were, with or without her father; on Sunday mornings where football at its most fundamentally amateur level is played. Sometimes her Dad showed up with her but most Sundays Paul just wanted a lie-in. Stella was always off early to Pratt Street Cathedral in Camden to attend the Orthodox Service, so Eleni had the morning to herself, invariably travelling down to Finsbury Park Fields for the home games or getting herself on to the away mini-bus with the half-time oranges.

Tony had a pigeon chest with a knuckle-sized hollow in the middle of it. He looked like someone had stuck a fist into his sternum. But crucially it also enabled him to take a ball from mid-air on his chest perfectly. His chest was made for chesting.

There was a feud between Tony ‘pigeon-chest’ Phillipou, the, t. and Mus, the Turkish delivery the driver. Tony thought Mustapha walrus moustache’ Ergun  had insulted the Cypriot flag because the latter happened to use what appeared to be a cloth in the canteen to wipe his hands with, but which was in fact, the damp, newly cleaned Cyprus flag, the former, had brought with him to take to football that evening, as AEK Athens were playing the Arse. It didn’t help that Mustapha was not only Turkish but a Gooner to boot.

Tony and Steve were fanatical amateur players and played every Sunday morning in Finsbury Park, along with all the other amateur football local heroes, on those pitches that are next door to each other and nearly always used to have each other’s footballs ending up on each other’s pitch.

Tony was a right-back like Steve Perryman and Steve was a centre forward just like Johan Cruyff. Tony was an old kind of right back though, that was fast disappearing from the game. No amount of mud, rain, sleet, or snow could deter them, the team and particularly, Eleni, from turning out for a game on Sunday mornings.

Tony always had a good head on him and as a back was used to going up into the box at important corners or free kicks. He could nearly always get on the end of something because he had the advantage of being that little bit taller. He also had his famous pigeon chest for bringing the ball under control. Panathniakos AFC, the side both he and Steve played for was a good side and was always in the running for the Isthmian League Cup.

Steve was, amongst other things, a trainee cutter by trade. In fact, in the factory, there were very few things he hadn’t tried his hand at. He was, by now, learning his trade from Tony and the two were close because Tony Phillipou saw Steve as the son he could never have. Steve used to work in a factory in Wood Green that was just down the road from the huge construction site at the soon to be opened, Wood Green Shopping City. The Queen was going to be opening it and Steve would say,

“She wouldn’t be able to find Wood Green on an A-Z, let alone open the bloody shopping City!”

Eleni wasn’t allowed in the changing rooms, not because they were always thick with cigarette smoke. It was because the boys didn’t want the young girl watching them all with their kit off. Before the game, everyone lit up and they all wanted some blokeish banter, so it didn’t suit the side to have a girl around then.

Eleni would bring the half-time oranges in from one of the local greengrocers on Green Lanes, who donated them free every week. She’d slice them up into quarters before she took them out onto the pitch, lighting up herself on the quiet after they had all left for the warm-up. She’d watch from the side of the pitch following the play up and walking up and down on the touchline.

She gawped at the much older girlfriends who wore miniskirts, long stick-in-the-mud-heels and had thick tree-trunk legs which got very cold and white in the exposed and sometimes brutally cold windy weather.

Eleni loved to watch Steve play because when he worked at the factory, he said he was, ‘like the lowest of the low’, but when he was on the football pitch he was “Zeus, on Mount Olympus!”

3.35pm

After she’d been waiting for Dr Keller Eleni had seen the Subbuteo table and challenged a boy who was a little older than her, to a game. As she set the table up, Eleni remembered the recent, crucial semi-final cup match that her team Panathniakos AFC had played.

Panathniakos AFC were playing AEK in the semi-final of the Isthmian League Cup.

Eleni had a very loud voice and was very vocal in her support. She was the noisiest supporter Panathniakos AFC ever had and that match was pretty special. In fact, she was so noticeable that the players wanted to adopt her as the mascot after that. She scared the opposition shitless. She harried them with her bellowing voice. In situations like that when you are on the touchline you can have a lot of influence on a game if you had a loud voice and Eleni was well-practiced at it. She said anything that came into her head and was a brilliant spur to any player who felt like he wasn’t able to reach a ball. ‘You’re pathetic!’ She would say, ‘You could have got to that.’ or ‘Call yourself a footballer, my Mum plays better than you do and she’s in a wheelchair!’ This stream of abuse went on for the eighty minutes or so each game lasted and the opposition didn invariably didn’t know what to do about her because she was so distracting. She went on and on at them throughout the whole match. It became something of a talking point between the referee and the opposing side because sometimes, even the referee got flustered. No one could stop her and AEK were so intimidated that her voice definitely had a hand in the first goal scored by her Steve. Her Johan.

