Donkey Work

NINE

The Sad Tale of Micawber

That wasn't the only setback we had that year. Back in the summer, with the tortoises newly with us, the mousing season in full swing and Annabel emerging by instalments from her baby coat, Charles had developed a passion for peanuts. Peanuts by the pound, since he never did anything by halves. The dustbin was filled with peanut tins, Charles was slapping his chest saying peanuts certainly had something. When I said they couldn't be good for him in such quantities and – by way of another approach – what on earth would the dustmen think when they tipped out all those tins, Charles, practically devastated by his own wit, said they'd think we were nuts.

He didn't laugh when his rash came up and the doctor said it was either the oil or all the salt in his system. For the next two months, he only had to get agitated or over-heated and it came up again within seconds, turning him a bright brick-red with bumps. It was during that period that we adopted a magpie, and in no time at all Charles' bumps were up like measles.

The magpie came to us from friends in town who'd found him sitting on their dustbin lid one morning. Tamed, they imagined, by someone who'd taken him from a nest in spring. Turned out to fend for himself when his owner got tired of him. Homeless but hopeful, with a strong predilection for humans despite the treatment he had received, Micawber didn't fancy fending for himself, and for a week, amply justifying the name they'd given him, he sat stolidly on their dustbin lid waiting for something to turn up.

Nothing did. Our friends fed him but wouldn't, as he obviously hoped they'd do, let him into their house. So he tried his luck with a neighbour, ate two rows of the neighbour's peas by way of introduction, flew frantically back to our friends when the neighbour chased him... He was now, they informed us in a phone call late that night, locked precautionally in their coal-shed. The owner of the peas was threatening to shoot him the moment he set eyes on him. Would we, for his own good, have him to live with us in the country?

Touched by his plight, we agreed. The cats were used to birds by now, we reasoned. Pheasants skimming the clearing in the wood with Solomon leaping salmon-like beneath them were a staple view from the cottage, but he never caught one. Sheba, going through the kitchen door, dropped to her stomach like a sharpshooter when she saw the blackbird in the yard, but it was only habit. The blackbird flipped his tail at her and went on eating. Sheba got automatically up as if from a curtsey and went on round the corner. Even the robin they besieged under the settee for an hour one day wasn't particularly worried. They sat there the whole of lunch-time – Sheba guarding one end like a Buckingham Palace sentry, Solomon peering intimidatingly under the other in the intervals of sharing the tomato soup, us thinking they'd mislaid a mouse until eventually they gave it up, wandered off, and, to our astonishment, a robin walked calmly from under the settee and started to look for crumbs. Nobody caught anybody any more. Micawber, we said when we heard of his troubles, would be quite all right with us.

Micawber was. It was Solomon who, within an hour of Micawber's arrival, was being rushed by car to the Vet's. Sheba, seeing us shut ourselves in the garage with a mysterious-looking basket and refuse to let her in, had climbed precipitously up to spy on us through a high outside window. Solomon, seeing her perched aloft like a mountain goat and inspired with his usual desire to imitate her, had tried to climb up to the sill himself and missed. Unknown to us there was a cloche beneath the window. And, as inevitably as everything happened to him, poor old Solomon fell through it.

His long black leg was ripped from top to bottom. Twelve stitches he had in it while, sick with remorse, we held him on the surgery table. Ten days he spent with his leg sewn up in a pathetic seam, turning our hearts every time we looked at him but not inconveniencing Solomon an inch. A fortnight we had Micawber and it seemed, in our extremity, like years.

Micawber said he was going to live in the garage. That was all right by us. We took down every cloche in sight. Charles put a ladder against the inside wall to give him a high, safe perch. We had to be careful, when we drove in, not to hit the ladder, otherwise the ladder immediately fell down and hit the car, but we soon got used to that. We put Micawber on the ladder by way of demonstration... Snag number one. Raised, presumably, in a low-hung cage, Micawber didn't like heights. He, he said, planing to earth so frantically you could practically see him mop his brow with relief when he got there, was a Ground Magpie. He took up residence on a box two feet off the ground, with a derelict door leaning against it one way which formed a sort of cave and a plank leaning against it the other way which formed a sloping gangplank and down this, to the detriment of Charles' rash, every time we or the cats approached he strolled grandly to meet us on foot.

