by Derek Tangye
He was a week old when he had this first escapade, a diversion, a mischievous exploration into tasting foal-like independence. Perhaps his idea was to prove to us that he could now walk without wobbling, that he was a sturdy baby donkey who could dispense with the indignity of being carried from one place to another. If this was so it was a gesture that was overambitious; and though the result caused us much laughter, Penny on the other hand was distraught with alarm at her son’s idiotic bravado.
I had guarded the open side of the little yard in front of the stables, the side which joined the space in front of the cottage, with a miscellaneous collection of wooden boxes, a couple of old planks, and a half-dozen trestles that during the daffodil season supported the bunching tables. It may have been a ramshackle barrier but I certainly thought it good enough to prevent any excursions by the donkeys, and in particular by Fred. I had omitted, however, to take into account that there was a gap between the legs of one of the trestles suitably large enough for an intelligent foal to skip through. Suitably large enough? It was the size of half the windscreen of a small car, and only after the escape had been made could I condemn myself for making a mistake.
The first to be startled by what had happened was Jeannie’s mother, who was sitting on the white seat beside the verbena bush reading a newspaper. She was absorbed by some story, when suddenly the paper was bashed in her face.
‘Good heavens,’ she said, ‘Fred! You cheeky thing!’
She explained afterwards that Fred appeared as surprised as herself by what he had done, though he quickly recovered himself, danced a little fandango, then set off like a miniature Derby runner down the lane in the direction of Monty’s Leap. Meanwhile there had developed such a commotion in the yard behind the barrier where Penny was snorting, whinnying and driving herself like a bulldozer at the trestles, that Jeannie and I, who were in the cottage, rushed out to see what was happening.
We were in time to see Fred waver on his course, appear to stumble, then fall headlong into a flower bed.
‘My geraniums!’ cried Jeannie. The reflex cry of the gardener. Only flowers are hurt.
‘Idiot!’ I said.
Penny by now was frantic and as I dashed down the path I saw that the battering ram of her shoulders was just about to break a way clear for her. I left Jeannie to join her mother who had already reached Fred, and set about calming a rampaging donkey which looked prepared to eat me if I gave her a chance. A minute later Fred appeared in Jeannie’s arms.
‘Not a scratch as far as we can see, and thoroughly ashamed. Aren’t you, Fred?’
He had grown so fast in a week that Jeannie could no longer carry him, as she did at the beginning, like a puppy. It was an effort to hold him, and his legs dangled close to the ground.
But he did not look ashamed to me. For here was the common denominator of all things young, the foolishness of enterprise before it is ready, the gusto of such foolishness, the bruised vanity after being found out, the genius of making the error appear inconsequential.
I moved a trestle, shielding it against Penny so that Jeannie could drop Fred in the gap without fear of attack from his hysterical mother. She was hysterical. She was like a wild beast in her distress.
‘There you are, Penny,’ said Jeannie, putting Fred to the ground and pushing him through the gap, ‘nothing to worry about.’
I fancy that Fred expected a joyous reunion, a pat on the back for being so original as to attack a newspaper, to startle an elderly lady, to cause consternation within a week of his arrival. He was mistaken. Penny was as angry as she was relieved at being united with Fred; and she chased him. She chased him with her nose, chastising his buttocks with her soft white nose as if for the moment she considered it a whip. She chased him round the yard and into the stable, and out again. She was so furious that she wanted to teach him a lesson he would never forget. Not on our behalf, but on hers.
Fred’s reaction seemed to be a relish that he was loved on both sides of the barrier, a wonderful hint that if the imponderables went well, he would for ever and for ever have the most wonderful life imaginable. And so when Penny’s fury had subsided, when Fred found himself once again a young donkey freed from his mother’s strictures, he smiled, putting his ears back and shaking his head. I am certain he was saying that he enjoyed every minute of his escape, the fall didn’t matter, life was fun and mistakes didn’t count so long as there were years ahead in which to correct them. I feel sure that when he came rushing up to my hand that I held out to him, nuzzling it with his nose, he was telling me what a hilarious time lay ahead of us.
