A Donkey in the Meadow

by Derek Tangye

  ‘I should certainly think not after you and Jack Baker and the donkey have carved it up.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.

  ‘What do you expect me to say? You’ve seen me enough times cursing and sweating, keeping the grass cut with the motor scythe, the most exhausting machine ever devised.’

  ‘It still isn’t really a lawn.’

  ‘It was improving.’

  ‘Where else can we put her? The stable is full up with junk and we couldn’t possibly clear it out tonight. And if we put her in a field she might jump over the hedge and be lost.’

  ‘I suppose it never occurred to you that you could have put the contraption in a field?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Jeannie softly, ‘I thought of that, but you see, she would be lonely. By having her on the lawn I can keep a watch on her through the bedroom window.’

  ‘All night?’

  ‘Every now and then I could look out and see she’s all right.’

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to carry out an armchair? You could sit beside her under an umbrella.’

  ‘What a good idea!’ she said laughing.

  There was a jerk as the Land Rover went through the stream that crosses the entrance to Minack, the stream we call Monty’s Leap. It was here, when at last we had arrived at Minack, that on a magical moonlit night Monty had nosed his way puzzlingly down the lane; and on reaching the stream had ignored my readiness to lift him over and, instead, had leapt majestically across. It was here, too, beside this stream that he was buried.

  ‘Hell,’ I said, ‘it’s started to pour.’

  I drew up outside the cottage and as I did so I saw the rain dancing on the bonnet; and when I switched off the engine I could hear the wind sweeping through the elm trees.

  ‘It’s going to be a dirty old night.’

  ‘What a beginning for her.’

  ‘She’s got to get used to it sometime. And, anyhow, didn’t she come from Ireland?’

  ‘That doesn’t mean she enjoys rough weather.’

  ‘Nor do we. And we are about to be soaked trying to lure a donkey from the back of a Land Rover towards a contraption outside our bedroom window, and keeping it from running away.’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  The lawn has a steep slope, the size of half a tennis court, and a section of the bottom end merged with the parking space for cars. I proceeded to back the Land Rover to this spot so that when the rear was unlatched the well of the Land Rover was level, within a yard or two, of the lawn. Hence Penny had only to jump this short distance to be on firm ground. Unfortunately her bottom faced the wrong way.

  ‘Come on, Penny,’ I said, gently pulling the rope of the halter, ‘turn round.’

  She stayed staring across the front seats at the windscreen.

  ‘Do please turn round.’

  I pulled again, firmly this time. It was like pulling a tree trunk.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Penny, turn round.’

  No response.

  ‘I’ll get a carrot,’ said Jeannie, running indoors and returning with a handful.

  ‘Look Penny,’ I said, tugging at her again and holding a carrot like a flag, ‘look what I’ve got.’

  There was an imperceptible movement of her head, an intimation that she was giving me a sideways glance, no immediate surrender to greed but one sensed a thought was passing through her mind; when did I last have one of these delectable things?

  I pushed the carrot up to her face, then cunningly traced it along the side of the canvas hood so that she had to turn her head to watch it. I knew victory was near. The ancient carrot trick was about to work. I stood at the open end of the Land Rover and waited.

  She did a neat turn. The well of the Land Rover is only four feet by three, a small space for a donkey in foal, but she manoeuvred herself with the ease of a large dog. Her bottom to the driving seat, her face thrust forward, peering into the rain and growing darkness, she now expected her reward.

  ‘I’ll let her have a nibble,’ I said, ‘just to whet her appetite. Then I’ll do the trick again to get her out.’

  Her idea of a nibble was to grab the carrot from my hand. A huge mouth, then crunch, crunch, crunch. It was a succulent sound, the forerunner of many, many such crunches. Here was enjoyment of high degree, the luscious favourite dish of a gourmet, the wild abandon of someone who had forgotten good manners in the pursuit of exquisite flavours. I felt, as I listened, my own mouth watering, and I thought of my supper, and I cursed the rain. Penny might be enjoying herself, but it was time we reached the comfort of the cottage.

