Cry of a Seagull

by Monica Dickens

  ‘How on earth did he get there?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, lady,’ Rose said roughly. ‘Just believe me.’

  ‘Oh, I do. Is he all right?’

  ‘I guess so. But someone’s gotta get him outa there as soon as possible.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Call the police, that’s all I’m telling you. Call them now. O.K.?’

  ‘Yes, I will. Thanks. Thank you very much. Please tell me who you are.’

  ‘Don’t matter. Just do what I say.’

  Before she hung up, Rose heard Judy calling excitedly, ‘Granddad! Come here quickly. They’ve found little Gully!’

  ‘Sorry about the window,’ Rose told the Bellevue Camping sign as she climbed out. ‘I hadda do it, pardner.’

  She ran down the steps to the beach. She hated to leave Gully, but she had got to get back to the hotel before anyone found out she was gone. The donkey’s eyes were closed again, and he seemed to be asleep.

  ‘Goodbye, old pal,’ she told him in her Abigail accent. ‘See ya!’

  She took the red bucket back to the boat as a souvenir of this great adventure.

  There was some warmth in the sun now, and the day was fair. As the bow of the whaler cut through a calmer sea, Rose took off her anorak and peeled off one of the sweaters. By the time she reached the headland on her way home, the wind had dropped and the tide had slackened. When she turned the boat to pass the rocks at a safe distance and make the run in along the inner curve of Sandy Neck, there was not much difficulty in getting through the choppier waves.

  Her journey home did not seem to have taken half as long as the journey out, but by the time she sighted the mooring she was half-dead with fatigue and the sleepiness that comes with tension relaxed and the luxury of relief.

  It was not until she put the throttle into reverse that she remembered to look at the fuel gauge. Almost empty. She had been lucky not to have run out of petrol, but she must find a way to sneak out in the dinghy and fill up half the tank before Ben and his father got back.

  Without much power in her muscles, she managed to make all the right moves to tie up the whaler and release the dinghy, and get herself and her clothes and the bag and the red bucket into it and put the oars into the rowlocks. It was still early. Looking back over her shoulder as she rowed, she could see only one or two people on the sand, and they were down at the other end. Nobody saw her beach the light dinghy and pull it up to the breakwater and tie it the way Ben did.

  At the hotel, there was a light in the kitchen, and someone was moving about. After she had put the oars away and hung up the key, Rose went in through the side door that led up to the family apartment, and was in her room before her father was up.

  She took off her wet clothes and pushed them and the red bucket under the bed until she could deal with them later. She fed the hamster and washed her hair, and had just finished changing into dry jeans and a sweater when her father knocked on the door and came in.

  ‘Great excitement,’ he said. ‘I just heard on the local radio something about a donkey falling down a cliff, and they’re taking a helicopter there to rescue it. It’s along the coast by the camping place. Want to come and have a look?’

  A lot of other people had heard about it too, and when they reached Bellevue Camping, the police had opened the big gate and there was quite a crowd on the grass camp ground, waiting for the helicopter. People were trying to get past each other to look down through the gateway at the top of the steps to see the donkey. Being small, Rose managed to squeeze among them until she could see down to the beach.

  ‘No one down the steps!’ a policeman was shouting up. ‘Keep back, everybody. We don’t want anyone else down here.’

  Gully was still lying as Rose had left him. A man with an R.S.P.C.A. cap was kneeling by him, rubbing him all over to get his circulation going.

  ‘You should have thought of that, Rose,’ said Rose’s critical conscience.

  ‘Well, but I had to get back home,’ she answered herself.

  Someone elbowed past her, and she was crowded out of the gateway and squeezed back into the grass space like a cherry stone. The R.S.P.C.A. horse ambulance was parked by the main gate, and the road outside was full of cars. Ben and his father were there.

  ‘We were driving back to Wood Briar and we heard it on the car radio,’ Ben said. ‘How on earth did the donkey get down there?’

  ‘Fell, they said,’ Rose answered innocently.

  ‘But he’d have broken all his legs. Is he all right?’

  ‘Seems to be.’ She was glad Ben was back, but now she wouldn’t be able to sneak out to the boat and fill up the petrol tank. ‘Listen, Ben.’ She had better get this in now. ‘While you were away, I rowed out in the dinghy, just to check that the whaler was all right.’

  ‘That was nice of you.’

  ‘I took the key, so I could check the fuel gauge. The tank’s almost empty.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ Ben said. ‘There ought to be about half a tank left. Must be using more than we thought.’

  ‘Must be. I’ll pay for the next lot. My turn. Listen. There it is.’

  The roar and clatter of the helicopter came closer rapidly. The noise grew so loud that no one could talk. When Rose saw Mr Vingo come through the gate from the road with Jim Fisher and Crasher she went to him, but she could not tell him anything.

  She did not need to. Mr Vingo nodded at her and dug a piece of paper and a pencil out of his raincoat pocket.

  ‘When I heard,’ he wrote, ‘I thought, that’s Rose. Good old Rose of all roses, I thought.’