She remembered the strange little man who talked to her in that terrible accent and wore that awful Mackintosh coat.

The man was a local journalist who was covering the match. He was from the Greek paper ‘The Chora’. It called itself a people’s paper, which was ironically, hardly read by any people at all. It supported the Labour party and was staunchly socialist in its editorials. It was the only paper that was printed in Greek and English so that the Cypriots in London, who no longer spoke Cypriot, could read it.

This journalist, who was covering the game was rather charmed by Eleni when he first spotted her and was intrigued that a girl could be interested in football. He also couldn’t believe the sheer loudness of her voice. He watched her from a little way off on the same touchline and scribbled down the abuse leaving blanks for the words he knew would never get into print. He blanched at the sound of all her profanity. He had the idea that if she were a representation of the young Cypriots of London, then he would have to document what she said and put it in his match report.

Eleni didn’t even notice him, as she was too taken up with the game and Steve’s goal had put her into a state of ecstasy. The more the reporter heard, the more he thought he ought to do a feature on her. A special on the young supporter of Panathniakos AFC. What could he call it he thought? ‘Featherweight feminine fan of Finsbury fields?’ No. ‘The voice that launched a thousand kicks?’ He said to himself. No, the boss would never buy it. ‘The little louse that roared.’ He thought, now that’s not bad! He decided to find out more about her and surreptitiously made his way towards her, pretending to follow the course of play, trying to keep up with her as she paced hurriedly up and down the touchline.

She hardly understood his very thick accent. She wasn’t even sure if he was speaking to her,

“Is this youa tim?”

“Eh?” Her face scrunched up at him, “Oh my team, my team, is that what you mean? My team?”

“Thas what I say.”

“Say? Thas’ whadisai!” She mimicked him, “that’s what I said, you min!” She corrected him pointedly and he immediately loathed her. The young were always taking the Mickey out of his accent he thought. She couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen and there she was, as bold as brass, taking him off like she was a comedian. Aris Theodogolos bristled with wounded pride and self-important umbrage. He would crucify her in print. Eleni had made an enemy in those few short seconds and she was completely, blissfully unaware of it.

“She’s telling me she can’t understand, when I speak better English than the English”, he thought to himself. He found the right English words in his head for how he felt. Incandescent with rage. Yes, that’s what he was.

“Do you speak Greek?”

Aris asked her in his native tongue this time hoping to catch her out.

“Yeah, of course but I’d rather talk in…” she replied in her best Cypriot dialect and mid-sentence, in English she screamed, “Pass it George, pass it, you pratt! Fuckin’ ayda! Right George, Steve’s free on the right. Give the ball, give the fucking ball…give it. Give it!!”

“You lie muppa eh?” he asked again this time back in English, hoping for at least an answer he could directly quote. Eleni was oblivious to him. The match was now her whole life and AEK were getting back into it putting in some good passing moves between themselves, hurting Panathniakos AFC on the counter.

Aris Theodogolos then seethed as Eleni quickly moved away from him to follow the action. She hadn’t even answered his question and the veins in his temples were practically bursting with hurt, macho, malevolent pride. Walking away from him like he wasn’t even there, he thought. Eleni had now broken into a run to keep up with the action elsewhere on the pitch and he didn’t bother trying to talk to her anymore. She was already quite a way off and not looking back at him as he scribbled his bile on to his little notepad. Perhaps her father was playing on one of the teams, perhaps a brother? Yes that’s it. One of them was her brother and that’s why she was here. Or maybe a cousin or an uncle? He had to know more about her and he stayed around trying to find out how she knew the players. He tried all he could to ascertain if someone in the Panathniakos side was attracted to her or if she looked at anyone more than anyone else but he couldn’t figure it out, even though it was blindingly obvious to anyone who saw the way she looked at Steve. While he was playing, Steve also noticed the strange little balding man in the pencil thin moustache and the long grey Mackintosh coat. He was carrying some sort of notepad. Steve thought he might be a scout or something, but he couldn’t be sure. At any rate he was distracting him from the game, because he seemed like he was trying to chat to Eleni and he didn’t like that. Was he some sort of pervert on the touchline? A dirty old man?

The reporter wrote some more notes in his book and tried to assess the sort of story he would write. Foul-mouthed little wretch he thought. The game was suddenly of no importance and covering it for the paper was off the agenda. Now he would write something about how the young disrespected the older generation.

Aris Theodogolos kept schadenfreude maturing like great wine in the old oak casket of his bitter heart. A bitterness few would ever understand or fathom. Deep, in the cellar of his mangled emotions, he tended to an ageing aching angst. Clasping, clawing, cackling at the cancelled career he used to have before he became a hack journalist in a dead end newspaper in the backside of a Camden Passage.