  ‘Here you are,’ I said, dangling another carrot invitingly, as I stood on the lawn three yards from the crunch. ‘Here you are,’ I said again.

  I have learnt now that you do not eat a carrot in the way you eat a handful of hay or a slice of bread. These are ordinary things. A carrot requires respect, and after the crunch there follows the lick. The purpose of the lick is to recapture the original delight, an attempt to linger the pleasure, mirrored by an indulgent look in the eyes of the licker. The licker prefers to lick a hand, or a stone if it is handy, but it can be perfectly satisfied by its own solid-looking mouth. In any case, the observer, the provider of the carrot, must be patient.

  ‘Look, look,’ I said, backing away up the slope, ‘another carrot!’

  I felt the rain filtering between my neck and the collar of my shirt, while Jeannie, scarf over her head, was clutching the rest of the carrots, allowing me to conduct the campaign on my own. Both of us were growing impatient.

  Lick, lick; like a cat after a capture.

  ‘Come on, Penny,’ I said, ‘jump out into your new home.’

  She did not jump, she scrambled; and in one awful moment three of her legs were on the ground while the other was left sprawling in the Land Rover.

  ‘Look out, she’ll break her leg,’ cried Jeannie.

  ‘I’m doing my best!’

  I was holding the halter, unsure whether to let it lie loose so that she could make her own recovery, or to pull it tight and so attempt to pull her with it. And I was angry with myself. I was angry that we should have been so foolish as to bring her home in such conditions of rain and darkness and ignorance. We should have gone back for her in the morning, or at any rate stopped at the farm at the top and asked Jack Cochram, the farmer, to come down and help us. It had been laziness on my part, or a vain wish to prove my independence, and Penny was paying for it.

  But, as it happened, in this instant of my panic I had overdramatised the situation. My habit of seeing disaster before it has occurred danced me to a conclusion which was quite invalid. Penny, realising her predicament, paused a few seconds to gain balance on the three legs already on the ground, then leapt forward bringing the fourth one clear.

  ‘Our first lesson,’ I said, mockingly serious, ‘let her look after herself.’

  For Jeannie, however, this was not a lesson that was easy to accept, as I learnt during the course of the night. A donkey in the darkness of a strange place, standing in driving rain and a gale, was certain to excite her pity.

  We tied Penny to the contraption on the lawn, fed her with a pound of carrots, three apples and half a loaf of home-made bread, and put a pail of water beside her. The adventure, as far as I was concerned, was over for the time being. I wanted my own supper, and a good night’s sleep.

  But Jeannie had no such intention. Twice during supper she dashed outside with a torch; and when we went to bed, no sooner had I turned out the light than she was at the window gleaming the torch through the rain at the bedraggled donkey ten yards away on the lawn.

  ‘Poor thing,’ she murmured.

  ‘Hell to it,’ I replied, ‘I want to go to sleep.’

  I awoke soon after dawn and I lay there listening to the dawn chorus, sleepily attempting to identify the many songs. The storm had passed and it was still again; and through the window I could see the crescent of the sun climbing behind the Lizard. It was a heavenly morning,
and for a brief moment I believed I possessed no cares. Then suddenly I realised why I had woken so early.

  There, just outside the bedroom window, was a donkey. A responsibility. I had waited for years for a holiday and I had sacrificed it to a four-legged creature which would be useless for any practical purpose. There would be nothing for it to do except mooch about demanding attention. And soon there would be the foal. Two donkeys mooching about.

  They would live for years and years; and every day I would be waking up, half worrying what to do with them. Should they be in this meadow or that? Have they got enough water? We had burdened ourselves with two large permanent pets, remote in manner but utterly dependent upon us. I had been rushed into making a purchase that any cool period of thinking would have made me check, see reason, and halt from making. On this lovely, fresh early morning I was angry with myself.

  And then I found myself wondering why I was vexed. True I had made an unreasonable, overexcited gesture, but it was a gesture which tied me even more closely to Minack; and Minack was a home neither of us would ever want to leave. So why was there a demon inside me who resented another anchor?

