Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (9 page)

Just before eleven o'clock on Sunday I heard the phut-phutting of a motorbike splutter to a stop in the road below my house. I looked out and there was a tiny red scooter thing more or less completely submerged beneath a mountain of man and material. Gregorice disengaged himself and came up the steep path looking like a combination of Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing.

In either hand he carried a four gallon tin of what turned out to be a super-saturated solution of whitewash, and the kitbag on his back was revealed as a tank with pumping attachment and various nozzles.

Waiting for him on the terrace were all the containers I could muster full of water. They had taken me four separate journeys to the well to collect, but
Gregorice immediately emptied two buckets on the ground so he could use them to mix his whitewash. By the time he had got his tank filled and under pressure he was ready for more water.

Before I set off for the well he had a trial burst from his spray-gun. All over some nice grey rocks around which I was planning to construct my rockery. Then, while I stood there, paralysed and inarticulate, he converted my solitary green oak tree into a truncated ghoul of grey ectoplasm which writhed horribly in the wind. I also got a pretty good coating myself. I hurried off as soon as I could get some motion into my legs.

Operation Whitewash was in full swing by the time I got back. The contents of my two rooms were heaped on the terrace and clouds of spray were billowing from the windows. Somewhere inside was Gregorice, though I could only tell by his voice, which kept on reminding me that he was the best whitewasher in Southern Greece and inviting me to agree with him by this visible evidence of his prowess. I felt as powerless to exert any direction or control over the proceedings as over Niagara. Sitting down on an unwhitewashed rock, I surrendered myself to superior forces. Gregorice emerged looking like something out of Jules Verne in a shroud and a gas-mask arrangement which did nothing to stop the flow of words, though it did seem to inhibit the range of conversation which consisted almost entirely of rhetorical questions devoted to confirming the fact that he was the greatest.

“You and Cassius Clay,” I said weakly. He accepted the compliment gravely, considering it no more than his
due. In half an hour he had finished the inside and the outside of my house. Then he set about mixing another tankful of whitewash – a project I contemplated with a mixture of curiosity, wonderment and horror. “You are going to give it a second coating?” I asked.

“That is not necessary. The house is ready. In one hour, the whiteness will dazzle you. But I do not leave the job half-finished. There is first the chicken-house, and then all this.” He waved his hand vaguely to cover the greater part of my hillside. Of course, I should have stopped him then, but I was in the grip of some potent spell, a horrible fascination to see this thing through to the bitter end. For another twenty minutes I sat there, numb and dumb, with blanching face while Gregorice pursued his wild alabaster ambitions. He did not stop until every plant, rock, flower and bush within fifteen yards of the front of the house had been converted to a uniform grey, soon to dry into an eye-shattering white. Even my brown shoes got the treatment. He swirled his nozzle like a Surrealist artist, and with the same serious intent. Finally, he stopped and looked at me triumphantly.

It had taken only a few weeks of my new life on this undisturbed hillside to make me realise that what I lacked most in the way of essential equipment was an encyclopaedia of natural history.

What I really lacked most, of course, was knowledge – knowledge of that vast and teeming world from which man and civilisation have emerged and on which they are constantly encroaching.

I also realised the appalling inadequacy of conventional school education, at least, of my generation. Nature study, if I remember rightly, disappeared from the curriculum soon after kindergarten. Biology was reckoned a bit sissy for boys, and even that wonderful and always contemporary subject, geography, was deemed unworthy of study after Form IV.

Thus I came to my wilderness with a largely unremembered comprehension of trigonometry, Euclid and Latin declensions, and no comprehension at all of those myriad other worlds of which all my senses soon became acutely aware and in which every opening flower and intricate insect emphasised my ignorance.

I spent hours and hours of fascinated observation and hours and hours of frustration in wondering what? And why? And how? As a practical consideration there was an early need for recognition of ally and enemy – those creatures and plants I had to tolerate and those I had to destroy. I was learning the hard way.

Take ants.

On second thoughts, don't take ants. My house was a virtual anthill, ready-made. And I must confess that on occasions I found the hens' wheat piled in a symmetrical
crater in the middle of the bedroom floor and disappearing piece by piece down a hole in the middle, or scooped up a teaspoon of ants instead of sugar, or discovered an expedition in search of water inside my kettle only after I had filled the teapot… there were occasions when I included ant poison on my shopping list and brought it home full of pleasantly sadistic anticipation.

But I learned that ants not only scavenge wheat and sugar, they scavenge everything else they can find – especially in the autumn when they are feverishly stocking up for winter. So the ant poison protected my food and furniture from invasion by strategic dispersal while the ants had the run of the rest of the house and garden.

And a fine garbage cleaning job they did. I had only to spit a couple of grape pips on the floor or a bit of unwanted fig (this is one of the great advantages of unspoilt concrete) and within half an hour they could be seen moving by some invisible agency across the room to a hole in a distant corner. I witnessed a three-quarter inch sliver of broken mirror going down an anthill, though what purpose that could serve baffled me. For the Queen Ant?

I was not the first human to find endless inspiration from watching the ant's industry, dedication and fantastic determination. But it surely could not be motivated by intelligence. If it were, there would surely have been a strike a long time ago. And what intelligence could have been guiding the movements of a dual column of ants
that had been going in opposite directions, round the outside of one corner of my hut through the walls and out again in a continuous, perpetually moving circuit every minute of every hour, twenty hours a day for the past six months?

They were doing it then and for all I knew, they would be doing it in ten years. My theory was that they were responding to one of their instincts to go somewhere and that they were always under the impression that they were going somewhere instead of in an endless circle. There was no message and no instinct that could stop them. But what did they eat and drink and when did they breed?

