Spiro Amerikanos!

continued from yesterday...

“So, as I was saying, we hold your uncle up at gunpoint.” Kostas laughed. “We couldn’t be too careful. The Italians crashed here too, you know.”

 “What was the name of the man who held him at gunpoint?” I asked curiously.

“His name was Fokion Halikiopoulos. His brother was Spiro Amerikanos, the man with the big car on Corfu. They called him to come and get them to take them to Corfu Town. It was a big event. Lots of Corfiots came to see. They had seen the crippled aircraft coming to crash lands. They party after you know.”

“So I heard.”

“Yes, we likes the British. They do so much to help us during the war. Not so much the drunks in Kavos though sometimes.”

So here I was, stood on the seashore adjacent to the Church of St. Mary, one of the remotest churches I’d ever been to in my life, staring out over the beautiful Ionian Sea, at a point my uncle had crash landed decades before, being told that he had been held at gunpoint by the brother of a man now made famous in a British television drama 'The Durrells'  which I’d not long watched myself. 

This was so surreal.

Of course, none of the British ‘drunks’ as Kostas referred to them as, would ever have been to this place even though it was just a short car ride to Kavos centre, but all owed their freedom to party to the likes of my uncle who gave their lives in the name of that freedom.

Crazy world!

#Corfu #GeraldsWar #EmotionalJourney #HistoricalFiction #WarTale #HistoricalNovel #HiddenTruths #WartimeSaga