Micawber liked having baths. Our friends discovered that when they saw him splashing earnestly in a garden puddle and we, to keep up the good work, provided him with a soup tureen. Snag number two. Micawber insisted on having that on the ground as well. Out in the drive in the sun, where he ducked and splashed like a grampus, sat blissfully on the edge of the tureen to dry, and we kept nerve-racked watch because if there was anything more vulnerable than a magpie who wouldn't fly it was a waterlogged magpie who couldn't.

That was how it appeared at first sight. Actually Micawber wasn't nearly as vulnerable as he looked. The moment a cat got within striking distance – sometimes, to make it even more hair-raising, the moment the cat actually struck – and Micawber, throwing the business of being a Ground Magpie to the winds, was away. Not, unfortunately, very far. Flapping heavily to the sharp thin top of a beanstick with, a second later, Sheba threatening to leap up there as well and turn herself into a kebab. Fluttering precariously to the top of the garage door with Solomon, sewn-up leg or not, crouched beneath ready for a suicidal spring. Sitting, most dangerous of all, on the apex of the greenhouse, with the car nearby where we normally left it, Solomon and Sheba on the car roof preparing to dive in unison straight through the greenhouse glass, and Charles and I diving even faster to prevent them.

We nearly went mad over the car. We moved it a dozen times a day to a different part of the drive, but it was no use. If we left it nearer the lane it was nearer the bean rows too. Within seconds, the cats were on the roof crouched ready for the take-off and Micawber was sitting like a coconut on the nearest stick. If we left it nearer the garage it was correspondingly nearer the garage door with, this time, Micawber sitting seductively on the top of that. If we put it in the garage and shut the door Micawber immediately flew down, drooped his wings in the dust, huddled dejectedly against the door of what he said was his Only Home and, we gathered from his attitude, wept.

We practically wept, too. We netted the greenhouse and conservatory roofs to afford some protection to the cats. Resulting, needless to say, in the neighbours asking what the mackerel catch was like this morning. We took the netting off again when the cats weren't about in case Micawber got his legs entangled in the mesh and hurt himself. We enticed Micawber down to the cottage proper – away, we thought, from the perils of car and glass. Only to find that he then either sat interminably on the windowsills with the cats charging like Bengal Lancers at the panes from the inside or else kept walking affably at ground level through a kitchen door which had, if we didn't keep eternal watch on them, two equally affable Siamese behind it.

We felt absolutely besieged. We were besieged. That was obvious when we opened the door one day in a thunderstorm, peered apprehensively out to check whether Micawber was sitting on the doorstep, breathed a sigh of relief to see that he wasn't and prayed it might rain for a week – and there, in a flash, he was. Padding wetly to the edge of the coalhouse roof from his vigil under a lilac branch; flapping his wings to attract our attention; assuring us in his loud, harsh voice, while the rain ran off his tail in streams, that he was there and ready and watching.

He was there and ready and watching whatever we did, wherever we went, whatever the hour. At dawn on our bedroom windowsill. Waiting like a customer for the sales to open because, to prevent him coming in during the night, we now slept with the windows shut. At night, having abandoned the garage as too far removed from the centre of things, he watched from a nearby tree. Twice when we'd been away all day until late evening we crept down the path at dusk, admonishing one another not to make a noise, fond as ever of Micawber but hoping, in view of the problems he set us, that he might have given us up for lost this time and gone to live elsewhere. It was no use. Even at nightfall, with every other magpie in England asleep and snoring long before, Micawber was watching us. Down through the dusk he came, circling our shoulders like a bat, sitting on the greenhouse while we put the car away, huddling – the last we saw of him as we closed the kitchen door – a watching outline on the coalshed roof.

That one day was the last we ever saw of Micawber as we knew him. Our first feeling, when next morning he was missing from our bedroom windowsill, was one of relief. No Micawber waddling demoralisingly through the kitchen door the moment we opened it. No Micawber, when we looked round the corner, sitting picket-fashion in the porch. No Micawber, when we went up to feed Annabel, running flat-footedly after us with raucous squawks to play with our shoe-laces, pull at our sandal buckles or jump with a splash into her water-bowl.