  She smiled at him, and folded the paper carefully and put it in her pocket. She would keep it always, with the red bucket.

  When the helicopter passed over their heads to hover above the beach, a mighty wind swept the spectators. Those who were wearing hats lost them. Coats blew open. Newspapers flew away. Hair streamed across faces. Rose’s hair was in her eyes when an arm went round her, and she knew that it was her mother.

  ‘Uncle Ted came,’ Mollie mouthed. ‘I wanted to see you.’

  Everyone was there. Rose saw most of the guests from the hotel. There were reporters, photographers and a television camera crew. Everyone but poor old Arthur.

  Then she saw him. By the ambulance, the old man was sitting on a camp stool, his face tilted to the clamouring sky, mouth open, holding on to his cap.

  A rope and a canvas sling descended from the helicopter’s innards, like a spider coming down from the ceiling. After it stopped, it seemed an age before the rope began to move again. Then the man standing in the open cockpit doorway gave a signal, and the rope was slowly winched up.

  Everyone craned to be the first to see the donkey. As his body appeared above the top of the fence, a great cheer went up, loud enough to be heard over the noise of the helicopter’s engine and clattering rotor blades.

  Gully had the sling under his stomach. Head and legs hanging, one ear forward, one ear back, they hauled him up like a dirty old sack of compost. Rose looked back at Arthur. The lined face lifted to the sky was rejuvenated by pure joy, and his faded blue eyes stared in wonder, as if he had seen God.

  With Gully dangling, the helicopter moved sideways until it was over the camp ground. Policemen held the crowd back to leave a clear space near the ambulance. Slowly and carefully, the small brown donkey was lowered. The R.S.P.C.A. man was there to steady him, and he dropped in a heap on the ground.

  The sling was unbuckled, and drawn up into the belly of the machine. The man in the doorway waved. The door shut, and the helicopter swung away fast, as if it had other urgent business.

  Now that people could talk again, there was a clamour of excited voices. Everyone wanted to tell each other what had happened.

  ‘How did they know the donkey was down there?’ Rose asked Jim Fisher, to find out what story was going round.

  ‘Someone must have seen it from a boat,’ he said. ‘The owner got an anonymous call.’

  ‘Who fro
m?’ Crasher asked.

  ‘If they knew that,’ Jim said, ‘it wouldn’t be anonymous, silly.’

  The R.S.P.C.A. man had heaved Gully to his feet. Judy got her father up from the stool, and he came forward with his bent-kneed limp and put one hand under Gully’s white nose and the other on his neck. The two of them stood there like that for a moment, and then with Arthur leading Gully by his insignificant mane, the donkey was able to walk unsteadily towards the ambulance.

  As Rose stood leaning against Mollie, because she was so tired, she saw the grey horse Favour materialize on the donkey’s other side, and walk with Gully, slowing his stride, his proud head bent mildly to the same level.

  Far overhead, a grey gull cried, and flew out over the boundless sea.

  The donkey stopped, stretched his neck, and opened his jaws to send out a feeble, croaking bray.

  ‘Almost as if the little fellow was saying thank you,’ Crasher said wonderingly.

  ‘You say the daftest things,’ Jim Fisher told her.

  A Note on the Author

  Great granddaughter to Charles Dickens, Monica (1915-1992) was born into an upper middle class family. Disillusioned with the world in which she was brought up, she acted out – she was expelled from St Paul’s Girls’ School in London for throwing her school uniform over Hammersmith Bridge. Dickens then decided to go into service, despite coming from the privileged class; her experiences as a cook and general servant would form the nucleus of her first book, One Pair Of Hands, published in 1939.

  Dickens married an American Navy officer, Roy O. Stratton, and spent much of her adult life in Massachusetts and Washington D.C., but she continued to set the majority of her writing in Britain. No More Meadows, which she published in 1953, reflected her work with the NSPCC – she later helped to found the American Samaritans in Massachusetts. Between 1970 and 1971 she wrote a series of children’s books known as The Worlds End Series which dealt with rescuing animals and, to some extent, children. After the death of her husband in 1985, Dickens returned to England where she continued to write until her death aged 77.

  Discover books by Monica Dickens published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/MonicaDickens

  Closed at Dusk

  Dear Doctor Lily

  Enchantment

  Flowers on the Grass

  Joy and Josephine

  Kate and Emma

  Man Overboard

  No More Meadows

  One of the Family

  Room Upstairs

  The Angel in the Corner

  The Fancy

  The Happy Prisoner

  The Listeners

  Children’s Books

  The House at World’s End

  Summer at World’s End

  World’s End in Winter

  Spring Comes to World’s End

  The Messenger

  Ballad of Favour

  Cry of a Seagull

  The Haunting of Bellamy 4

  For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been

  removed from this book.The text has not been changed, and may still contain

  references to missing images.

  This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,

  London WC1B 3DP

  First published in Great Britain 1986 by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd

  Copyright © 1986 Monica Dickens

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

  make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

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  printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

  publisher.Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The moral right of the author is asserted.

  eISBN 9781448213924

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