The Donkey Rustlers

by Gerald Malcolm Durrell

  The Donkey Rustlers

  Gerald Malcolm Durrell

  This lively story with a Greek island setting tells how Amanda and David plot to outwit the unpleasant local mayor and help their Greek friend, Yani. The villagers, and especially the mayor, depend on their donkeys for transport. If the children are to blackmail them successfully the donkeys must disappear. And disappear they do, to the consternation of the whole village . . .

  “. . . a rarity. Gerald Durrell has written a comedy that should be welcomed by readers of all sorts and sizes.”

  Growing Point

  THE DONKEY RUSTLERS

  For Andreas Damaschinos,

  my adopted godson,

  who lives on an island

  where this could well

  have happened

  CHAPTER 1

  Melissa

  The island of Melissa lies somewhere in the Ionian Sea. It is so tiny and so off the beaten track that very few people know about it. It is a lucky island in the sense that water is plentiful and so the countryside is lush with olive groves and cypress trees and at certain times great areas of it are pink and white with almond blossom. It is visited once a year by a small tourist boat which puts in to the port of Melissa and here the tourists tumble ashore and buy quantities of fake Greek antiquities, which are the local potteries’ chief source of income.

  The island boasts a small foreign colony which consists of one very elderly Frenchman, who lives in a remote villa and very rarely puts in a public appearance. Rumour has it that he is recovering from an unfortunate love affair but to judge by the number of plump, pretty peasant girls he employs at his villa, he has found the right antidote for his sorrow. Then there are two elderly English ladies who spend their lives rescuing stray cats, doing good works and giving excruciatingly boring English lessons to those Melissiots who wish to acquire a knowledge of the English tongue.

  That is, so to speak, the static population, but during the summer months the few people who know about Melissa (and who are wise enough) come and rent crumbling villas in the country where they lie in the sun, bathe in the lukewarm sea and every year become more and more devoted to the island and its charming, gentle inhabitants. Melissa is really a sort of looking-glass world where the term logic can never be used; on it practically anything can happen, and frequently does.

  The Patron Saint of Melissa is Saint Polycarpos. He had once, during his travels in 1230, been blown off course by a sirocco and had been forced to stay in the island until the weather cleared up. As a token of his gratitude for the hospitality shown him, he presented the island with a pair of elderly slippers. The Melissiots, enchanted with this generous gesture, immediately made him Patron Saint of the island, and the slippers (carefully enshrined) became the focal point for every religious ceremony.

  In the northern part of the island there is a small village called Kalanero. It is perched up on the hillside and down below it there is a flat, fertile area which is cultivated and which leads to the sea. The villagers get up every morning and go down the hillside — and it is a good two or three miles — on their donkeys to cultivate their various crops. In the centre of the village there lies a large Venetian villa which has been decaying in the sun for the last three hundred years or more.

  For a great number of years, the villagers of Kalanero regarded this villa with some animosity because the few people who came to stay there never rented it, and so, while other villages could boast that they had villas which were inhabited by foreigners, the people of Kalanero could not. Then there arrived the Finchberry-Whites.

  The father, Major-General Finchberry-White, was the personification of what the people of Melissa think an Englishman should be. He was tall, inclined to be a little portly and always walked everywhere with the air of one who owns the place. But he really was a Melissiot at heart. He had an obscure gift — at least obscure as far as the English are concerned — and that was his mastery over languages. I cannot, off hand, recall the number of languages there are in Europe, but however many there are, he spoke them all with the fluency of a native. So he had the immediate attraction to the local peasantry of an Englishman (of all things) speaking Greek. He had another attraction too; he had lost a leg and had an articulated aluminium one on which, in moments of stress, he played complicated African drum rhythms. When he discovered the villa in Kalanero and immediately rented it for a very lengthy period, the villagers were, of course, delighted. Now they not only had an Englishman living in their midst, but a Greek-speaking Englishman and, moreover, one who was obviously a war hero since he had lost his leg. The village was divided into two schools of thought as to how he had achieved this. One half insisted that he had done it while taking Rome single-handed; the other half were convinced that he did it while taking Berlin single-handed. The fact that he had lost it through getting rather drunk and falling down a flight of stairs in a friend’s house in Chelsea had not been vouchsafed to them. But it really was his command of the Greek language that endeared him to them most.

  The Major-General had only one ambition in life, and that was to paint, but owing to his leg he could cover only very short distances. This is the reason that he immediately rented the villa in Kalanero. It had a wide terrace which commanded a view of cypress trees with the sea as a background to them. So from this vantage point he could paint. He would set up his easel and paint numerous and excruciatingly bad pictures of cypress trees — which he was under the impression were easy to draw and that, if you put plenty of colour behind them, could be made to look as attractive as anything in the Royal Academy. So, with a pertinacity that I am sure earned him his rank, he painted picture after picture from this same vantage point, to the utmost satisfaction of both himself and the villagers. who, of course, treated him with a reverence that would have done credit to a Rembrandt.

