Donkey Work Read online

Winter was with us all right. The village cultural society started its Wednesday evening meetings and embarked on its usual round of setbacks. One night the lecturer forgot to come. Another night the electricity broke down. Another night it rained, the lady in whose house the meetings were held complained of footmarks on her brand-new Indian carpet and banished future meetings to the garden room.

  Out there everybody froze and, when they had slides, the projector wouldn't work. An expert came to give a talk on Minoan architecture and nearly went mad because every time he said 'And now we pass on to the next Great Wonder' and tapped the table, only half a picture came on and that was upside down. The schoolmaster, re-connecting the projector, broke a piece out of the lampshade. The secretary offered to resign.

  A few weeks later an expert came to give a talk on music, the lady of the house graciously allowed the society back into the lounge for the occasion on account of the piano, and there was another crisis. To protect the carpet she'd laid down a sea of thick brown horse blankets. That was reasonable enough, but when the expert tested us to see, as he laughingly put it, whether our musical intelligence was A or B; found it was somewhere around Z; pulled himself together saying Never Mind he'd give us a recital to pass the time – and found every time he put a pedal down it got caught up in horse blankets, he got pretty mad too.

  It saw us pretty well through the winter. That; and the doctor, when the bungalow was halfway up, worrying about where its septic tank was going to be. His, because of the fall of the land, was piped under the road and ended in what would be the garden of the new bungalow and supposing they fractured his pipes, he said. By the time a man had come from the Council to sort that one out, not to mention the rest of the village making surreptitious surveys of the layout after dark and giving one another frights round corners... By that time it was Spring, and our thoughts turned once more to a donkey.

  Almost at once we saw one advertised in The Times. A pigmy donkey at a ducal address on the other side of England – but that didn't matter, said Charles, as long as it was a foal and a good one. We could easily drive the couple of hundred miles to bring it back. It must have been a good one. Not only was it already sold when Charles rang up but it had gone for fifty guineas. I was there, hanging excitedly at his elbow, when Charles asked what it had fetched. When, without turning a hair at the reply, he enquired whether they had any more little foals for sale, and said in that case we'd watch the paper and perhaps in due course they would, I thought it must have been quite reasonable. When he put down the phone, looked at me with glazed eyes and said 'Fifty guineas' I felt quite queer. Charles felt so queer he didn't know whether he'd been talking to the duke or the butler. He didn't remember anything after the fifty guineas bit, he said. I felt so queer – though admittedly it transpired it was laryngitis – that I lost my voice immediately and it didn't come back for days.

  We got one in the end, though. Not from our previous donkey-man. After all the optimism about baby donkeys popping up in all directions come April there was nothing doing there. Out of six owners their jennies had only thrown two foals between them, and both of those were jacks. We could, said one owner helpfully, board one of his in-foal donkeys if we liked, and then when the foal was born and weaned we could buy it off him and return the mother. We walked up the promenade in a positive dream of delight at that proposition, seeing a day-old donkey kicking its little heels among our buttercups, Mum standing bashfully by and the cats hilariously joining in the capers… until common-sense prevailed and we saw it as it more likely would be. Our sitting panic-stricken in the shed holding Mum's head, having to send for the Vet at midnight – paying for the privilege at that, said Charles, wilting as he visualised himself running up and down with hot water at two in the morning – and sure as eggs were eggs it would be a jack.

  We rang a horse dealer who said Simple – about twelve pounds it would cost us, he said, and they were only the size of sheepdogs when they were small so he could bring one out in the car. He'd ring us when he got one, he said – and that was the last we voluntarily heard of him. Next time we rang him he said they were harder to get than we thought. Harder than he thought, too, apparently. We never heard from him again.

