A Visit To The Crash Site

Papa Spiro, the priest at Kavos told me he knew more about Uncle Gerald’s crash landing on Corfu and told me he knew the exact location of the crash-landing site, situated on the seashore at Lefkimmi next to the isolated and remote Church of St. Mary.

I headed back to my Citroen C1 Hertz hire car, holding securely the compass from my uncle’s Blenheim Bomber in my hands and placed in carefully on the front passenger seat. I was still in awe that this object near to me was the very compass that Uncle Gerald had used so often in his life. I had no time to dwell on this as Kostas sat astride his ancient Yamaha 50cc moped and kick started it into life. He turned the bike around and started following Papa Spiro who had already driving at some pace down the drive of St. Procopius Church in Kavos towards the main Kavos to Lefkimmi road. Papa Spiro’s Citroen C3 with its red barred roof rack headed out of Kavos and we headed back past Amelia’s Garden where I was staying and on into Meliki, Kostas’s home village. We were soon into the tiny streets of Lefkimmi, where Kostas abandoned his moped on a street corner in favour of the front passenger seat of Papa Spiro’s car. I was soon to find out why!

The two set off again at a pace through the narrow streets of the old unspoiled town.  I couldn’t help thinking as we drove through that my uncle would have passed these exact same buildings at some stage after his Blenheim Bomber crashed somewhere nearby on 24^th November 1940.

At a point towards what to me looked like the ‘top-end’ of Lefkimmi, Papa Spiro indicated right made though even narrower back streets. I followed him as closely as possible worried I might get separated and lost. We headed on until the old buildings came to an abrupt halt and were replaced by an overgrown scrubland of interspersed with ancient olive trees, bamboo, willow and various other apparently out of control vegetation, which encroached on the ever-narrowing road. Well, road wasn’t the word really, the tarmac of the town had been superseded some time back by a bumpy and rock-strewn dirt track.  I could now hear the vegetation crying out as it slid down either side of my precious hire-car and all I could think of at this stage was the excess I might have to pay if the motor was scratched which, seemed very likely to be happening.

Some considerable distance beyond the fringes of Lefkimmi town and in what seemed one of the remotest parts of the beautiful island of Corfu, the tiny track came to an end in a tiny clearing with nothing but the azure blue of the Ionian Sea in front of us. To my right I saw a single storey building with a low angled pitch roof of red tiles. Its walls were plain and thew white-washed walls looked like they were overdue a paint job. Two tiny deeply recessed square windows, at adult head height, were on the side of the building, as were two sets of mahogany doors. The doors to the left were double doors and were adorned with two wooden crosses painted in a brassy hue. A tiled veranda jutted itself out for half the length of the building and sat against the side of the outer walls were six wooden benches, some of which were in the shade under the veranda.  At either end of the roof apex sat two plain wooden crosses reaching up a couple of feet into the cloudless sky.  This was a church of a sort but who would come to such a place in the middle of nowhere?

There was hardly room to turn the cars around but between the building and the sea there was a circle of tyre tracks which led around a gnarled old olive tree where people turned around. 

Papa Spiro drove directly into a free space near the seashore and I parked similarly, facing the northern Greek mainland and Albania some twenty odd miles across the turquoise mill pond stretching out in front of me. Two Corfiot fishermen sallied forth from a small bright red and white caique*, which they’d dragged onto the dried seaweed strewn shore. The crackle of their footsteps on the dry vegetation must have been a sound Uncle Gerald would have heard as he waded ashore on that fateful Sunday back in November 1940.

The fisherman, with their small catch obviously knew Papa Spiro and they exchanged a few sentences in Greek, with wide smiles before they headed to their car and drove away, leaving just myself Kostas and Papa Spiro in the sunshine of a fabulously hot day by the seashore.

“Welcome to special place in Corfu for you!” Papa Spiro said in broken English and then proceeded on in Greek with Kostas ably translating.

“It is here.” Papa Spiro said. “Right here.”

He pointed to the building off to the right. 

Kostas spoke. “This is the Church of St. Mary.  It is only opened once a year for a service on the 23 August. The feast of St. Mary, but Papa Spiro tell me that during the war it was a different place. This is where the man with the gun who held your uncle at gunpoint was staying.  He was guard to this area for the Corfiots to stop any invasion.  What one man could do with a gun… yes, we don’t know, but here he was.”

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