  There was also, of course, a Mrs Finchberry-White and two children, a boy and a girl. The wife was one of those faded English women who once must have been very beautiful and was allowing herself to decay very charmingly. She spent her time drifting about vaguely, collecting wild flowers and organising thoroughly disorganised meals at irregular intervals. But of course it is the children who are, as it were, the hero and heroine of this story, David and Amanda.

  CHAPTER 2

  Arrival

  All two hundred and fifty inhabitants of the village of Kalanero were, of course, aware of the impending arrival of the Finchberry-Whites and so the whole village was in a turmoil of excitement and activity. Certainly the most excited person in the village was Yani Panioti; of the same age as the children, Yani had become their particular friend, and from the very start he had fallen deeply in love with Amanda and was her devoted slave. His wiry body was burnt brown by the sun and his movements were as lithe as a cat’s. Under his thatch of hair — as black as jet and as curly as wood shavings — his huge dark eyes stared at the world with a disarming limpid innocence, or else flashed with wicked impishness. Now he whistled softly and tunefully to himself as he helped prepare the villa, and his heart was gay because Amanda was coming back to him at last.

  So the great, creaking, sun-blistered shutters were thrown open in the villa and old Mama Agathi and her husband, who were caretakers, set to work sweeping up the accumulated winter’s spiders’ webs and scrubbing the white wood floors, while Yani himself supervised the sweeping and weeding of the great terrace. In fact, it is more than likely that the great terrace got more devoted sweeping and cleaning than The rest of the villa — but this was only natural since it was the General’s vantage point.

  Then one morning when the villagers awoke, they knew that the great day had arrived, for the Ionian Nymph (a small vessel with a list to starboard and a large ho
le In Its bows, which was Melissa’s only contact with the mainland) was due to arrive. In spite of its manifest unseaworthiness, the General liked to travel on it for, as he said, each voyage became a nautical adventure worthy of Raleigh or Drake. So the Ionian Nymph docked safely in the port of Melissa and very soon Yani Panioti, perched high in the branches of an olive tree, waved and shouted to the village below that he could see the white cloud of dust created by Melissa’s one and only taxi as it conveyed the Finchberry-Whites towards Kalanero.

  The exuberance with which the villagers greeted the arrival of the taxi in the main square of the village had to be seen to be believed. Even old Papa Yorgo, who (as everyone knew) was well past a hundred, had to be escorted out, tottering on two sticks, to shake hands. The Mayor, Niko Oizus, a circular man with a large walrus moustache who exuded sweat and cringing servility at the same time, was there to greet them on behalf of the village. Even Coocos, the so-called village idiot, with his round face wreathed in smiles, was there and was wearing (as it was a special occasion) the old bowler hat the General had brought. out from England the year previously. This hat was one of Coocos’s most treasured possessions, next to a goldfinch in a tiny cage which he carried everywhere with him and on which he lavished incredible love and devotion. Gifts were given by everybody. There were baskets of oranges and lemons, handkerchiefs full of eggs, almonds and walnuts and, of course, vast quantities of multi-coloured flowers of all shapes and descriptions.

  Yani thought that, if anything, Amanda looked even more beautiful than she had the year before, and he followed her with a broad grin on his brown face as she ran excitedly through the village, her golden hair shining in the sun, her blue eyes brilliant with excitement as she kissed and hugged everybody. David followed her at a more sedate pace and solemnly shook hands.

  “Do you like Kalanero?” said Yani teasingly, as the exuberance of the village died down, and the three children walked back towards the villa.

  “Like it?” said Amanda, her eyes flashing sapphire in the sunlight. “Of course we like it. It’s our village.”

  When they got to the big rusty wrought-iron gates that guarded the entrance to the villa, Yani’s mood of excited enthusiasm at their arrival appeared to have waned.

  “What are you looking so miserable about?” asked Amanda. “Aren’t you pleased that we are back?”

  “Of course I am,” said Yani. “It’s just that I’m worried.”

  “What are you worried about?” asked Amanda in astonishment.

  “I can’t tell you now,” he said. “I’ll meet you this evening down in the olive groves. I’ve got to go and do some work now’.

  “Is it something nice?” inquired Amanda, excitedly.

  “No,” said Yani. “It isn’t nice at all, and I want your advice.”

  “Tell us now,” David demanded.

  “No. Tonight in the olive groves where nobody can hear us,” said Yani, and he turned and ran back down to the village.

  By the time the children re-entered the villa it had been happily and lovingly disorganised by Mrs Finchberry-White and Mama Agathi. In spite of the most desperate attempts, Mrs Finchberry-White had never succeeded in mastering more than four or five words of Greek and as Mama Agathi was no linguist either, a combination of the two was something that had to be heard to be believed. The General had unpacked — as far as he was concerned — the most vital portion of their luggage, his easel and paints, and had set them up on the terrace.

