Raining Cats and Donkeys

FOURTEEN

Putting a Foot in It

As far as her undercarriage was concerned, Annabel went on being a lady. Her teats were there all right, hidden in the thick cream fur that covered her stomach, but they didn't swell. Perhaps with a little donkey they wouldn't said someone else – or maybe not until she actually foaled.

As the months went by there were other signs, however. One morning we noticed Annabel, as we thought, looking persistently in at us through the kitchen window – the one that faced on to the yard. She was there when we had our coffee. She was there when I went out to get the lunch, nuzzling round the frame and wasn't she clever, I said, to realise she could watch us through that?

What she was actually doing was eating the putty. Charles had recently renewed it and presumably it still tasted of linseed, but it was an odd thing to do, nevertheless. Other than Charles's anguished outcry when he saw the tooth-marks – that dam blasted donkey ate everything, he said; it was a wonder she didn't eat us – undoubtedly it was significant of something.

So it appeared when, for the first time ever, she jibbed at climbing the steep track up into the Forestry estate. It was safe to let her run free there and normally, full of excitement at going for a walk, she galloped it like a Derby winner – up and back at least six times while we climbed it ourselves, kicking skittishly sideways at us when we laughed. Lately, though, she'd taken to walking it and this time, at the steepest part, she stopped. She sighed, eyed the track and visibly rested. We would have taken her back but for the fact that when we tried to turn her, being Annabel she immediately insisted in going on up. If she stumbled by the wayside we weren't to worry, she assured us. She knew donkeys were only beasts of burden. If Julius fell right out she'd carry on.

Having reached the top without this calamity happening she announced that it was all right this time but now Julius would like some grass, and started grazing. She always did up here, where the grass was green and lush. She'd stay there for hours if we let her, and normally we chivied her on. This time, however, we left her, slipped quietly round the corner, and continued our walk alone. We'd go just to the gate at the bottom to give Julius time to settle, we decided, and then come back, put her on her halter and take her home. No more up the hill for her, we said. One shock like that was enough.

We got our second shock ten minutes later, when, while we were at the gate, leaning on it and gazing, still sweating slightly, at the scenery, we heard the sound of determinedly galloping hooves. 'Annabel!' I gasped in horror, recognising the beat. 'It can't be!' groaned Charles. But it was.

Round the corner she came, like a four-footed avenging angel. Downhill now, so there was nothing to hold her up. Wheezing like a bellows with the exertion and shaking Julius roundly at every thud. Leaving her behind and trying to lose her, she snorted when she caught up with us – and, when we tried to placate her, she kicked petulantly out at us and promptly lost her footing in the mud.

We expected Julius to appear at any moment on the way back, but he didn't. Even so we didn't take her up the hill again. She stayed in the Valley now. Receiving her many callers; bulging, so it seemed to me, daily; and beset, as soon as the summer came, by flies.

It so happened that Aunt Louisa had given me some old lace curtains of my grandmother's to put over the rasp­berries, and when Charles came in one day and said the flies were pestering her badly, couldn't we find something to cover her head and eyes, I said I had the very thing. I got a piece of lace curtain long enough to hang over her nose, cut two holes in it for her ears, put it on and tied it firmly behind her head.

It worked wonders. Admittedly she looked like a Spanish duenna wearing her mantilla back to front – but who, I said, was going to see that, if we kept her grazing quietly on the lawn? The answer was the riding school, who appeared within minutes as if summoned by a bugle. Annabel sauntered over to greet them, putting her head, curtain and all, over the wall; there was a chorus of 'Oooohs' from the children... 'Look Miss Linley, Annabel's getting married' called one excited voice. There was no answer from Miss Linley this time. She was quite at a loss for words.

Before long the flies involved us in a far more serious situation, however. By this time we'd discovered a fly repellent made specially for horses, which we sprayed on her back and legs and – since she objected to the hissing at too close quarters – rubbed by hand round her nose and ears. One warm morning I sprayed her thoroughly as usual, put her to graze on the slope behind the cottage – not far enough to involve her in any real climbing but enough to give her a change of grass – and was coming back down with the fly spray when I suddenly realised that I had the wrong tin. Not the fly repellent for horses but a tin of household fly killer containing Pybuthrin.

I knew what the instructions said without looking at them.

'Remove birdcages and fishbowls... cover children's cots... not to be used on cats and dogs...' We never used it at home ourselves. The only reason we had it was that we'd taken it on a trip to the Camargue in the mosquito season – and the only reason it happened to be on hand, which was how I'd picked it up, was that I'd got it out the previous day to give the name of it to Louisa, who was going on her first-ever trip abroad and had visions of deadly insects everywhere from Calais onwards.

When I told Charles what I'd done, his opinion, based on the observation that I'd used it enough on the old etangs and he was still around himself, was that it probably wouldn't hurt her at all. She was big, he said. She didn't lick herself as a cat or dog would. Better just watch her for a while, he advised. There was nothing else we could do.

There was, though. After ten minutes of waiting for her to collapse – sure at one moment that she had because I couldn't see her, but it was all right, she was only hidden temporarily behind a tree – I rang up Boots in the nearest town and asked to speak to one of their chemists.

'A what?' was the astonished comment when I told him what I'd done. 'A donkey', I worriedly confirmed. It was like confiding one's troubles to a policeman. When he said hold on a moment while he consulted his colleagues and incredulous voices saying 'She's sprayed a what?' came from the room behind him, the equanimity with which he in turn replied 'A donkey' was really magnificent. There was a muttered conference, after which he returned to the phone to report that the general opinion was that if she were their donkey they'd wash her. 'With what?' I enquired puzzledly. 'Oh, the usual thing – soapflakes or detergent and plenty of hot water', he said, speaking by now as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

It wasn't, of course. I thanked him, told Charles, and the pair of us started slogging up behind the cottage with buckets of detergent. Better to do the job up there, we decided, where the water could sink into the ground, instead of in the yard where the next thing would be Solomon paddling in it and we'd be ringing up Boots about him.

