Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance Read online

  Yet my detachment was far from complete. I still needed links (reduced to airmail) with my past and my responsibilities to achieve the peace of mind which made detachment possible and endurable. And my failure to reach detachment had been further emphasised by my need to know more about what had happened in Athens on the night of the coup and what was happening in the immediate world surrounding me.

  Perhaps it was the pursuit of some sort of involvement in contemporary events which made me walk the eight miles into the nearest town to see what was going on. One kilometre from the town centre I encountered a road picket of a sergeant of police and two lolling infantrymen with bayoneted rifles. The sergeant walked across and I thought he was, at least, going to ask for my passport.

  “Good morning,” he said, grinning pleasantly.

  “Good morning,” I replied (it was a Greek phrase I had mastered.) “Is it good to go into the town?”

  “It is good. The town will be happy to see you.”

  “No boom-boom?” I asked, pointing an imaginary pistol at his stomach but with an eye on the lolling bayonets.

  “No boom-boom,” he answered, the grin bursting into a laugh in which the soldiers joined. I went on my way laughing with them but marvelling at this jolly revolution.

  In the town itself I was passed by a casual patrol of four soldiers and a sailor as I sat sipping a glass of wine on the pavement of a quayside cafe. The presence of the sailor, I deduced, was to demonstrate that the army had the full support of the navy in this takeover. Later I found that every government building and bank in the town had an armed sentry at the entrance with two more seated inside. The only building of note unguarded was the police station and there I found a steady trickle of civilians carrying shotguns.

  All weapons, I was told, had to be handed in within twenty-four hours and I felt thankful for the respite that would be granted the much-harried birds of Greece by this measure. I was also told that the curfew had been eased to operate between 1am and 5.30am which was all right with me.

  At lunch with an English-speaking friend I learned that the military coup was exclusively anti-Communist and it had probably been timed to forestall all possibility of a left-wing success in the General Election announced for 28 May 1967. The election would not now be held and nobody could suggest when, or if, there would be another one.

  I had yet to meet anybody who was not happy about the course of events. But that part of Greece was traditionally Royalist and many of the inhabitants had only bitter and brutal memories of Communist activities during and after the German occupation.

  The feeling there was probably reflected in most rural areas, but there was plenty of opposition – temporarily leaderless – to the new form of government. That would surely manifest itself in some form in due course.

  My own reaction was an enormous contentment at being not only ignorant and uninvolved, but wholly unconcerned.

  Chapter 4

  A Small Piece of Warm Bread Dipped in Hot Olive Oil

  Janni Boucouvalles: that was the name of the Greek farmer who had presented me with two houses on the coast near the little port of Gythion. Translated, it meant: “a small piece of warm bread dipped in hot olive oil.” I discovered this from Maria, daughter of the town clerk of Anogia, the little village twenty-five miles north of Gythion, which I made my headquarters during my search for a home. Maria had a degree in English literature from Athens University and taught English in a nearby school.

  That school had introduced English to its curriculum only two months ago and her class consisted of everybody who wanted to take it – from twelve to nineteen. There was no apparent difference in the capacity for learning between the different age groups.

  Maria had been invaluable as an interpreter. Before I moved in she had come with me to my new landlord in order to make quite sure that Janni understood the position and that I understood him.

  I was not so much concerned as unbelieving. It all seemed, literally, too good to be true. I also wanted to make quite sure that I would not be asked to move on at the end of a few months or when he wanted the house for one of his farm-workers. I should have known better.

  We had tea together at his home and I quickly discovered that not only could I occupy my houses free “for as long as you like” but that he would let me have a chicken, a dog, and a cat when I moved in. They were, he insisted, essential to my sort of existence.

  After tea (which nearly always consists of Turkish coffee in Greece) Janni took the three of us down to the beach in his “tractor Engleesh”. It was more suitable than the car for the roads.