  We rang a dealer seventy miles away who specialised in donkeys. A cute little jenny he had, he said. Eleven months old. We'd be lucky to get one younger than that – they weren't weaned till they were six months old and they were harder to get than we thought. Twenty pounds she was, he informed us, and a beautiful little off-white. Off we went, to find she was actually a sad-looking little off-grey. We wouldn't have minded that so much but she wasn't so very little either. She was almost as tall as another donkey which, he said, was a two and a half year-old riding jenny at twenty-five pounds. When we remarked on that he said they were nearly as tall at a year as they were at two and a half – 'twas their bodies that filled out, he said. It was also of course, if only we knew how to get at them, their teeth that grew. We did ask the man to open her mouth and he obligingly did, but we still didn't know what we were looking for, so we suppressed a shudder at the purposeful-looking set of teeth that he revealed, thanked him nicely, said we really did want a smaller one than that, and drove home.

  We found Annabel the very next day. Just when Charles was saying we might as well buy a cultivator to get down the nettles – twenty pounds for a donkey plus transport was a bit much, he said, and now there were those teeth and supposing it bit the cats – I opened the newspaper and there she was. A demure-looking, shaggy little foal standing coyly by the side of her Mum at the one local resort we hadn't visited. Children were patting her head, parents were looking beamingly on. 'Everybody's Favourite' read the caption and Charles said he couldn't see her biting the cats.

  We could, on the other hand, see her among our buttercups. We drove over straight away. It was raining and when we saw her for the first time in real life in the field beyond the beach she was standing knee-high in dock-leaves with a small green macintosh over her head. There was no doubt about her being young. Halfway through the interview she went and had a drink from Mum. He might, said her owner cautiously when we broached the subject, be prepared to sell her...

  We examined her feet. One of the things we'd been told in our travels was that you had to be careful of soft spots in donkeys' hooves – spongy places which you can press in like sodden leather, caused in the case of imported donkeys by too much standing in the Irish peat bogs and for which, we were told, there is no remedy. We looked quite professional examining her feet, though there was really no need. She had been born in England, she was only ten months old, and her small polished hooves, the size of half-crowns, were as black and hard as ebony. We looked at her teeth – we still didn't know what we were looking for but they were apparently all there. We looked at her eyes. We couldn't see those at all. When we lifted the silky top-knot that covered her head like a floor-mop in reverse she had them modestly closed and all we could see was a sweep of long black eyelashes.

  We bought her on the spot. Twenty pounds we paid without a murmur. Think, said her owner as he signed the receipt with a look of sorrow on his face, what he'd be losing by way of her attracting the children. Think, I said, struck by a fleeting attack of common sense on the way home, of how far that would have gone towards a cultivator. Think, said Charles, gazing happily at the sunset, of the fun we'd be having with a donkey.

  THREE

  She Doesn't Care for Carrots

  The fun began the very next night when Annabel arrived by van, pattered demurely down the backboard, took one look round and immediately tried to patter up again. She didn't like us, she said from under her fringe. She was going back to Mum.

  She looked smaller than ever standing there in the lane, with her shaggy brown coat, ears like a big toy rabbit and a set of sturdy little long-furred legs which, ending abruptly in those minute hooves, made her look as if she was wearing pantaloons. She was about the size of a sheepdog. She looked, said the Rector's wife who happe
ned along just then and immediately went into ecstasies over her, as if you could have wheeled her along on her dear little feet like a toy on castors.

  She might have looked like that, but there was good solid donkey under that winsome exterior. She wouldn't be led, and when Charles and the donkey-man tried to push her she planted her hooves firmly in the lane, settled her rear practisedly against their hands, and pushed back. They looked, said the Rector's wife, watching rapturously from the garden gate, like a group by Rodin. They did indeed. The Boulder-pushers in granite.

  People who believe you can move a donkey by dangling a carrot in front of its nose are, I can assure them, quite wrong. I didn't just dangle it. On account of her possibly not being able to see it because of her fringe, which was particularly bouffant that evening, I put it actually in her mouth, let her take a bite, and started walking enticingly backwards with it towards the gate. Only I moved. The Rodin group stayed exactly as it was. Nothing happened at all except for a couple of village men who cycled past with ostentatiously rigid backs and said to one another as they turned the bend 'Didst thee see that?' Annabel didn't care for carrots.

