Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance

by Robert Crisp

  We discovered that Jonathan Crisp had commissioned his brother Peter “to write a book about our father (who art not in heaven – family joke)”. As part of Peter’s research, he spent a week in the National Newspaper Library of Great Britain. He went through every page of every edition of the Sunday Express from 1967 to 1974 on microfiche rolls. He photocopied the articles that Robert Crisp had written under the name of Peter White and then spent a happy midwinter weaving them into a coherent narrative.

  As Peter worked on the book, he was struck by the idea that it would make a classic travel book in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson. He recognised that the deceptively simple story of an older man living his dream, enjoying freedom, self-sufficiency and the simple life, contained powerful messages:

  It’s OK to be poor – in fact, it’s not just OK, it’s liberating. It’s all right to be alone – it’s not just all right, it’s great. It’s fine to grow old – indeed it’s the happiest time of life.

  Even after being diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live, Robert Crisp confirmed “I can say truthfully that I have seldom felt more alive or enjoyed each moment of life more continuously.”

  We hope you enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed discovering it.

  Prologue

  A Hankering for Pericles Smith

  “If you, born in these latter times

  When wit’s more ripe, accept my rhymes

  And that to hear an old man sing

  May to your wishes pleasure bring…”

  Prologue to Pericles, William Shakespeare

  I sat in a room at the Grosvenor Hotel, London, overlooking Victoria Station, and wrote “Love, Dad” at the bottom of a letter.

  It was the final one of three – one to my wife and one to each of my two sons. The letters told them I would not be coming home that night. Nor any other night. And tried to explain why.

  It was Friday 30 December 1966. By the time the letters were delivered on Monday morning it would be another year and I would be in another country. Nobody would know where I was. I hoped nobody would care very much.

  I was fifty-five years old. The thought was pretty often in my mind that in another ten years I would be sixty-five. Or dead. It seemed a good time and a last opportunity to start a new life and a new career.

  Like many of my fellow citizens of a similar age most of my time was being spent in a sepulchre constructed of repetitive work, convention and obligation and the crumbling bricks and mortar of long years of marriage.

  For a large number of people this is no doubt an ideal and noble arrangement blessed by God and man and essential to a decent and stable society.

  For others the slow dissolution of independence, the surrender of privacy and individuality, the nagging erosion of love and tolerance are a descent at best to boredom, at worst to continuous conflict fought out in a state of inescapable and soul-destroying proximity.

  Noble or ignoble it is hardly possible for a man to lead his own life under the legal and Christian obligations of matrimony. The responsibilities of family, the confinement of custom, the burden of imperative bills and imperative taxes … these are the walls of a tomb from which there is no escape except to the pub, the club, the back garden or the telly.

  It may not be quite a definition of slow death – and there are clearly a lot of people who are happy with it – but it is surely a definition of stagnation and immobility. So I decided to come alive again. To move again. I would walk out of my home, out of my marriage, out of my tomb into a totally new environment and a new life.

  I didn’t believe I would leave any great unhappiness behind me – certainly no greater than what I had already caused. But walking out of an environment that had absorbed me for more than twenty years so that nobody knew I was going to do it required the careful planning and deception of a military operation. The essence of it was that I put myself in a position, physically and mentally, to take advantage of the moment when it presented itself.

  In my case, economic considerations were paramount. I couldn’t leave my family without any financial resources – though I reckoned my sons were old enough and intelligent enough to do without me – and I couldn’t expect to move far or live long without any money at all. The second factor was resolved for me by a German artilleryman who fired indiscriminately from his gun position in a field near Caen in Normandy in July 1944. One of his shells landed near me and a chunk of it nearly took my right arm off. As a result of this injury I was awarded a disability pension of approximately ten pounds a month for life.

  I had few doubts that this would be enough to provide me with the bare means of existence in my new environment. For essential to my concept of freedom was freedom from the need for and the demands of money.

  The other factor of family income provided greater difficulties. I resolved them by approaching John Junor, editor of the Sunday Express, with an outline of what I intended to do and a suggestion that his readers would be interested in the attempt of a man aged fifty-five to find a new life in a new land on an income of ten pounds a month. I had the feeling that a considerable number of people of both sexes would like to be doing what I proposed to do.

  Thank God he agreed with me. Without that I could never have started.

  The nature of my departure and my whole intention demanded, of course, an impenetrable cloak of secrecy. The first disguise was a pseudonym under which my stories could appear. I was asked to offer suggestions. I provided a list of half-a-dozen, indicating that my own preference was for Pericles Smith. This was considered a little too fancy and the Sunday Express christened me Peter White – a name not on my list. I still had a hankering for Pericles Smith.

  There was a limit in those days of fifty pounds on the amount an individual could take out of Britain to a non-sterling area, plus fifteen pounds for traveling expenses. It was going to be a non-sterling area. I had made up my mind where I was going at the same time as I made up my mind to go.

