Lucky to be here book

“Right,” said Paul, (one of my many brothers in law), “Are we going to start this well you have been talking about, or not?” (I say one of my brothers in law because all three of Lida’s sisters had at least 3 relationships and brothers in law were mounting up! Lida has been the most conservative, having only been married twice! Paul was Dutch and then living with Liesbeth, Lida’s younger sister, and they had been staying with us for some time.)
Until now, we had been getting all our water (including drinking water) from one of the “vouthanas” (pools) in the stream beds that bordered our land. However, this was an easily polluted source of water (not that there was much to pollute water tables and streams in those days), and I really wanted a stable, covered well, from which we could definitely drink the water safely.
Paul and I went down to the point where the two streambeds met, at the west corner of the land, and decided that this should be a good spot to dig a well. (Wrong, as it turned out!) The first day we got down about 1 metre and had a small hole (2.5 metres wide), a small pile of earth and lots of blisters to show for our work. It was a start! In the following days we went deeper but had still not much water even at the 3 metre mark. One of our neighbours saw our efforts and put in a few hours work, he could dig and shovel twice as hard as both of us put together and we got to 4.5 metres (with some slightly stronger trickles of water) much quicker. However, we were now into rock, (sandstone fortunately) but still hard going. Our neighbour suggested getting some digging equipment like a pneumatic drill (jack hammer) to get through the rock but we should think about lining what we had dug so far with breeze blocks. I couldn’t see any way we could get the equipment up our dirt path yet, but it was obviously a good idea to line what we had dug so far to avoid the walls collapsing. It took several days to get the necessary blocks, cement and sand to the well head as we were still bringing everything by horse and donkey from the main Aselinos road, but the following week we organized a “well lining party”. Mike and Phil turned up, they had been working on Koukounaries Beach for Christo and Gail helping to rent out canoes and giving water ski lessons, and were happy to have a day doing something else. (It might seem strange to some people that they wanted to get away from being on the beach every day and all day, but when you have to do it for a living, it loses some of its appeal.) Mike and Phil went down to the bottom of the well and bailed out what water was in it. Paul and I mixed the mortar and started handing down breeze blocks and buckets of mix. They lined the well, row by row, leaving sufficient gaps between the blocks to allow water to seep in. As they build upwards, we arrange temporary scaffolding for them. Neither of them had done any similar work before but it all went very smoothly with much joshing and only the occasional curse when a finger got trapped under a block, or a bucket of mortar hit the side on the way down and spilled over one of them. The well became 2 metres in width and 5 metres deep (as we built it higher then the ground level) and took us a day to line. At the end of the day we all had a feast washed down by copious amounts of wine and reveled in a shared job well (sic) done.
We checked it the next day and there was about half a metre of water in it, rising very slowly. We knew that this would not be enough water to be able to have a garden and (dream on) running water in the house, but (once we had covered the well) at least this was safe for drinking, and we could still get general use water from the vouthana.
The way we brought water up to the house was in 10 litre jerry cans, for drinking, or 30 litre “square buckets” designed to be loaded onto a horse or donkey saddle. We would fill up the “loading buckets” with bucketfuls from the vouthana – one bucket per side at a time so as not to unbalance the load. If some spilled on to Francine the donkey, she would growl and attempt to kick us. She also had the “knack” of moving slightly just as you were pouring the bucket in, causing you to miss the tank and pour it down your leg! Once full, we went up the hill to the house and with hoses from the bottom of the loading buckets, we let the water run into two 50 gallon barrels we had. To fill the barrels and enough jerry cans for a week, took about a day of sweating, swearing and (in most people’s case) avoiding Francine’s hooves. From these barrels, water was taken as needed for washing, washing up, etc. We re-used any washing water for our tiny flower garden which brought a little natural colour into our lives. It took the best part of a day to fill up the two barrels and we would empty them within a week at least. When friends were staying, and asked us how they could help, we often asked them to bring up water as it was a long, boring job which we were glad of a break from. Unfortunately, Francine hated being led by anyone other than me and could be hard to handle. Once, fully loaded, she kicked Kees (another Dutch brother in law and built like a brick shit house) into the bushes, much to our hilarity!
A year later, after our neighbour had bulldozed a very rudimentary dirt road from the Aselinos road, through our land and up to his, we managed to get a pneumatic drill and a cement mixer (which had a hoist on it), back to the well head. These were both diesel driven and made lots of noise! The operator of the pneumatic drill and our neighbour went down the well and started to drill through and break up the rock. Up above, we hoisted up the pulverized rock in large buckets with the hoist system on the cement mixer, and dumped it nearby. With one day’s work we went another 1.5 metes deeper and found a few more small trickles of water but, all in all, it was pretty disappointing. We didn’t line this bottom part of the well as it was all rock and we were not afraid that it could collapse. In fact, it never has.
