• Complain

Gerald Durrell - The Donkey Rustlers

Here you can read online Gerald Durrell - The Donkey Rustlers full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. genre: Children. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover

The Donkey Rustlers: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Donkey Rustlers" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

This lively story with a Greek island setting tells how Amanda and David plot to outwit the unpleasant local mayor and help their Greek friend, Yani. The villagers, and especially the mayor, depend on their donkeys for transport. If the children are to blackmail them successfully the donkeys must disappear. And disappear they do, to the consternation of the whole village . . . . . . a rarity. Gerald Durrell has written a comedy that should be welcomed by readers of all sorts and sizes. Growing Point

Gerald Durrell: author's other books


Who wrote The Donkey Rustlers? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Donkey Rustlers — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Donkey Rustlers" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

THE DONKEY RUSTLERS

For Andreas Damaschinos my adopted godson who lives on an island where this - photo 1

For Andreas Damaschinos,

my adopted godson,

who lives on an island

where this could well

have happened

CHAPTER 1

Melissa

The island of Melissa lies somewhere in the Ionian Sea. It is so tiny and so off the beaten track that very few people know about it. It is a lucky island in the sense that water is plentiful and so the countryside is lush with olive groves and cypress trees and at certain times great areas of it are pink and white with almond blossom. It is visited once a year by a small tourist boat which puts in to the port of Melissa and here the tourists tumble ashore and buy quantities of fake Greek antiquities, which are the local potteries chief source of income.

The island boasts a small foreign colony which consists of one very elderly Frenchman, who lives in a remote villa and very rarely puts in a public appearance. Rumour has it that he is recovering from an unfortunate love affair but to judge by the number of plump, pretty peasant girls he employs at his villa, he has found the right antidote for his sorrow. Then there are two elderly English ladies who spend their lives rescuing stray cats, doing good works and giving excruciatingly boring English lessons to those Melissiots who wish to acquire a knowledge of the English tongue.

That is, so to speak, the static population, but during the summer months the few people who know about Melissa (and who are wise enough) come and rent crumbling villas in the country where they lie in the sun, bathe in the lukewarm sea and every year become more and more devoted to the island and its charming, gentle inhabitants. Melissa is really a sort of looking-glass world where the term logic can never be used; on it practically anything can happen, and frequently does.

The Patron Saint of Melissa is Saint Polycarpos. He had once, during his travels in 1230, been blown off course by a sirocco and had been forced to stay in the island until the weather cleared up. As a token of his gratitude for the hospitality shown him, he presented the island with a pair of elderly slippers. The Melissiots, enchanted with this generous gesture, immediately made him Patron Saint of the island, and the slippers (carefully enshrined) became the focal point for every religious ceremony.

In the northern part of the island there is a small village called Kalanero. It is perched up on the hillside and down below it there is a flat, fertile area which is cultivated and which leads to the sea. The villagers get up every morning and go down the hillside and it is a good two or three miles on their donkeys to cultivate their various crops. In the centre of the village there lies a large Venetian villa which has been decaying in the sun for the last three hundred years or more.

For a great number of years, the villagers of Kalanero regarded this villa with some animosity because the few people who came to stay there never rented it, and so, while other villages could boast that they had villas which were inhabited by foreigners, the people of Kalanero could not. Then there arrived the Finchberry-Whites.

The father, Major-General Finchberry-White, was the personification of what the people of Melissa think an Englishman should be. He was tall, inclined to be a little portly and always walked everywhere with the air of one who owns the place. But he really was a Melissiot at heart. He had an obscure gift at least obscure as far as the English are concerned and that was his mastery over languages. I cannot, off hand, recall the number of languages there are in Europe, but however many there are, he spoke them all with the fluency of a native. So he had the immediate attraction to the local peasantry of an Englishman (of all things) speaking Greek. He had another attraction too; he had lost a leg and had an articulated aluminium one on which, in moments of stress, he played complicated African drum rhythms. When he discovered the villa in Kalanero and immediately rented it for a very lengthy period, the villagers were, of course, delighted. Now they not only had an Englishman living in their midst, but a Greek-speaking Englishman and, moreover, one who was obviously a war hero since he had lost his leg. The village was divided into two schools of thought as to how he had achieved this. One half insisted that he had done it while taking Rome single-handed; the other half were convinced that he did it while taking Berlin single-handed. The fact that he had lost it through getting rather drunk and falling down a flight of stairs in a friends house in Chelsea had not been vouchsafed to them. But it really was his command of the Greek language that endeared him to them most.

The Major-General had only one ambition in life, and that was to paint, but owing to his leg he could cover only very short distances. This is the reason that he immediately rented the villa in Kalanero. It had a wide terrace which commanded a view of cypress trees with the sea as a background to them. So from this vantage point he could paint. He would set up his easel and paint numerous and excruciatingly bad pictures of cypress trees which he was under the impression were easy to draw and that, if you put plenty of colour behind them, could be made to look as attractive as anything in the Royal Academy. So, with a pertinacity that I am sure earned him his rank, he painted picture after picture from this same vantage point, to the utmost satisfaction of both himself and the villagers. who, of course, treated him with a reverence that would have done credit to a Rembrandt.

There was also, of course, a Mrs Finchberry-White and two children, a boy and a girl. The wife was one of those faded English women who once must have been very beautiful and was allowing herself to decay very charmingly. She spent her time drifting about vaguely, collecting wild flowers and organising thoroughly disorganised meals at irregular intervals. But of course it is the children who are, as it were, the hero and heroine of this story, David and Amanda.

CHAPTER 2

Arrival

All two hundred and fifty inhabitants of the village of Kalanero were, of course, aware of the impending arrival of the Finchberry-Whites and so the whole village was in a turmoil of excitement and activity. Certainly the most excited person in the village was Yani Panioti; of the same age as the children, Yani had become their particular friend, and from the very start he had fallen deeply in love with Amanda and was her devoted slave. His wiry body was burnt brown by the sun and his movements were as lithe as a cats. Under his thatch of hair as black as jet and as curly as wood shavings his huge dark eyes stared at the world with a disarming limpid innocence, or else flashed with wicked impishness. Now he whistled softly and tunefully to himself as he helped prepare the villa, and his heart was gay because Amanda was coming back to him at last.

So the great, creaking, sun-blistered shutters were thrown open in the villa and old Mama Agathi and her husband, who were caretakers, set to work sweeping up the accumulated winters spiders webs and scrubbing the white wood floors, while Yani himself supervised the sweeping and weeding of the great terrace. In fact, it is more than likely that the great terrace got more devoted sweeping and cleaning than The rest of the villa but this was only natural since it was the Generals vantage point.

Then one morning when the villagers awoke, they knew that the great day had arrived, for the Ionian Nymph (a small vessel with a list to starboard and a large hole In Its bows, which was Melissas only contact with the mainland) was due to arrive. In spite of its manifest unseaworthiness, the General liked to travel on it for, as he said, each voyage became a nautical adventure worthy of Raleigh or Drake. So the

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Donkey Rustlers»

Look at similar books to The Donkey Rustlers. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Donkey Rustlers»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Donkey Rustlers and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.