  It all began way back in 1941 when I as stationed in Anogia. I was visiting the Mayor, Nick Xepapas, when the announcement came over the radio that Athens had been taken by the Germans. It was a poignant moment. The ring of silent faces and silent tears, the room full of the uncompromising phraseology of evil triumphant, the moment when a way of life ended and tragedy began.

  Since that memorable morning, I had often recaptured that scene and had always wanted to know what happened in Anogia. I sent a letter addressed to Mr Nick Xepapas or Any Member of His Family, Anogia, Sparta, Greece. I thought it would be delivered to somebody, but probably not into the hands of the old patriarch.

  I received a letter by return, and turned quickly to the end to see the signature. To my great joy it was signed “Nick Xepapas and family”. The letter closed like this: “All the family remember you very much and we often wondered what happened to you. We will all be very happy to have you visit us very soon.”

  Part 1

  Greece

  Chapter 1

  The Pattern of My Magic Carpet

  I had a pretty good idea where I wanted to go, but I was far from certain how to get there.

  The statutory fifty pounds was in my wallet in traveller’s cheques and the fifteen pounds sterling allowance in my pocket. That, and that alone, was my capital.

  I looked again at the folded map of Europe in my hand. Then I crossed the road to the Continental booking office and bought a ticket for Salzburg in Austria.

  “Return?” asked the clerk.

  “Definitely not,” I told him.

  It was not only that seeing the name Salzburg awakened an old wish to see the town. From there, it seemed to me, I could go south-west, south-east, or due south and still be heading for the destination which heart and memory had chosen.

  The train left at 10am. On the side of the carriage was spelled out the pattern of my magic carpet: DOVER – OSTEND – FRANKFURT.

  It was not very full. Most of the passengers in my compartment were casual
ly reading morning newspapers. They might just as well have been in the 10am for Bromley and Sevenoaks. A few letter-writers scribbled, serious-faced. Nobody bothered to look up as we pulled out of Platform 7. My departure could not have been less dramatic.

  Was I unique on that train? Newspapers were on my lap, too. There was nothing about me to distinguish me from the other passengers.

  Yet I was looking at London and Southern England for the last time. Not only at England, but at fifty-five years of my life. They flashed past the window as rapidly as telephone poles.

  Twenty-four hours after leaving Victoria, I was standing on the main road leading south out of Salzburg. In my right hand, I carried my suitcase. A typewriter and a briefcase struggled for possession of my left hand.

  My tactics were simple enough. Every time I heard a car coming I picked up my paraphernalia and lurched along the edge of the road. If the driver ignored me, I just dropped everything and basked in travel-brochure sunshine until the next one came along. Just before noon, a car slowed and halted. It was middle-aged. So was the woman at the wheel. Both were unmistakably English. There was a girl in the front seat. The back seat was empty.

  “Konnen wir Sie helfen?” she asked, smiling.

  “Only as far as Athens,” I replied in my deliberately best English.

  “That’s where we’re going,” she said, determined to be imperturbable. “Know anything about cars?”

  “I can push one further than most.”

  “Jump in then. You may be just the man we’re looking for.”

  The glum expression on daughter’s face indicated disagreement with this assessment but what did I care? Athens was suddenly within reach.

  Athens was, in fact, nearly 2,000 miles and thirteen days later. And if I’d known how much pushing lay ahead of me, perhaps I would have carried on walking into Yugoslavia. It was not her daughter. There were the formal introductions. “I am Mrs L… and this is my niece Deborah and we’re going to have a look at Greece while it isn’t full of tourists.” I responded appropriately and made a brief reckoning that Mrs L was forty-something and Deborah was twenty-something. Well, at least, I thought, contemplating the days of propinquity ahead, they are both over the age of consent. Deborah clearly thought I was past the age for anything.

  Four or five days, we reckoned, would see us in Athens. I was overwhelmed by my good fortune. But I should have had more respect for the verities of isostasy – isostasy being my own personal religion. It is a word manufactured from the Greek isos, meaning equal, to describe the geological phenomenon of maintaining equilibrium on the surface of the planet. If a mountain range is elevated the imbalance thus caused is compensated by an equal and opposite depression. If there were no compensating factor, no isostasy, the earth would develop a wobble in its revolutions with unpredictably dire consequences for the human race including probably universal seasickness.

  That every action has an equal and opposite reaction is a well-known principle of physics. I have come to believe that it applies equally emphatically in the realm of metaphysics and human behaviour. Our lives, whether we recognise it or not, are affected intimately and potently by the same laws of compensation. We are always involved in isostasy. With curious appropriateness the Greek word also means perhaps.

  The morning had been too favourable and I had been too lucky. Isostasy was not long in making adjustments. Five minutes after I had entered the car, cluttering up the empty space in the back with my load, there was a loud bang and we swerved to a halt as the rear tyre went flat. Naturally, it fell to me to change the wheel but I got a shock when I saw the condition of the tyres. They were all worn smooth.

  “Listen,” I said to auntie, “you’ll never get over that mountain let alone reach Athens on those tyres.”

  “What would you suggest?”