‘I have a feeling,’ said Jeannie’s mother later, ‘that this donkey is going to be a nuisance!’
She did not mean, of course, this to be a reproach. Nor for that matter a waffling. It was a gentle joke, said in a soft voice with just the trace of a Scottish accent. I realise in retrospect that her affection for Fred stemmed from something deeper than a superficial enchantment for a Disney-like creature. He was to her, in the last few months of her life, a link with the future. Her intuition made her aware that time was against her, and so she was glad to find in this absurd little donkey a bridge. Jeannie’s uncle told Jeannie how a few weeks later he was with her mother waiting for a bus to take them from Gloucester Road to Hyde Park corner. They waited twenty minutes at the bus stop, not because there were no buses. Three went by; but Jeannie’s mother went on talking, and the subject was Fred. The poor man cursed the donkey as he stood there, listening patiently. He did not know the secret. Fred, at that very instant, running free on the Cornish cliffs, the skies and wild winds, sunny days and torrential rain, the sea lurching then calm, scents of the salt, wild grasses, pinks, meadowsweet, puzzling cries of gulls, woodpeckers laughing, badgers solidly plodding ageless paths, foxes alert, exultant chorus of the early morning, marsh warblers, summer larks, blackbirds trumpeting, wrens erupting; for all these Fred was the spokesman. These pleasures, enriched by the eyes and ears of centuries, projecting the kindness of permanence and security, dwelt there hopefully in her mind.
And there were the incidents of which she had been a witness at Minack. Visits at daffodil time and potato time, Jeannie coming into the packing shed with baskets of flowers in either hand, Jeannie in shorts under a blazing sun grubbing through the soil quicker than anyone as she picked up the potatoes. Glorious moments of anticipation when arriving for Christmas, carefully thought-out presents in gaily coloured paper awaiting disclosure, champagne on the day – shall we have the turkey for lunch or for dinner? Times of disaster when gales and salt spray cut the potato tops like a scimitar, leaving a barren harvest in their wake; and a terrible spring when a disease attacked the daffodils, spotting the petals with a brown mould, making them useless for market so that the compost heap grew higher and higher with thrown-away stems. She had been at Minack when Lama was first seen, a black spot in a meadow, and when Monty died. She had known Jane and Shelagh of A Drake at the Door when each had first arrived, Jane with the corn-coloured hair touching her shoulders, Shelagh with the shy smile, both with the gift of making us feel happy that they were with us. Funny times . . . she was in the cottage on Jeannie’s birthday when, after a night of raging wind, I went out to find the cloches scattered across their field. I was fighting in the gale to save those which were left when suddenly I saw Jeannie, struggling towards me. ‘A cup of tea with Glucose,’ she shouted above the noise. I was grateful she had taken pity on me, and I seized the cup and took a gulp. It tasted like acid. ‘Hell,’ I shouted, ‘have you poisoned me?’ When I got back to the cottage her mother was waiting at the doorway. ‘Look dear,’ she said gently, ‘you opened the tin of Epsom salts.’ Quiet times, when there was the idleness of a deckchair in the wood, or a stroll to the cliff to watch the little fishing boats feathering for mackerel and the big ones on their way to and from Newlyn. Or just sitting on the white seat where Fred bashed the newspaper.
A month after she had returned to London, and Jeannie was with her,
I took a pair of scissors and cut a small piece of Fred’s mane and sent it to her tied with a pale blue ribbon. It was still in her handbag eight months later when she died.
‘Whatever else he does in his life,’ said Jeannie thoughtfully, ‘Fred has justified his existence.’
Boris leads Fred .
. . . to the door
10
Fred now faced a glorious summer of adulation. Nobody could resist him. Children and grown-ups both uttered cries of delight as soon as they saw his gambolling fluffy figure, cameras were poised, small hands held out to stroke him, picnic baskets searched for sugar; and his response was to pander to his admirers in various fetching ways. Sometimes he would stand beside them soulfully staring into the distance as they stroked him, sometimes he would surprise a new admirer by a comical, harmless dance, sometimes he would show off his speed by sprinting across the meadow, sometimes he would hug close to Penny, but always sooner or later he would allow every admirer to fondle him.
