Kos - Part 1

I have spent many of my childhood summer holidays on the Greek island of Kos, part of the Dodecanese island group and, until 1947 under Italian rule. We chose Kos - well, I didn't, my parents did, together with relatives and friends - in the mid-1960s for two main reasons:
1. Kos, together with the other Dodecanese islands, were incredibly cheap as they were still in a transitional taxation period from Italian to Greek rule, a massive benefit for our financially hard-pressed families. This allowed us to spend more time on holiday without breaking the budget, with little terrors such as myself unable to spend more than a few drachmas a day no matter how foolish our spending.
2. There were few motor vehicles on Kos at the time but many, many bicycles, so that we could be allowed to roam hither and thither without much risk of incurring bodily injuries of any serious nature, other than minor scrapes from the occasional fall.

The tourist industry at the time was in its infancy, with Greece still recovering from World War 2 and its aftermath; there were a few rooms to let and a handful of rickety hotels, offering little more than a place to sleep that was very basic indeed. The first small hotel we stayed in - there were no big hotels on the island at the time - was near the sea, in a pretty but decrepit italianate building and had the name of a wind. To describe it as basic is kind, but at the age of 10 I couldn't care less, even when the occasional wandering cockroach was factored in to the equation - Kos was an adventure!

The first day we arrived, I and my oldest childhood friend LJ (Little John) set out to explore the place and, being young and football mad, we found the local football stadium and went to investigate what was what. While at the stadium we met a smiling young local boy, probably a bit older than us, called Hippocrates; he became our first local friend and helped us to meet several other local boys so that we could all play football together. We became so close to our new friends that, when the locals would play football against the holidaymakers team we were always on the locals side.

Childhood friendships, especially holiday ones, often disappear and fade with the passage of time and when distance emerges; sometimes you simply stop visiting a certain place and, as a consequence, all your local connections weaken and eventually cease to exist. So to a certain extent happened with LJ, me and our friends in Kos - life just separated us... until about 15 years ago, when I receive a telephone call from a TV program in Greece whose reason for existing was to reconnect people who for some reason had lost touch.

Not only did I get to go on television again - I had some appearances in my racing driver days - but the person looking for me was an old friend from Kos who had emigrated to the United States but was now back. The show was intriguing, emotional and gave me a prod to try and reconnect with the island where I had spent so many happy times but, assuming they were still around, with some of the friends who had made my youthful holidays so special. A few years later I took an early morning flight and spent three days searching around Kos town for my old friends.

Kos town was changed, sure, but not so as to be unrecognisable; it was still, at least in parts, picturesque and beautiful. Even more beautiful was the fact that I managed to find Hippocrates and really reconnect, leading to meeting some of the others. The rest, dear reader, is history, some of which you will read in the next post about Kos!