At night, Mum and Dad discussed the letter from school. The walls in our council flat were thin, so I could hear them: 'Once in a lifetime opportunity.'
'Never be able to afford… '
The trip to Vido Island cost £100 and Great-Auntie Theresa had offered to pay the money. Great Auntie, indeed.
At school, I found out my best friend Kwok-Ying was coming. She was clever and I was usually able to copy from her. I wasn’t good in class, I was a "space-cadet" – always looking out windows and dreaming, struggling with words and numbers. We were friends because we shared crisps and sang songs on swings and played together with Teeny Terrapins from Kinder Eggs. I was glad she was coming on the trip.
We got a train to Newcastle Airport with our teachers, then we lay on the floor in sleeping bags waiting for our flight. I knew Kwok-Ying was properly sleeping because she breathed so deeply. I’d never been on an aeroplane. Up in the sky, Kwok-Ying sat next to me, and we looked out the window, excited by clouds.
In Corfu town, we got on a boat to Vido. From the island’s shore, children and adults were waving, welcoming us. Once there, we were assigned tents that looked like they were from the circus. We didn’t have a carpet, just dry mud and patches of grass. We ate snacks from Woolworths bags before putting on pyjamas. Kwok-Ying didn’t have insect repellent, so we shared mine and helped each other to roll it up arms and legs so that the bugs didn’t bite us.
In the morning, we dressed quickly to go to the meeting place where a blue and white flag was raised. The children from Corfu saluted and sang the Greek national anthem. Some of my school thought it was funny, but I wished I was like them with grubby feet and dusty hair, happy in mismatched clothes. Our flag went up and it was their turn to laugh at us because we didn’t know, Flower O Scotland. We needed to learn how to sing our own song.
Every day, our breakfast was bread and chocolate milk. We swam in the sea, played basketball and table tennis; I tried to be part of a team. Kwok-Ying joined in too, but she was sometimes quiet and liked it best in the tent. Each night we shared the insect repellent.
Two girls from my school didn’t like me, they kept asking where I’d got my dress: I wasn’t cool because I wore hand-me-downs and stuff from Asda, they said they’d batter me. Me and Kwok-Ying made friends with Corfu girls instead.
After the beach, we had showers. One of the camp leaders asked if I needed help to wash my hair because it was long, they tried to open the curtain. They said I should take off my costume to wash, but I didn’t want anyone to see my body. My head was itchy because lice had crawled into my hair and were laying eggs.
One night, we were woken by camp leaders. We needed to get up and go somewhere, but I didn’t understand. Our whole camp walked a dirt track on a midnight visit to the War Memorial. Torches flashed on the ground; I was cold and didn't like being taken out of bed. The sea sparkled black in the moonlight and Kwok-Ying walked beside me. At the memorial, the camp leaders told us about Greece and Serbia being friends during WWI. They said people had died in this place when Vido was a hospital island. It was eerie to think about them: five thousand soldiers were buried in the sea, close to where we swam. In torchlight we read, The Blue Tomb:
Ту на дну, где шкољке сан уморан хвата
И на мртве алге тресетница пада,
Лежи гробље храбрих, лежи брат до брата,
Прометеји наде, апостоли јада.
There at the bottom, where shells sleep and other
Marvelous creatures seek nightly relief,
A graveyard of the brave is lain, brother alongside brother.
Prometheuses of hope, apostles of grief.*
The next morning, I wrote a postcard to my mum, I asked her to look up at the moon and I would look at it too. Afterwards, I tried to put the basketball in the hoop but kept missing. The wind blew leafy trees, making shushing sounds, and mossy-green shapes danced against the blue sky. I didn’t want to forget.
One of the Corfu boys liked a girl from my class, and he kept running into our tent, climbing up the pole and humping it. All the girls except Kwok-Ying dragged him outside. We were in a circle and the boy was on the ground, I watched some of the girls kick him. I didn't like it, so went into the tent to find Kwok-Ying. The boy ran back in and climbed the pole again.
It was the night before we went home: I rolled the insect repellent up my arms and down my legs. There wasn’t much left to give Kwok-Ying. I was annoyed at her mum because she hadn’t given her any, but she said her mum couldn’t read the letters from school. I felt guilty. She scraped the repellent across her skin, but the plastic was sharp because it was empty.
In the morning, Kwok-Ying was covered in bites. Ants marched from beneath her camp bed, working together to carry a leaf. We moved the metal frame and found a tree stump with hundreds of the beasties. We followed them out the tent as they trailed across the ground to a dead rabbit. Our teacher called our names,
“Kwok-Ying!”
“Anna!”
It was time for us to leave Nisída Vído. We ran together, jumping over tent ropes to collect our belongings; marked by sun, and lingering grains of the island’s sand.
*Plava grobnica / The Blue Tomb - Serbian original by Milutin Bojić (Greece 1917)
English translation by Zoran Bogdanovic (Chicago/Belgrade, 2008/2015)
For more information on the poet, visit Milutin Bojić Public Library, Belgrade, Serbia: https://milutinbojic.org.rs/(this link will open in a new window)