A Donkey in the Meadow

by Derek Tangye

  But there were times when the gales roared like a squadron of supersonic hedgehopping aircraft, deafening us in the cottage so that when the news came on I had to switch the radio to full strength if we were to hear the announcer. Lama would be curled up comfortably in a chair, Boris in his house in the wood would be sitting on his perch; the gulls, Knocker and Squeaker or the lonely, friendly Peter, would be safe beneath some leeward cliff until many hours later the gale died down and they set off to fly to the roof again.

  It was at a time like this that I indulged in protecting Fred. At first I used to lead the two of them to the shelter of the wood, and they would stand around the outside of Boris’s house among the ivy-covered trunks of the elms, the wind slapping the tops, swaying, branches cracking and falling, an invisible angry hate hissing its fury, mad with rage that its omnipotent, conquering, horizon-leaping triumph over the sea was being checked by hands held high; trees and hills and houses and sudden valleys, old buildings and church spires, hedges acting as ramparts. Penny and Fred would stand there with the roar of the gale above them and the roar of the sea behind them. They did not like it.

  And so in due course, whenever a gale blew, I took them to the stable meadow where the security of the stable awaited them. In a severe gale you would find both of them within. In any kind of wind you would always find Fred.

  The stable was dilapidated but solid. It was an ancient building with arm-length-thick walls made of stone in all shapes and sizes and bound together by clay. The clay in many places outside had cracked and fallen away over the years, and sparrows and bluetits made use of the holes in the spring; one wall was so popular with the sparrows that their nests resembled a series of flats, each one above the other. Huge beams stretched across the battered ceiling inside, rusty hooks where once hung harness stared from the walls, cobblestones like knuckles of a hand lined the floor, and in the corner there was the broken frame of a manger.

  On Christmas Eve we took mince pies to the donkeys in the stable. A lighthearted gesture, a game for ourselves, an original diet for them.

  ‘Donkeys! Donkeys!’ Jeannie called into the darkness of the meadow, ‘come into the stables. We’ve got something for you.’ And after a minute or two, their shadows loomed, heralded by enquiring whimpers.

  ‘Fred,’ I said, ‘you’re about to have your first mince pie.’

  Inside we lit a candle in an old-fashioned candlestick and put it on the window sill. The light flickered softly. It flickered on their white noses, their eager faces, their giant rabbit-like ears. They pushed their heads forward, nuzzling us in expectation.

  ‘Patience, patience!’ said Jeannie, holding the mince pies high in her hand, ‘don’t be in such a hurry!’ And then with a quick movement she gave one to each of them.

  As I stood there watching I began to feel the magic of the occasion. Our intention had been to have a joke, to enjoy the merry spirit of Christmas and now, unexpectedly, something else was taking place.

  ‘Look at their crosses,’ I said to Jeannie. The cross of Penny was black merging into black, but that of Fred was easy to see; the dark line tracing up the backbone beneath his fluffy brown coat until it reached his shoulders, then stopping abruptly when it met the two lines tracing down each foreleg. ‘Here we are,’ I went on, ‘with two biblical creatures eating mince pies.’

  ‘In a stable.’

  ‘On Christmas Eve.’

  There was the gentle sound as they shifted their feet on the cobblestones, and I was aware too of the musty scent of their coats. Ageless simplicity, laughed at, beaten, obstinately maintaining an individuality; here indeed was a moment when there was a communication with the past. Struggle, self-sacrifice, integrity, loyalty; how was it that the basic virtues, the proven talisman of man’s true happiness, was being lost in the rush of material progress? Why was it that civilisation was allowing its soul to be destroyed by brain power and the vacuous desire it breeds? Why deify the automaton when selflessness has to be won? For a shimmering moment we felt the race halted. No contrived, second-hand emotion. We were not watching, we were part. As it always had been, so it was now.

