Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance Page 5

  Then, one late afternoon, some three weeks after my arrival, I paused with uplifted hoe at the unwonted noise coming towards me down the road. It was some sort of internal combustion engine but did not sound like a tractor, which was the only internal combustion engine that usually risked coming down that track. There was a familiarity about the noise that I could not properly define but which made me listen intently and unbelievingly. I was too far back from the edge of the slope to see down and to my astonishment whatever the vehicle was stopped abreast of my hut and, more astonishingly, the engine switched off.

  I walked slowly to the top of the path – curious, cautious and ready to resent another intrusion. At the bottom of my hill, there was something parked. And immediately the familiar shape explained the familiar noise. It was Annabel. And out of Annabel stepped Deborah.

  Suddenly I found myself running down that perilous pathway and, equally suddenly, I found her in my arms with her own arms tight around me. There were some breathless and probably irrelevant murmurs, which I have forgotten. The first sensible remarks I made were: “What the hell are you doing here?” and “How long are you planning to stay?” She answered both questions by pointing to the roof of the car. Roped tightly to it was a bed. And a mattress.

  “Does that answer your question?”

  Thus Deborah and Annabel came back into my life again. Somewhat to my surprise I was delighted to have her there. She settled into my new way of life immediately and with amazing facility for a girl who had never before lived outside a civilised community. She assumed charge of the kitchen and household chores – proving herself an excellent and inventive cook – and participated fully in all the external labours. She would have made an ideal wife for a Greek peasant farmer. And maybe one day she’d be one.

  It was surely as a direct result of her presence that I set about making a table, sideboard and bookcase. Within a few days too, she had transformed the hut into a home with curtains and various colourful flimsies without which the female could not comfortably exist. Hanging shelves appeared on the walls. Naturally there were new complications which had formed no part of my original assessment. Chief among these was whether two people – instead of one man – could live on ten pounds a month. There was no point in discussing it. We had to and we did.

  Each day, each week, we extended by a few square yards our occupation of the world about us and our possession of the precious earth. Our assault on the wilderness was brutal and the wilderness contested our assault with all the weapons it had so that we would end the day not only exhausted, which was an enjoyable feeling, but bruised and scratched and bloodied. Some of the retaliation against us seemed to be as deliberate and vicious as our own attack.

  I am not talking about the reptile and insect world, which remained dormant in hibernation, or whatever happens to the myriad life of summer in the winter months. Nevertheless, there were strange slitherings and movements in the deep undergrowth or the tangle of rotting grass and leaves in the path of our advance as invisible things moved supine and unwillingly away.

  One day, a loud ejaculation from Deborah – she was not the screaming type – brought me hurrying over to where she was hacking another small clearing. She indicated something hideous in the new-disturbed and dank leaves. It was the biggest, thickest scorpion I had ever seen. I chopped it in two so we would not have to think about it in the warm days.

  There was a need for urgency in our labours. The cotton fields were a chief source for a wide variety of edible weeds and roots and Janni had told us that in a month or so he would be ploughing in preparation for the spring planting. That would be the end of that. It was clearly going to be necessary to have at least the beginnings of a vegetable garden of our own. I doubted whether man could live by greens alone any more excitingly than by bread alone. Anyway I was not over-anxious to make the experiment. We got an occasional egg but the chickens’ ration was obviously as inadequate as our own. Some supplement was necessary for both.

  The money situation was causing me a little concern – not so much because I was in a continuously penniless state but because, after more than six weeks, there was no sign of my pension at the bank in Gythion.

  Occasionally, I walked the nine miles into the town in the hope of finding 1,000 drachmas awaiting. Each time I had to walk back. The bank manager was friendly and helpful and promised to send me a letter as soon as the money arrived by the postman who chug-chugged on his moped around the gullies and potholes of the track that led to a village high on the end of the promontory on which we lived. Its name was Ageranos and the postman always came twice to it every week: on Tuesday and Saturday.

  I used to hear that moped a long way off and would wait anxiously with fingers crossed for the stop at the foot of the hill that would mean he had something to deliver. The only letter I wanted was the one from the bank.

  But Saturday followed Tuesday and Tuesday Saturday for week after week and the bread bill – my only remaining concession to the credit system – at Stavros’s magazie began to rise to a point which made me think I was back in a capitalist economy.

  Once more the chug-chug came cautiously down the road. I and Deborah stood looking at each other fully expecting the usual crescendo and slow fade as it went past. This time the crescendo stayed with us and was interjected by a joyful succession of toots.

  “It’s arrived!” we yelled in unison and rushed down the hill.

  There was the postman, aware of our predicament and grinning with shared pleasure, handing me a letter. It was from the bank all right and informed me that two payments had arrived and 2,000 drachmas had been credited to my account.

