Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (6 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.