  We had changed since we had first known each other, Jeannie and I. Once we had both fought hard to savour flattery and power, to be part of a glad world of revelry, to be in the fashion, and to rush every day at such speed that we disallowed ourselves any opportunity to ponder where we were going; and now we were in the stable at a customary moment of merriment, perfectly happy, alone with two donkeys. It is easy to remain in a groove, a groove which becomes worn without you realising it, only recognisable by friends who have not seen you for a long time, and it is usually luck which enables you to escape. Jeannie and I had the luck to feel the same at the same time, and so we had been united in forcing ourselves to flee our conventional background. There had never been any argument between us about the pros and cons; gradually the standards we once believed so important appeared sadly ineffectual, only vital until they had been experienced. Moreover the merciless zest required to achieve them became an exhausting effort as soon as the standards, reached at last, had to be maintained; for it became obvious to us that in most cases the banners of success were made of paper, waved by entrepreneurs who were temporarily leeching on the creative efforts of others.

  Thus Jeannie and I belonged to the lucky ones who, having seen their personal horizon, had also reached it; and yet in doing so there was no possible reason for self-satisfaction. It was true that contentment was always near us, but there was an edge to our life which stopped us from ever taking it for granted. What had become our strength was the base to which we could retreat. We had a home we loved. Around us was the ambience of permanency. We had roots. And so, when we became involved in sophisticated stresses which touched us with memories of other days, there was a moat behind which we could recharge. We then could quietly observe the enemy; envy, for instance, the most corroding of sins, the game of intrigue which fills so many people’s lives, the use of the lie which in business is considered a justifiable weapon, the hurt that comes from insecurity, the greed which feeds on itself, the worship of headline power without quality to achieve it. We watched, and sometimes we were vexed, sometimes we were frightened. Across the moat we could see the reflection of the past.

  On occasions we were interviewed for magazines, radio and television, and Jeannie usually had to take the brunt of the questions. And how weary she grew of that inevitable question: ‘Don’t you miss all the gay times you had at the Savoy?’ She would smile brightly and say no, and there would follow the second stock question. ‘Don’t you ever say to yourself that you would like to go back?’ These leading questions demanded an affirmative answer, or at least a hesitation on Jeannie’s part. Instead the second no was as firm as the first. Jeannie always failed to gratify any outsider’s hope that she might be dissatisfied in a life so different from that she described in Meet Me At The Savoy.

  One day a distinguished interviewer arrived with a caravanserai of cameramen and others at half past eight in the morning at Minack. Dapper and trim in a city suit and shiny black shoes, looking like a stockbroker on the way to the office, he stepped up the path and into the cottage. He left over twelve hours later. An illuminating day.

  The tone was set by a tough, preliminary crossexamination, as if Jeannie and I were suspected partners in crime; and in the best tradition of detection, we were questioned separately. First myself, then Jeannie; and when we compared notes afterwards we found we had each endured a similar, attacking interrogation, the aim of which was to discover the weakness in our happiness. ‘What do you quarrel about?’ was the first question he put to Jeannie.

  But as the day wore on, we became aware once again of the loneliness which besets an idol whom everyone admires but few have time to know. He did not wish to hurt us. His screen self was confused with his true self. He had to maintain his image and so he was trying to knock us down. Perhaps he saw in us what he wanted for himself, a happy marriage and the ti
me to enjoy it; and thus he hoped to explode our way of life in order to reassure himself that conventional happiness was impossible. He wanted reality but was trapped by outward success; he had to live with the bathroom door open or the public would rage. I found it strange to watch him straddled in an armchair at the end of the day, staring gloomily into the fire, whisky glass in hand, and to know that he represented in the eyes of millions their imaginary ideal of twentieth-century contentment, a conqueror of the small screen. All I saw myself was a man who spent his life shuffling from one arc lamp to another, secretly cherishing a hope that a home one day awaited him.

