Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (21 page)

One part of the legend was that Mouse Island in Corfu was – no doubt because of its shape – the petrified remains of Ulysses' boat turned to stone as a punishment for having taken him home.

I could not remember who ordered or executed such punishment, nor why. I had no wish to be so immortalised.

If there were any petrified remains of me or my rowing boat to be found, I hoped they'd be happily immured on some sunlit beach or, preferably under an olive tree where I would, at least, feel productive for a few hundred years.

My intentions for the foreseeable future could be put in one sentence: I was going to buy a rowing boat, ten foot or twelve foot long, equip it as bed-living-room (and possibly kitchen) and row around Corfu, never venturing more than ten yards from the shore and, whenever more than a Force One gale sprang up, tying up to the nearest
taverna
until it subsided. I had no idea what distance was involved in the circumnavigation of Corfu nor how long it would take. I hoped it would be at least two years.

Tolstoy and Hemingway had been ejected from my travelling library to make room for an Admiralty Pilot of the eastern Mediterranean and a chart of the coast of Corfu and the adjacent coasts of Greece and Albania. The latter publications were full of marvellous knowledge for mariners but both were ominously silent about what was likely to happen to me if I got blown – or washed – ashore on the coast of Albania which was ominously close to that of my island.

But that was only a situation which had to be dealt with if and when it arose. My present preoccupation,
apart from finding a rowing boat and having two good hands to row it with, was to determine whether I would row around Corfu clockwise or anti-clockwise. There were more ponderables in this question than you might think.

I was on this small floating paradise of Corfu, suspended between Greece and Italy in space and history, for no other reason than that I was going to row around it.

The last time I'd rowed anything was in 1947 when, concerned about a developing waistline, I used to take a small boy out before breakfast and row around the Serpentine.

I was still concerned about a developing waistline, but that was not the purpose of my present venture.

Having been the first sexagenarian with cancer to complete the circumperambulation of Crete – assisted by a donkey – I thought it would be an added achievement to be the first ditto to complete the circumnavigation of Corfu in a rowing boat – unassisted, as Ulysses was, by anything.

But first one must find his rowing boat. This was an easy matter in places like the Serpentine at so much an hour but I had no intention of hiring a rowing boat at so much an hour to row around Corfu, a journey that I hoped would occupy me for the next year or two.

There are 8,760 hours in a year, including Sundays. So it was necessary to buy a boat.

This had not proved altogether easy. There were a lot of rowing boats in Corfu and a good proportion of them were clustered in the moat of the Old Fort in the capital.

I had been there every morning and every evening of the first three days of my stay and had been unable to find one owner nor anybody who knew an owner.

So I did what I should have done as soon as I arrived and walked the two kilometres of beautiful but
slightly smelly esplanade that separates the main town from the fishing suburb of Anemomilos.

There were three men in the
taverna
excluding the staff. I simply announced in Greek: “I want to buy a rowing boat,” ordered a half-litre of
krasi
, sat down and prepared for a lengthy wait.

The results were more immediate than I had hoped for. Two of the men stood up and walked silently out. In the next ten minutes I had three propositions put to me.

A man came in and said: “You want a rowing boat? I have one.”

“How much?”

“12,000 drachmas.” (About 170 pounds)

“
Po po po
,” I said, which is Greek for exactly what it sounds like.

This conversation was more or less repeated with the man who came in two minutes later with a price of 10,000. A third man appeared who said 6,000. It was time to go and have a look.

Six thousand drachmas was a lot more than I had expected to pay for a second-hand rowing boat. A year before I had watched a brand new boat being built in a yard at Chania which would have cost me 10,000 drachmas but in that year the raging inflation that had hit the whole world had nearly doubled the prices of many things in Greece. So I did not, on reflection, consider 6,000 exorbitant especially when it was pointed out to me that the Chania price did not include the paintwork.

When I saw the rowing boat moored to the retaining wall of the esplanade I tried hard to conceal my delight. It was almost a replica of the image I had been carrying in my mind since soon after I had ended my walk with Gaithuri.

Just over four metres (about fifteen feet) in length it (she?) was comfortably broad in the beam. It was a three-seater affair with facilities for rowing from each seat.

I didn't know yet how much water it drew but that was clearly something I should have found out the easy way instead of the hard way.

When I first saw her she was covered in mats against the sun but these were soon stripped off to reveal a clean green-and-white striped motif pleasing to the eye and harmonious with the environment.

Also revealed was the name in black capitals on each side of the bow and prominent on the backrest of the rearmost seat: NIKH. That was the Greek word for victory.

I could think of no good reason for changing it except perhaps to Nicky, which I thought of as more friendly and feminine and therefore, from then on, it would be “she”.

There was, for the sake of custom and my reputation, a little haggling to be done.

“Five thousand,” I said.

“No, six.”

“Look,
kirios
, you want six thousand. I want five thousand. How about five thousand, five hundred?”

The logic of this argument must have seemed to him irrefutable. His shrug meant acceptance.

This was, of course, nearly four times as much as I paid for Gaithuri, but there were compensating economic and other factors. A boat did not require food and water every day and this one didn't require petrol and oil. I could leave it out in the wet for free and I could leave it tethered to a tree for days or weeks while I was away without having to pay a farmer ten drachmas a day to
look after it.

Something else I could do on the boat that I couldn't do on the donkey was sleep. It shared with Gaithuri the great advantage of not being able to answer back. And it couldn't kick.

She, the boat, no doubt had her own characteristics and some anti-human vices but these were still to be discovered. Something I discovered in two minutes was what a landlubber I was.

The old man who was selling it (he was sixty-seven) went aboard like a gazelle by placing one foot on the gunwale or the thwart or whatever it was and leaping nimbly into the bottom of the boat.

