Donkey Work

FIFTEEN

To Be or Not to Be

One might have expected life to be a little humdrum after that, but we had our diversions. A tile blowing off the roof in a gale, for instance, and Charles going up in the dark to replace it and coming resignedly down with the cause. A marsh tit's nest. Built under the roof in the previous spring. Swollen with winter rain, which was why it had pushed up the tiles. Made, Charles pointed out, of donkey hair, and he bet we were the only people in England who adopted a donkey and got their tiles blown off as a result.

Then the stream – which normally disappears down a swallet-hole up the lane – rose as it always does in the January rains, ran down to us, couldn't get through our ditch on account of the rubble from the fireplace, and no doubt we were the only people in England doing that. Digging the darned stuff out again. With the stream gushing down the middle of the road. The cats sitting happily on the coalhouse roof advising everybody who passed that we were digging it out fast before the policeman saw us. Annabel informing the world from up the lane that she didn't do it and could she please be moved to a place of safety. And Timothy, engaged to help us in return for cash towards a racing bike, leaving us goggle-eyed with his account of every day getting his jean-legs shrunk in the stream, every night hanging them up to dry over his mother's Aga with the legs tied at the ends with string and filled with stones – and every morning, our helper assured us with aplomb, the jeans as good as new again and the legs stretched back to normal.

We had a morning when we sat up in bed to find a heron on our garden path. Following the stream, no doubt; coming down to land when he spotted the outline of our fish pool; flapping off as cross as a crow when he found that Charles hadn't finished it yet and there were still no goldfish in it. We had a morning when we sat up in bed to find a squirrel on the lawn. Digging under an apple tree, coming up triumphantly with a brace of our biggest cob-nuts and we'd wondered where they'd got to in the previous autumn. We had also, recurring like an echo through the tempo of our activities, the question of whether Annabel was to be a mother.

If faddiness was anything to go by she was probably having triplets. She still ate bran in preference to oats. She rejected two entire bales of hay on the grounds that she didn't like that kind and we had to get some more. She announced that she wanted her drinking water hot. A decision understandable in January, when we'd heated the water to prevent it freezing, but slightly suspicious come April, when the sun shone, the cats sunbathed on her shelter roof and Annabel, confronted by a pail of fresh cold water, pouted her lips at it and said she still required it Hot.

What with that, a liking for carrots and a sudden passion for orange peel – she found some on the hill one day, savoured it as if it were caviare, and thereafter a customs inspector had nothing on Annabel going through the waste-basket at the bus-stop every time she passed – things looked pretty black indeed.

There was no point in consulting the Vet. That became obvious as Spring rolled on and practically every day we opened the papers to read of unexpected foals.

A twenty-year old donkey whose owner said he couldn't think how she'd managed it had had a little blackjack. A small bay mare, bought for a greengrocer's round by a man with a lifetime's experience of horses, had scared the daylights out of him by lying down in the shafts on her first trip out with the cauliflowers and producing a small bay filly. A little girl's riding pony, whose owner could only inform reporters that recently Polly hadn't seemed keen on going to pony-club meetings though previously she'd liked the other ponies, had had a white one with spots... The papers quoted veterinary experts as saying you often couldn't tell with horses.

We certainly couldn't tell with Annabel. One minute we thought she was and prescribed plenty of greens for vitamins. Her own paddock being threadbare after the winter's eating we tethered her up on the hill to get them, trekked leisurely back to the cottage – and within minutes were running back up again like mad. Annabel, by way of amusement and pre­sumably trying to snap her tether at the same time, was up there galloping furiously down the slope like the Charge of the Light Brigade, pulling taut on the end of her rope with a jerk that must be knocking the triplets for six if she had them, plod­ding steadfastly back to the starting point like a skier returning up a ski-run, and doing it over again.

Later we decided she couldn't possibly be in foal, the trouble was she was eating too much and we ought to cut her rations down. The result of that was that Annabel's stomach, which despite her non-stop eating habits had rumbled at intervals ever since we'd known her like a distant train on the Underground, now began to rumble more loudly, like an incipiently active volcano. The day we gave her a reduced allowance of hay, stayed to clean out her house, heard what we thought was Timothy trundling his go-cart down the lane and looked up to discover that it wasn't Timothy at all but Annabel's stomach rumbling, we gave up putting her on a diet. We decided to let nature take its course, fed her so that her stomach remained muted though steadfastly barrel-shaped, and waited. For what looked like being rather a long wait, seeing that it takes a horse eleven months to foal; presumably (though we couldn't find it even in Britannica) it takes a donkey the same; and it would be October before we knew.

Meanwhile, so that we wouldn't get ennuied while we waited, the bird-mating season set in at the cottage. Missel thrushes nested trustingly in the damson tree, we showed them by way of a treat to Miss Wellington, and created a ripe old situation there. We had Miss Wellington hovering constantly by our gate in case when the young were hatched they fell out on to our path. Miss Wellington nipping smartly across to the hedge to pick dandelions when anybody passed – 'To make wine,' she informed passers-by; 'To put them off the scent,' she advised us; with the result that after being put off the scent daily for a week Father Adams enquired interestedly of us what th'old girl was making as much wine as that for; planning a Batchanalia? When the birds hatched they did start falling out, too, and, as nutty as Miss Wellington, we put straw down for them to fall on and kept going out when she wasn't around to return them to the nest.

