This will be the final instalment in this thoroughly sad story. It was with great reluctance that Ron and Janet agreed with their son Dale to go back to the UK, at least for a while, while they assessed what it might take to get the house habitable again, primarily the water supply, as explained in the last post. They made a couple of final visits to the villa, Ron now definitely showing signs of a possible mental breakdown about it all, which is understandable in the circumstances. He couldn’t seem to grasp why there was no water in the taps, no lights came on when he flipped a switch. When you consider the complete devastation that was in evidence right outside the front door, it must have been very fazing to go inside the house and have it all looking normal. To top all that, it was only hours before that everything about their happy life on Rhodes was as normal.

Now, some of these final details I may get slightly muddled, and Janet and Dale will forgive me for this, but the heart of the story is correct, it’s all true. When they returned to the villa a day or two before they were due to fly to the UK (something which Ron was thoroughly wretched about having to do), to add insult to injury, they discovered that some scum of the lowest of the low had broken in. It didn’t look like much had been taken, but there definitely had been a break-in, as the state of the front door testified. As if it wasn’t bad enough that their lovely settled life in the Rhodes sun had been well wrecked already, they now had to deal with the security issue. How on earth would they be able to keep the house secure now that there were no neighbours to keep an eye out? The house stood alone atop a one-kilometre long track with no prying eyes to see what went on up there. Dale reported the break-in to the local Police in Gennadi, who took a statement and then indicated that there wasn’t much they could do. Very reassuring, eh? OK, so the Police obviously had a lot on their hands, but I can’t imagine how I’d have felt if they gave me the brush-off in such circumstances.

Dale did all he could in the time he had available. He rigged up a couple of exterior motion-activated video cameras. With heavy hearts he and his parents then flew home to Cheshire. Ron and Janet no doubt gazing out of the aircraft window as it gained altitude and wondering when, if ever, they’d be able to resume their life there on a hillside on Rhodes.

The next day we received a message from Janet. They hadn’t been back in England even a whole day when Ron had died. He’d sat down in a chair and his heart had given out, it was as sudden and simple as that. I haven’t even mentioned the fact that they also had seven cats back at their home on Rhodes, only one of which had reappeared at the door looking extremely shabby, singed and ash-covered when they’d gone back to the villa, the fate of the other six Janet said they had no idea about. Now she’d lost her husband totally without warning. Dale actually sent me the coroner’s report when it was completed, and it definitely looked as though the stress had simply been too much for him. Had they not had this huge catastrophic event take over their lives just a day or two before, Ron would no doubt even then have still been sitting on his lounger on their terrace back at the house on Rhodes reading the Guardian on his tablet, one of the cats sprawled out beside him. His total reluctance to return to the UK climate from his hilltop Rhodean ‘Shangri La’ had weighed so heavily on him that his body just gave up.

There’s yet another devastating detail to add to this truly tragic story for our old friends and neighbours, the Griffins.  A couple of days later Dale sent me a video. His camera had caught the house-breakers as they returned for a second time. Janet sent me a ‘still’ that I couldn’t really make out. Oh the image was clear enough all right, it showed their sun terrace and their front door, and closer to the camera their patio furniture. But just rising from one of the chairs around their table was a man in a camouflage jacket with his back to the camera. Seeing that image, it didn’t kind of compute in my mind. Dale’s video, however, showed this nasty lowlife as he charged the front door and gave it a huge flying kick, shattering the lock and sending the door flying open. He then ran straight inside the building without hesitation. I can’t imagine how Janet must have felt on seeing this brief clip of her beloved home on Rhodes, the place that she and Ron had sunk their lives into and had been their happy home for approaching two decades. Words fail me now, they really do. Janet is still over there in the UK, her son and daughter-in-law trying to give her emotional support, while every waking moment she not only desperately misses her husband of fifty years or so, but has the mental image of this total stranger smashing his way into her house and she knows that there’s nothing that she can do about it. When she does eventually get to return, what’s she going to find? All her worldly belongings, her whole life is invested in that house. Although she and Ron had taken what they could as they fled, there are still innumerable personal effects, belongings, furniture, everything that made up their life for the past almost two decades in there, and there’s this despicable youth rifling through it all.

Below is the video short that Dale sent me. The quality isn’t good, but imagine how you’d feel if this were your home and you were 2,000 miles away at the time…

There’s no happy ending to this story. What drove me to write about it was the fact that it all happened because a fire was started, allegedly deliberately (the truth will hopefully one day come out in the law courts) by a few greedy individuals with a plan to make some money out of a new wind farm. Even worse, it may simply have been some people playing around up in the forest out of pure devilment, arson pure and simple. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Like that Greek Fire Department official said whose words I quoted in the first of these three instalments, “Fires don’t start themselves very often.”

I’m sure that, if I were able, I’d discover many more stories about lives that have been destroyed by this, the worst wildfire in the island of Rhodes’ long history. But there can be few as tragic as this one, because in the space of a few days a good friend and neighbour of ours went from sipping his iced coffee under the brilliant blue sky of a Greek summer on the terrace of the home that he and his wife had built with the proceeds of many decades of damned hard work and toil during their careers back in the UK to losing his life through the sheer shock and stress of seeing all that they’d worked for go up in smoke. In fact, crazy as it may seem, it would probably have been better for them had their house been gutted like the ones either side of it. At least then they could have considered their option to rebuild, hopefully with the proceeds from an insurance payout, and there’d have been no immediate need to worry about the vulnerability of a lone house far from prying eyes.

The next time I post, I shall return to my usual upbeat positivity, but I had to tell you this story. For Janet’s sake I had to tell it. There is little justice in the world anyway, and even if the slimy git that broke into their house is ever caught – and sadly it isn’t very likely – whatever happens to him will not bring back the sovereign right of Janet to the security and integrity of her only home. 

And for sure it will never bring back her husband, whom she had stood beside for so many years. During all the time we’d lived next door to the Griffins they’d been inseparable, as are my wife Yvonne and I. I can’t allow myself to even contemplate how I’d be feeling if I were in Janet’s shoes right now. Spare a thought for her. When all is said and done, she still misses Rhodes. We never ever thought about Ron or Janet as individuals, we always, without exception, thought about ‘Ron and Janet’ as an entity. What a tremendous example of a couple who weathered every storm that they encountered for many decades, until that is, they came face to face with the flames, those in all probability purposely-started flames, that brought it all crashing down.

Below is the view from the Griffin’s veranda of the landscape as it is now. The wall is their garden perimeter wall…

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