If I had attempted it I was absolutely sure I would have ended up in the sea. I went aboard like a walrus encountering an escalator for the first time.

I had no difficulty rowing in the conventional (Serpentine) fashion even though the oars were completely different and had a strange feel in the water. But when I stood up and rowed in the Mediterranean fashion, facing forward, I got an aching back in something less than ten seconds.

This method may have been fine for gondoliers but it was not a posture I would have recommended for anybody taller than four feet eleven inches. Nevertheless, it was something that I had to learn to cope with as I could already foresee plenty of occasions when I would have to look where I was going.

So another adventure began. The sun, I fancied, was going to prove a crueller enemy than the sea. I hoped to defeat him by installing one of those multi-coloured beach umbrellas. It would serve a dual purpose because whenever there was a following breeze I would tilt it into
a spinnaker.

Enemies like wind and wave I intended to avoid altogether though there are many ancient mariners around only too ready to tell me that you can never anticipate all their whimsies. They gave you the impression of hoping that you'd hit a typhoon on your first day out. But I did not intend to go further from the shore than I could easily swim back from and, for most of the time, than I could walk back from.

I must also confess to having been vaguely frightened with that pit-of-the-stomach feeling that comes to those who wait for the referee to say “Seconds out!” or the starter to say “On your marks!” It was not a wholly unpleasant sensation.

I was sure it was because the sea was not my element. Though I didn't expect the feeling to survive the first week or so.

Humanity, including this human, had an amazing capacity for getting used to anything and there was probably no more true saying in the whole of Mr Benham's
Book of Quotations
than familiarity breeds contempt. As if to ensure that I didn't get too familiar there was a letter in an abandoned air edition of the
Daily Express
lying on the cafe table beside which I was writing.

“When will people learn that they should not venture to sea without a sound knowledge of seamanship, navigation and emergency procedures and without proper safety equipment…”

The writer also suggested that coastguards should
prevent people leaving port who were not thus instructed and equipped. I could only hope that the Corfu coastguard would not get round to acting on such advice.

I supposed the inflatable ring I had acquired could be considered safety equipment, but that was much more concerned with my posterior than with my future.

Gaithuri? Xenophon in Matala had promised to keep me fully informed of any major developments in her pregnancy – or should I say minor?

He even suggested before I left that should the offspring be a male it should be called Petros, and if female, Petra. Thus we achieve intimations of immortality.

It wasn't exactly the sort of day I would have chosen to begin my row around Corfu.

Thunder had rumbled around the twin peaks of Pantokrator all morning and across the narrow waters the rain was soaking the mainland.

By mid-afternoon, the clouds had rolled away to be survived by what was known, I believed, as good sailing wind. But it was no use for rowing.

“Tomorrow it will be better,” said Christos, the previous owner of Nicky, my boat. “Why don't you wait?”

I had been waiting too long already. Anyway I wouldn't be going far that evening. Just around the corner.

With the shrug that I was expecting and which said plainly: “Well, it's your boat now, not mine,” he helped me load my gear. It was just about all I possessed in the world and after I had distributed it around the place, it looked as though I had been living there for years.

It had not taken much thought to decide which way I was going to row around Corfu. A brief study of the Admiralty chart and
The Channels of Corfu with the Adjacent Coasts of Albania and Greece
indicated that it would be sensible to go clockwise.

Saint Spyridon, as everybody who had ever been to Corfu knew, was the long-established and revered protector of the island and its inhabitants and was
particularly potent in the matter of protecting sailors and fishermen. A visit, I thought, would be prudent.

The saint lay in permanent state in his own church in the centre of town. The morning I called he was having a very busy time with the mothers and the relatives of the young men recently mobilised against the ancient enemy, all pleading tearfully for his intervention.

However I bought a five-drachma candle and placed it among the hundreds of other supplicant flames hoping that I would not be overlooked in the rush.

It was 6.15pm when I took the first strokes of my odyssey intending only to go as far as the first attractive and secluded beach for the night. Five minutes after leaving the shelter of the sea wall that holds the esplanade running south from the town I and Nicky were in difficulty.

The trouble was she had rather a large backside and as, in my ignorance, I had paid little attention to weight distribution, her stern was rather up in the air and at the mercy of every passing gust. Nothing on earth – or water – would have persuaded me to get off my seat with the boat heaving about like that.

So we pursued an erratic course not quite in the direction I wanted to take but with the wind blowing from the north there was no danger of ending up in Albania though there were moments when I thought there was some prospect of missing Corfu altogether on the starboard beam.

I was straining so hard on the oars to get round a lighthouse marked Gp F1 (2) R 10 sec. 28 ft 2M on the chart – and I hoped I would never get myself into a situation requiring a translation of that into English – that one of them snapped thus justifying the regulations
compelling all rowboats to carry a spare set of oars. Immediately Nicky whirled completely round on her own axis. I had more than a moment of panic before I got another oar functioning but the reward was waiting.

I rounded the headland and glided into a small corner of paradise. I recognised it immediately. It was Mon Repos, summer residence of the kings of Greece and looking as restful, peaceful and beautiful as its name, but cypress-shrouded and shuttered now against a king who might never come home.

A weathered pink and white stone jetty jutted into a small bay unruffled by the wind that whipped the white horses in the open channel I had just left and that bent the tops of the high trees above the cove. At the end of the jetty a solitary girl was absorbing the silence and the last of the sun. If I could have painted the sort of place I was looking for, this was an improvement on it. I kept a respectful distance, unwilling to disturb the solitude and the evident desire of the girl to enjoy it. She gave me a small salute when she saw me. I acknowledged it and shouted: