‘Grandad John! Grandad John! Come and see!’ Hector, my little Greek grandson, had rushed into the cottage, his eyes shining with excitement, to tell us his news. ‘An aeroplane has landed on the water!’
We rushed out of the cottage and on to the beach, fearing the worst. Could a plane really have crashed into our bay without us hearing an explosion of some sort?
We were just in time to see the aircraft taking off again. It had not ‘landed’ on the sea and nor, mercifully, had it crashed. It was a fire plane that had swooped down to suck up thousands of gallons of water and, even as we watched, more planes arrived.
For the children, it was a thrilling sight, but my son, Christopher, and his wife, Peppy, watched with growing concern because they knew what it meant: the mountains and villages of the Peloponnese were aflame.
Over the days that followed, it became clear the planes and the thousands of firemen throughout the peninsula who battled day and night were powerless to control the worst forest fires in living memory.
By the time they had burned themselves out, millions of acres of forest and thousands of homes had been destroyed. Worse by far, more than 60 people lost their lives.
And now, two years later, the fires have returned to Greece. This time, thank God, no one has died. Not yet, at any rate.
But the environmental damage has been devastating. The great city of Athens has been dealt a savage blow from which it may never fully recover.
The flames have roared through the forest on mountains to the north-west of the city - destroying the trees that were the lungs of this desperately overcrowded city.
For decades, Athens has struggled to control the pollution that had been slowly choking the life out of it, and in the past few years - thanks largely to a new metro system that has encouraged Athenians to leave their cars at home - real progress has been made. The air has become perceptibly cleaner. And now this.
It is like taking a man who gave up smoking so long ago that his lungs were beginning to recover and locking him in an airtight room and pumping it full of cigarette smoke until he can scarcely breathe.
And what makes the tragedy so hard to bear is that no one believes it was a random act of nature: the inevitable result, perhaps, of a long, hot summer where one small fire is fanned by a mighty wind and spreads at breathtaking speed through tinder-dry vegetation, leaping from one location to another and wreaking destruction wherever it rests for a moment.
But if they do not believe that, what do they believe?
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