Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (12 page)

I am ashamed to say that I sometimes bought some. He and the constant boats were a reminder of the one signal failure of my new career. When I had worked out the economics of living on ten pounds a month, do-it-yourself fish had been a very significant item in my plans.

It would be untruthful to say, after well over a year of fairly continuous effort, that I had never caught a fish. I had caught two. The bigger of them measured three inches.

I began fishing from the beach the day after I moved into my upstairs house. I put a heavy sinker and two hooks with worms attached on the end of a lengthy nylon line. This I whirled around my head and hurled a good forty or fifty yards into the sea. It was a method of fishing that had worked well in the tropical waters of my youth.

Almost immediately I felt the nibbles communicating their exciting message along the telegraph of the nylon. I gave the required jerk and hooked fast in a rock. I played that rock for ten minutes
without success.

There was nothing for it but to strip naked and try to free my precious hooks with my hands. The mid-winter waves were freezing and when they reached my knees I abandoned the project.

Instead I tied the line round a stone which I left on the edge of the surf rather hoping that a big fish would take one of the worms during the night and free the line for me. Well, if it was a fish, it was a very big one for when I came down the next morning even the stone had disappeared.

A week later, with a new length of line, I tried again from the rocks of the peninsula. People always seemed to fish from rocks.

My first cast fouled some underwater entanglement. I gave one or two pulls just to make sure I hadn't caught an octopus or something and the nylon snapped just below the surface of the water.

Fishing lines were not included in my monthly budget and this time I had to go in. I saved the hooks and half the line but lost my enthusiasm for sea-bathing.

Since then I had tried a wide variety of methods – including when-in-Rome-do-as-Romans-do. My neighbours did not use fishing lines; they used spears. The spear was a ten-foot reed with a trident fixed to one end. The other essential piece of equipment was a piece of wood, the size of a pencil, and a small bottle of olive oil.

The fisherman patrolled the rocky foreshore sprinkling two or three drops of oil on the water in likely places. This gave him a clear view of the submarine scene and any fish that may have been lurking there.

It also, I discovered, gave the fish a clear view of
me and my inexpert trident. I had not yet managed to impale one and it became expensive in olive oil.

During the early summer months, as soon as the sea warmed up a bit, I tried a new attack by suspending my hooks clear of the rocky bottom from a cork float. As I could not get this far enough out by throwing, I would swim out for a hundred yards or so and leave it bobbing on the surface while I returned to the beach.

I soon discovered that the float intercepted all the information about events on the end of my line and that the fish were indulging themselves on these exotic meals without, to use a contemporary metaphor, ever getting hooked.

A boat was the obvious answer. But there were no boats on my beach. I took the opportunity, one July weekend, to borrow an inflated Li-Lo from a party of tourists. It was a windy afternoon with the sea abnormally rough. There was no great difficulty in getting the Li-Lo out to where I wanted it with my fishing tackle aboard. It was a different matter getting astride it, but I finally managed it.

For five minutes I was precariously perched on this volatile raft with the worm-cased hooks dangling full fathom five directly below me. Then I felt an electrifying tug and in the same moment as I pulled and felt the weight of the fish firmly held, the Li-Lo shot from under me and I went over backwards.

I came up to feel the line slipping through my fingers and the Li-Lo ten yards away and heading before the wind to Crete.

You have to make up your mind pretty quickly when confronted with this sort of choice. The thought that impressed itself most forcibly on my mind was that if the fish was mine, the Li-Lo was not. It might have been an easier decision had the fish been going in the same direction. I had to let it go and set off after the Li-Lo.

It was a hopeless chase from the start. I'm a good swimmer but when the wind got under that air-cushion, it lifted it six feet in the air and sent it cavorting over the waves in a series of somersaults. I kept up the pursuit long after I realised its hopelessness because I was reluctant to swim back to the beach and because I thought that by doing so I might divert the owner's concern from the Li-Lo to me.

Fortunately the tourists were Greeks from Athens and not English and they accepted the loss as one of those playful quirks with which the gods enjoy themselves at the expense of humans.

There was some conjecture, stimulated by much cognac with which they were intent on reviving me, as to where the Li-Lo would eventually come to earth. I liked to think of it being picked up by a sailor off one of those Russian warships in Alexandria, or even perhaps gliding gently along the Suez Canal.

Ah, yes! The fish I caught.

I had been demonstrating to a small Greek of about six how to throw a line fifty yards into the sea. I hit the beach behind me on the final twirl and the sinker splashed in little more than five yards from the shore.

When I pulled it in, there was this three-inch fish on the hook. After some argument as to ownership I took it home and had sardine on toast for supper.

I had been away from my house on the hill for more than two weeks. It was a long, long time. Time enough for something to happen to me, and time enough for something to happen to all the things I had left behind.

I came round the bend in the road that used to be a road in the late afternoon. It was late afternoon because my taxi had refused to leave the main road and all my paraphernalia, including a magnificent ship's compass, had been dumped at the intersection while I went off in search of a donkey.

Although I had been absent for only a fortnight the reunions with each of my sparse neighbours became a return of the prodigal son. I had hoped to slip past unobserved in the taxi, but now I was compelled to look in on each and every house along the road. To leave one out would have been unforgivable and, anyway, I wouldn't have known which one to leave out.

I came round the bend in the road leaning heavily on my borrowed donkey and steering, on the compass, a slightly erratic south sou'east. I was full – as well as of wine – of a mixture of expectancy and fear and an enormous curiosity. What I was frightened of was that the homecoming would mean nothing, that the white walls of my
spiti
would not welcome me with the same gladness that they had always done even after a brief day trip to Gythion.