How they escaped the cats was a miracle, said Miss Wellington. Actually it was because the mouse-hunting season had started also and our March of the Siamese Cats was returning, not, as it often did, via the front gate with an excursion up the damson tree for exercise, but in a crow's flight line from the paddock. Over the wall, down the path, up the stairs to our bedroom where they usually stored their catches and where one day, to our horror, we found they had stored a rat. Only a young one, stone-cold dead on its back, but where there was one there were others.

There were, when we started to look for them, dozens. Multiplying like flies, no doubt, with the warmer weather; attracted by Annabel's bread; and coming not only from the walls of her house but trekking, at feeding time, down the valley. Like a portage procession through the Khyber Pass, said Charles, who watched astounded one morning from across on the hillside as they filed familiarly down a track from some ruins in a neighbouring field, disappeared into Annabel's house, and a second or two later filed familiarly back up again carrying whacking great lumps of bread.

Something had to be done, of course. We couldn't leave the cats to deal with them – otherwise, as we knew full well, one day they'd come up against a big one and somebody would be bitten. We couldn't trap them on account of the danger to the birds and cats. We couldn't call in the Pest Officer and have them poisoned for the same reason. On the other hand, for our own sakes and everybody else's, we couldn't have them multiplying like this. So Charles, with the cats shut in the cottage, Annabel on the lawn and a bowl of bread in her house for bait, shot them. Not before we'd noticed something interesting, however. On the whole the rats made Annabel nervous. She stamped her feet at them; kicked when she was eating and they rustled in the straw; looked worried from time to time at their entrance holes in the corners. Not, however, when it came to a certain light-brown rat. A rat whom we, too, recognised.

He could come out of his hole with impunity. One night, when we went up to see Annabel at dusk, we discovered him actually feeding with her at her bowl. We watched amazed from the paddock as he stood up on his hind legs, leaned into her bowl and ate nose to nose with our donkey. We watched even more amazed when, as the level of bran went down, the rat got into the bowl, Annabel went on eating, and when he got in her way she just tossed him out with her nose. Even then, while we stood there pop-eyed with incredulity, the rat unperturbedly climbed back again.

We didn't shoot him. He was a rat of character. If we kept the rest of them down, we decided, he could hardly propagate the valley on his own. So Charles despatched the rest. The fawn one was allowed to go free. In order not to encourage a further invasion we fed Annabel, as it was now full Spring, in the open field where rats hesitate to go...

Meanwhile Annabel had a further adventure. We were having lunch one day when the owner of Misha the Alsatian arrived with a distracted expression on her face and asked whether she could borrow Annabel for a while.

She had, she explained, a two-year-old called Monarch, destined to become a racehorse. Her other horses had gone away to grass. Monarch, kept behind because he needed building up as thoroughbreds sometimes do, was pining for the others and refusing his food. She wondered if Annabel could help him eat.

Annabel, we assured her, could help anybody eat. Probably only by getting the idea from watching her that if they didn't hurry up there'd be a famine. But they'd eat. She even made us feel ravenous at times. Which was why, that evening, the village saw another local procession. Our taking Annabel over to meet Monarch.

Some of them, since Monarch lived quite near the centre of the village, saw the moment when they actually did meet when Monarch towered over his gate to sniff at her and Annabel, with one look at the tallest horse she had ever seen, put her tail between her legs and started determinedly for home.

Still more of them witnessed the next scene. When we led Annabel into the field, she hid behind us, Monarch tried to get round us to look at her, and the lot of us – since as fast as we sidestepped evasively so did Annabel behind us and so did Monarch in front – did a veleta across the field.

Roused, no doubt, by banging on one another's doors, a crowd that would have done credit to a town crier witnessed the scene when we ran to encourage Annabel, Monarch ran too to catch us up, and, encircled with animals like an Indian attack, we went flat out for our lives.

Eventually we left them together, however. Eventually they touched noses and made friends. Magically, with Annabel feeding beside him and he looking proudly down at her, Monarch started to graze. She could sleep soundly tonight now, said Mrs Jennings, as we slipped off up the lane.

Not perhaps so soundly as she hoped. Somebody passing our cottage later that evening reported Monarch and Annabel going round their paddock like the Valkyries. Somebody else, passing our way at closing time, reported Mrs Jennings and her husband going like Valkyries too. Trying to catch them, they said – for one of the conditions we'd made about lending Annabel was that she should be locked in for safety at night. They'd caught them. Led them in. Annabel first, reported the onlooker; Monarch refused to move a step till he'd seen Annabel put into a loose box ahead of him. Let them out the next morning, continued the report, when Annabel was seen heading through the vegetable garden as her personal short cut to the paddock and Monarch gallivanting after her.

Gallivanting was the word. The whole of that day, apparently, he never stopped chasing Annabel. Whether – which was something we hadn't given thought to – it was because she was a girl. In which case, said Charles, her marriage to Henry was no doubt null and void but in the course of time we could expect a donkey foal with legs like a racehorse. Whether, which was the Jennings' interpretation, she was just too small for Monarch... From the point of view of playing, explained Mrs. Jennings – with those little legs and that long coat and Monarch chasing her round like a puppy.

But that night they brought her back again. Monarch was eating like a horse, they said, thanks to her. To keep up the good work they'd borrowed a companion for him more his own size and now he was chasing that one round the field...

Never, in all the time we'd had her, had we seen a more thoughtful donkey than the one who walked into her house that night, looked appreciatively at her bed, and snorted with contentment as we put her hurdle up. East, West, Home Was Best, said Annabel as she lay down in the straw. She didn't like racehorses, she said as we crept quietly away with the cats.