Donkey Work

ONE

Nettled

People staying in the district and hearing that we keep Siamese often stop at the cottage and ask to see them.

'Quiet spot you have here,' they comment, gazing idly round at the garden, the valley and the rolling West Country hills. That, say the more lynx-eyed of them a second or two later, spotting a pair of Seal Point ears protruding bulrush-fashion from a clump of grass on the far side of the lawn, must, from what they've heard of him, be Solomon. It is indeed. Solomon in ambush. In his favourite hide behind the air-vent of the septic tank, and a more embarrassing introduction than to say 'This is Solomon' – and then, when they enthuse about how beautiful he is and what is that interesting stone he's sitting behind, is it a Roman milestone, having to confess that that is the air-vent to our septic tank – it is difficult to imagine.

Flustered – some of them muttering doggedly that it looked like a Roman milestone anyway – they gaze around for inspiration. It is not long in coming. It arrives in the form of a pint-sized Blue Point queen within seconds of hearing people talking to Solomon. Belting down the path at top speed, dwindling to a coy dawdle when she nears the party – once, as the result of a springtime mousing expedition in the ditch, she appeared with her eyebrows starred with cow parsley flowers like the Primavera; we have often wondered how accidental that entry was... That, they say, greeting her arrival with delight, must be Sheba.

It is too, and a happy scene ensues with Sheba being cuddled, Solomon determinedly dodging his would-be cuddlers round the air-vent and everybody saying how they just love Siamese. Until sooner or later somebody spots Charles, my husband, in the vegetable garden or up on the hillside and asks, in a voice of dumbfounded amazement, 'What on earth's he doing with a donkey?'

She is our donkey, her name is Annabel, and we bought her because we had nettles. Two acres of them, growing waist-high round Charles' fruit trees with the village sages surveying them as gloomily as if they were mandrakes and saying 'twas a pity to ruin good trees like that, Charles unable to get at them because he didn't have time, and Sidney the handyman refusing to touch them because he said they was just the place for snakes. Sidney had a thing about snakes. He even advised us not to eat the watercress from the stream up the valley because, he said, it had little black snakes in it and his father knew a man what had dropped like a log after eating some for his tea one night. It was a moment of sombre triumph for Sidney when we asked how he knew it was the watercress. When they cut the poor bloke open, he said dramatically, there inside 'un was a little black snake...

Nothing short of a suit of armour would have got Sidney into the nettles. Charles toyed with the idea of a flame-thrower and discarded it because it might, he said, be difficult to keep it clear of the trees. (It might indeed; the last time Charles had used the blow-lamp he'd set fire to the garage door.) There was bracken growing between the nettles, too, and long ropes of bramble which, when Charles or I did venture up there with reaping hooks for a quick five-minutes' hack, caught us suddenly round the ankles and sent us leaping sky-high with thoughts of Sidney's snakes. All in all we were ripe as a couple of greengages for the day when, opening the Sunday newspapers, we found an article about donkeys.

Why more people didn't keep donkeys he couldn't imagine, enthused the writer. Neither could we when we read how in the old days farmers liked to run them with their cows (donkeys, it seemed, not only acted as herd leaders but cleared fields like magic of weeds which would spoil the milk); how they were no trouble to keep and cost nothing at all to feed if you had a piece of rough land – particularly, said the article, they liked nettles; how intelligent they were, and patient; and how, if you encouraged them and made a fuss of them, they would respond to you like a dog.

We looked at one another entranced. A little donkey eating down the nettles like a suction-pump. A little donkey cavorting between the apple trees, once it had cleared a cavorting space, like a character from Walt Disney. A little donkey – we smiled mistily at the thought – who would respond to us like a dog.

