Donkey Work

TWO

Sleuthing on the Sands

We didn't get a little donkey from him. He didn't breed 'em, he said; only kept 'em for riding. When Charles mentioned Dolly having had a foal he said it was a surprise to him, too, Mate; the only stallion he had was over thirty-five and the fairies must have had a hand in it. He might, he said, spare us a mare at the end of the season like he had the lady at the guest house and we could hope the fairies had had a word with her, too... But that wasn't what we wanted.

We didn't get one from our next port of call either, though we did – against a background of small boys screaming to get on, small girls screaming to get off, and Charles trying to look dignified with a horse-drawn coach labelled the Deadwood Stage standing ostentatiously behind him – get quite a lot of information. That male donkeys are called jacks, for instance, and females are called jennies, and that what we thought were light little ponies cantering up and down the sands were in fact jennets. Crosses between horses and donkeys, said the man, and when we said weren't those mules he said that was when the father was a donkey. When the father was a horse, he said, you got a jennet.

Actually when we looked it up in the dictionary it said that what you got was a hinny, while a jennet was a small Spanish horse. That, said Charles, was genealogically very interesting. Donkey men were often of gypsy stock, lots of the English gypsies came originally from Spain – what was more likely than that they should call their donkey crosses after the small Spanish horse?

What struck me as even more genealogically interesting was that when I asked the man was it true that donkeys lived to be around forty, as it said in the article, he said sixty was more like it. He had a donkey at home, he said, that had belonged to his father, and his father had been dead sixty years so it showed how old the donkey was, didn't it? It did indeed, particularly as he himself couldn't have been a day over fifty. I puzzled over it for hours.

He didn't have any donkey foals either. He had a couple of jennies, he said helpfully, who'd be throwing 'em in the Spring and we could come back and have one then. The next two owners we enquired of also said their jennies would be throwing them in the Spring. Come April, it seemed, foals would be being thrown in all directions like apple blossom at a Spring wedding. What we wanted was one right then.

We didn't get it. The nettles grew and faded. The grapes ripened in the conservatory. We, having first waited till the grapes had ripened so that we could eat them, went on holiday to Provence so that we could eat some more. Up through the lavender fields to St. Paul de Vence where, in the last place on earth we expected it, right up there in the mountains, we met a Siamese cat. Sitting in a wood-carver's shop daring us to enter, and when we spoke to her and she was rude back her owner came rushing out to grab her and said not to mind Mignonne, she was a Siamoise. We, we assured her, understood. We had two Siamois. Aaah, she said, shaking her head sympathetically, at which point a small girl came round a corner hugging a black kitten. 'Mignette!' she said, holding it happily up for our approval. We looked from Mignette to Mignonne to the shopkeeper and raised our eyebrows. She raised hers too, and spread her hands in abnegation. What would we? she deplored. Mignonne, without waiting for the nice Siamois husband they had planned for her from a lady in Grasse, had gone out one night and been trumped. Mignonne had the final word about that. Surveying us loftily as she stalked across the shop to retrieve Mignette – it was Dark, she said over her shoulder.

We came back from the South of France – passing en route the swallows from our barn, according to Father Adams' grandson Timothy who will one day drive us mad with his efforts to be a naturalist, but we didn't recognise them. The cats came back from Halstock, on the one hand yelling that they were Home now for the Winter and we weren't to forget it and on the other recoiling from their plates with dramatic incredulity when we fed them, complaining that the Francises cooked better than that. Up the lane, to the doctor's horror, a builder started putting up a bungalow bang opposite his Queen Anne cottage – a situation complicated not only by the fact that the doctor didn't want it there but that the builder had promised some months previously to repair the doctor's chimneys and hadn't done it before starting on the bungalow. The doctor brought it up one day when he met the builder in the lane. Supposing they'd blown down the other night in the gale and come through the roof, he said reproachfully. Well they hadn't, had they? said the builder. His bark was worse than his bite, however. The next night he and one of his men went consolatorily up after they'd finished work on the bungalow and started on the chimneys. The only snag being that by that time it was nearly dark, they hadn't told the doctor they were going up (they couldn't, actually, because he and his wife were out) and when the doctor's wife came tripping back from her visiting, opened the garden gate, and saw figures prowling mysteriously round her chimney pot in the gathering gloom, she nearly fainted.

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.