Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (7 page)

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.

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. The 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.

He was now, I was glad to say, developing the proper possessive instincts and beginning to bark at strangers. The reason I was glad to say this was that among the unwanted animals in my life were the stray dogs which came to my upstairs house in search of food.

Greek dogs were always hungry. They seemed to be used almost entirely for hunting, and they made very good hunting dogs from an early age because they had inherited knowledge that their only chance of getting anything other than a crust of bread to eat was to put up something that could be shot down. There was no longer very much to put up during most of the year: consequently, there were a large number of hungry dogs in Greece.

I discovered this after my third cake of expensive soap, brought all the way from England to save drachma expenditure, mysteriously disappeared from my bathroom. My bathroom was a concrete step outside the front door on which was placed a polythene basin and a piece of soap. The first piece vanished while I was away from home. The second and third while I was either in the house or ten yards away sawing firewood.

The fourth piece I staked to a nail with several
wrappings of string around it. I came back from the beach house to discover one third of it missing and the canine tooth marks on the remainder clearly visible. On each occasion a piece of Greek-made soap on the same step was left untouched.

One Sunday night, when I was having dinner with Janni and his wife, a young man brought a sack into the dining room. He threw it on the floor where it landed with a thud and started mewing. It was the kitten I had been promised, and I carried it three miles home slung over my shoulder.

In my kitchen I untied the neck of the sack, put in my hand, and pulled out a small bundle of multi-coloured hellfire. It spat viciously and damn near tore my wrist and hand to ribbons.

I finally got it immobilised in the crook of my elbow and set about establishing a more harmonious relationship by feeding it condensed milk on the tip of my little finger. Twice it licked this off happily. The third time it nearly bit off the top quarter inch of flesh. That was how Elsa came into my life. And that was how she went out of it the next morning – through the window with about two inches of my skin trailing from her claws. But she came back at night and licked up the saucer of milk I put on the window-sill for her. I knew it was Elsa because I sat up in the darkness until midnight to make sure nothing else got it.

I did not call her Elsa immediately. That came a week or two later when I was beginning to feel like Joy Adamson. Every nightfall Elsa would come into the
kitchen as soundless as a ghost. The first I knew of her presence was the lapping noise at the saucer. Even Dog missed her arrival. By sunrise she had vanished into the bush and rocks which surround me.

Very occasionally she would let me stroke her – an operation which I approached as suspiciously and fearfully as she did. Then, on the cold nights, she would let me wrap her in the apron of my jersey and she would sleep on my lap. I thrilled to the first purr as any mother hearing the first baby-gurgling noise. Then, one night at supper, I felt a sudden, light weight on my knee. I could hardly believe it. But the kitten had jumped on my lap. That was when I called her Elsa.

She was now almost tame, slept on my bed every night and sometimes on my face, had polished off the mouse and begun to pinch the cheese herself, and played happily with the centipedes, beetles, lizards, flies, scorpions and other awakening denizens of my many-holed walls. Soon, I hoped, she would have established better than neutral relationships with Dog, who desperately wanted to be friendly but whose advances were always repelled by three or four incredibly swift left jabs.

Elsa still disappeared in the mornings, but never before breakfast and was always back in the afternoons. She did not go far from the house, and I often saw her crouched on top of the big rock above the woodpile watching me sawing or lazing, leopard-like across the branch of the thorn tree. I hoped she'd stay that way. I didn't want a civilised tabby cat. It would not have gone with the
furniture.

There was a boat-builder's yard at Gythion. It was at the entrance to the island (now linked to the mainland by a causeway and a sea wall on which Paris and Helen took refuge on the eve of their flight to Troy.) I had often wandered around there among the fishing boats under repair and the sad hulks of vessels whose sea-going days were over and who had now come ashore to end their days as misplaced and neglected as a retired merchant skipper.

The boat builder's name was Alexis and he was, I hoped, a friend. There was a boat there that he said I could have for thirty pounds, but it had no motor and no sails and it was too big to row any distance. I did not wander with any specific intent. I had not got thirty pounds. I believed I had a backer to the extent of about ten pounds which was roughly what I bartered my labour and a month of my life for down in the cotton fields. It was just that I didn't want to miss another opportunity; also I liked wandering around boat-yards at the edge of the sea. What I was really looking for, of course, was a miracle – a miracle that would come to me out of that sea.

Alexis and I sometimes sat under the trees of the island cafe trying to make conversation about boats above the noise of the record player and above the limitations of my Greek. We didn't do too badly and the wine was a great help to understanding. “You see that one? I built that one myself.”