Jeannie and I soon found that his presence was exceedingly helpful. When one writes about the place where one lives, it is to be expected that strangers will call. Seldom a day passed in the summer without someone arriving at Minack; and as we were so far off the beaten track it was a feat of exploration to have found us.
Visitors were of all ages and came from all parts of the country. The snag of these visits was that we were always caught by surprise. We would have to emerge from a greenhouse in which we had been tending tomatoes, and appear in the role of host and hostess with our hands and faces green with the juice of the leaves. Or we would be disturbed at some peak time when we were wanting to rush something into Penzance. One daffodil time a couple arrived as we were packing our flower boxes as fast as we could into the Land Rover so that we could catch the flower train to London. We also knew that we were far behind in our picking, and there was a whole meadow awaiting our urgent attention. I suggested to the couple that they might like to see such a beautiful sight, and off they went. When they returned, the woman in a lofty voice said: ‘I would have thought you would have found time to pick those daffodils!’ Jeannie had to stop me from braining her.
Once we had a visitor who looked up at the gull on the roof and asked: ‘Is it plastic?’ There was a man who arrived on a bicycle and, pointing to the pedometer on the front wheel, said: ‘I’ve ridden three hundred and seventy miles to prove to my wife that you are not fictitious!’ Another time we had a carload of people whose car got stuck at Monty’s Leap, the low-slung chassis was jammed on the bed of the stream; they were there for four hours. We have had strangers who have brought us presents. We frequently met people with whom afterwards we kept in touch; and at all times Jeannie and I found it a wonderfully rewarding experience that any of these people had taken the trouble to find their way to Minack.
Such visits, however, inevitably took time because we could not just say hello and goodbye. Tasks we were performing had to be suspended and, if they were tedious tasks like hand weeding the freesia beds, we often found it difficult to return to them. The nature of the visit was likely to have disturbed our sense of routine, and we were inclined to relax and await the possible arrival of another visitor.
Our usual procedure was first to show these visitors the gull on the roof, provided one of the gulls was there; but it was maddening how often Knocker, Squeaker or Peter would let us down, and would only sail into view after the visitors had disappeared up the lane. Boris, the drake, however, could always be relied upon. He enjoyed attention as long as no one tried to touch him. He squatted imperiously in the shade of the flower house or in the grass by the elms, eyeing the strangers, stretching his neck forward towards them, hissing gently at them if they seemed to be coming too close, hissing loudly if they did and at the same time raising the feathers on the top of his head as a cat will lift its fur in anger. Then he would rise majestically to his large yellow webbed feet and waddle away, waggling his olive-green tail feathers in protest.
Lama’s behaviour, as one might expect, was unpredictable. Sometimes she was in a sociable mood and she would appear jauntily with a hop, skip and a miaow. At other times she would remain obstinately in her hiding places while we rushed round the usual sites bleating for her. At last the visitor would say: ‘Don’t bother to look any more. It doesn’t matter. We didn’t come specially to see her.’ Then, of course, Lama in a trice would be with us.
There were many occasions, however, when people did come specially to see her. Her particular attraction was that she had been a wild cat; a cat who had spent extreme youth in the cold but now was conquered by comfort, an irresistible situation for cat admirers, a cat who had been tamed, a human victory over the feline species. Jeannie and I, on these occasions, would anxiously watch how she would behave because there was one thing she loathed and that was sugary flattery. Any visitor who tried to win her that way was beneath her contempt. Hence if someone began cooing at her in the manner so often adopted towards cats, Lama would stiffen in disgust. I have often seen her in the arms of a visitor who was cooing like mad, have seen the danger signal, then leapt forward and snatched her away a split second before harm was done.