Which was how – elevated on the hillside as on a stage we were next to be seen industriously bathing a donkey. Rubbing in the detergent till she foamed; running up with buckets of water to rinse her; running up again with the proper fly spray when we'd finished because, having got off all the original repellent, the horse-flies were pitching on her in hundreds as she was now so attractively wet.

'What be doin' up there then?' came Father Adams's voice inevitably, in due course, from the bottom, and when we told him he said we fair beat cock-fighting. When, a few weeks later, he looked over the wall one day and saw me fitting a striped canvas bag with a rubber sole over one of Annabel's feet it was too much even for him, however. 'Don't tell I thee bist making her boots!' he declared. And when I confessed that as a matter of fact I was – 'God Almighty!' he breathed incredulously.

There was a logical explanation, of course. There was for most of our actions. It was just the appearance of what we were doing that so often looked peculiar – the snag being that in most cases it is the appearance by which one is judged.

In this case I'd noticed Annabel limping and, thinking maybe one of her hooves needed trimming, I'd called in the farrier. Twudn't her hooves, he reported after his examination. The little old girl had trodden on a nail. He'd never known it afore with a donkey, he said. Horses, yes – but not donkeys, who usually trod so lightly. There were the hole though, he said, gently squeezing the upturned hoof at which pus came out of it and Annabel whimpered with pain. Us had better get the Vet.

I did. Harler, when he came, expressed no surprise at all on hearing that Annabel was the first donkey the farrier had ever known to get a nail in her foot. He'd never known of one either, he said, but if anybody was going to be first it would undoubtedly be her. Would I mind holding her head?

Actually there was no need. Just as Annabel had stood unmoving for the farrier, so she now stood like a slave in a Roman forum for Mr Harler. He examined her, cleaned her foot and gave her an anti-biotic injection in the rump. All we had to do now, he said, ruffling her fringe when he'd finished and telling her that she was a far better patient than a certain Siamese cat he knew, was to soak her foot three times a day in hot water to bring out the pus, and keep it covered to fend off the dirt.

All we had to do indeed. If he'd put her foot in a bucket she'd no doubt have stayed there batting her eyelashes at him till the water froze. When we attempted to do it she either took it out again and stuck it determinedly in the dirt, kicked the bucket over, or, if the fancy took her, strolled around the lawn while we strove to move the bucket with her like an outsize Wellington boot.

If we kept her foot in water for a minute we were lucky, and as for covering it afterwards – in the corner of an old nail-bag or something like that, said Mr Harler; heavy canvas so she could walk on it, and tied round her fetlock so she couldn't get it off – we managed that all right. The trouble was, Annabel kept wearing through the canvas.

Whether it was relief at being able to stand on the foot again or a desire to show off about having seen the Vet, she stumped up and down her field so solidly that in two days she went through both corners of the only nail-bag we could get and after that I was reduced to making her foot covers out of a piece of deck-chair canvas. These she went through even more quickly, until I hit on the idea of sewing a rubber heel to the bottom with string – back to front, like a miniature horseshoe, to fit the shape of her foot.

It worked. It was perfectly logical. Even Father Adams had to admit that when it was explained to him. Unfortunately we couldn't explain it to everybody, however, and when Annabel discovered that the rubber heel made a useful digging implement... It wasn't so much that she dug holes all over the lawn with it – what with molehills and drains our lawn was pretty well past praying for in any case. It was the fact that people saw her. In a green and orange-striped boot with a back-to-front rubber heel on it. You can guess what they thought about that. What Miss Wellington wanted to know when she heard we'd had the Vet was what he'd said about Annabel. 'About the baby', she urged insistently. 'Did you ask him if it was true?'

As a matter of fact I hadn't. For one thing I didn't think it was fair, having got him along to see to her foot, to ask him to throw in a confirmation that she was in foal – and for another I was perfectly certain she was. The way she bulged, the way she acted – only that very week Janet and I had watched entranced as she stood in the lane, her sides jumping like a Mexican bean with what we were sure was unquestionably Julius.

He would have thought I was nuts, asking him if a donkey bulging so much she looked as if she was wearing panniers under her skin was in foal, I replied to Charles when he in turn, on coming home that night, said but why hadn't I asked Harler to confirm it. All I'd done was tell him she was in foal, to make sure the injection wouldn't harm her, and he had said it wouldn't.

It was my fault entirely, therefore, that we still didn't definitely know. July came and went, but no Julius. August came and went, but no Augustus. One night in August I sat with her for ages in her stable, watching her sigh and stamp her feet as she ate and feeling her stomach at cautious intervals for signs of movement. We'd just been told that it took fifty-four weeks – a year and a fortnight – for a donkey to have a foal, as against a horse's eleven months. A year and a fortnight from the time Annabel had been mated would have been that very day and there were signs of movement now all right. Annabel's stomach twitched and she stamped her back feet irritably every time I touched her. Towards midnight, awed by the thought of what the morrow might bring, I went back down to Charles. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Augustus were here by morning, I told him.

He wasn't. Septimus wasn't there by September, either. We put off our holiday week by week just in case, but by mid-September we'd completely given up hope. We went on holiday and Annabel went to the farm. Not entirely uneventfully. She had her foot in a plaster casing.