Eleni encouraged and rallied the men on the pitch. They were her side and they weren’t going to be beaten.

“We can do it. You know we can. Come on! You know you can do it. PANA. PANA!!’”

She raised her voice to deafening levels of encouragement. The team had dropped their heads and she could see it. Then a wonderful thing happened. Little Steve came over during a stop in play and quietly said,

“Keep it goin’, it’s good. Who is that geezer, is he pestering you?”

“No! Now get out there and score the winner, for me!”

This was like music to his ears and he went back on to the pitch with the confidence of Johan Cruyff in the 1974 final.

The opposition were sick to death of Eleni and this only encouraged her more. She got a huge laugh from the whole side when she pretended to be the opposition scorer celebrating his goal. Mocking AEK all the while, it sent a wave of pride through the team. They played better than they had ever played before because now they realised, they were playing not just for themselves and a place in the final but for little Eleni on the touchline. They were possessed with such motivation that a professional coach could not have done better in raising the morale of the side. They played like the great players they admired so much. Panikos Michalis was Pat Jennings and he threw the ball to George Savvides who was Alun Mullery who stroked the ball through to Panos Nicolaou who was Alun Gilzean, halfway to the centre circle. Martin Chivers who was Marios Hajisavva beat one player laid it on for Tony Phillipou who was Steve Perryman striding out from the back and throwing caution to the wind. Perryman whacks the ball long through to Steve Loukades who was Glenn Hoddle unmarked on the edge of the penalty area and he chests it down with immaculate skill on to his right foot and in one continuous movement volleyed it into the top right had corner of the AEK/Arsenal goal.

Eleni heard the voice of the BBC Grandstand announcer in her head say at full time,

“Panathniakos 2 AEK London 1.”

Eleni was looking forward to watching the final in three weeks and tore the older boy limb from limb, in the game of Subbuteo.

NEW – GLOSSARY

AHSICKTÍRI! – Gordon Bennett or Jesus wept or anything similar. A curse.

AHSTOTHIÓWLLO! – To hell with it (literally, to the devil himself)

ARSE – Arsenal football club, after Harry Enfield’s Stavros, but well established before then in North London parlance and especially well used by Tottenham Hotspur supporters.

AVGOLÉMONI – Egg and lemon soup. A delicacy normally served with a garnish of boiled chicken. There is rice in it as well.

BANO SANEMO – Without any reason (literally, on a whim)

BROXENIA – The ancient and time-honoured tradition of matchmaking for a prospective marriage.

BUNDLE – All the material necessary to make the number of dresses shown on the bundle ticket. This ticket, presented after the bundle was finished, proved the machinist had made that bundle up and she was credited in her own book for that number of dresses. It was ticked off after every bundle was finished and entered into her book. Each dress had a costing per item and therefore the larger the bundle, the greater the amount it was worth.

CABBÁGE – Excess dresses sold under the counter for cash and not shown on the books. Pronounced kah-bahj, as in onion bhaji, (if posh) or pronounced just as the vegetable is in north London Cypriot.

CHATISTA – A form of improvised singing more common with rap than any other form of contemporary music. It is generally sung in praise of the bride and groom at a wedding and is also akin to African praise-singing.

COSTING – The amount of money the Govna or the manufacturer was prepared to make or give for the production of one finished garment.

DAIMOKU – A Buddhist chant (nam-myo-ho-renge-kyo) normally spoken by Naishiren Daishonen Buddhists.

DÉSERA MADIA – Four eyes literally, but meaning, be doubly aware.

EN AMARTEA NA BEDASIS TO PSOMI – It’s a sin to throw away bread. Or ‘waste not want not.’

ÉRODA – Making love. The act of lovemaking.

ESINITHISES – You got used to it!

GÓRI – Girl as in the sassy type.

GOROU – The same but a family member saying it.

GOUMBAROS – The best man (as at a wedding). At Cypriot weddings many best men are allowed, and this can mean their introduction into the family forever; all of them!

GOUMBARA – The same applies to women.

GREEN LINE – The dividing line between the two communities in Cyprus after the 1974 invasion by turkey. It runs right through the centre of the capitol Nicosia. To Cypriot-Londoner’s it runs down the middle of green lanes in Haringey.

GRIMAS TANIADA MAS GE BERASAMENDA STIN ANGLIA – A lament much used by the older Cypriot. All those years were wasted, I spent in this country! In other words, I gave this country the best years of my life.

ESINITHISES – You got used to it or acclimatised.

HALOUMI – Eponymous Cypriot Goat’s cheese. The only authentic Cypriot cheese.