  “Aren’t our villagers wonderful?” asked Amanda, spread-eagling herself on the flagstones in the sunshine.

  “Very kind,” said the General, carefully drawing another cypress tree with great precision and complete inaccuracy.

  “Father, you aren’t going to paint another one of those awful pictures, are you?” asked David. “Why don’t you paint it from some different angle? And you’re getting the trees all wrong too.”

  “When my senility requires me to have an lessons from you, David, I shall not keep you unapprised of the fact,” said the General, painting away unconcernedly.

  “I think you ought to do things like Picasso does,” said Amanda, “because then nobody would notice how badly you draw.”

  “Why don’t you go and help your mother?” asked the General, “otherwise, with her command of the Greek tongue, I doubt whether we will ever get any breakfast.”

  Amanda sighed a resigned sigh and wandered through the great echoing rooms to where her mother, in the kitchen, was endeavouring, without very much success, to explain what scrambled eggs were to Mama Agathi. As far as Mama Agathi was concerned, there were two kinds of eggs: one kind was raw and the other was hardboiled and dyed red for Easter.

  “Mother, you are hopeless,” said Amanda, impatiently. “Even if you can’t learn to speak Greek, you might at least stop confusing her by asking for things she has never even heard of.”

  “But my dear, everybody’s heard of scrambled eggs,” said Mrs Finchberry-White, startled. “But everybody. Why, when I was a gal, we had them every day for breakfast.”

  “There are some interesting little pinky sort of flowers in the other room that Yani gave me,” said Amanda, “why don’t you go and put them in water and I’ll organise the breakfast.”

  Happy to be released from the irksome burden of scrambled eggs, Mrs Finchberry-White drifted out of the kitchen to add the flowers to her collection, while Amanda with a few quick decisive phrases organised the sort of breakfast that the General desired.

  Presently the table was laid on the terrace and the General, smelling strongly of turpentine, took his place at the head of it and devoured great mountains of sunset-gold scrambled eggs, huge’ brown pieces of toast dripping with butter and covered thickly with a layer of the special marmalade that he had brought out with him for the purpose.

  “What are you children going to do to-day?” inquired Mrs Finchberry-White.

  “I want to go out to Hesperides,” said Amanda.

  “No,” David said firmly. “We can’t go to Hesperides without Yani and Yani is working to-day.”

  “But I want to swim,” said Amanda.

  “Well, you can swim, but we are not going to Hesperides without Yani.”

  It was curious that, in most things. Amanda was the more domineering character of the two children, but on the very rare occasion when her younger brother adopted that tone of voice with her, Amanda would give in meekly.

  “All right,” she said resignedly.

  The children had discovered Hesperides their first summer there. It was a tiny island lying off the coast near the village, thick with cypress trees so that it protruded from the water like a little furry isosceles triangle. Right on the very top was a terraced area with a minute church, such as you so frequently find in Greece, which would comfortably accommodate a congregation of three, provided no priest was present. Next to it were two small white-washed rooms in which for many years had lived a very old monk. He had long since died and although the Archbishop of Melissa had written to Athens for a replacement, no reply had been forthcoming. So, as the Archbishop had not heard from Athens within two years, he had presumed his letter had gone astray. He had made a mental note to write again but had forgotten about it and so the tiny island was completely deserted. It was within easy swimming distance of the coast and the first time the children had swum out there and Amanda had hauled herself, brown and dripping, ashore, she had seen, at the bottom of the flight of steps that led up to the church, a tangerine tree, heavy with fruit.

  “Look, David!” she had shouted, her blue eyes getting almost black with excitement, “just look! Golden apples!”

  David had gravely inspected the tree. “They’re not apples, you clot,” he had said. “They’re tangerines.”

  “Well, we can petend they’re apples,” she said conceding this point, “and we’ll call this place Hesperides.”

  And so, from then on. the island became known as Hesperides and even the villagers had started calling it
by this name. Prior to this the island had never been christened and had just been known, somewhat unfairly, as “the island with the monk on it.”

  “Are you going out for the whole day, dear?” inquired Mrs Finchberry-White. “If so, I’ll pack you up a picnic.”

  “Yes, we’ll go out for the whole day,” said Amanda, “but don’t bother, mother, it’s quicker if I pack up the picnic.”

  “Good, dear,” said Mrs Finchberry-White with relief, “because I’ve got any number of flowers the villagers gave me that I want to press, and your father wants to paint.”

  “Yes,” said the General, with satisfaction, swivelling round in his chair, screwing his monocle into his eye and peering at his hideous canvas with every evidence of satisfaction. “Should be able to knock that one off by sunset.”

  “Well, come on, David,” said Amanda impatiently, “I want to get down to the sea.”

  She went into the kitchen and rapidly and methodically packed a small haversack with the various foods that she thought were necessary for herself and her brother. She did not bother to take water, for the beach to which they were going had a spring that burst from the red and yellow cliffs, sparkled briefly across the sand and was then lost in the blue waters of the bay.