Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (2 page)

That was his second death. The first was 30 years earlier. That was in the Libyan desert, the day after he discovered, while listening to the BBC's 9 o'clock news on his tank's wireless set, that he was to be awarded the Distinguished Service Order for conspicuous gallantry. Shell shrapnel hit his head. As he lay crumpled at the foot of his turret, Crisp felt “beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was going to die. The darkness I was sinking in to was the darkness of the grave. Strangest of all, I didn't care a damn. As I went out into eternal darkness the last thought I had was … death is easy.” He survived, thanks only, he was told by the gynaecologist who performed emergency surgery on him, “to the good thick bit of skull” that the metal hit.

So far as anyone can be, Bob Crisp was an honest memoirist. As his son says “like most biographers, while they appear to be critical of themselves they very rarely appear in a light that is totally unflattering”. He does write with startling honesty about his mistaken assault on an English tank. He accidentally killed its gunner, “a young lad, red hair, fair skin, freckled face. As they pulled him out, the head rolled side-ways and two, wide-open, empty eyes looked straight into mine. In that moment I touched the rock-bottom of experience.” The war moved so fast, though, that he scarcely had time to dwell on what he had done. More cheerfully, Crisp also admits that he once caught crabs after pinching another officer's pair of silk pyjamas to sleep in (and foolishly tried to cure himself by dousing his genitals in high-octane petrol).

The early months of Crisp's war were spent carousing in Alexandria, singing and dancing for his dinner (typically
escalope Viennoise
and a bottle of white wine) in the local cabaret clubs. He seduced a local showgirl, Vera, who he had to leave behind when he was sent to Greece. He writes so tenderly of their relationship that he almost persuades the reader he really was in love. Until he describes their final kiss: “I knew that I would always think of that last, innocent contact – and that if I ever missed her it would help me to remember how her breath always smelled, just a little bit, of garlic.”

Greece was little more than a rout, one long retreat from the border with Yugoslavia back to the bottom tip of the country. Along the way Crisp had three tanks blown up underneath him, hijacked a New Zealand officers' Mess lorry, and shot down a low-flying German Heinkel bomber with a burst from his machine gun while it was in the middle of a strafing run. The beating he took seemed to fuel his thirst for action. He found it at the battle to lift the German siege of Tobruk, where he fought continuously for 14 days, on an average of 90 minutes sleep a night. He won his DSO at Sidi Rezegh, where he led his tank in a single-handed charge across an airfield that temporarily checked an advance of 70 German Panzers.

Crisp later told the cricket writer David Frith that his courage was a “reaction to the shame he felt at being afraid”. But his modesty concealed a darker truth, as he once confessed to Jonathan. To his shame, Crisp admitted to his son that he actually “loved the war. He enjoyed it. He thought it was fantastic”.

MacDonald Fraser, who also served in North Africa, writes brilliantly about men like Bob Crisp. They epitomise, Fraser says, “this myth called bravery, which is half panic, half lunacy”. After the attack on Sidi Rezegh, Crisp seemed to catch a fever for fighting. The next day, stranded on foot, he commandeered a signals tank whose crew had “never even fired their gun before”, let alone been in battle. Crisp hauled their officer out of his turret, and with a cry of “Driver advance! Gunner, get that bloody cannon loaded!” led them in a surprise attack on a group of German anti-tank guns. Afterwards the driver was so shell-shocked by this startling turn of events that he started running around in small circles with a wild look on his face. The poor chap hadn't the faintest idea where he was or what he was doing. Crisp cured him with a “tremendous kick up the backside”.

Jonathan Crisp says he has it on “very good authority from a lot of different people” that his father was recommended for the Victoria Cross, but Field Marshal Montgomery refused to allow it because Crisp was so ill-disciplined. He was demoted three times. But then he was also mentioned in despatches four times. Crisp was awarded the Military Cross instead. He was presented with it by King George VI, who asked him if his cricket career would be affected by the wound. “No sire,” Crisp replied. “I was only hit in the head.”

In fact Crisp was too injured to play cricket again. After the war he went back into journalism, and, almost a footnote in his life this, founded
Drum
, the radical South African magazine for the township communities. He fell out with his fellow editors there. “Like a lot of rogues,” Jonathan says. “He was very charming and entertaining until things started to go wrong.” So he came back to Britain to work on Fleet Street, and fell back in to his old friendships with two fellow rakes, Denis Compton and Keith Miller.

Having survived the war, and cancer, Bob Crisp finally died in his sleep, at home, in 1994. When Jonathan found his father's body in the morning, there was a copy of the
Sporting Life
in his lap. The only thing Bob Crisp left in the world was a £20 bet on the favourite in that year's Grand National. “It lost,” says Jonathan. “Of course.”

There is a line in
Big Fish
, Tim Burton's movie about how we can never really know the lives of our parents, which goes: “In telling the story of my father's life, it's impossible to separate the fact from the fiction, the man from the myth. The best I can do is to tell it the way he told me. It doesn't always make sense and most of it never happened … but that's what kind of story this is.” Well, Jonathan Crisp knows that most of his father's story really did happen. And if there are a few exaggerations and fabrications along the way, well, the story is truer for their inclusion. “One of the most extraordinary men ever to play Test cricket,” says
Wisden
. If there's someone out there who tops him, I'd like to hear their tale.

We first read about Robert Crisp in Andy Bull's article in the
Guardian
‘The life of the most extraordinary man to play Test cricket'. We imagined what a fascinating autobiography Robert Crisp might have written and contacted his sons to see if such a book existed.

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.

“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.”

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.