It was Charles, growing worried, who found him, lying stunned in a nearby lane. It was nobody's fault that we could see. A rough, bumpy lane where nothing could possibly have speeded. A car lumbering up in bottom gear. Micawber wandering about the verge under the overhanging grass and flying up at the last moment, as was his wont with people and animals, only this time into a car... Sadly we took him in and fought to save him. Micawber fought too, but he died.

It sobered us all for a while. He'd been a nuisance, a danger to the cats and a chaser of other birds. Even the blackbird and the robin had deserted us, chased off so fast by Micawber when they came down to land that, scuttling about the yard on his big flat feet, he looked like a character in a silent film. It was, perhaps, for the best, but we wished it had been some other way. We wished Micawber had taken to the woods where, with no danger to anybody, he might be flashing still between the trees.

The cats missed him. Sheba sniffed puzzledly round the windowsills and thoroughly searched the garage; Solomon sat for hours behind the kitchen door for a Micawber who didn't come; the pair of them scanned the sky when they went out for the familiar flapping of wings. We missed him too. Poking his meat fussily into corners of the yard for storage; raising his head in enjoyment as he drank from a saucer at our feet; sitting – the memory that stayed with us longest of all – at nightfall on the coalshed roof.

It took another setback to return us to normal. Annabel, eating her way steadily through the summer, had chewed her hedge quite threadbare. From that, with Annabel's eye for effect, it had been a short step to putting her head through the gaps when people passed and reaching, seemingly ignorant of their presence, across the ditch for an odd, stray bramble leaf or an overlooked blade of grass. A touching sight, particularly now that she'd lost her baby coat completely and looked more defenceless than ever with her rounded limbs, minute feet, tiny little tail and the winsomest golden cowlick outside a toyshop. Quite unnecessary, of course, seeing that the paddock was big enough for a dozen donkeys, she had two meals a day and the neighbours fed her till she was fit to pop. But it got her buns and sympathy, and people – watched approvingly by Annabel over the side-fence once their backs were turned – coming to tell us she was hungry.

It also got her out. Annabel, leaning through the wires one day after an elusive dandelion, discovered that she could stretch the top strand up with her head, the middle strand out by leaning on it like a dray horse with her chest – and thereafter, having reduced them in a couple of performances to sagging loops, all she had to do was up with her head, through (stepping carefully) with her feet, and she was free. Running up the hill with Charles and me after her, Timothy racing to cut her off up a side-track, and the lot of us going round like Paul Revere.

Three times she did it in a day, each time at a different point, till the wires hung like Christmas bunting, Annabel was wild with excitement and we were practically flat on our backs. The next day we had to tether her. We didn't like it but there was no alternative until we could get home from town with additional poles and wire and reinforce her fence. She'd be all right, we told ourselves. We'd tethered her for days when we first had her, till we got her fence up. Apart from regularly winding herself up like a maypole till she was on ten feet of rope instead of thirty – plodding self-pityingly round being a Treadmill Donkey, we supposed, though we'd never seen her do it – she hadn't come to harm. Never, as we imagined her doing now, breaking a leg, or strangling herself, or tying herself to a tree. She just couldn't do it, we assured ourselves.

So we left her. Watching us downtroddenly from the middle of the field on the end of her rope. Practising, for the benefit of the day's passers-by, her Burgher of Calais look. And when we got back she'd done it. Hogtied herself so thoroughly in a corner of the paddock that at first we thought she was dead.

She lay there unmoving under the elder tree. Eyes closed, legs bound to her muzzle, coat damp with fear and sweat. Only later had we time to work out how she'd done it – rolling like a puppy in a dust patch with the rope tightening round her with every kick. Meanwhile, panic-stricken, we cut her loose, helped her to her feet, trembled to see that she limped and that, when she opened her mouth to trumpet, only a squeak came out.

She recovered all right. Water, a couple of peppermints, Charles massaging her legs while she leaned convalescently against his head and Annabel was as right as rain. Only Charles was back where he started from, with a flaming peanut rash.