Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 60]
not know how many. After this he said nothing. No doubt he was on the look out for us, but due to his ignorance of German he was not certain. We said good-bye to him and moved off along the road, but he followed us keeping about 100 yards behind. After going another mile or two we sat down again, and he came and spoke to us again, asking questions about prisoners of war but we always had an answer for him. We were almost sure that he knew who we were and were almost on the point of throwing ourselves on his mercy. We moved off again and after going a few hundred yards we saw that he was not following us so we quickened our pace. Here another strange thing happened. We met the old man who Nichols had bought the food off in the village only three days before. He was with a gendarme (police) with slung rifle. At first we thought that he had afterwards had suspicions on us and had been into Mersini to bring the police out to look for us but they passed us. The old man just nodded and smiled, and we breathed freely once more. We were getting very close to Mersina and there was a lot of traffic on the road so we decided to leave it. All round the outskirts of Mersina there are vegetable and fruit garden of about 2 acres each.
Note from side: Mersina very important town large port pop. 20,000 about ½ Greek.
They are not fenced off but just separated by narrow lanes and surrounded by poplar trees which look very nice. All these gardens are irrigated from a small river or rather a creek, which flows through Mersine. They are mostly owned by Christian Arabs. (Greeks?) After leaving the road we made our way towards these gardens as we thought we would be able to buy some food and by going through them we would miss going through the town of Mersine. The first people we met were three Arab women. Two of them were washing clothes, the third was cooking Arab bread. I think it is just flour and water flattened out till it is about 2 ft. square and not much thicker than a sheet of brown paper. We immediately asked them to sell us some, but they said they had none to spare so we asked for some fruit. We could see the grapes growing and knew they were ripe. One of the women called a boy out who climbed up one of the trees with a basket and got us about 3 lbs. of grapes. There the grape vines grow up the trees and I don't think I have ever seen such large bunches of grapes any where else. Just as were walking away one of the old women ran after us with one of these sheets of bread I will call them. We offered to pay but she would not take the money. We thanked her very much and went on our way. We went into another house and there we found a woman and two or three children. We asked for bread but without luck. We asked her to sell us some figs. She sent a little girl out with a basket with us to pick them. When we thought we had about 1 oke (2 1/5 lbs) we came back to the house for the woman to weigh them. The weight was just under the oke so she made us take an onion to make up the weight, although we said it was near enough (this 2 1/5 lbs of beautiful fresh figs only cost us 2 piastres (4d)). Just as we were about to leave a man arrived; evidently this woman's husband. He looked very suspiciously at us but said nothing.