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Authors: Robert Crisp
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had missed the early crop which was the one that gave the best prices.
The hunterâs news sent me hurrying down to the beach house garden and to the sad sight of blackened stumps of greenery draped over my vegetable beds except for several rows of hardy âwild spinachâ. The locals, as I should have known, had been right. I would not plant any more seeds until the weather improved.
Chapter 8
I Could Have Happily Wrung a Million Speckled Necks
By this time there were a number of animals in my life other than the two hens. There was a growing population of wild birds: robins, chaffinches, wrens, blackbirds, magpies and various other specimens that in my ignorance I did not know.
I had never been an avid birdwatcher or bird-lover. There was a time, in fact, when I came to hate starlings so violently that I could have happily wrung a million speckled necks. But those little creatures around my upstairs house inhabited my new life like old friends, and far less obtrusively.
The first permanent feathered board-and-lodger was a robin, obviously a bachelor. He was soon joined by a married couple whose intrusion on his privacy and perks he deeply resented. I spent many fascinating minutes in the study of animal behaviour so closely identified with the human species.
The first robin spent a good deal of his time defending his territory against the other two. Whenever they flew over the boundaries defined by himself he hurtled at them and they would flee precipitately but as soon as he was out of his ground they would turn on him and he would beat just as hasty a retreat. What a pity that human battles could not be fought so decisively and bloodlessly. Right, in the animal world more than among Christians, was might.
Yes, there were a number of animals in my life. A large proportion of them I fervently wished would share some other life. But there were the four I had introduced deliberately: my two hens, a cat and a dog.
The names of the hens, Stavros and Jannis, denoted not their sex but their origin. Stavros was six months or a year older than Jannis (it is as difficult to tell a henâs age as that of any other female) and something curious had happened to her since Jannis had started laying an egg every day while she had dropped off to an egg every other day.
She definitely needed psychiatric treatment or perhaps I had been diddled at the
magazie
and she was much older than I thought.
However, from being as undomesticated as pheasants they now more or less shared my outside meals by picking up the crumbs from between my feet. The puppy was called Dog. This was not only for the sake of brevity and convenience. The dogs of Greece had some rather original names (the shepherd in the field below me had three called Sobranie, Kapitano and Panayotis) and I wanted something equally unique for my pup. I was fairly confident that there was not another dog in the whole country called Dog.
Dog was a slight furry animal with a retroussé nose and Friesland-cow colouring and the unusual distinction of having been born with a stubby tail. He was two months old and the month he had been with me had wrought great changes. He could speak English for a start, and he had developed a taste for sophisticated food like bully beef, sardines and evaporated milk which Greek dogs only dreamed about in a high fever. Standard diet for the latter was dry bread.
Dog was never any trouble from the moment I gothim from a farm up the road. His eyes were still clouded with puppy opaqueness, yet he became house-trained within twenty-four hours â possibly because there was not all that much difference between the inside and the outside of my house â and he settled into his cardboard box and bits of ancient newspaper from the first night. In a moment of acute shortage, which still persisted, I used the newspaper to light the fire and substituted a woollen vest which had become superfluous, without Dog seeming to know the
The hunterâs news sent me hurrying down to the beach house garden and to the sad sight of blackened stumps of greenery draped over my vegetable beds except for several rows of hardy âwild spinachâ. The locals, as I should have known, had been right. I would not plant any more seeds until the weather improved.
Chapter 8
I Could Have Happily Wrung a Million Speckled Necks
By this time there were a number of animals in my life other than the two hens. There was a growing population of wild birds: robins, chaffinches, wrens, blackbirds, magpies and various other specimens that in my ignorance I did not know.
I had never been an avid birdwatcher or bird-lover. There was a time, in fact, when I came to hate starlings so violently that I could have happily wrung a million speckled necks. But those little creatures around my upstairs house inhabited my new life like old friends, and far less obtrusively.
The first permanent feathered board-and-lodger was a robin, obviously a bachelor. He was soon joined by a married couple whose intrusion on his privacy and perks he deeply resented. I spent many fascinating minutes in the study of animal behaviour so closely identified with the human species.
The first robin spent a good deal of his time defending his territory against the other two. Whenever they flew over the boundaries defined by himself he hurtled at them and they would flee precipitately but as soon as he was out of his ground they would turn on him and he would beat just as hasty a retreat. What a pity that human battles could not be fought so decisively and bloodlessly. Right, in the animal world more than among Christians, was might.
Yes, there were a number of animals in my life. A large proportion of them I fervently wished would share some other life. But there were the four I had introduced deliberately: my two hens, a cat and a dog.
The names of the hens, Stavros and Jannis, denoted not their sex but their origin. Stavros was six months or a year older than Jannis (it is as difficult to tell a henâs age as that of any other female) and something curious had happened to her since Jannis had started laying an egg every day while she had dropped off to an egg every other day.
She definitely needed psychiatric treatment or perhaps I had been diddled at the
magazie
and she was much older than I thought.
However, from being as undomesticated as pheasants they now more or less shared my outside meals by picking up the crumbs from between my feet. The puppy was called Dog. This was not only for the sake of brevity and convenience. The dogs of Greece had some rather original names (the shepherd in the field below me had three called Sobranie, Kapitano and Panayotis) and I wanted something equally unique for my pup. I was fairly confident that there was not another dog in the whole country called Dog.
Dog was a slight furry animal with a retroussé nose and Friesland-cow colouring and the unusual distinction of having been born with a stubby tail. He was two months old and the month he had been with me had wrought great changes. He could speak English for a start, and he had developed a taste for sophisticated food like bully beef, sardines and evaporated milk which Greek dogs only dreamed about in a high fever. Standard diet for the latter was dry bread.
Dog was never any trouble from the moment I gothim from a farm up the road. His eyes were still clouded with puppy opaqueness, yet he became house-trained within twenty-four hours â possibly because there was not all that much difference between the inside and the outside of my house â and he settled into his cardboard box and bits of ancient newspaper from the first night. In a moment of acute shortage, which still persisted, I used the newspaper to light the fire and substituted a woollen vest which had become superfluous, without Dog seeming to know the
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