She was so benevolent that two nights later the cat ventured out from behind the hurdle and began to sleep in an even warmer place. Right against her head. We knew this because there was a deep indentation in the straw where she slept, and when we went out in the mornings now the cat was lying, still curled into a ball, against the place where her head had been.
The next thing Charles reported was that he'd seen Annabel and her new friend eating side by side from her bowl of breakfast bread. Had I, enquired Charles, any old food Solomon and Sheba didn't want? A cat had to be pretty hungry to eat bread, and though Annabel might think she was being generous, he couldn't be getting much nourishment out of that.
So the ginger stray, now known as Robertson on account of his marmalade colouring, was put on the strength. He got two meals a day – taken up to him in Annabel's house because Solomon and Sheba wouldn't have stood for our feeding him in the cottage. Milk – at which he purred his delight like an orphan being taken into a rich man's house and given the delicacies he'd so long seen only with his nose pressed to the window. He was unwise, actually, to make such a song about the milk. Annabel, thinking it must be something special to warrant all that noise, promptly forgot her good intentions, pushed him to one side, and drank it herself. Annabel as a foal had indignantly refused to drink the cow's milk we offered her, declaring that we were poisoning her and it wasn't like Mum's. The sight of her now, delicately pursing her lips into a saucer of it like a dowager duchess taking tea, in order to show Robertson that everything round there was hers, was absolutely typical.
Robertson was a match for her, though. A few intrusions like that and Robertson, when she stuck her big white nose into his saucer, sat up and slapped her on it. A spectacular left and right which, oddly enough, Annabel didn't appear to mind in the least. If our two had done it to her they'd have gone through the doorway like a couple of shooting stars. When Robertson did it, all she did was snort to show she didn't want his old milk anyway, and go back to eating her hay.
They slept together. They fed together. When anybody called to see Annabel at her paddock gate Robertson's little ginger figure was there as well, and as they fondled her head Robertson rubbed against her legs and rose, purring, on his own hind legs to share in the petting. The amazing thing was that Annabel – so jealous when the jennet was with us that she pushed between him and visitors and kicked him if anybody so much as spoke to him – didn't mind at all. Maybe, knowing Annabel, because she thought she'd put one over on us. Adopted him herself. Been really clever and slipped him in when we weren't looking.
The only ones who did object were Solomon and Sheba. Robertson, realising that for all we fed him in Annabel's stable the food actually came up the path from the cottage, started coming to meet us when we took it up. Sometimes he waited on the wall by the garage. Sometimes he appeared through the door of the conservatory, where he'd apparently been looking for mice to fill in time. One day, to Solomon's intense indignation, he appeared on the path outside our window while we were still at breakfast and sat there looking expectantly in at us while Solomon howled at him from inside to go away. All the Food round here was his. And all the Scraps were SHEBA'S, roared Solomon, his voice rising in indignant crescendo at the sight of Robertson, taking no notice of him at all, but still sitting there looking expectant.
Even after we'd escorted Robertson back to the paddock with the dish of food for which he'd come, Solomon still wouldn't be content. He sniffed the wall by the garage and sprayed it to mark the boundary. He sniffed the path where Robertson had sat, and sprayed the nearby jasmine by way of warning. He sniffed round the flower pots in the conservatory and sprayed those, according to Charles who'd witnessed it, like a Whirling Dervish with a hose pipe.
Solomon, of course, had been spraying outdoor landmarks to mark his ownership ever since his delighted discovery that, neuter or not, he could spray. What really brought home to us the seriousness with which our two regarded Robertson's arrival was the behaviour of Sheba, whom I also found sniffing intently one day in the conservatory. Not to worry, I said, stroking her delicate little ears as she looked up at me. Robertson wasn't going to live with us. It was only Solomon being Silly, I said – and laughed to feel her stand, as she had a habit of doing when she wanted to show special closeness to us, on my feet.