  When, by dint of practically carrying her, we finally got her into the paddock next to the cottage where she was to stay till we put her out on the hillside, Annabel didn't care for that either.

  She was going now, she said, determinedly following the donkey-man to the gate where, with a last sad fondle of her ears and instructions that that was car oil on her bottom through rubbing against the van and we could wash it off with Omo when we had a fine day, he left her. She was going now, she reminded him when he started up the engine. She couldn't believe he was leaving her behind. She stood with her ears pointed incredulously after him as he drove off up the hill and when we lifted her fringe and bent down to speak to her there was no doubt about it at all. Annabel was crying.

  We did everything we could to comfort her. We fetched the cats. Far from consoling her they spent the rest of the evening on the garden wall, alternately craning their necks at her over the brambles like a pair of Indian scouts and beating it for the cottage like a pair of Indian arrows when she brayed.

  We fed her with bread and a piece got stuck. We'd have called the vet within her first hour with us if it hadn't been that while we were deliberating how we were going to break it to him that we had a donkey – he was already, as we knew, inclined to lean his head against the wall and groan when we phoned him about the cats – Annabel got it up herself, drop­ping a soggy piece of crust into my hand with a thankful gasp.

  Eventually, having provided her with water that she wouldn't drink and straw that she wouldn't lie down on, we went to bed. Not to sleep. Our idea of animals at night was the cats curled comfortably in the spare room armchair with a hot water bottle, or the squirrel we used to have who slept in our wardrobe; not a forlorn little donkey in a field crying for its mother. What, we wondered – while Charles kept interrupting our train of thought with the suggestion that perhaps we should put her in the conservatory for the night so she'd feel closer to us, and I kept saying she'd break the glass – had we let ourselves in for?

  One thing we'd let ourselves in for was the loudest voice in Christendom shouting unremittingly for Mum. Annabel didn't, to correct another fallacy about donkeys, say hee-haw. She went AAAAAAW – HOO – AAAAAAW – HOO – AAAAAAW – HOO – FRRRMPH at approximately half-hour intervals. Long enough to allow for listening for a reply from Mum in between. Long enough for the neighbours to drop off into a fitful sleep from which they must be leaping galvanised in their beds by the next AAAAAAW – HOO – FRRRMPH as if Gabriel was sounding the last trump. And in a voice which, if they didn't know there was a baby donkey in the valley, they might well mistake for a jungle elephant's.

  We shuddered when she did shout. We worried when it was time for the next bray and she didn't. At one time instead of a bray a sort of gulping noise came through the night. What, enquired Charles anxiously, did it sound like to me? A strangled gasp I said as we bounded out of bed. Annabel was tethered on the advice of the donkey-man who said if we didn't, until we got the place wired she'd be on her knees and through the gaps in the hedge bottoms as soon as our backs were turned and we imagined her with her rope wrapped round a hawthorn bush choking herself to death.

  We were saved from tearing up the lane in our dressing-gowns by the fact that Charles, who was only half awake, insisted on putting on his socks as well and while he was fastening his suspenders Annabel let out such a fanfare – probably at hearing him move, for she seemed to have very good hearing – that it was obvious there was nothing wrong with her. Charles took off his socks, rolled back into bed and started snoring with exhaustion. Annabel, hearing him from the paddock, sent forth an answering call which if it once more roused the neighbourhood at least roused Charles as well and stopped him snoring. From the cats' room came a succession of bumps and padding noises as they kept getting up to look out of the window. And so the night wore on.

  We'd had nights like that before, of course. The night we acquired the squirrel. The night we acquired our first Siamese. The time we tried to add Samson the kitten to the household and Solomon and Sheba stayed up all night threatening to take him apart. Life always seemed more liveable the next morning and apart from the fact that when Charles opened the spare-room door this particular next morning the cats, instead of tumbling down the stairs with enthusiastic demands to be let out, filed silently past him into our room and got into bed with me – Tired through being up all night, said Solomon, subsiding heavily across my neck; got a Headache, said Sheba, vanishing crossly beneath the bedclothes – things weren't too bad at all.