  We strolled through the citrus and olive groves, the fig trees and cotton fields while Janni and Maria identified half a dozen edible varieties of weeds for me. They would keep me in fresh green vegetables indefinitely. Some of the fig trees, I noticed, were already carrying the first green knobs of future fruit. With eggs, fruit, fish and vegetables at hand and with substantial home-made bread available at low price from the magazie up the road, most of the ingredients for self-sufficiency were at hand.

  Water was plentiful at the well, requiring only muscular activity on my part to raise it to my kitchen. Wood, my only source of heat for cooking and warmth in winter, was available in bulk supply. Again, muscular activity was the essential preliminary to domestic consumption.

  The only immediate decision confronting me was which house I should occupy. This did not take a lot of resolving. I intended to occupy them both. But as long as there was a likelihood of rain the beach house was virtually uninhabitable. What I called my upstairs house could be put right in a day or two of vigorous cleaning and perhaps some whitewashing.

  Maria and I spent an hour or two sweeping and heaving out a miscellaneous collection of boulders, scrap iron and various items of primitive furniture and discarded clothing – together with the attached livestock – which passing families of gypsies and shepherds had left behind.

  The litter included five different sizes of shoes from a man’s Wellington boot to an infant’s slipper. Before he left, Janni said he would send over a couple of women to finish the cleaning and do some whitewashing, and that when I came I could help myself to the oranges and lemons and to the left-over cotton if I wanted to make any pillows.

  I went back to Anogia for the last time to make arrangements for moving to my home by the sea. I was full of a happy confidence that my monthly pension of ten pounds – all the income I had in the world – would more than satisfy all my needs and that I had found a means of living without the responsibility of money, so far as I myself was concerned.

  I now had in my pocket only 813 drachmas (there were three pennies to one drachma). This was all that remained of the sixty-five pounds with which I had set out from Britain. But I had made some useful purchases during my stay at Anogia. These included a pick, shovel, spade, various containers, five metres of hessian and five of transparent polythene, timber of various dimensions, a second-hand folding table, half-a-hundredweight of cement, a few tools, seeds, and a stove with separate chimney attachments.

  Before I left Gythion, I had spent more of my dwindling capital and my pile of luggage on the corner of the main square, between the quay and the cafe tables, had been added to by a rake, a hammer, a saw, assorted nails, cooking utensils, two oil lamps, matches, three earthenware pots, a dish drainer, length of rope, clothes pegs. My luggage seemed to have half the population of Gythion around it by the time the Pullman came and every single one of them wanted to play a part in getting it all up on the roof.

  Ten kilometres away, where we came to the turn-off to my upstairs house, another similar crowd awaited me. It was composed of ten or twelve schoolchildren, a couple of adults, Janni and a man with a donkey. The procession to my new home looked like the beginning of an attempt on Everest, particularly as we wound in single file up the final zigzag path.

  In the evening, by the light of my new oil lamp, I counted what was left. One hundred and thirty-six drachmas.


  Outside my door the night was filled with the noise of frogs from the river against a constant background of the rumble of the surf. Familiar constellations revealed themselves in a new sky with Orion striding majestically across the middle of the heavens. I could hardly believe my eyes, when, later in the night, the two bright pointers showed me the Southern Cross.

  The next day I visited Janni for lunch. A longish walk but well rewarded. I came back with a can of olives, a jar of olive oil, a piece of sheep’s milk cheese, and, gift from Olympus, a live hen.

  The temporary hutch I made for it that night was all too temporary, and by next morning the hen had vanished. I hunted for it all next day, in between building a more substantial shelter.

  Occasionally I heard the hen clucking in the thick undergrowth but it stayed invisible. There was more than a hen involved in this. Honour, national pride, vanity, face… they were all in it. I decided I must have a decoy and ordered another hen from Stavros at the magazie. But at sunset I heard mine flying up into the tree behind my house to roost. I remembered how, in my youth, I used to catch a guinea-fowl by shining a torch in its eyes.