  Jeannie and I had the home but we were, on the other hand, disorganised. I sometimes felt I behaved like a rabbit caught in the glare of headlights dashing this way and that without purpose until it zigzags its way to the safety of a burrow. I seemed incapable of solving the problems around me. I would have one idea, then another, then another, and none of them would ever quite come off. I was safe at Minack but I was not progressing. My imagination became congealed, for instance, by the tedious detail of spending three days, Jeannie beside me, on my hands and knees weeding freesias; and we would both become doped by the simplicity of the task. We would cheer when we had finished. We would gaze in admiration at the neat beds and convince ourselves that something worthwhile had been achieved. So it had been. Unhappily it was at the price of thinking. There is a soothing, narcotic daziness in weeding which pleasingly seduces you from concentrating on plans for the future. A day of weeding might satisfy our consciences but it did not advance us. It only helped to obscure the trouble we were in.

  The manager remained charming and anxious to please. He laughed often and apologised handsomely whenever it was necessary, but as we shivered slowly towards the daffodil season, it was clear he was not the man we had been looking for. Able in many horticultural departments, always pleasant and amiably tempered, it was no fault of his good nature that he did not unfortunately fit into our type of flower farm. Thus Jeannie and I were now in a web of our own making, and our position was far more difficult than before he arrived.

  We were, for instance, embroiled in the man’s life. We were not a large soulless organisation which could upturn the life of an individual ‘for the good of the Company’. His three children were now at local schools. There were no other jobs in the district which would suit his managerial manner. Thus if he left us the children’s schooling would be disrupted when they were just growing accustomed to their new surroundings. The family had no permanent home. The cottage we rented for them was their home until they could find somewhere else to go.

  ‘We’ll have to compromise,’ I said at last.

  ‘How?’

  ‘The best thing we can do is to concentrate on the next three months, keep him for that time, and let the summer look after itself.’

  It was the only thing we could do. The daffodil season was advancing upon us with the massive inevitability of a steamroller. There would be three hundred thousand individual blooms to pick, bunch, pack and send away to Covent Garden. Every day would be a race against time, against the lowering of prices, against the gales which always threatened; the blooms were never secure from being destroyed in the meadows until they rimmed the pails in the packing shed. And I was still writing A Drake At The Door. I could not break away and put my full mind to the flower farm. All I could do was to shut my eyes to the future, and aim to salvage what we could from the huge harvest of daffodils. I had no time in which to attempt a reorganisation. I had to muddle through; and when it was all over, and we were in a vacuum, we would then pause and ponder which way we had better go.

  We would then decide whether to continue with the flower farm or to give it up.

  Fred and Penny look at Peter the gull from the field above the garden

  16

  When the snow came after Christmas we shut the donkeys in the stable at night. We did it for our own peace of mind. We could not bear to lie in bed and think of them out there in the dark becoming snow donkeys; and yet, as experience proved, they did not seem to object. One evening when we returned home late and snow was falling, we found the two foolish things out in the meadow despite the fact the comfort of the stable awaited them.

  Fred was like a small boy in the snow. The first morning he was introduced to it, he came rushing out of the stable, stopped in his tracks when he saw it, began pawing with his front feet, put his head down and pushed his nose into it, then in wild excitement started a fandango of flying kicks which made me speedily run away from him. Then he raced into the middle of the meadow and without more ado sank to his knees which was, of course, the preliminary to a roll.

  The roll, in normal circumstances, was a solemn ritual. The ceremony was performed on a small circular patch in a carefully chosen position and, as it was well worn, the ground was either dusty or muddy according to the weather. This, however, had no bearing on the success of the ceremony, for the roll was a donkey bath; and whether Fred rose from his roll in a cloud of dust or caked in mud, he was satisfied. As far as he was concerned he was clean. He had had his wash.

  Penny, like a fat lady on the seashore, had to watch her dignity when she followed suit. She would collapse to her knees, fall over to one side, then begin to wriggle this way and that in an endeavour to complete a roll. It was an embarrassing sight. She would get on her back, a huge grey barrel facing up to the heavens, then miserably fail to force herself over. Nor would her attempts be silent. She, like Fred, accompanied her efforts with repetitive, body-shaking grunts. A desperate sound, like a wrestler in combat; and when, if we were watching, she at last succeeded in making it by a final glorious lurch, Jeannie and I would send up a cheer. She would then get up, turn her back on us, stare at an imaginary interest in the distance, and pretend that nothing whatsoever untoward had happened.