Although we now had a bit more water, it was still very limited, and although I put in a small vegetable garden near the well, it was a struggle to keep it alive and producing anything like edible veggies.
The next project to try to get more water was to build a large tank behind our house which could gather water from the house roof. Franz also donated an old petrol operated water pump which just had enough strength (when it felt like it) to pump water up to this tank (and a tad higher). This alleviated the donkey trips but the pump was so temperamental and caused me many a skinned knuckle trying to start it that sometimes I wished we were back in the days of the donkey. Eventually, we added a shower room on to the side of the water tank and put the two barrels on its roof so that we had enough gravity to have something like a decent shower. The temperamental water pump would sometimes decide it had enough power to fill the barrels – but not every time – so we often had to fill them by bucketing up by hand water from the water tank. The water was heated by a wood fired boiler at the back of the shower room and we had “shower nights” where everyone took their turn for a shower provided that they stoked the boiler at the end of their shower ready for the next person. This was done via a fire door in the room itself, which also helped to heat the shower room and was very welcome in the winter months.
We finally managed to put a tap in our house with the water running from the two barrels. Just one cold water tap over a simple sink. However before we managed to sort out a drain for this, an American friend came by with some lettuce for us and proceeded to clean them in the sink – which promptly deposited the waste water on to his feet! We lived like this for a few years more, heating water for washing on the wood range or gas stove and I well remember washing nappies over this sink when Zoi was born. We used what was called a “Pressure Wash”. This was a smallish drum, with a lid that you could screw down tightly, and which could be rotated on its axis by a handle. We filled the drum with washing, poured in hot water and soap, and rotated the drum some 50 times before opening it again. It was amazingly effective and saved as a lot of time compared to scrubbing the wash by hand. Originally, we had done the weekly washing as the local Greeks had done for hundreds of years. We took a large, galvanized washing kettle down to the vouthana, filled it, and built a fire underneath it. Once the water was hot, sheets and clothes were washed in it, scrubbed in a wooden tub, and then rinsed with cold water in the tub. The washing was then draped over bushes to dry. When we installed our first washing line, this was looked on as quite a novelty for the neighbours, but it didn’t take them long to realize the benefits, as often the washing came off the bushes dirtier than when it went on! We also brought an old hand wringer from Holland to wring the clothes out, and this was viewed as a huge technological advance by our neighbours! We felt that, with our running water in the house and our “Pressure Wash”, we were now quite the sophisticates!
It was still to be quite a while before electricity came to the valley so we used this system of washing for most of the early years of our daughter’s lives.
I started to get really fed up with the temperamental water pump and was looking for a better substitute when Christo (who comes from the Peloponnese) mentioned that all the farmers in his home village were becoming electrified (not electrocuted!) and there were plenty of old diesel driven water pumps which were going quite cheap. He was due to take a trip down there to see family and friends and check up on some property he owned, and suggested we go with him to see if we could find a good engine. He had a Land Rover and said we could drive down and then bring an engine back with us, if we found one suitable. We jumped at the chance to see somewhere new and maybe mix business with pleasure. Christo was always entertaining, so we knew we would not have a dull trip, even though it would take a couple of days to get there and a couple back again. Once we arrived at his village, he spent some time with his family, and tending to business, and then we went to see an engine that was for sale. It looked and sounded good, so we agreed a mutually satisfactory price with the owner, and humped it into the Land Rover. The ex owner grew and sold mandarins for a living and insisted on giving me a bag to take with us on our journey back to Skiathos. However, we walked past row after row of mandarin trees before he finally came to one surrounded by goat manure, where he picked loads of fruit. When I asked him why he hadn’t taken them from a more accessible tree, he said, “Ah, those trees are for selling, this one is for the family.” The commercial trees were fertilized with artificial fertilizer and sprayed against various diseases and bugs, but the one that they ate from was “pure”.
The engine was an old, Italian made, single cylinder diesel engine, which made slow, “doug, doug, doug” noises as it turned over, but was simple and strong. It was called a “Malkotsi” and was the staple engine for pumping water and driving small fishing boats as it was so reliable. Once it was started, it would run forever, but starting it could be fun! There was a starting handle with which you turned over the whole engine and a decompression handle which was held open until one had got sufficient revs up. As the flywheel spun faster the decompression handle was dropped, and the motor kicked in, but, you had to get the starting handle disconnected quickly or it would (literally) fly off the handle, and could be most dangerous. Also, to get the compression up sufficiently to get it started, we often poured a little engine oil down the exhaust vent and when it did finally start, huge clouds of black smoke would be emitted for the first few moments. The engine was water cooled so a barrel of water had to be next to it which had an inlet and outlet hose to and from the engine. The water in the barrel slowly warmed as the hours went by (if we were pumping a lot) and would gently “steam” during the winter months.