  I did the same to my hen and when I finally picked myself out of the thorn bushes at the foot of the tree, I still had it clutched in my hand. To make sure it did not escape I tied it by the leg to a stake. It was a great pity that I could only explain to the unbelieving locals what had happened by gesture. They were all quite sure that I would never see it again as the hills were full of foxes.

  Next morning the hen from Stavros arrived with my weekly loaf of home-made bread. Which is where we come back to the main thread of my story. Hen and loaf cost me 112 drachmas – twelve for the loaf. In the evening, remembering that my oil lamp had consumed the paraffin that had been put in it by the salesman, I went along to the magazie and bought a can. It cost me twenty-two drachmas. That left me with two.

  There was not much you could do with sixpence. But there was more you could do with it in Greece than perhaps anywhere else. I bought half a pint of wine and shared it with Stavros. Well, where else could you buy half a pint of good wine for sixpence?

  Chapter 5

  Money Itself Was Becoming Meaningless

  One night I woke up from a dream in which I was trying to bring off a big property deal with some easily identifiable tycoons. I had taken two of them for lunch in London to clinch the matter and the bill came to four pounds seventeen shillings and ten pence. Pulling out a handful of notes from my hip pocket I put a ten pound note on the table and a fiver on top of it.

  The tenner was too big for the bill and the fiver too small. So I searched around for a one pound note for the tip to leave with the fiver. When I looked again at the table the fifteen pounds had disappeared.

  I came out of that dream terribly upset at the loss of the fifteen pounds, as even my subconscious had always been acutely aware that I had never been able to afford to lose that sort of money. Now, whatever deep meanings psychiatrists may have placed on such an affluent dream, in my present circumstances the really significant thing was that as soon as I realised where I was, my concern about the loss of the money vanished. Money itself was becoming meaningless. I felt in that moment that I had arrived somewhere.

  There in that two-roomed hut – my upstairs house – my possessions and needs were gathered about me. The bedroom/living room was furnished with a bed, a folding table and two chairs. The walls were of whitewashed stone nearly three feet thick, and wherever I had been able to find accommodation holes I had driven in nails from which hung the shelf which held my thirty odd books and my wardrobe. The monotony of white was relieved by a large map (in Greek) of the Peloponnese and a larger map of Europe showing the route by which I had travelled there. The floor was unspoilt concrete.

  But the glory of that room was that it had a south-facing door and four windows, each framing its own vision of loveliness from the snow-capped peaks of Taygetus in the north, across the Gulf of Laconia and the near surf of my personal beach, to the tree-covered peninsula which was the westward limit of my panorama.

  There were no window panes. The windows were either shuttered or wide open. On two of them I had fitted transparent polythene, so that I could have light and loveliness without the cold. One of those days the wind would blow them in and I would not bother to repair them for already there had been days when the heat of the sun had driven me into the shade.

  I had just been checking on my food stocks. This was the position: eight pounds potatoes, half a dozen small onions, two pounds dried peas, one pound lentils, three packets corn flour, half bottle vinegar, half tin tomato paste, half packet tea bags, quarter pound tea, quarter pound instant coffee, three pounds flour, one eight pound jar home-made marmalade, four pints olive oil, one loaf of bread, two jars olives, quarter pound ewe’s milk cheese, salt, pepper, one jar home-made tomato sauce.

  This was supplemented by my outside larder of oranges, lemons and wild vegetables.

  In the past weeks I had discovered the great virtues of bread, potatoes, soup and olive oil. Together with the wild vegetables they formed the basis of my diet and provided enough sustenance to keep a man healthy and vigorous – I hoped. I was also discovering untold, and possibly unheard of, variations with these ingredients.

  Bread and olive oil deserved special mention. I had always considered “Give us this day our daily bread” an inadequate metaphor, but had now come to appreciate the full worth of its inspiration.

  The bread I bought and ate there was not your light sophisticated loaf. It was baked in an outside brick and stone oven called by the Greek peasants a fourno and pronounced furnace. Which was very nearly what it was.

