Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance
Page 18
By great good fortune, the builders had laid on a connection to the main water supply and while the helpers dispersed, Xenophon sprayed every inch of her, every nook and cranny, with a strong jet of water while I stood at her head and gave what comfort I could.
She was shivering with cold by the time he had finished but munched contentedly enough at some grass when we tied her up. Later when I brought back some fruit and vegetables for her as a special treat she gave me a glad bray of anticipation which dispelled my gloomy thoughts.
It was two weeks before I saw or heard of Gaithuri again.
I had taken a long-awaited fishing trip to an outlying island intending to be back in twenty-four hours. But the weather turned bad and it was four days before we were able to leave the shelter of the island’s solitary little port.
My first question to Xenophon when we got back to Matala was: “How is Gaithuri and the little one?”
He dropped his eyes before answering and did not look at me when he said: “Gaithuri is dead!”
It had been sudden and unexpected. He had given her a meal of grain and a bucket of water as usual in the evening. The next morning she was dead.
That evening I talked sadly with the villagers about Gaithuri. Among them was the farmer from whom I had originally bought her and who had told me she was ten years old.
“Now you can tell me the truth about her age,” I said to him.
“She was twenty,” he admitted gravely. “As old as my eldest son.”
That, I thought, made her close to a centenarian in human terms. I was strangely happy at the thought that the two of us had spent perhaps the best year of our lives together.
Chapter 45
The Civilising Presence
The road was a little different to the one I had walked along so expectant and wondering that January day more than eight years before.
It was tarred for a start. In those other days it had been suitable only for donkeys and tractors and, after heavy rains, rowing boats.
I was back on this road of memory as a result of a message that had been carried to my winter lair in Crete by a visitor from Gythion in the Peloponnese that the old man did not expect to survive another winter and hoped that the summer would bring me to see him.
It was something I could not refuse because the old man was Janni who had given me my first home in Greece – the hillside hut on the edge of the Mani peninsula, in which I had spent the first two years of my exile.
And although I suspected – rightly as it turned out – that reports of Janni’s ill-health were exaggerated, I also had a nostalgia to see again the place where I had lived.
I called it the upstairs house because he had also provided me with the ruins of a mansion on the beach which was marvellous when it wasn’t raining.
I knew everybody along that mile and a half of road from the bus stop and knew, as I left the main road behind me, that I would have to run a gauntlet of hospitality that could well defeat my main objective of revisiting two of the most rewarding years of my life.
Of course, all these people (there were only five families along the road) were very much a part of that, but I had made the hut a home and turned the wilderness about it into a garden.
My first neighbour was no problem. His house was 200 yards back from the road and obscured by the sprouting fields.
Another couple of hundred yards along and I was going past George’s house on tiptoe, my eyes averted but my ears alert for the loud, blasphemous greeting that would mean an hour of foot-trodden wine and some incredibly indiscreet questioning by George and his wife, Athena – which I used to mispronounce anathema.
The next farm belonged to Dimitrios and Voula. There were three reasons why I should call on them.
The first was that they were certain to invite me to lunch later; the second was that I needed the magic of Voula’s ventosa (the ancient method of cupping to draw out the evil of lung congestion); the third was that I wanted to see the fulfilment of my prediction that their ten-year-old daughter would grow into a beautiful woman.
They were just finishing a late breakfast when I arrived. I had long since ceased to be surprised at wine on the breakfast table in Greece but I was allowed to proceed after two fried eggs, two glasses of retsina and the ventosa on promising to return for lunch.
The prediction about the daughter, I might add, had been adequately justified.
I had envisaged insuperable difficulty in getting past the magazie just down the road. This magazie was a combination bakery, grocery and taverna and acted as the social centre for the whole district. It was there I had been arrested one midnight for playing poker – still illegal in Greece.
Either proprietor Stavros or wife Maria or daughter Eugenia or son Nikkos would be sure to see and stop me and that would begin a session of wine or ouzo.
If they were all inside with shutters closed I knew that at least three dogs would rush out in horrible uproar and try to bite my ankles. They always used to.
The windows were shuttered all right. So were all the doors. And had been for a long time.
The space under the mulberry tree that once shaded our midday, wine-smoothed conversations was a confusion of long-established thistles and weeds.
The final obstacle before the long, lonely, curving stretch to the foot of the path up to my hut did not offer much cause for evasion.
It was the home of Dionysios, brother of Voula, who in my day had exhibited all the makings of a confirmed bachelor.
But Voula had revealed that he had been recently married and, as it was Sunday morning, I assumed he would be too preoccupied to pay any attention to a passing pedestrian.
In this I was apparently right and came unhindered to the bend in the road from which I would catch a first glimpse of the white-washed corner of my house through the close-crowded trees.
There was an inner and mounting excitement which was only a little dampened by the sign at the river crossing: For Sale – Beach Building Sites. Apply…
The zigzag path that led up to my front terrace had disappeared under six years of fecund vegetation.
I searched for another way up and came across a broad if steep path made by sheep converging from their mountain grazing to cross the ford on to the lands beyond.
Those laborious stone steps I had made were invisible but firm underfoot and I soon stood on a level patch that had once been my lawn waist deep in thistles and nettles and a host of flowers.
It had been the only lawn in Mani but now I searched my immediate environment for some sign that I had lived there and hacked and hewed and hoed and planted this earth into a recognisable bit of civilisation.
But the wilderness had advanced from the bastions of the mountain to which I had once made it retreat and had now totally overrun my few square yards of flowers and vegetables and rockeries.
Sole survivors of two years of the civilising presence were the six-inch high cactus plants that I had filched from some park. They had sprouted to a muscular and many-pronged five feet. Survival of the fittest.