Once we had it back at home, we cast a concrete base for it, hooked it up via an old belt system to a pump, and suddenly, we could pump to our heart’s delight. Unfortunately, we still didn’t have much water to pump and this was becoming a real problem. I had seen people putting in boreholes via an antiquated drilling rig that belonged to Margaritis, who had come from Volos on the mainland to work on the island. It didn’t drill but literally pounded its way through earth and rock and was slow but very effective. I had told him many times that I would like to drill to find more water but that I couldn’t afford the cost. Eventually (probably just to get me off his back) he told me he would do the drilling work for the cost of the diesel if I could pay for the lining pipes and any other associated costs. I gratefully accepted his offer and he came to see the land to see where he could drill. I wanted him to drill next to the existing well (stubborn fool that I was), because that is where I had set up the diesel engine, but he said it would be very difficult to get the rig there and the plane trees surrounding the stream beds would get in the way. Was there anywhere near the road that had water? I knew that Denis Magill, one of the very first villa owners had discovered that he had a talent for dowsing and so I asked him to come and see if we could find water at a more convenient spot. Just inside the land and right next to the road, still close to the stream but not bothered by plane tree branches, he found what he described as “a considerable amount” of water and not too deep. This turned out to be an underestimate as I shall tell you anon. Margaritis was happy with the position and brought his rig the next day. It took a while to get everything set up and then he started it pounding away. He brought a barrel of water with him as the pounding action needed water to be efficient and until we hit a source, he had to add his own. Unfortunately, within the first metre, he found only sand and this kept collapsing into the hole and filling it up. He said he would have to put a larger diameter pipe down for one or two metres to stop the sand from running in and this would be an extra cost. By this time, I was determined to have more water whatever the cost and told him to go ahead. He sunk a lining pipe, then made his drilling (pounding) bit a little smaller by simply cutting off a few edges with a welding torch, and proceeded to pound away again. As the rig pounded up and down he would occasionally grab the wire hawser and give it a twist so that the teeth were not always pounding on exactly the same spot. (Fortunately, we had no “Health and Safety” officers around then!) Every so often, using the welding torch which ran off a generator run by the rig’s engine, he would weld new “teeth” on to the bottom of his “drill” as they wore away grinding the earth and rock to dust. To get the ground refuse out of the hole, he used a long, thin, “bucket” which had a simple valve on the bottom which allowed water and refuse in but not back out until he released it on the ground a little distance from the hole. At 5 metres he found a little water but at around 12 metres, there was a deluge! He continued to drill to 18 metres but then said, we will not find anything more and I am sure there is plenty of water here. Also he told us that we seemed to have hit an artesian source and the pressure was raising water up to within a couple of metres of the surface. This sounded fantastic as some people have had to drill to well over 100 metres to find a good source and then install quite an expensive, electric pump deep below the water level. He brought galvanized pipes to line the hole which he welded together as they went down. We then shoveled fine gravel around these pipes to keep them stable and to help filter the water as it flowed into the borehole. Margaritis used his “bucket” to try to measure the flow into the hole by simple filling it up and emptying as often as possible. He said that he could not keep up with the amount flowing in so that we had at least 12 cubic metres of water per hour. That is 12 tons of water per hour!!! An absolute abundance! I owed our borehole driller friend a great debt of gratitude and was able to pay a little back when he bought land near us and I could supply him with water until he developed his own source.
Plentiful water changed our lives!
It may not be obvious to people living in the so called developed world just how precious water is. You just turn on the tap and there it is, and usually drinkable as well. It is, in fact, the second most important thing in our lives (after air) and access to clean and sufficient water is a true luxury and should never be taken for granted. We are and will always be absolutely in Margaritis’ debt for drilling at cost for us. I was able to pay a small amount of that debt back by helping him when a few years later he brought a plot of land very close to ours.
We transferred the Malkotsi and water pump to the borehole, made the belt system a little more sophisticated, and now we could pump water (seemingly) for ever. I bought an old 5 cubic metre plastic water tank, installed it at the top of our land and ran a 2 inch diameter plastic pipe up to it. From there we ran a 1 inch pipe down past the Barn to the house and we then had plenty of water with good pressure everywhere. The possibilities opened up; a flower garden and a large vegetable garden (and even a lawn!) were within our reach. A flushing toilet (instead of the “Long Drop” hole which we had been using) was an option, but I would first have to build a toilet to be able to install one.
As the years went by and electricity came to the valley, our pumping system became more sophisticated. We eventually built a solid concrete water tank (faced with stone to blend in to the scenery), had a float switch installed so that we did not have to keep switching the pump on and off up by hand, and put in automatic drip systems to water the flowers, vegetables, lawns, and trees that we planted all around the houses.
I am still careful with our water even though we seem to be blessed with more than we could ever use, and a dripping tap will still annoy me as I remember how precious every drop was to us in the early years.