Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance

By Robert Crisp

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.
“Return?" asked the clerk.
“Definitely not," I told him.

In December 1966, the New Year looked exciting for fifty-five-year-old Robert Crisp. As a man whose youth was spent in constant adventure, leading a calm, domestic life in England had become a burden from which he needed to break free. Named by Wisden as "One of the most extraordinary men ever to play Test cricket" Crisp served as a soldier in the Second World War in Greece and North Africa for which he was decorated for bravery, later becoming a writer and journalist.

With his marriage over and his sons old enough to fend for themselves, Crisp decided to start a new life. With sixty pounds in his pocket, his wartime disability pension of ten pounds a month, and a plan to write about his adventures under a pseudonym, his journey began. Through twenty columns filed from abroad over years of rustic living and travel, Crisp, as Peter White, shared his experiences of hitch-hiking through Yugoslavia, settling in a beach shack in Greece where he attempted to cultivate the stubborn land, and a nearly fatal solo boat trip around Corfu. As the first year of his dream life came to a close, he found out that the stomach pain he had been suffering was not a side effect of too much Greek wine, but cancer. With a prediction of only one year to live, he set off on a trek around Crete, his only companion a donkey with plenty of personality.

Robert Crisp's account of his travels, originally serialised in the Sunday Express, is an honest, funny, touching account of this charming rogue's journey through a foreign land and culture in search of inner peace and happiness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781448215225

Robert Crisp

Robert Crisp was an extraordinary man: a Test cricketer described by Wisden as "one of the most extraordinary men to play Test cricket"; a decorated soldier (DSO, MC); a journalist who founded the South African newspaper, Drum, and wrote for The East Anglian Daily Times and The Sunday Express; an author, a mink farmer, an adventurer, a charmer. In short, a man of many talents.

Book preview

Part 1

Greece

Chapter 1

The Pattern of My Magic Carpet

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.

Return? asked the clerk.

Definitely not, I told him.

It was not only that seeing the name Salzburg awakened an old wish to see the town. From there, it seemed to me, I could go south-west, south-east, or due south and still be heading for the destination which heart and memory had chosen.

The train left at 10am. On the side of the carriage was spelled out the pattern of my magic carpet: DOVER – OSTEND – FRANKFURT.

It was not very full. Most of the passengers in my compartment were casually reading morning newspapers. They might just as well have been in the 10am for Bromley and Sevenoaks. A few letter-writers scribbled, serious-faced. Nobody bothered to look up as we pulled out of Platform 7. My departure could not have been less dramatic.

Was I unique on that train? Newspapers were on my lap, too. There was nothing about me to distinguish me from the other passengers.

Yet I was looking at London and Southern England for the last time. Not only at England, but at fifty-five years of my life. They flashed past the window as rapidly as telephone poles.

Twenty-four hours after leaving Victoria, I was standing on the main road leading south out of Salzburg. In my right hand, I carried my suitcase. A typewriter and a briefcase struggled for possession of my left hand.

My tactics were simple enough. Every time I heard a car coming I picked up my paraphernalia and lurched along the edge of the road. If the driver ignored me, I just dropped everything and basked in travel-brochure sunshine until the next one came along. Just before noon, a car slowed and halted. It was middle-aged. So was the woman at the wheel. Both were unmistakably English. There was a girl in the front seat. The back seat was empty.

"Konnen wir Sie helfen?" she asked, smiling.

Only as far as Athens, I replied in my deliberately best English.

That’s where we’re going, she said, determined to be imperturbable. Know anything about cars?

I can push one further than most.

Jump in then. You may be just the man we’re looking for.

The glum expression on daughter’s face indicated disagreement with this assessment but what did I care? Athens was suddenly within reach.

Athens was, in fact, nearly 2,000 miles and thirteen days later. And if I’d known how much pushing lay ahead of me, perhaps I would have carried on walking into Yugoslavia. It was not her daughter. There were the formal introductions. I am Mrs L… and this is my niece Deborah and we’re going to have a look at Greece while it isn’t full of tourists. I responded appropriately and made a brief reckoning that Mrs L was forty-something and Deborah was twenty-something. Well, at least, I thought, contemplating the days of propinquity ahead, they are both over the age of consent. Deborah clearly thought I was past the age for anything.

Four or five days, we reckoned, would see us in Athens. I was overwhelmed by my good fortune. But I should have had more respect for the verities of isostasy – isostasy being my own personal religion. It is a word manufactured from the Greek isos, meaning equal, to describe the geological phenomenon of maintaining equilibrium on the surface of the planet. If a mountain range is elevated the imbalance thus caused is compensated by an equal and opposite depression. If there were no compensating factor, no isostasy, the earth would develop a wobble in its revolutions with unpredictably dire consequences for the human race including probably universal seasickness.

That every action has an equal and opposite reaction is a well-known principle of physics. I have come to believe that it applies equally emphatically in the realm of metaphysics and human behaviour. Our lives, whether we recognise it or not, are affected intimately and potently by the same laws of compensation. We are always involved in isostasy. With curious appropriateness the Greek word also means perhaps.