  Fred’s roll in the snow, however, was purely a gesture of joy. He was captivated by the feeling of the powdery stuff, and he rolled this way and that snorting with pleasure, kicking his heels in the air, and when he had had enough and stood up again, he looked as if he were a donkey wrapped in cotton wool. He then hoped for a game. Ears pinned back, head on one side, one could sense he was laughing at the huge joke of it all; and when I began gently throwing snowballs at him, I was surprised he did not pick one up himself and chuck it back. He wanted to, I’m sure.

  We had no fear that the bitter weather might affect our daffodils. It delayed them, of course, and for weeks they stayed constant a few inches above the ground, too cold to move; and instead of starting to harvest them in the middle of January, we had to wait until the middle of February. Our main concern centred round the freesias, for their peak flowering time coincided with the day and night frost. It was awful. We had a splendid crop but our heaters did not have the power to lift the temperature sufficiently, and although they kept the frost out they did not make the air warm enough to bring the buds into bloom. The heaters, using huge amounts of oil, curled the equivalent of pound notes into the chill air, but the plants did not move, and because of this the roots began to develop a disease. Then, when one week we picked enough to send a consignment to Covent Garden, they froze on the way. The van was unheated, and the consignment was unsaleable.

  The donkeys, meanwhile, were becoming restless. There was nothing for them to nibble, and we fed them on pellets, hay and anything they might fancy. it was one long round of eating, and as the ground was too hard for any serious exercise, they began to store up energy; and the energy unleashed itself as soon as the soft winds began to blow again and the frost disappeared. And then twice they disappeared.

  At other times of the year we would have been annoyed, but not worried. But on these occasions their disappearance coincided not only with the time the daffodils were coming into bloom; it was also potato planting time. Neither among the daffodils nor on the newly turned soil could donkey feet be anything else but a troublemaker.

  I had already suspected that some of our neighbours might h
ave considered the donkeys as parasites. After all, we had been asked any number of times during the summer by visitors, ‘Don’t they do anything?’ And if the visitors asked such questions it was understandable that farmers might be asking them too. They could see them meandering aimlessly around the meadows, creatures that wouldn’t draw carts, couldn’t be milked, and were incapable of performing any farming activity. Nor were they proving the success at keeping the grass down that I had hoped. They were choosy. They would eat certain grasses and certain weeds, but I was astonished how much was always left behind; and a meadow had still to be cut down after their presence had been intended to clear it. We felt they ought to do something, and so when the daffodil season began we got hold of two Spanish onion baskets. We tied them together and put the rope across Penny’s back so the baskets rested against either flank, then we led her to a daffodil meadow and filled the baskets with the stems we picked. It was a total failure. For one thing it was obviously much simpler and quicker to fill an ordinary hand basket, then put it in the back of the Land Rover; for another, Fred, who was too young to be asked to share in the task, treated the whole effort as a game. He butted the baskets with his head. He whinnied. He was, in fact, a nuisance.

  I could not, therefore, tell anyone that they performed any useful function, but it was easy to answer the other regular question: ‘What do you have them for?’ I explained they gave pleasure both to ourselves and to strangers, and that they were plainly happy in themselves. Every day they were becoming more affectionate and more trusting; and the responsibility of looking after them, which once I had feared, had turned instead into a reward. They enriched the tapestry of our life at Minack; and by touching us with their mystical quality of antiquity provided a reminder that in an age when the machine is king, all life is still sacred whether it has wings, or two legs, or four. There was another, more personal feature about them which perhaps only Jeannie and I could understand. They had become to us a symbol. They were the tangible reflection of the simple life which we were struggling to maintain in the face of the outside stresses which were trying to envelop us.