  I lay thinking and was unable to answer. There was just this vague, tenuous sense of distress that I had committed myself. Perhaps I had discovered for myself the reason why so many are scared of the affection of animals. They do not want to be tied. They do not want anchors. Their lives are complicated enough without having to worry about a creature on four legs.

  I was fully awake by now. I also found that a curiosity was already replacing my negative thoughts. How was she? What was she doing?

  I got out of bed and looked out of the window.

  Penny was happily eating the lawn I hadn’t cut for a month.

  7

  Penny was black, and this had disappointed me from the first moment I saw her. Only the bottom half of her nose, the rims round her eyes, and a rotund girth were white or a light grey. I felt as I did when, years ago, I went to Tahiti and found the sands which edged the lagoons were black. In both cases my preconceived ideas had been affronted; sands of the South Seas should be white, coat of a donkey should be grey.

  We were later to be told by a horsey gentleman who came to inspect her that he considered her to be of Arabian donkey stock.

  ‘Look at the way she holds her head,’ he said, ‘she has the nobility of a thoroughbred.’ Then he added, ‘I’ve got a fancy she was bred for racing.’

  We were impressed.

  Neither Jeannie nor I understand the language of horsey people. We listen but cannot match it. Jeannie, when she was at the Savoy, listened a great deal to English, French and Irish talk about horses; jockeys, trainers and owners gave her advice, and once she won £50 on the Derby. Usually it was talk that was painfully forgotten.

  Even to our eyes, however, Penny was a beautiful animal. Her head, when she was alerted by some noise or by some sight she did not understand, was elegantly intelligent with eyes sharp on the look-out and her large ears pointing inquisitively towards the mystery. After Penny came into our life we were never able to look at a horse without thinking how funny its ears looked.

  On this particular morning, her first morning at Minack, Penny could not possibly have earned flattery from anyone.

  We had moved her after breakfast from the lawn she had close cropped during the night to the stable meadow, so called because an ancient cowhouse and stable border one end of it. Here in early spring, stretching towards the sea and in close view of the cottage, a variety of daffodil called Oliver Cromwell flower profusely, defying the experts by doing so year after year without at any time receiving special attention. The bulbs have been in the ground for so long that I cannot find a person in the parish who can remember when they were planted.

  A gentle slope falls to the end opposite the stables, then a stone hedge, and on the other side of it the big field which was our special pride when we first came to Minack. It was wasteland, covered in gorse and brambles, and gradually we brought it into cultivation until one year we grew four tons of potatoes. The field is called the cemetery field because in olden days dead cattle were buried at the bottom of it; and here at this point the field is poised above the cliff, the cliff which is cut into small meadows that fall steeply to the rocks and the sea of Mount’s Bay.

  On one side of the stable meadow is a finger of land which is the watercourse of the stream; lush in spring and summer with wild parsley, mint and watercress, it is in winter a haven for snipe. We do not allow anyone to shoot them.

  On the other side is the path which leads down from the cottage to the cemetery field and the cliff. A low stone hedge divides it from the stable meadow, and it is a path which was in due course to give endless excitement to the donkeys.

  Whenever they were in the stable meadow, and this was often, they would keep a watch as to who was passing by; and as soon as they caught sight of one of us they would race across the grass, then prance parallel to the hedge as we walked down the path until they reached the gap at the end where we had put a wooden fence.

  Then, if we continued to walk on towards the cliff, there would be snorts and bellows, such a hullabaloo that we would be forced to turn back to talk to them. Often, in fact, we found it simpler to avoid the path and go across a field out of sight when we wanted to go down to the sea.

  Here was Penny seeing the meadow for the first time and when I unfastened the halter, letting her be free, she looked around her for a moment, placidly without fear; and then began ravenously to eat the grass at her feet.

  ‘That is the Dr Green Roy Teague talked about,’ I murmured.

  ‘We must get the vet as well,’ said Jeannie.

  There were bare patches on Penny, like moth-eaten patches on a discarded fur, and her coat was dull, like old silver waiting to be polished.

  ‘No wonder she might have gone to the knacker’s yard after the foal is born,’ I said, ‘she’s scraggy, despite the foal.’

