Winter sun on the Kastro, photo by Sayyid
THE KASTRO HOUSE
– A THOUSAND AND ONE GREEK EXPERIENCES…
Lesley and I arrived in April, for her first look at the house – what trust I wondered, and would she like it? We had contacted the previous owners and asked them to vacate one month before we arrived, to find that they had moved out only two days before – our first experience of ‘Greek Time’. Those two days had been spent cleaning the completely empty house, so it appeared reasonably O.K. at that stage. We found 24 broken panes of glass in the windows and internal doors, and water gushing out of the inlet pipe at the back of the toilet pan flooding the bathroom floor. What a good idea to have a drain in the middle of the floor, we thought.
We called in an English plumber, who had been living on Skopelos with his family for some years. He noticed a funny gurgling noise coming from beneath the sink unit when it was draining away. While we were investigating this we saw some funny little black squiggly marks completely covering every inside surface of the kitchen units. ‘What was this?’ we asked our neighbours and friends who had been living there for many years. Everyone denied seeing anything like this before. Why had one of the drawers been nailed shut? The only thing left in the house was a metal fish slice which was poking out of the side of the nailed-up drawer. We thought that the previous owners had been keeping cheese and maybe some sort of plants inside the drawers, and the little squiggles were something to do with this.
Little did we know!
A little black cockroach introduced himself, cute little thing, but we didn’t think too much about it. However, we bought some cockroach spray, and to escape the aroma, went out for our dinner, returning a couple of hours later. The semi-basement kitchen is down some steps off the hallway. Lesley went down but forgot to switch on the light. As she walked across the floor she felt a strange crunching underfoot, returned to the steps, and turned the light on. And then...................... we nearly freaked out!!! The floor was literally COVERED WITH COCKCOACHES !! Lesley grabbed that fish slice and spent hours splatting the little rascals before retiring exhausted. My role was simply director of operations – exclamations of ‘There’s another one’! The next evening was much the same story, with them endlessly coming out of the gap between the sink unit and the wall, the drain, in fact from nearly every little crevice. After spending the following day playing detectives trying to find out where they were coming from, we decided that they seemed to be living somewhere behind the kitchen units, and thankfully appeared loath to climb upstairs where we were sleeping on the floor.
As we were not yet ready to let the house to non-paying guests, we had to do something to evict them. To investigate the gurgling noise, we reckoned that the kitchen units just had to come out. At one end was a brick wall alongside the cooker recess of the old fireplace. With the units removed – they just fell to pieces probably as a result of mice attack - we discovered a small hole in this wall, which was built of hollow bricks. The little beasts seemed to be actually nesting there, and behind the wall tiling, and some of them were HUGE!. In the middle of all this, we had our electricity cut off at the meter. One of the evenings was spent splatting by candlelight - how romantic? After panic faxes to the mainland for authorisation, and eventually paying a fee, the electricity was reconnected before the weekend. So we demolished the wall, removed all the tiles, and cemented up every hole we could find. Altogether, we killed nearly a kilogramme of the little beasties over the week - and if you can’t imagine how many this is, we had HALF A PLASTIC CARRIER BAG FULL !! We were the talk of our friends, if not the town - even our neighbours had never seen anything like it. We salvaged the kitchen unit drawer fronts and doors for reuse (after cleaning of course), and chopped up the rest for firewood kindling for one of our friends. Waste not - want not, but we have often wondered whether she has ever realised what the little black squiggle marks were.
Lesley was my saviour. She had found her mission in life, and it was passionate – what right did these things have to invade our new house? To see her wielding the fish slice at everything that moved (I kept very still) was quite inspirational and unforgettable – amazing after 35 years of marriage. I now try very hard not to upset her. A bit embarrassing really, because perhaps the fish slice should have been in the other hand!
We have now destroyed the ideal environment for these little pests to survive. There is no hole for them to nest in, which positioned alongside the cooker provided an ideal area of heat and food, and there’s no nearby leaking drain to quench their thirst. What price ‘sustainability’?