Charles and I liked dogs. We didn't have one because, whereas if we were away during the day we could leave a couple of Siamese cats companionably ripping up the stair-carpet or sleeping on the eiderdown, we couldn't leave a dog. Earthboxes we might have, but as Charles said, we weren't importing trees. We also didn't have one because, even if we had been around all day, the cats wouldn't have stood for it. A small black poodle called Prune, who lived down the lane and came flat as an ink-blot on his stomach under our gate in a way that had them spellbound with admiration, was permitted into the yard for biscuits. So was a corgi from up the hill, on account of his short legs at which they gazed with such interest that he invariably ended by tucking his tail self-consciously between them and scuttling crestfallenly away. But dogs in general – No. Certainly not in the house. Not unless we wanted fights and ambushes and cats leaving home in all directions, and we'd had enough of that the time we tried to adopt another Siamese kitten.

So there we were. Ripe, as I said, as a couple of plums. Telling ourselves that donkeys were different. That one could live out on the hillside without the cats being worried about its wanting to come indoors. They might, we envisaged, even think it was a little horse and like it. Solomon was particularly fond of horses... Imagining it following us across the hills like a dog – with Solomon and Sheba sitting one each side in panniers, said Charles enthusiastically, which I couldn't quite see coming off myself judging by the hell they created when we put them in their baskets ready for the cat kennels at holiday times, but there was no harm in hoping. We could, we told one another excitedly, hardly wait.

As a matter of fact we had to wait for six months. Donkeys, we found, weren't so easy to get. Particularly a baby donkey, which was what we'd decided on both from the point of view of bringing it up with the cats and because the first thing our neighbour Father Adams said when he heard we were getting one was that we'd have to watch the horse dealers. Do you soon as look, he said encouragingly, and we'd better watch their teeth. As we hadn't a clue as to how to watch either a donkey's teeth or a horse dealer's – and neither, when it came to the point, did Father Adams; only that it had been a maxim of his Dad's before him and his Dad, he said, had had his head screwed on when it came to horses – we decided a foal was safer. See it with its mother, we said (making sure that 'twas its mother, adjured Father Adams darkly, and not a little old dwarf donkey bunged up against a big 'un) and there we were.

There, to begin with, we nearly were indeed. Almost immediately Sidney heard of a donkey and foal in the very next village. The property, it appeared, of a lady who ran a guest house, liked getting up amateur theatricals for her visitors, and had, in a moment of over-enthusiasm, purchased a she-donkey eighteen months before to take part in a Christmas masque.

For, it seemed, one performance only. (Twice round the table-tennis room and that was that; never believe it, would us? said Sidney wonderingly.) After which the donkey had rested in the orchard until Spring, gone – her owner thinking she might be feeling lonely – to join the donkeys on the local beach for the summer; come back – to the consternation of her owner, who hadn't reckoned on her being as lonely as that – in foal. And now, said Sidney explicitly, there were two of 'em.

Not by the time we got there there weren't. Dolly pottering round the orchard on her ageing own had been one thing. Dolly with romance in the field behind the seaside gasworks in mind, and a jaunty little he-colt at her side, was quite another. You'd think they had wire-cutters the way they kept getting out, said their owner despairingly, and always it seemed to be at mealtimes, with visitors clattering their forks for service and somebody ringing up to say Dolly and Desmond had just passed by en route for the seaside and her having to hare down the road after them. In the end, she said – showing us with a sentimental sigh a photograph of two donkeys giving such old-fashioned looks at the camera that for a moment we almost wavered in our decision... Did it, enquired Charles, remind me of Anyone? I'll say it did. Solomon and Sheba to the life, but then I remembered we were only having one donkey and the apprehension passed. In the end she'd sold them, only the week before, to some people who lived near Manchester. People who liked donkeys, she said, and would keep the two of them together. Manchester, she added, brightening considerably as she thought of the advantages, was two hundred miles away.

It didn't occur to us that if donkeys could get out of a wired-in field how were we going to manage on rambling hillside land with gaps big enough for elephants in the hedges and not a gate to the place. It didn't occur to us that if we followed our plan of having a dear little she-foal (because, we imagined, she'd be more amenable and affectionate) sooner or later we'd either have a neurotic spinster donkey on our hands or have to let her have a dear little foal herself and keep two of them willy-nilly. We hadn't thought ahead as far as that. All we knew was that we wanted a donkey. Which was why the following weekend saw us down at the seaside, the lady at the guest house having given us the address of the place where she got hers, interviewing a donkey man.