  Annabel was still there for one thing, with her fringe cocked raptly at us over the mowing grass. The sun was shining. Solomon, emboldened, no doubt, by the fact that he hadn't been murdered in his bed while he slept after all, came spying cautiously round a grass clump at her while we gave her breakfast and, when she looked at him, purred. By the evening, our confidence soaring like a temperature chart, we were taking her for a walk.

  Like a temperature chart it pretty soon went down again. Annabel, plodding demurely up the lane with Charles and me beaming proudly on either side and Solomon trailing us interestedly in the rear, did the length of a sixpenny donkey ride – and that, she decided, was that. Turning determinedly for home she began, in approved donkey return-ride style, to trot. Never having given donkey-rides herself, of course, but just having accompanied Mum, she didn't realise she was supposed to stop at that. Within seconds the trot had become a gallop, the gallop – with Annabel kicking her heels light-heartedly behind her as she went – had become a charge, and I, holding frantically to the end of her rope and shouting to Charles for help, was going down the lane behind her like a kite.

  Charles held her rope the next night, while Solomon and I followed behind. We needed firmness, he said, if we were going to train her like a sheepdog and sure enough when we got to the sixpenny mark and once more she stopped and we, putting our shoulders to her rump, were firm practically to the point where our arms dropped off, it worked. Once past that point and she ambled up the lane like a lark. Like a lark, too – to use Charles' description of her as he walked proudly at her side – she turned when directed at the forest gate and began to amble back. And like a lark, the moment she rounded the corner and could see the long straight stretch of lane ahead, she began to fly. Much faster than the previous night. Solomon and I were delayed only for a matter of seconds by his stopping to look down a mousehole en route and by the time we rounded the corner there was no sign of Charles or Annabel at all. Only a cloud of dust settling silently in the distance.

  They were in the paddock when we got back – Annabel eating dandelions and Charles leaning breathlessly on the gate. Annabel, as she'd done the previous night with me, had frightened the daylights out of him by pretending to be set for a top-speed tour of the village and then zooming into her paddock at the last moment. Annabel, we were to discover in th
e days that followed, had that kind of sense of humour.

  The next night, to avoid coming back each time as if we were practising for the Grand National, we took her on a circular tour. Up the valley. Over the stream. It took us twenty minutes to cross that on account of Mum having apparently warned her to keep away from water, and the only way we did it was by eventually going over ourselves, leaving her behind and commenting loudly that we didn't want her. Whereupon, with a snort to us that she was Coming and another one to the stream to be careful otherwise she'd deal with it – over she came. Stopping immediately to eat a plantain to show her independence, but nevertheless she was across.

  After that we met a man with a dog and Annabel, towing Charles and me like a couple of tugboats, chased it. After that – while we explained that she liked dogs and was only playing and the man indignantly said it looked like it, didn't it, butting a poor little spaniel in the backside like that – she ate a foxglove.

  At least, said Charles, as with aching arms and long past the time we'd expected to be back we turned at last on to the track leading down to the cottage, we wouldn't have to run back this time. Annabel didn't know the track from Adam.

  Undoubtedly she didn't. Either she could smell her way, however, or donkeys have an amazing sense of location, for hardly were the words out of his mouth when she began to gallop. Down the hill in the gathering dusk like a sheepdog-sized toboggan. Mane flying, legs flying, Charles and I running frantically behind her. Past the cottage, with the cats watching round-eyed from the hall window. In at the paddock – when, Charles told everybody afterwards with pride, she might so easily have passed it in the twilight. Annabel knew her home now coming from any direction. Where, she demanded with a snort as Charles and I clung mopping our brows at the gate, was her supper?