Donkey Work Read online

  That was all very well, but Annabel's voice carried. Up the hill and round the bend till it reached Miss Wellington, busily working in her cottage garden. And Miss Wellington, hearing that voice like everyone else for a good two miles around, echoing up the valley in strong competition with the cuckoo, immediately began to worry.

  It was fatal when she did that. She worried once about Father Adams' pig being on its own and for weeks she spent an hour each evening doing her knitting by its pigsty. Standing bolt upright by the pigsty gate, which produced a much more urgent effect than if she'd done it sitting down, and saying it was company for Daisy. Which was more than it was for he, said Father Adams, who when he saw her nipped smartly out of the back gate and up to the Rose and Crown.

  She'd worried another time about what she thought was a neighbour's cat. A big fat black one which she kept seeing sitting soulfully on the neighbour's doorstep and which, being Miss Wellington, she kept opening the door and letting in again, announcing loudly for the neighbour's benefit that it was draughty on the doorstep and she was sure its Mummy wouldn't mind.

  Actually its Mummy minded very much. She was new to the village. She had, though Miss Wellington didn't know it, two black cats, both exactly alike. Right then she was trying to keep them at the back of the house because she had someone staying with her who was allergic to cats while the cats, typically enough, were marching indignantly round to the front door saying they wanted to go in that way. What with Miss Wellington popping them in at the front and their owners putting them out again at the back they were going round like Red Indians doing a war-dance by the time the new people discovered who was responsible, and they weren't half mad with Miss Wellington when they did.

  In our case Miss Wellington decided that Annabel was shouting because she was lonely, and when we said she wasn't, she was only talking, she said we didn't Understand. In order to convince us that we didn't understand she started inviting friends to tea who apparently did, and bringing them down to see us. Nearly every day when we were home a little group could be seen advancing down the hill around half-past four. All ladies. All of somewhat indeterminate age. All dressed like Miss Wellington in macintoshes and – as it was summer – straw hats that had been rained on and gone rather bumpy-looking in the process. And all nature-lovers to the last eye-tooth, in evidence of which they darted about the lane like dragonflies as they came, picking little bunches of flowers.

  At this time of day we were usually having tea ourselves on the lawn and Charles, if he spotted them first, was not above slipping out of his deck-chair on all fours and making for the garage. What most often happened, however, was that there was a coy little cry of 'ANNN-abell!' from Miss Wellington, Charles swore soundly into his teacup, and when we looked up there they were, standing in a group on the corner, gazing enchantedly across the garden at our donkey.

  Annabel from that angle was a particularly enchanting sight. All you could see of her was her head. The wall hid the rest of her from view and the Alice in Wonderland effect of her rabbit ears, enormous puffball fringe and inquisitive white nose framed in the tall May grass filled her visitors with delight.

  They swept up the lane to pet her like a swarm of bees. When we for politeness' sake left our tea and went up to join them, there they were having their flowers eaten and their coat-hems pulled, one of the party was by that time generally clasping her jaw and assuring her companions that she could hardly feel it, and Miss Wellington was looking worried.

  Not about the jaw. That was the result of somebody bending down to whisper affectionately in Annabel's ear and Annabel whose idea it was of being affectionate back, docking them soundly under the chin with her nose. That Miss Wellington, who never remembered to warn people that Annabel did it dismissed with an absent-minded smile. Lucille, she would inform us anxiously as we approached – or Violet, or Agatha, or whoever she considered the most impressive of this particular batch – was afraid that Annabel was lonely.

  When they marched back up the hill again Miss Wellington, despite the weight of her supporters, was still looking worried. Annabel, we informed her at least three times a week, could not go and live with the riding school for company. The horses didn't like her. Annabel, we said, could not wander loose in our garden. We wouldn't have any plants. Annabel, we explained, could not have another donkey to talk to because we only wanted one and anyway she talked to us. Annabel, we assured her, was perfectly happy as she was.

  Annabel certainly should have been. She had her own house with a tarpaulin roof to keep out the rain, she had her own paddock with a private ant-hill on which to roll, and by this time – despite Miss Wellington's conviction – she was acquiring a wide circle of friends.

  There was the marsh-tit whom she allowed to perch on her back and, while she stood demurely in the sunshine, take beakfuls of her hair for its nest. There was the blackbird who pottered unconcernedly round her feet for breadcrumbs while Annabel, as we crept quietly closer to watch, looked down with tilted ears and a benign little droop of her lips to see him do it. There was Prune the poodle with whom Annabel had struck up the same sort of friendship she had with Solomon consisting of watching him with invitingly lowered ears while he got in through her fence and then chasing him round the paddock like a Derby runner. Just to confound all the rules, there was also an Alsatian and a horse called Major.

  Annabel, according to the man we bought her from, didn't like Alsatians. Little dogs she could butt with her nose were acceptable, he said. And, he had no doubt, Siamese cats. But not Alsatians, one of which had chased her as a baby and she'd been scared of them ever since... On the understanding that horses didn't like donkeys, it gave us quite a turn one morning when we glanced out of the window to see a great grey hunter towering over the fence, looking patronisingly down at Annabel in just the way we'd seen her looking at the blackbird. On the understanding that Annabel didn't like Alsatians, it gave us even more of a turn when we took another look and there, leaping wildly at her ears and apparently about to seize her by the throat at any moment, was an Alsatian the size of a wolf. We went up the garden like greyhounds. At times like this I realised the probability of Charles's forecast that with the sort of animals we kept we'd still be running when we were ninety.

  She hoped we didn't mind, said the owner of the animals, who when we got there was leaning patiently against a tree – but Major, her horse, was mad about our donkey and wouldn't pass the paddock till he'd seen it, and Misha, her Alsatian, insisted on having a game. While we watched with trembling knees they had a game. Misha put his head under one strand of wire and drank from Annabel's water bowl while Annabel leaned over another and apparently bit his tail. Misha rushed into the paddock, leapt playfully at Annabel's ears, and Annabel butted him with her head. Side by side, apparently doing their best to knock one another flat, they cantered round the field a couple of times at least before, with a last nip at her ear and a bark which presumably meant he'd see her again tomorrow, Misha bounded up to join his owner. What, said Charles as the riding party moved off up the lane while Annabel watched them from the gate with the air of a small girl seeing guests off from her birthday party – would Miss Wellington have thought of that as company for Annabel?

  What would she have thought, if it came to that, of the morning three of the riding school children turned up on foot and asked if they could take Annabel for a walk. It was a fine opportunity for exercise for her, and with reservations we agreed. They were only, we stipulated, to take her up the valley where she couldn't run away. If she did get loose, said Charles, at which they raised professional eyebrows at one another and sighed politely inaudible sighs, they must come back and tell us immediately. They shouldn't, I advised them, walk too close to her head in case she butted. Or too close to her heels, put in Charles, in case she frisked and kicked them by accident.

  With that, and final instructions that she wouldn't cross the stream except when we were with her and to watch out if she rolled because although she w
as small she was heavy, they set out. One each side, one behind and Annabel plodding demurely away in the middle, like a string of miniature Canterbury pilgrims.

  It was two hours before we saw them again. Two hours during which we kept looking anxiously up the lane assuring ourselves that of course they were all right and we mustn't fuss. Two hours in which we kept imagining the children butted over banks or rolled on by a rioting donkey, Annabel with a broken leg or running lost among the hills, and the lot – when time went on and neither she nor they showed up even independently – down one of the local pot-holes.

  When suddenly they were at the back gate, having done a complete circuit of the valley and come down the hill behind us. She hadn't, they informed us as they hitched her expertly to the gatepost, tried to roll or gallop or butt them once, and she'd walked absolutely for miles. She'd gone over the stream without a pause, they said – they couldn't think why we thought she wouldn't. Could they take her out again?

  Annabel was doing very well for friends indeed, and it was a pity Miss Wellington couldn't know. Miss Wellington was on holiday, however. Staying with a friend near Clovelly. Sending us cards with donkeys on them, invariably in groups of two or more, with a message that had the postman positively mesmerised. SOME DAY, enquired the cards in large capital letters – THIS?

  SIX

  The Donkey Owners

  They supposed, people sometimes commented in suitably saddened tones, that the cats were settling down now and that was why we'd bought a donkey.

  Those were the people who didn't own a Siamese themselves; who took at its face-value the sight of Solomon sitting soberly on the field wall watching Annabel and of Sheba, who'd at last got round to acknowledging that there were such things as donkeys and we had one of them in the paddock, sitting equally soberly beside him. Bless their dear little hearts, they would sigh. Pity they got older, wasn't it?

  Those two weren't getting any older. The fact that Solomon's normally orchid-spotted whiskers were temporarily snow-white and contrasted oddly against his seal-black face, and that Sheba had gone white too, all round her mouth and nose so that it looked as if she'd been dipped in face-powder, had nothing to do with age. Way back before we'd had Annabel they'd been ill, and the whiteness was part of the aftermath. They were six now and fighting fit again, and as fiendishly bad as ever. Even their illness had resulted from one of their escapades. One of Solomon's in point of fact, though Sheba encouraged him in it.

  Solomon had decided he was a tom. He'd decided it some time previously, when a real stray ginger tom appeared on the scene and, to show there was a man around at last, started to spray about the valley. Solomon, not to be outdone, immediately started to spray back. An action not unknown in a jealous neuter, particularly in a Siamese, but which we had so far not experienced. He not only sprayed wherever the ginger tom had been… On our Rockery Wall, he would announce, examining it with dark suspicion as he passed and immediately backing up to it to effect his own contribution… On our Garage Door, he would add a second or two later while Sheba watched with admiration and said fancy his being able to do that... On our Loganberries, he informed us on one occasion and without more ado bang went the loganberry crop for the season before our very eyes... but he sniffed.

