Maureen McCarthy — Light a Penny Candle

‘You’ve never done a brave thing in your life Mum! Think about that’

I took the words to heart of course. Who wouldn’t? My son was often harsh and he sometimes skewered the facts but he almost always spoke the truth.

And it was one of the last things he said to me before disappearing from my life.

Bravery was on my mind as our little group meandered down through the winding streets of Pothia to the waterfront. Specifically, the bravery of the sponge divers, all those men from this island of Kalymnos who’d headed off for months every year in caiques to harvest the sponge beds off the coast of Africa. So many thousands died and many thousands more were maimed for life. I was shocked when I first saw the Skafandros in the local museum, that bulky heavy waterproof canvas suit and heavy copper and brass helmet that the divers wore.  How utterly terrifying to think of wearing it in water! Of diving off a boat into the cold sea and heading down, down, down onto the sea floor with only a rubber hose between you and … death. What a desperate way to make a living.  How brave would you have to be?

‘Yet how our hearts leap still at bravery,’ Charmian Clift wrote in Mermaid Singing, and when her son Martin spoke with one of the divers ‘his heart goes to his eyes’. I thought of poor Fotis in Honour’s Mimic. At the bottom of the sea, in the darkness, amongst the weeds, feeling the terror grow in him. Afraid for his life. And the shame of that. From then on,  a coward shunned by the other men.

We heard the music before we got there. Loud, slightly manic Greek music. All that intertwined gaiety and pathos had the strange effect of making me want to dance and cry at the same time.

But this was something to see. Circles of teenagers dressed in traditional costumes holding hands and dancing to music played by half a dozen musicians on the steps above them. Out in the open, and in full light, so many gorgeous kids surrounded by a loose crowd of onlookers, friends and families, standing about laughing, chatting, calling out to each other and pointing proudly to their children. 

A few of us had initially felt a little wary about joining the throng of onlookers. After all, our group of about ten would be arriving up unannounced to what was essentially a private end-of-term school performance. We needn’t have worried. No one knew much English and I didn’t know any Greek but we were met everywhere with warm smiles of welcome. Space was made in the crowd and no one minded photos.

The girls were dressed in long full waisted dresses and low-necked blouses, their lovely faces, not smiling exactly, more exultant, as though transported to some other realm as they stepped and turned, whirling seamlessly in unison to the wild hypnotic tunes. The boys too in their black pants, white shirts and wide red cummerbunds, stepping backwards, forward, sideways, stamping their feet and smacking their ankles were maybe a little more self-conscious than the girls, but proud too. This music was in their blood.

There was one boy that my eyes returned to again and again. He was maybe sixteen, handsome, with a serious expression that bordered on sullen. While his face remained passive, his feet seemed to possess an extra dose of jubilance that he didn’t know how to control. I loved it. And his face. I wanted to laugh. He reminded me so much of Joe at the same age. That straight faced nonchalant thing that adolescent boys do, when so much emotion is bubbling away inside.

At sixteen Joe was obsessed with Michael Jackson. With music and dancing generally but Jackson in particular. We got him the tights and the shoes and I remember taking him across town to tap dance lessons twice a week after school. Although he’d refused to speak a word about it (after all he was officially into basketball) we’d hear him practising out in the back room. When it came to the end-of-year concert he was adamant no one should come. There weren’t many friends and he’d already alienated both his brothers by this stage, so it would have only been his father and me. His father obliged by not going but I snuck in the back of the local church hall and watched him on stage, dancing the main part, complete with a Michael Jackson wig.

So great! My Joe. Tap dancing. I can’t tell you.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’ I said to a woman next to me

‘Beats shooting each other doesn’t it?’ She had faint American accent.

 I was taken aback. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Florida,’ she said still looking at the dancers, ‘but we live here now. After travelling the world for years, we’ve decided to live here.’

‘Whose we?’