  “There’s only one thing to do. Go back to Villach and get a couple of retreads for the rear wheels.”

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon before we finally got away from Villach but the new sense of security was worth the delay. To make up the lost time it was agreed to keep going through the night, taking turns at the wheel. I wished they had taken turns at the punctures too. There were three more in fairly quick succession soon after crossing into Yugoslavia at sunset. Fortunately one of them occurred while we were filling up at a garage with the Balkan equivalent of an AA man present. He refused to accept a tip, which surprised and impressed me.

  At midnight we were on top of another mountain in a howling blizzard when we went past a hotel sign with lighted windows gleaming warmly through the snow.

  “Doesn’t it make you want to stop?” said Deborah and immediately there was a now familiar detonation with the sway and slither of a flat front tyre.

  “That’s it,” I said firmly. “I’ll change the wheel but then we’re stopping for the night. In the hotel.”

  The two females hurried inside while I went through the wheel-changing motions that had become automatic. My palm was slashed on some sharp projection and left the snow crimson with my blood and blushing at the torrent of imprecation with which I reviled the night and the car and the universe. In the hotel I was greeted with the news that there was only one room available and in that room only one bed.

  “How big is the bed?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s a big one.”

  “Well then, there’s no problem, is there?” I said and forestalled any argument by heading for the kitchen where I persuaded an elderly woman to produce bread and cheese and a flagon of red wine.

  There was some hesitation in the air at the end of supper so I said I would get into bed first and warm it up.

  “And I’m sleeping with all my clothes on if that’s any comfort to you. Except my boots, of course. I suggest you do the same.”

  I grabbed the flagon of half-finished wine and went upstairs. By the next morning, I was more or less one of the family.

  On the way down from the mountains to the coast, we passed half a dozen overturned or ditched lorries which had skidded off the road. I could not resist the temptation to point out what our fate would have been without the new tyres. The enticement of the blue Adriatic, which kept on revealing itself unexpectedly, obliterated all thoughts of gloom and disaster.

  We barely paused in Rijeka, a town of umbrellas, and driving alongside the sea with the high passes behind us and the sun coming a little nearer with each kilometre we believed there could be no more hazards of nature to interfere with our progress. It was an optimistic forecast – as are most beliefs.

  At one coastal resort we were delayed for twenty-four hours because a busload of people had literally been blown sideways off the road and the police had stopped all traffic. There was immediate compensation in a lunch in a deserted hotel dining room, consisting of soup, roast sucking pig with heaps of three kinds of vegetables, peaches and custard, a bottle of good, red wine and coffee for a total cost of fourteen shillings each.

  It was at this hotel during the enforced overnight stay that, quite innocently, I broke my bed. When I reported it to the manageress, she broke into peals of laughter and a stream of gay words which I brought the head waiter along to translate.

  “She wants to know,” he told me, “which of the two ladies was the lucky one.”

  I carefully avoided looking at either of them.

  The corniche was a pure delight once the ice-breaking gale had stopped but our enjoyment of the scenery was slightly marred by the explicit road signs which the Yugoslavs go in for. Cars are featured crushed under enormous boulders to indicate the possibility of avalanches and slippery road surfaces are portrayed by vehicles toppling over cliffs with a nightmare death’s head skeleton superimposed.

  They could hardly be dismissed as exaggerations. Just before Dubrovnik three-quarters of the midnight road was blocked by a fall of earth and rock that I swear was still moving when I jammed on the brakes as we came round the bend. On another midnight a policeman flagged us down and asked me in three
languages whether I spoke English, German or French.

  “English,” I said.

  He went on flawlessly: “You have just come through our village at forty kilometres an hour when the sign plainly limits you to thirty kilometres an hour. You may either go before the magistrate in the morning or pay a fine of 15,000 dinars now.”

  Fortunately, auntie was driving at the time. She paid while I wondered what his annual income was. We left Dubrovnik with the feeling that Greece was just around the next corner. What was really waiting round the next corner was a remedial dose of equal and opposite reaction.

  On the morning’s run, our stomachs replete with ham and eggs at the most expensive hotel in town in a dining room peopled by what appeared to be dowager Russian duchesses, we had skirted probably the most beautiful bay on the Dalmatian coast and turned inland to Titograd over the mountains.

  From Mostar the road climbed apparently eternally and as it went up and up, the temperature went down and down. Annabel, the name Deborah had given to the car, lacked internal heating.

  Any thoughts that we might have entertained that we were on our way to some sort of celestial realm were brutally contested by the road conditions. The surface was un-tarred in the passes and deep snow and mud had been churned into an indescribable mess by the passage of scores of heavy lorries denied other routes from the coastal regions to the south. This was not the worst of it. The wheel tracks of huge trucks were a foot wider than Annabel’s and we lurched crazily from side to side in deep slush bouncing from one hard-pressed snow wall to the other. Every now and then, the headlights would reveal an impenetrable cliff-face straight ahead or would launch into space above an abyss plunging into unseen depths below.