  Round the garden, under the gate, up the lane – he followed the trail, being Solomon, with the sniff of a Hound of the Baskervilles and a spray with the force of a Flit gun. We tried to stop him, knowing the risk. We sprayed the lane ourselves with disinfectant till people stopped and sympathetically asked us whether our drains had gone wrong. It was no use. It was a hot dry summer, we couldn't disinfect the entire countryside though goodness knows we tried, Solomon followed the trail with gusto and the next thing we knew he had a germ and was lying, a sad small shadow in a blanket, with a temperature and a swollen tongue. He couldn't eat, he couldn't drink, he dribbled and he was very ill.

  Our only consolation in the anxious days of nursing him was that Sheba was unlikely to get it. From the moment she walked wide-eyed into the room on the first day of his illness, sniffed cautiously at him over the top of his blanket and backed speedily away saying he was Catching, we weren't nearly so much worried about Sheba picking it up as unnerved by the precautions she took to see that she didn't.

  Passing the invalid's couch in an exaggerated circle, for instance, presumably in case he leaned out and breathed on her. Leaping defensively on to the table when from time to time, not knowing quite what to do with himself, Solomon got feebly down and tottered across the room. Let them sleep together, said the Vet, because if it was infectious she was incubating it anyway and meanwhile she might comfort him. But when we put them in the spare room at night, laying Solomon tenderly on his favourite corner of the settee and inviting her to cuddle up to him, Sheba took up quarantine stations in the other corner, with a good big ridge of blanket between herself and the germy one, and refused to comfort anybody.

  Five weeks after Solomon's outbreak, with Solomon himself convalescing nicely, the Vet declaring five weeks' incubation was unheard of and she couldn't possibly have it and Sheba looking sorrowfully at him saying she was afraid she did, she began to dribble too.

  At that stage we had the further complication of Solomon, now he was on his feet again and it wasn't him the Vet was coming to give injections to, taking such an interest in medical affairs we were scared stiff he'd reinfect himself. Where Sheba had kept away from him, for instance, the moment he came into the room he strolled up and took deep diagnostic sniffs at her stomach. When we put cream round her mouth in an effort to get her to eat and she listlessly left it there he bounded forward, saying it was a pity to waste good stuff like that, and ate it off himself. When I gave her water with a teaspoon, trickling it gently into her mouth as she lay frailly in Charles's arms, he nipped up behind us and had a good long drink from the bowl in case it contained something special. And when we shut him out through one of the sitting-room doors to keep him away from the germs it was only a question of seconds before Solomon, having streaked like a black-faced hare through the kitchen, round the cottage and through the porch, was coming through the other door, agog with excitement to see what we were doing to her now.

  He didn't reinfect himself, in due course we reached the happy day when two fit Siamese cats – one big, black and important-looking; one small, blue and extremely self-possessed – sat side by side in the cottage porch. We hoped, we informed Solomon as he sat looking interestedly round the garden, that this would be a lesson to him and we'd have no more of this business of being a tom. It was, of course, like water off a Siamese's back. The next stage in Solomon's campaign of being a tom was that he had to have a girl-friend.

  Solomon didn't like girls. There was a blue one down the lane, a black and white one up the hill, Father Adams' Siamese Mimi if he felt like company of his own superior kind... Solomon never had liked girls. Silly, prissy things, he said. When he saw them he chased them as he did the toms, with the exception of Mimi who was apt to chase him back. For the demonstration of the next step in being a tom he chose, of all people, Sheba.

  Both of them were neutered and it couldn't do any harm but it was embarrassing, to say the least, to be walking down the lane and several times en route have Solomon suddenly spring on Sheba, grab her by the neck, and start howling through a mouthful of fur to Look what He was Doing. Particularly since Sheba, after the first couple of times when she kicked him in the stomach and fled, decided to co-operate. There they posed, Sheba flat on her stomach uttering coy feminine cries with her nose in the dust, Solomon holding her manfully by the scruff and daring the ginger tom to get his Woman. Been seeing too much television, commented Sidney. Dear little friendies playing together, beamed Miss Wellington when they did it outside her gate. Absolutely disgraceful, said somebody one day who fortunately we didn't know.

  Disgraceful or not, they went on doing it. Never in the house or garden, only when we were coming back from walks, and only when we were far enough ahead
for them to pose before we could stop them.

  It meant – for the information of psychiatrists who may see in this some evidence of sad frustration – absolutely nothing. In their minds it was part of the fun of the walk, like shinning up the fire-warning notice when we came to the forestry gate and drinking from muddy puddles, and it was forgotten the moment they got home. It was also typical of Siamese, a fitting answer to the suggestion that now they were six they were settling down, and it carried them inevitably on to the time when Solomon caught up with the ginger tom again and got another germ.

  This time they fought in the garden shed and the tom gashed Solomon on the cheek. That, judging from the tufts of ginger fur we found scattered in the shed next day, with Solomon going gloatingly in to look at them every time he passed, was nothing to what Solomon had done to the tom. But it was enough. A fortnight later Solomon started sitting by the fire looking sorry for himself. The next day his tell-tale third eyelids came up, with Solomon peering woefully over the tops of them looking like Chu Chin Chow. Once more Solomon was sick.