My world was full of this sort of spectacle and conundrum. Some of them were answered.

My hot siestas were noisy with the drone of hornets and hunting wasps probing the holes and crannies of my walls. I had always thought they were looking for a place to build their little mud tenements or lay their eggs.

Then one day I shook out my jacket that had been hanging on the wall for some months and out tumbled half a dozen smooth, brilliantly engineered mud barrels. I broke a couple of them open. Out of one fell a soft and succulent green caterpillar and from the other seven small spiders; each little barrel also contained a white egg.

One question was answered. The hornets and wasps were sealing up caterpillars and the spiders, together with their own eggs in the mud tenements, so that their young would have a supply of fresh food when they hatched out.

But other questions immediately posed themselves. I regarded spiders among my allies as long as they laid
snares for flies (Public Enemy Number One in my realm) and mosquitoes (Number Two). Hornets and wasps could best be described as armed neutrals, but not desirable bedfellows. Anyway, I'd rather have had seven spiders than one hornet. What intrigued me was that each capsule containing spiders contained seven of them. One question, you can see, led onto others.

There was one morning when I felt as I imagine Fleming must have felt when he first saw his penicillin fungus or Cortes when he glimpsed the Pacific “Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

I was hanging up the washing at the time. Suddenly, at my feet I saw the slow undulating movement of an unhurried snake. From a safer distance I looked again and noticed that it was not only undulating sideways but up and down. I was not aware of any snakes that could do this and I approached a little closer.

It was not a snake. It was fourteen caterpillars, nose to tail, pretending to look like a snake. Each of those caterpillars knew that separate and alone they would be snapped up and swallowed by the first passing bird. Together, in the form of a snake, they knew that birds would avoid them. But how did they know? And how did they know what a snake looked like? Or that birds were frightened of snakes? Because I did not expect many people to believe this phenomenon, I took a photograph of it. Unfortunately, it was a bad photograph but there, undoubtedly, were fourteen caterpillars trying to look like a small snake – and succeeding.

I followed their slow progress across four yards of earth to a cluster of rocks. They disappeared down a space between with excruciating caution and it must have been absolute hell for the last man down. Of course, they
might have all been women on a culminating mission to lay their eggs. I would never know. The next day when I went to go look for them and cleared the rocks away they had all disappeared.

Oh! My aching back. It was cotton picking time out there and I had made the sort of barter arrangement to which I was becoming accustomed in order to ensure my olive oil supplies lasted through the winter. I only hoped I would survive to enjoy the oil.

Cotton picking started at the beginning of September and finished at the end of October. From shortly after sunrise to shortly after sunset it continued daily for sixty-one hot days of which easily the best part was the first two minutes. The really fast pickers could move between two rows of cotton plants, grabbing with both hands, and collect up to two hundredweight of cotton in a day. Rates of pay varied between three pence and six pence a kilo.

My own talents were assessed at three pence worth of oil a kilo. After a week's work my rate of production increased from forty pounds a day to round about eighty. I achieved this largely by copying the methods of the experts. For although there was a good deal of art in the profession, there was also a considerable amount of craft, and anybody picking two hundredweight a day had concentrated his expertise on the easy pickings, leaving the more obstinate cotton on the low-lying plants to mugs like me.

For the technically interested and for those who may feel inspired to join the cotton picking next season, the cotton boll expanded on ripening into four fluffy quarters. If this is judged to be a redundant use of words, I would point out that it very often expanded into five-quarters and, whereas it was comparatively easy to grab a handful of four in one operation, that recalcitrant fifth
one could upset the whole concept of economic time and motion. When two handfuls had been gathered they were stuffed into an apron carried across the stomach and thighs like a marsupial pouch. At the end of an hour you would begin to look and feel like a kangaroo with triplets – though hardly as bounding – and it would be time to unload and start refilling.

The fact that I was only able to collect such an insignificant amount was due to my inability to walk slowly forward with my head below my knees for any length of time.

It was this process of long periods with the head below knee level varied by short upright intervals which led me to believe that the flow of blood to the head, interrupted by the sudden, brief ebb, was responsible for the strange flights of fancy which the solitary cotton picker could enjoy provided he could overcome the pain in his back. And back in this case refers to the whole area between kidneys and Achilles tendon.

Incidents, however, were not always fanciful.

There I was, one morning, just tying up my
kaiki
alongside the bastions of Tower Bridge and waiting for the Rolls-Royce to take me off to lunch with the Lord Mayor at Guildhall, when I heard this rustling noise that was just different enough from the noise of the wind in the nearby reeds to make my hair stand a little bit on end.

I got back from the Pool of London with a jerk that brought me wide-eyed upright. It was all of twenty long seconds before I saw it, less than a couple of yards away and still moving slowly towards me. It's not much good hitting a four-foot snake with a handful of cotton wool. But I had to throw something.

All I wanted to do was stop it until I could find a
suitable weapon. No doubt an unexpected handful of fluff in the face would stop anyone, and this snake showed every evidence of astonishment. It reared up and blinked.

At this stage we could have gone our separate ways and no harm done, but I did not like the idea of snakes slithering under the cotton leaves where I was working in bare legs and very often in near darkness. Snake lovers will be sorry to learn that I found a big, and accurate, rock.

As further alleviation of the monotony a loud crashing noise from my house just above where I was working sent Dog and me rushing madly up the hill.

Dog beat me to it by a good twenty yards but, when I reached the terrace, I was startled to see him come bolting out of the door with a horned and hairy head about a foot behind his rump.

I was about to lead the way downhill when the rest of the creature emerged, revealing itself as an adolescent billy-goat which had wandered into my kitchen and jumped on the table.

The result was not quite bull-in-a-china-shop, but it was a pretty good attempt for a small goat.