  Two thousand drachmas! I was a millionaire. Better than a millionaire because I knew the full value of my wealth. According to the postmark it had taken two weeks for that letter to travel nine miles – a feat which seemed to surprise no one.

  One immediate advantage was that Annabel could play a useful part in our lives again. We had not been able to go into Gythion with her because although there was enough petrol in the tank to get us to town there was not enough to bring us back if the money had not arrived. Also we had no difficulty in coming to a conclusion that if it came to a choice between buying a bottle of wine and a bottle of petrol we would rather walk home.

  So to Gythion in style the next day where I drew all 2,000 drachmas out. One thousand of these were spent on food stocks to see us through a month, including a few luxuries like instant coffee, tea bags and tinned milk because there were few things more reassuring in an alien land than a nice cuppa and rural Greeks never made one; there were tins of sardines and meat, olive oil, of course, and a final extravagance of a piece of Dutch cheese. Nor did I forget the hens with a kilo of wheat. The wine we had in celebration was not reckoned an extravagance. Not when you could get pleasantly merry for twenty drachmas.

  Chapter 7

  It Was All Going a Bit Too Well

  It was against the advice of the locals that I planted my vegetable seeds as soon as I had enough space available. They insisted it was one month too early but I preferred to believe in the evidence all around me. The sun came up each morning like an over-ripe blood orange turning as it rose to a hot yellow that brought to flaming life the winter-dormant flora of the hills and valleys. As long as I supplied the water that sun would surely bring to life my seeds as well.

  February had not moved into March but I was naked to the waist as I hoed and heaved my garden out of the wilderness and planted it with lettuce, cabbage, beetroot, peas, beans, pumpkin, watermelon and even a few rows of sweet corn. Down at the beach-house where the soil was sandy and easy to work we established another vegetable patch and added potatoes and onions. All these were supplemented by rows of wild greens which we hoped would thrive immediately to fill in the hunger gap until the sophisticated stuff was ready for picking.

  It was not that I thought that I knew better than my neighbours – though I soon discovered how committed the Greek peasant was to the
methods of his great-grandfather. It was simply that I had to have vegetables as soon as possible. Then I sat back and waited – as I have done so often since – for the miracles to happen.

  To say I sat back and waited is a little euphemistic. The twice daily treks to the well, bringing back eight buckets of water each time from 400 yards away, were hardly a sedentary occupation. Nor was the firewood. To keep the stove going for three meals a day and the evening warmth I had to saw wood for at least an hour every morning in addition to supplying the wood to saw. When the weather was bad and the rooms full of cold damp, another hour’s work was necessary.

  This was an excessively mechanical and boring occupation though very good for the biceps. So I developed a method of sawing – holding the wood firm with my feet – which enabled me to read a newspaper or book while my arm moved like some automatic piston. It worked fine. I had early reward for my labours when small green sheaths of fertility and future food thrust themselves out of my well-watered soil before anybody else around me had even planted. And the second hen came into lay.

  It was all going a bit too well. I had forgotten isostasy. The invisible forces of compensation were marshalling against us and were soon to reveal their tactics. One morning I had fried egg and chips for breakfast, went down to the well with the two buckets which now had become virtually extensions of my arms and trudged back up the hill for the beginning of the daily watering. Instead of the green-flecked seedbed I found the two hens contentedly fluttering in sandbaths, splashing dust over their feathers and happily pulling up the green shoots and swallowing the unexpected dividend at the bottom of each one.

  They hadn’t quite eaten everything and I made frantic plans to save what was left. Wire netting was too expensive and I could not keep both hens cooped up in their cramped henhouse twenty-four hours a day. Their free-ranging not only helped the economics of egg production but kept down any insects and grubs with a preference for young vegetables. A covering of thorn bushes was the only answer. There was certainly no shortage of thorn bushes and within a day my garden resembled what would be recognised by every district commissioner in an empire on which, alas, the sun has set forever as a boma or maybe a Masai cattle kraal. The problem could, of course, have been resolved by wringing the chickens’ necks but they were supplying me then with three eggs every two days and Deborah had big plans for bringing the outside fourno into use and making scones and cakes and pastry as well as our own bread.

  It would help, too, if I diverted the interest of the hens from seeds by increasing their grain ration. I went up the road to the magazie to buy ten kilos of wheat, put my hand in my back pocket to pull out the envelope containing my last 1,000 drachma note and found it empty. That note was worth twelve and a half 1967 British pounds. It may not seem a great deal in contemporary terms but it was not only 100% of my total financial possessions; it was the end of all immediate plans for capital investment essential to maintain our gross national product at a viable level. And if that sounds like familiar gibberish, it is only because nations have the same economic problems as individuals.

  Two days of frantic searching turned up no trace of the missing money. I was irritated rather than dismayed because I had kidded myself that I really had arrived at a situation in which I could do without money. Looking back over all the possibilities I had a feeling that I had dropped the envelope during an earlier visit to the magazie and that it had been swept up or picked up by one of the half-dozen children that were always playing around Stavros’s place, including his own. I decided to try a little psychology.