I turned to the house itself. Every inch of those two square rooms, inside and out, was familiar and I was not surprised to see that the stonework above the kitchen door had collapsed.
Seven years ago I had anticipated this by cutting down a young oak tree and using it as a prop for the doorway.
Nor was I taken completely by surprise when I pushed the door open to be welcomed by a hiss. I had spent the first three months of my arrival in almost daily encounters with snakes. It was to be expected they would return with the wilderness when man withdrew.
There was this black head, weaving and flickering about two feet off the ground above a heap of rubble in the corner. With snakes I worked on the principle that they are all poisonous. So I conducted my inspection, against the hissing background, through the windows, all of which were unglazed and open.
There was, of course, nothing left of my hand-made furniture, but surely two years of constant occup
ation would have left some signs – if only scars.
But there was nothing to show that Peter White had passed this way except some nails hammered into the wall above the connecting doorway from which I had suspended a sackcloth curtain, and a hole carved in the wooden shutter of the kitchen window to accommodate the chimney from the stove.
But wait!
I scrambled through the thistle thicket to the wild olive tree growing out of the rocky terrace. There, just discernible in the bark, was the pale wraith of two carved initials: P.W.
The snake was still hissing when I gently closed the door and turned away.
One thought predominated over every other memory and emotion.
That it would be wonderful to start all over again.
Photographs
Zen
Annabel, Deborah, me and Mrs L
The upstairs house
The seaward view
The inland view
The well
Operation Whitewash
Water, Water, Every Where
Dog and me
Cancer
Gaithuri at rest
Gaithuri at work
NIKH
Robert Crisp in Cardiff, June 1935 to play Glamorgan © Getty Images
Picture credits: all courtesy of the Estate of Robert Crisp and Getty Images where noted.
Acknowledgements
I would like to say a big thank you to Jonathan Twiston Crisp, a noble soul, a prince among men and a true brother who has looked out for me from the day I was born till now. If it were not for his generous support and unfailing encouragement to do the research, editing and polishing, this little masterpiece would not exist. It was a privilege and a pleasure to weave together these halcyon days from the articles in the Sunday Express and the papers that our father left in a trunk in his house in Greece.
I’d also like to mention the National Newspaper Library in London, part of the magnificent British Library, for preserving every issue of the Sunday Express between 1967 and 1974, where most of these pieces originally appeared. I spent a happy few days in 2012 going through the microfiche rolls and making photocopies of the articles.
Peter Crisp, 1 January 2014, Rock, Cornwall.
A Note on the Author
CRISP, ROBERT JAMES, DSO, MC, who died in Essex on March 3, 1994, aged 82, was one of the most extraordinary men ever to play Test cricket. His cricket, which is only a fraction of the story, was explosive enough: he is the only bowler to have taken four wickets in four balls twice.
Born in Calcutta, he was educated in Rhodesia and, after taking nine for 64 for Western Province against Natal in 1933–34, which included his second set of four in four, was chosen for the South Africans’ 1935 tour of England. He took 107 wickets on the tour at a brisk fast-medium, including five for 99 in the Old Trafford Test. Crisp played four further Tests against Australia in 1935–36 and appeared eight times for Worcestershire in 1938 without ever achieving a huge amount.
But it is astonishing that he ever found a moment for such a time-consuming game as cricket. He was essentially an adventurer – he had just climbed Kilimanjaro when he got news that he was wanted for the 1935 tour – with something of an attention span problem.
Like other such characters, his defining moment came in the Second World War when he was an outstanding but turbulent tank commander, fighting his own personal war against better-armoured Germans in Greece and North Africa. He had six tanks blasted from under him in a month but carried on fighting and was awarded the DSO ‘for outstanding ability and great gallantry’. However, he annoyed authority so much that General Montgomery intervened personally and prevented him being given a Bar a year later; his second honour was downgraded to an MC. Crisp was mentioned in dispatches four times before being invalided out in Normandy. The King asked if his bowling would be affected. ‘No, sire,’ he is alleged to have replied, ‘I was hit in the head.’
Crisp never did play again and found the tedium of peacetime presented him with a problem far harder than anything offered by the Germans. He was briefly a journalist for a succession of newspapers, and went back to South Africa where he founded the now firmly-established paper for blacks, Drum. But he wanted a magazine about tribal matters rather than something appealing to urban blacks and rapidly fell out with his proprietor.
He returned to England, tried mink farming and, for an unusually long time by Crisp standards, worked as a leader-writer on the East Anglian Daily Times. While there he wrote two accounts of his war exploits, Brazen Chariots (1957) and The Gods Were Neutral (1960). Then he suddenly left and lived in a Greek hut for a year. Told he had incurable cancer, he spent a year walking round Crete, selling accounts to the Sunday Express. He died with a copy of the Sporting Life on his lap, reportedly having just lost a £20 bet, a risk-taker to the last. Crisp’s 276 career wickets came at an average of only 19.88, but statistics are absurd for such a man.
Wisden obituary © Wisden 1995
His Final Message
You will be sorry to hear that Robert died on 3 March 1994. He was anxious that you should be told and that you should know that you were in his thoughts during his last days. He would also like you to know that he died happy in his memories to which you contributed so much.
There will be no funeral arrangements but he hopes you will open a celebratory bottle of wine, which he regrets he will not be able to share with you. Some laughter, please, to accompany his departure; no tears.
This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain between 1967–1974 in instalments by
Express Newspapers/Express Syndication
Copyright © Robert Crisp
‘The life of the most extraordinary man to play Test cricket’
© Guardian News & Media Ltd 2013
Extract taken from ‘Little Gidding’ taken from Four Quartets © T.S. Eliot renewed 1970 Esme Valerie Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Wisden obituary © Wisden 1995, used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
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eISBN: 9781448215225
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