And what about Dog and Elsa the cat? Anything could have happened to them in two weeks. I had arranged for them to be fed twice a day. But I had not arranged for them to be loved and there was no explaining to them why I was going away or for how
long I was leaving them. Had Dog become one of the skeletal strays that haunt the roads and garbage heaps of Greece? Had Elsa gone back completely to the bush and rocks from which I had never wholly succeeded in enticing her and to which she always fled for refuge on the approach of strangers or the unexpected?

These thoughts jostled for space in my mind with fears that my house had been ransacked and my hard-won garden despoiled by vandals or overwhelmed by thistles. There were no locks on my doors or windows and no window panes anyway. And the door had been left open all the time I had been away to allow Dog and Elsa to go in and out. And there was that other fear – that the homecoming would be empty of emotion, a meaningless experience that I dreaded more than anything.

I came round the big oak tree which was what I regarded as the entrance to my drive and there, suddenly, were the square white walls jutting out from the hillside like a piece of fashioned cliff. They were as familiar and welcoming as they had always been and I knew immediately that nothing had changed in me and that the glow inside me was not only the warmth of wine. I knew I had come home. I started whistling for Dog. Not only for Dog. Elsa responded just as quickly to this summons and was sometimes first at the foot of the hill to greet me. This time I walked a good fifty yards along the road without anything happening at all. Just the echo of a whistle going up the pass into the hills.

Then I saw the black and white shape fleeting downhill through the bushes and Dog came out on the road looking in the opposite direction. He swung his head round, unbelieving. When he saw me he came up
the road. Not in the ears-back flat gallop with which he usually met me but in a half-hesitant lope – recognising the whistle and the figure but not really believing it, confused by the donkey and striving to reconcile sound and sight and memory to overcome two weeks of human indifference and, no doubt, rejection.

I called his name and the last doubt vanished. He plunged towards the voice and soon had covered my only suit with the paw prints of his delight and the mud that provided mute testimony to the continuing rain that, everybody was quick to tell me, had dragged this worst of all Peloponnese winters right out of season into spring. But there was no sign of Elsa. This did not worry me unduly. Elsa could look after herself, as all cats could – even Park Lane cats. Her contacts with civilisation meant food and warmth and these she would resume at need. I just hoped that she would remember me and stay around.

Preoccupied with these thoughts, I tied the donkey to a tree and trudged up the zigzag path to my homely eyrie more or less as lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills. When all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils. That was not, of course, an original thought, but Wordsworth could not possibly have been more surprised than I was and I felt entitled to the same privilege of poetic licence. Actually, there were five daffodils, in full bloom. I had bought the bulbs in Athens where I discovered that the Greek word for daffodil was
Pseuthonarkissos
and these were the first daffodils I had seen growing in Greece. They were also the first daffodils any of my neighbours had seen.

They had been planted last October and had thrilled me with the first green shoots through the frost-hard ground of January. When I left they were still only a few
inches high and when I softened the earth about them, it became a favourite siesta place for Dog. I did not give them much of a chance.

Those five bright nostalgic suns of spring were an astonishment in their own right but even more astonishing against the background of the green wilderness that confronted me on that first evening of my return. Everything had run riot in two weeks. Or rather, everything had tried to run riot but had been overwhelmed by a profusion of tall grass and even taller daisies that had fought their way up to reach the light.

Subsequent search for the anemones, cyclamen, poppies, lilies and other wild flowers with which I had covered my hillside patch the previous spring revealed that the tall grass was wheat. I was left wondering whether to cut it all down or whether there would be enough of it to make a loaf of bread. You can't have everything.

Late that first night I was wakened from sleep by a familiar pressure on my feet and the soft padding up the length of my legs. Before it had reached my knees I could hear the purring. Elsa knew I had come home before I sat up to stroke her. She took up her usual and precarious couch on top of my hip and all through the night I could feel the happy treading of her paws while she throbbed like a distant dynamo.

There was a small glass before me containing half an inch of water. In a few moments it would become probably the most expensive short drink in the world. Nobody yet knew all the effects of the most expensive drink in the world. I hoped to live long enough to be able to tell.

Now I was opening two ampoules from a box labelled FLUORO-URACIL (it came with a tiny metal saw with which to cut through the glass) and tapping them into the glass of water. It was in ampoules because up to now it had been injected into the veins of people with my complaint.

My drink was not only expensive it was an experiment. For all I knew I may have been the first person who had actually swallowed any on a doctor's prescription. Each ampoule cost me forty-one drachmas – as I was drinking it in Athens. Every time I swallowed that fortified half-inch of water, I swallowed eighty-two drachmas. That represented about one pound three shillings a half-inch. And I had been taking it twice a day.

It tasted awful.

The process culminating in this extravagant concoction had begun some weeks before, in Monemvasia, down on the southernmost tip of Greece, where I was inclined to spend the summer months and sometimes the winters.

Taking advantage of a chance encounter with the local GP, I asked if he could give me something for a stomach ache. This was a condition which I tended to blame on the red wine of Crete which was imported quarterly into Monemvasia.

The fact that it had become rather a persistent condition since the Easter festivities I likewise blamed on a rather persistent consumption. I owed an apology to the Cretan wine growers.

The doctor invited me to his surgery where it took only a few minutes prodding by fingers which obviously knew their business to start a chain of events which caused a great deal of hilarity and which led me to these postprandial ampoules.

“Ha, Ha!” he chuckled, with a final prod which made my stomach muscles twitch convulsively. “You must go to Athens immediately.”

I gaped at him.

“What do you mean, immediately?”

“Tonight,” he grinned down at me.

“Look, doctor, all I want is a dose of medicine for stomach pains. As long as it's not castor oil.”

This was obviously a very funny thing to say.