  ‘I’ll go and ‘phone the vet straightaway.’

  We had no telephone at the cottage, sure that by being without one we were spared complications that we could gladly do without. Thus, when we wanted to telephone, we either went to a call box two miles away or, when it was particularly urgent, asked permission to use the phone of our neighbour, Jack Cochram.

  The vet was a Scotsman whom we had known for many years. A shy, polite man, he had the combined gifts of compassion and zeal which knighted his technical experience with a special quality. He was ready to make his skill available at any hour, there was never any suggestion that one might be wasting his time; and this attitude, together with that of his staff, induced many people to wish they were an animal instead of a human being.

  The treatment he prescribed was simple if unpleasant. We had to rub her coat every other day for a fortnight with a delousing powder.

  ‘Do this,’ he grinned, ‘and let her eat as much grass as she wants. Then you’ll find she’ll be as right as rain when His Nibs arrives.’

  He was always to call the foal ‘His Nibs’.

  ‘And when can we expect him?’

  ‘In about three weeks. You’ll go out into the field one day and find him beside her.’

  ‘It seems very casual.’

  ‘She’ll prefer it that way.’

  During the following fortnight we conscientiously carried out our instructions, helped by Penny, who displayed no objection to the smelly powder with which we dusted her; and at the fortnight’s end a stubble of hair had begun to cover the bare patches. But her coat was still dull, and her feet were awful. We were, in fact, filled with embarrassment when anyone asked to see her.

  Her feet, particularly the two front ones, had the shape of Dutch clogs; and they were so long that she gave the impression that she walked on her heels. The cause of this was that the hooves of a donkey grow fast if they are not subjected to the wear of a hard surface; and so a donkey which does nothing else but graze all day requires a regular pedicure, performed
by a blacksmith with a large file, a pair of clippers, and a strong arm with which to check any protest that the donkey concerned might try to make. It was the fear of this protest, and the fierce struggle that might ensue, which decided us to postpone Penny’s pedicure until after the foal was born.

  Penny, meanwhile, was oblivious there was anything in her appearance of which to be ashamed. It was clear by her gentle manner that she was exceedingly content. Here was grass galore, titbits which included carrots, apples, currant cakes and homemade bread, and a pair of humans who fussed over her as if she were a queen. There was also a cat.

  Lama’s attitude was one of benign approval from her first sight of Penny. One might have expected upright fur and an arched back, a mood of anger or terror, when Penny, like a moving mountain, advanced towards her, a black cat so small that some people still mistook her for a kitten. Not a bit of it. There was not a quiver of a whisker nor a twitch of the tail. She was serenely confident that Penny threatened no harm.

  This belief of Lama that nothing, not even a motor car, possessed any evil intentions towards her, frequently caused us alarm. How was it possible that the character of a cat could so change? Only three years before she was wild, and now nothing scared her. If a car came down the lane she lay in the middle until the car had to stop. If a dog lunged from a lead and barked insults, she complacently stared back, a Gandhi policy of non-violence. If a cat hater tried to avoid her, she pursued him with purrs. Once I saw a fox cub taking a look at her from a few yards off as she lay, a miniature Trafalgar lion, in the grass. When she became aware of his attention she got up, stretched, and walked peacefully towards him. What does one do with a cat so trusting?

  Soothing as it is to watch a creature so happy in its surroundings, there are some moments when the onlooker is scared stiff by its amiable antics. Penny was one day in the middle of the stable meadow munching away at the grass when I saw from the window the silky black figure of Lama advancing towards her. It was a deliberate, thoughtful advance because the grass was cat high, not high enough to advance in secret, nor short enough to walk briskly through; indeed the grass was at that particular stage of growth when an intuitive, experienced cat leaps at one moment, then crawls at another. These alternative gestures brought her in due course to Penny’s hind legs. They were powerful legs. They looked so powerful to me that, despite the nonchalant contentment Penny so apparently displayed, I quickly skirted them whenever I was having the fun of making a fuss of her. I respected the potential kick. I was not going to risk a sudden outburst of unreasonable, donkey temper. But Lama!