‘Oh, just me and my daughter’ She pointed a tall ethereal fair-skinned girl. ‘That’s her. We’ve only been here since September last year and she knows the language and all the dances already.’

 ‘So, the schools in Florida…?’

 ‘I never sent her to school there.’

‘You have family here?’

‘No,’ the woman shook her head. ‘There is just us. My daughter and me. We’re a unit’

The woman was of medium height and dark, obviously of Greek heritage and the girl was slim and tall, with honey-coloured hair. Reading my mind the woman laughed and told me quickly that that she’d been single and wanted a baby and so ‘I got me some sperm and got myself pregnant and we’ve only been back to the US once since then.’

Wow. I laughed. Gutsy. There were so many questions I wanted to ask. But the music was slowing down and when I turned back to her, she’d disappeared.

My psychologist friend told me once that she sometimes had to convince very distressed clients — the ones whose belief in themselves had completely disintegrated — that sometimes simply getting out of bed is an act of bravery.

The dancing girls were pulling away to the edges of the square leaving the centre to a line of boys. The music became slower and the crowd stilled. The boy I’d been watching earlier was in the middle of the line. The Mechanikos. A dance that had been created to honour the many thousands who’d lost their lives or become crippled in the depth of the ocean.

The boy — my boy,the one I’d been watching — began to slump and stumble. The boys around him on either side held him up but still one leg was dragging. The music became charged with a mass of discordant notes and the boy continued to tremble, slip and then fall. His friends lifted him again, one of his legs was shaking violently. They heaved him forward. He fell, and again he was hauled up. This almost freakish but totally fascinating and convincing dance sequence went on for maybe a couple of minutes. The boy suddenly fell face down onto the ground. There was a general charged hush as the crowd waited. One moment and then another.

The music changed and suddenly it was over. The boy sprung up, joined hands with his friends and began to dance wildly again to warm applause from the crowd.  

 I felt some one behind me and I turned around. A heavy-set, good looking man with steel grey hair, well dressed in his mid-forties was edging forward, his bright almond shaped eyes glistening with tears. We smiled at each other.

  ‘Your son?’ I ventured.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He did very well.’

  ‘Yes.’ he smiled ‘and my grandfather … here…’ He pointed back at the port where boats were docked.

  ‘A diver?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a diver’ he shrugged in frustration at the language barrier. ‘Here. A diver.’

  ‘In Kalymnos?’

  ‘Yes.’

I kept Joe’s tap shoes for years after he’d left home, but eventually they disappeared. Maybe he took them during one of the many short stays he had back living with me. I don’t know. What I do have left of him is a pair of heavy work boots. Those elastic sided, steel-toed, heavy-duty jobs made of good leather that he found, almost new, in an op-shop.

 ‘Look Mum. Five bucks!’

‘Not much good for dancing, Joey,’ I joked.

‘I don’t dance these days’ he scowled.

He had big feet and they fitted him perfectly. He was so pleased with them at the time, I can’t bring myself to throw them out now. I don’t know where he lives and I haven’t spoken to him in years but I’ve kept them clean and I live in hope that he might drop by one day and claim them.

I stopped by the St Christos Cathedral on the way back to meet the others for dinner. It was shut for renovations but outside a small ikon was set on the wall above a table with a lighted flame underneath. Mother Mary. A donation tin along with a pile of long thin yellow candles sat near an enclosed glass box with sand at the bottom. A few lighted candles were already burning softly. I dug into my pocket for coins.

After selecting two candles, I lit the first, put it in the sand and closed my eyes.

For bravery, I murmured to myself. For the divers and the dancers and for those who dare. I thought of Charmian coming to the island with her family to write her books, full of talent and courage and hope.  And what great books she wrote!

I lit the second candle and closed my eyes again.

‘And for those brave enough to get out of bed every day,’ I whispered and stuck the candle in the sand right next to the other one. ‘And for those who can’t … for whatever reason. This one is for you.’