  The next time I went to the magazie I announced to the Stavros family and all the customers that I was going in to Gythion to report the disappearance of my 1,000 drachma note to the police station just in case somebody had found it somewhere and handed it in. I was sure, I added, that the Mani people were honest enough to do that. The next morning Nikkos – son of Stavros – came to the hut to say that his father wanted to see me. When I arrived at the magazie Stavros handed me my lost envelope with the 1,000 drachma inside.

  “One of the children,” he said, “found it in a hedge.”

  I didn’t ask any questions but told him to give the finder 100 drachmas on my behalf. “It will do,” said wife Maria, “to buy Nikkos a pair of trousers.” My delight in repossessing this vast sum was evidence, at least to me, that I was not as independent or as immune as I had thought and hoped. But isostasy was not finished with us yet and perhaps we had been building up too much a debit account of happy events.

  February came to an end with a dramatic switch from warm to cold weather. Meeting Stavros on the road one early morning he pointed to the near hills of Taygetus.

  “You see the snow on those hills? That is the first time it has fallen there this winter. If the cold comes into the valley here my tomato crop will be ruined. I have just transplanted 5,000 small plants outside.”

  He also told me that in the night foxes had taken three of his hens and mauled three others. I hurried home to strengthen my own anti-fox defences. The hens were well established in their new surroundings by then, and, wherever they roamed in the day, always came back at nightfall.

  The cold persisted and one morning, when I went down to the well there was a thin sheet of ice covering the water. A passing hunter gave me the bad news that frost had killed off most of the tomato plants in the valley including those of Stavros. I knew that he would start all over again but he had missed the early crop which was the one that gave the best prices.

  The hunter’s news sent me hurrying down to the beach house garden and to the sad sight of blackened stumps of greenery draped over my vegetable beds except for several rows of hardy “wild spinach”. The locals, as I should have known, had been right. I would not plant any more seeds until the weather improved.

  Chapter 8

  I Could Have Happily Wrung a Million Speckled Necks

  By this time there were a number of animals in my life other than the two hens. There was a growing population of wild birds: robins, chaffinches, wrens, blackbirds, magpies and various other specimens that in my ignorance I did not know.

  I had never been an avid birdwatcher or bird-lover. There was a time, in fact, when I came to hate starlings so violently that I could have happily wrung a million speckled necks. But those little creatures around my upstairs house inhabited my new life like old friends, and far less obtrusively.

  The first permanent feathered board-and-lodger was a robin, obviously a bachelor. He was soon joined by a married couple whose intrusion on his privacy and perks he deeply resented. I spent many fascinating minutes in the study of animal behaviour so closely identified with the human species.

  The first robin spent a good deal of his time defending his territory against the other two. Whenever they flew over the boundaries defined by himself he hurtled at them and they would flee precipitately but as soon as he was out of his ground they would turn on him and he would beat just as hasty a retreat. What a pity that human battles could not be fought so decisively and bloodlessly. Right, in the animal world more than among Christians, was might.

  Yes, there were a number of animals in my life. A large proportion of them I fervently wished would share some other life. But there were the four I had introduced deliberately: my two hens, a cat and a dog.

  The names of the hens, Stavros and Jannis, denoted not their sex but their origin. Stavros was six months or a year older than Jannis (it is as difficult to tell a hen’s age as that of any other female) and something curious had happened to her since Jannis had started laying an egg every day while she had dropped off to an egg every other day.

  She definitely needed psychiatric treatment or perhaps I had been diddled at the magazie and she was much older than I thought.

  However, from being as undomesticated as pheasants they now more or less shared my outside meals by picking up the crumbs from between my feet. The puppy was called Dog. This was not only for the sake of brevity and convenience. Th
e dogs of Greece had some rather original names (the shepherd in the field below me had three called Sobranie, Kapitano and Panayotis) and I wanted something equally unique for my pup. I was fairly confident that there was not another dog in the whole country called Dog.

  Dog was a slight furry animal with a retroussé nose and Friesland-cow colouring and the unusual distinction of having been born with a stubby tail. He was two months old and the month he had been with me had wrought great changes. He could speak English for a start, and he had developed a taste for sophisticated food like bully beef, sardines and evaporated milk which Greek dogs only dreamed about in a high fever. Standard diet for the latter was dry bread.

  Dog was never any trouble from the moment I got him from a farm up the road. His eyes were still clouded with puppy opaqueness, yet he became house-trained within twenty-four hours – possibly because there was not all that much difference between the inside and the outside of my house – and he settled into his cardboard box and bits of ancient newspaper from the first night. In a moment of acute shortage, which still persisted, I used the newspaper to light the fire and substituted a woollen vest which had become superfluous, without Dog seeming to know the difference.