The presence of the donkeys now produced a major diversion. Sometimes I had found a conversation difficult to sustain and I would stare out to sea, the visitor beside me, murmuring foolishly over and over again: ‘Isn’t it a glorious view?’ There was now no fear of a faltering conversation, no cause for me to fill a silence with an inane remark. The shyest visitor was filled with rapturous excitement as soon as I said: ‘Have you ever seen a baby donkey?’
I thereupon led the way to the meadow, and it was usually the stable meadow, where Penny and Fred were perusing the green grass around them.
‘Penny! Fred!’ I would call out authoritatively, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them immediately to obey me.
‘Penny! Fred!’
They would stare from afar and make no move.
‘Come on, Penny!’ I would shout again, wanting to prove to my visitors that I was in command. ‘COME ON!’
I soon noticed, before he was even a month old, that Fred was usually the first to react. He could be in deep slumber, lying flat on the ground with Penny standing on guard beside him; but when I called he would wake up, raise his head in query, scramble to his feet, pause while looking in my direction, then advance towards me. First a walk, then a scamper.
‘He’s a very intelligent donkey,’ I would then say proudly. A sop to the fact that Penny had ignored me.
But Penny at this time was still a sorry sight, the sores had gone but her coat was still thin. We had to excuse her appearance by repeating the story of how we had found her. We explained her elongated feet by telling how we had waited for Fred to be born before dealing with them, and that now we were waiting for the blacksmith. We chattered on with our excuses and then realised no one was listening. All anyone wanted to do was to fuss over Fred.
‘Aren’t his ears huge?’
‘I love his nose.’
‘Look at his feet! Like a ballet dancer’s!’
‘What eyelashes!’
‘Does he hee-haw?’
I remember both his first hee-haw and his first buttercup. He was a week old when he decided to copy his grazing mother, putting his nose to the grass without quite knowing what was expected of him. He roamed beside her sniffing importantly this grass and that; and then suddenly he saw the buttercup. A moment later he came scampering towards me with the buttercup sticking out of the corner of his mouth like a cigarette, and written all over his ridiculous face was: ‘Look what I’ve found!’
The first hee-haw was to occur one afternoon in the autumn when Jeannie and I were weeding the garden. There was no apparent reason to prompt it. They were not far away from us in the meadow, and every now and then we had turned to watch them contentedly mooching around. And then came the sound.
It was at first like someone’s maiden attempt to extract a note from a s
axophone. It was a gasping moan. It then wavered a little, began to gain strength and confidence, started to rise in the scale, and then suddenly blossomed into a frenzied hiccuping tenor-like crescendo.
‘Heavens,’ I said, ‘What an excruciating noise!’
‘Fred!’ called out Jeannie, laughing, ‘what on earth’s the matter?’
At this moment we saw Penny lifting up her head to the sky. And out of her mouth came the unladylike noise which we had already learnt to expect. No bold brassy hee-haw from her. It was a wheezy groan which at intervals went into a falsetto. Here was a donkey, it seemed, who longed to hee-haw but couldn’t. All she could do was to struggle out inhuman noises as her contribution to the duet. It was painful not only to listen to, but also to watch. This was donkey frustration. The terrible trumpet of her son had reawakened ambitions. She wanted to compete with him, but she hadn’t a ghost of a chance.
Meanwhile, as the summer advanced, Penny had developed a role of her own towards the visitors. She was clearly, for instance, used to children and although it was Fred who received the initial caressing attention it was only Penny, because she was full grown, who could give them a ride. Ignored during the first ten minutes, she then became a queen in importance, and she would patiently allow a child to be hoisted on her back, and a ride would begin.
But Jeannie and I soon found that her job was far easier, far less exhausting than ours. One of us had to lead Penny by a halter, and as she would not move without Fred, Fred had to be led along as well. I had bought him a smart halter of white webbing within a few days of his being born, and he never resented wearing it. He wore it as if it were a decoration, a criss-cross of white against his fluffy brown coat giving him an air of importance. One visitor said he reminded her of a small boy who was allowed to wear trousers when all his friends were still wearing shorts.