HICKMAN LINE – A plastic tube inserted into the subclaveal region in the chest. It facilitates the injection of chemotherapy into the body without having to constantly reinsert a needle.

IGOYÉNIA – Family or relatives but can mean in practice everyone invited to the wedding.

ILIOS – The sun.

KAKOPETRIÁ – The village of bad rock. The legend has it that the village was founded on a huge rock, which had rolled down from the mountain above and crushed two young lovers beneath it. The enormous rock is still there today as a tourist attraction sitting where it stopped and on the remains of the crushed copulating couple.

KIRIELEISON – God be praised. Can mean, oh god! Or god help us!

KOLOGO – (Pronounced go-lo-go emphasis on first syllable) Marrow-head…pretty self-explanatory.

LINGRÍ – (Stress second syllable) A now extinct game which is more related to cricket than anything eastern-Mediterranean and was played by my father because when I asked him about it, he said he had played it as a boy. The game ‘lingri’ is played by balancing a small stick (about the thickness of a finger and about six inches long) between two stones about six inches apart on the ground. The stones would have to be big enough to keep the stick off the ground by about six inches. A larger stick the length of a forearm (the thickness of a thumb) is then used as a baseball-type bat. The player scoops the smaller stick out from under the stones with the larger stick. As the small stick is balancing in mid-air the larger stick is then used to hit the smaller stick as far it will go. Timing is everything. Whoever hit the little stick the farthest, without it being caught, was the winner. And that was the point of the game. There could be as many players as there were in the group or gang that were playing. Each took it in turns to play. I think my father was brilliant at it. He was strong and forceful and nearly always won “as long your mind was there” he would say. Distractions were part of the game too so if you were looking at girls you could be easily distracted. But that would also be part of why he won sometimes too. Because the girls would be looking, and you had to win at both games.

NUMBER – (Pronounced numbah) The individual style number given to a dress by the manufacturer.

MALÁGA – (Stress second syllable and pronounced ma-lag-ga) Wanker.

MÉDRIO – A medium Turkish coffee made with a little sugar and ground coffee beans in copper coffee pot. Normally drunk in a demitasse cup there are three types of coffee known to Greek-Cypriots. Sketo is a plain coffee made with no sugar and `Gliki is a sweet coffee made with at least one teaspoon of sugar.

MÓNI MAS – By ourselves.

MUCHTÁRI – The headman of the village (appointed during Turkish rule) who was the magistrate or judge and jury on behalf of the Turkish government.

MUPPA – Soccer.

OOSSOU – There there. As in to comfort. Or you be still. It’s alright.

OVERLOCKER – A machinist who did nothing but overlock stitching with an overlocking machine in preparation for the dress being made up by a piecework machinist. Some dresses needed overlocking before making up, as this would ensure hems, cuffs, and collars were cleanly finished.

PANO SANEMO – On the off chance. Without planning. On a whim. Or, on the spur of the moment.

PIECE WORK – The making of each ‘bundle’ for the ‘costing’ which was arrived at by the sample machinist and the boss at the beginning of each new style.

PUTANA – (Stress second syllable) Prostitute or whore.

RE – (Pronounced reh) Mate, as in pal {masculine}

RA – (Pronounced rah) Mate {feminine though a much less flattering term when used in the same way as re}

REMBETIKO – The Greek equivalent of the blues. A thirteen beat to the bar repeatable passage along with a set pattern of chord changes and a repeated generic drumbeat.

SINGENIA– A relation of any kind (female).

SINGENI – A relation of any kind (male).

SOUVLA – A Cypriot gathering normally of relatives, but it can be anytime anywhere and for any purpose, to eat skewered lamb grilled over a barbecue of hot charcoal and seasoned with salt. (not to be confused with a British barbecue, which is normally cooked on an outside grill of bottled gas consisting normally of overcooked beef burgers and chicken drumsticks with a marinade from Sainsbury.)

SPITAKI MAS – Our little home.

STIN IYIAMAS or YIAMAS – Cheers (as in a toast), To health.

SVIGWA – Hornets.

TAVLI – Backgammon.

O VOVOS – The dumb guy, as in someone who couldn’t speak.

VRAGA – The baggy type of Arabic pantaloons that have a dip in the middle of the crutch reaching almost to the knees with an excess of material. Something to do with the next coming of Allah being born through a man’s pants, so to facilitate this they made sure that Allah would fall into a comfy little spot.

YATAGAN – Or yataghan or ataghan (from Turkish yatağan), also called varsak, is a type of Ottoman knife or short sabre used from the mid-16th to late 19th centuries. The yatagan was extensively used in Ottoman Turkey and in areas under immediate Ottoman influence, such as the Balkans and the Caucasus.

YERO – Old man. Can be, respectful, sarcastic, or cheeky.