The morning had been too favourable and I had been too lucky. Isostasy was not long in making adjustments. Five minutes after I had entered the car, cluttering up the empty space in the back with my load, there was a loud bang and we swerved to a halt as the rear tyre went flat. Naturally, it fell to me to change the wheel but I got a shock when I saw the condition of the tyres. They were all worn smooth.

Listen, I said to auntie, you’ll never get over that mountain let alone reach Athens on those tyres.

What would you suggest?

There’s only one thing to do. Go back to Villach and get a couple of retreads for the rear wheels.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon before we finally got away from Villach but the new sense of security was worth the delay. To make up the lost time it was agreed to keep going through the night, taking turns at the wheel. I wished they had taken turns at the punctures too. There were three more in fairly quick succession soon after crossing into Yugoslavia at sunset. Fortunately one of them occurred while we were filling up at a garage with the Balkan equivalent of an AA man present. He refused to accept a tip, which surprised and impressed me.

At midnight we were on top of another mountain in a howling blizzard when we went past a hotel sign with lighted windows gleaming warmly through the snow.

Doesn’t it make you want to stop? said Deborah and immediately there was a now familiar detonation with the sway and slither of a flat front tyre.

That’s it, I said firmly. I’ll change the wheel but then we’re stopping for the night. In the hotel.

The two females hurried inside while I went through the wheel-changing motions that had become automatic. My palm was slashed on some sharp projection and left the snow crimson with my blood and blushing at the torrent of imprecation with which I reviled the night and the car and the universe. In the hotel I was greeted with the news that there was only one room available and in that room only one bed.

How big is the bed? I asked.

Oh, it’s a big one.

Well then, there’s no problem, is there? I said and forestalled any argument by heading for the kitchen where I persuaded an elderly woman to produce bread and cheese and a flagon of red wine.

There was some hesitation in the air at the end of supper so I said I would get into bed first and warm it up.

And I’m sleeping with all my clothes on if that’s any comfort to you. Except my boots, of course. I suggest you do the same.

I grabbed the flagon of half-finished wine and went upstairs. By the next morning, I was more or less one of the family.

On the way down from the mountains to the coast, we passed half a dozen overturned or ditched lorries which had skidded off the road. I could not resist the temptation to point out what our fate would have been without the new tyres. The enticement of the blue Adriatic, which kept on revealing itself unexpectedly, obliterated all thoughts of gloom and disaster.

We barely paused in Rijeka, a town of umbrellas, and driving alongside the sea with the high passes behind us and the sun coming a little nearer with each kilometre we believed there could be no more hazards of nature to interfere with our progress. It was an optimistic forecast – as are most beliefs.

At one coastal resort we were delayed for twenty-four hours because a busload of people had literally been blown sideways off the road and the police had stopped all traffic. There was immediate compensation in a lunch in a deserted hotel dining room, consisting of soup, roast sucking pig with heaps of three kinds of vegetables, peaches and custard, a bottle of good, red wine and coffee for a total cost of fourteen shillings

Reviews for Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance

[whiskey3pa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An odd tale, written by a combat veteran of the western desert, a tanker in the 8th army. This is the story of his later life. He basically left his family with his financial resources and departed to parts unknown (to them). He settled in Greece and lived something of a hermit life along a beach in a small shack that he fixed up. He writes well and led an interesting life. He later took a donkey walk around Crete. He is a likable writer, who lived uniquely.

[atticusfinch1048 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Zen and the Art of Donkey MaintenanceIn December 1966, with his marriage over, his sons able to look after themselves the 55 year old Robert Crisp decides it is time to change his life and have a new start. Robert Crisp had a reputation as a hero, winning the Military Cross during World War 2, a former South African test cricketer, writer and journalist. Sometimes referred to as a ladies’ man, who was a serial womaniser, but founded The Drum newspapers for the Black Majority in Apartheid South Africa and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro twice. So not a man for sitting back and relaxing allowing life to pass him by.So at 55 Robert Crisp moves to Greece, with Sixty Pounds in his pocket plus his war pension, he planned to write about his life out there. Through his writing appearing the Sunday Express, the readers learnt about his life in Greece, his hitchhiking to what was Yugoslavia, then a communist country. Even at his age he had a near disaster when he attempted to sail around Crete.Towards the end of his first year in Greece he had severe stomach pain and was diagnosed with cancer, so he undertook to travel around Crete, with a donkey that has a personality that ordinarily set it out but both well matched. This donkey like Crisp was stubborn which at times turns this journey around Crete in to sometimes a comedic experience at times quite touching.This book is a collection of those travels around Crete with said donkey, in what he thought was the last year of his life; he was to live another twenty years or so. The book has been edited by his estranged son, so that too must have been hard work.This is an unlikely positive and funny story that will do much to endear itself to the reader, that makes you want to look at Crisp and admire him for overcoming much adversity. At the same time one does get the feeling that he is rather self-centred and is only thinking of number one, especially when he did have family. Saying that this is a great read.