  Branches of wood were placed in a six or eight-foot tomb and set alight. When only the ashes and the heat from the interior were enough to send you reeling back from the entrance the ashes were scraped out and the lumps of dough placed inside.

  About an hour later the loaves were taken out. They weighed five to six pounds each and one of them lasted me a week.

  By the end of that week the outside crust is so hard it damn near needed an axe to cut off a slice, but the inside remained fresh and satisfying.

  I had put a quarter loaf of bread that I did not eat into the supporting wall of the terraced lawn I was making. It was serving its purpose alongside the other rocks very efficiently and was a fitting monument to the permanent qualities of Greek bread.

  What would have happened to the Greeks if they had no olive oil? For a start, it would have crippled the country economically. Not just because so much of their national income was supplied by the export of oil but because it played such a large part in the life of every family.

  An incredibly large percentage of the population in the southern half of Greece owned olive trees. It was a father to son and father to daughter arrangement which in the course of the years had provided all members of land-owning families with their own olive trees.

  They ensured annual income for the sons and marriage dowries for the daughters. They also supplied oil for home consumption. And in Greece oil was the universal food.

  It was used in everything and nearly for everything. For every occasion on which the housewife in Britain used butter, lard, animal fat or cooking oil, the Greek used olive oil.

  I myself had used it for frying eggs, making potato cakes and marmalade pudding, it went in the soup and the onions and bubble and squeak, it was an ingredient of the delicious honey buns and it was very tasty mixed with salt and spread on dry bread.

  It never burned when fried, stayed clean and could be used again and again. You also used it as a lubricant on hinges, on a stone for sharpening knives, as a salve on burns and my old friend, Nick Xepapas, swore that his ninety-three years of good health was due to swallowing a small glass of olive oil before breakfast every morning.

  In one way and another, I consumed about two pints a week. It had been added to my new list of the glories of Greece.

  Chapter 6

  This U
nlikely Foreigner

  From the moment I woke up with the first greying of the sky in the morning until I eased wearily into my stretcher-borne sleeping bag at night I was performing some tasks with my hands or feet or both. The first few days were exhausting and painful as unaccustomed muscles and desk-soft palms hauled buckets of water up thirty feet from the well surface, carried them back to the high house, chopped tough oak trees, sawed wood, slashed weeds and undergrowth, hoed the reluctant earth, shifted rocks and formed them into embryo rockeries and terraces, stooped and straightened as I gathered wild food.

  In between there were all the standard house chores with none of the standard home facilities. Cooking was as simple as I could make it (it couldn’t be anything else with the materials at my disposal) and the washing up, whether of plate, frying pan or pot, was invariably done with a piece of bread. This was effective, sparing of my hard-won water and nourishing.

  Gradually muscles hardened and adapted themselves to their numerous and particular tasks. The flabby bulge of civilisation around my waist dissolved into a rippling potency that I was not ashamed to expose whenever, after a couple of hours of early exertion, I would be compelled to discard the winter clothing – woollies, jersey, the lot – which I had to put on to go to bed. Go to stretcher, rather.

  It was an alien and, I anticipated, a hostile environment but at that time it was too cold for the creepy crawly things to emerge and contest my invasion. Man, for a change, could not have been more helpful though he, and the feminine variety, were almost intrusively inquisitive. There were no near neighbours but they would come for miles to have a look at this unlikely foreigner who had turned his back on most of the things they coveted and pursued everything they wanted to get away from.

  I was seldom short of company in those early days. They watched me from the edge of my property, intrigued and anxious to be friendly but perforce silent since I could not understand them nor answer anything beyond the first greetings. The nights were severely my own and it did not take all that long for me to discover that I was not cut out to be the complete hermit. It would be nice, I found myself thinking over my final cuppa to have a cat by the fire; it would be even nicer to have a dog by the fire; it would be nicest of all to have a cat and a dog. I could not think of any particular human being I would like to have by the fire. But that was probably because I was not thinking of any particular human being.