It was a good thing I was wearing gum-boots. When I looked down she was determinedly spraying a chrysanthemum plant – and the lot, this being her first attempt ever at direction and I hadn't, until that moment, known that female cats were capable of spraying at all – was going straight over my legs.
She wasn't Worrying, said Sheba when she'd finished her personal contribution to the defence preparations. She and Solomon were keeping him off.
FIVE
The Bread Line
There are various indications of the approach of winter in the village. The emergence of Miss Wellington in a fur hat, for example, and the appearance at Father Adams's windows of a set of maroon plush curtains which, having belonged to his grandmother and looking it, have a psychologically depressing effect on everybody save Father Adams himself for the next six months.
That particular year, however, it was the behaviour of the rooks that aroused the greatest comment around the place. Based a good half-mile away in the elms around the Rectory, with a birds' eye view of Farmer Pursey's cornfield and consequently rarely seen in our part of the world, they had suddenly taken to flying down the valley in formation in the mornings. And the thing that made everybody notice them was that one of them talked so much as he flew. Not cawing, but chattering away to his companions like an incorrigible gossip on a village bus.
We wondered whether it was the rook that, years before, had been raised as a fledgling by Father Adams's grandson, Timothy, and used to chatter to people as they passed the gate. Whether it was or not, his nattering as he accompanied the flight down the valley caused people to look up, and so, by force of country habit, did his nattering on the flight back. It was on the return flight, however, that the onlookers stood open-mouthed and stared. When they came back the entire armada of rooks – including the natterer, still talking indefatigably away but rather more muffled this time because his mouth was full – were carrying pieces of bread Charles and I recognised the source of the phenomenon the moment we saw it, of course. Annabel. The cook in Charles's favourite lunching place, who insisted on presenting him with a bag of bread crusts for her every day, had, as winter approached, increased the supply on the ground that the dear little soul could do with a bit of feeding now the colder weather was coming. The dear little soul, filled to bursting point with hay and pony nuts, couldn't encompass another crumb. Most of it was lying uneaten in her bowl now that Robertson was getting proper cat food. There weren't even any rats about to eat it, thanks to Robertson himself, who kept leaving large fat dead ones in the path just to show us what a handy cat we'd taken on. And so – no doubt with the same Big-Eared Lady Bountiful expression on her face that she used when patronising Robertson. Annabel was letting the rooks have it.
Charles didn't like to say anything to the cook for fear of offending her. She, enthusiastically doing her good turn for the winter, went on stepping up supplies to the point where he was coming home every night with two large carrier bags overflowing with bread-crusts. Even the rooks couldn't cope with that lot, of course and, as inexorably as things always happen with us, eventually we reached a state where we were running round after dark tipping bagfuls of it over hedges, near foxholes and badger setts – anywhere where we felt something might be glad to eat it, yet far enough away not to encourage rats or foxes near the cottage.
In the end, after several occasions on which we were caught in the headlights of neighbours' cars either having just ditched a bagful over a hedge and trying to look innocent, or with the bag clutched like loot in Charles's arms and our looking extremely guilty, he just had to explain to the cook before we got ourselves arrested.
She, without curtailing his o
wn meals by way of retribution as Charles had apparently feared, agreed to cut down supplies. There was still enough bread for the rooks, and the natterer, who returned on his own at odd times during the day, could always find a spare piece or two to talk to himself about as he flew contentedly up the valley. A happy situation indeed, and there was nothing at all to worry Charles as he went out one day, with the idea of winter activities in mind, and bought a lathe he'd seen advertised in the paper.
For wood-turning it was, and it was worked by treadle, and Charles wasn't the least deterred by the owner explaining that he was selling it on his doctor's advice because one of his legs was longer than the other as a result of too much treadling and he was switching to an electric model. The seller was only twenty. He – Charles – was older and had stopped growing, said Charles when I pointed out the possibility of one of his legs getting longer too. It couldn't happen to him.
So, the following Saturday morning, the young man arrived towing the lathe in a box-shaped trailer through the swirling fog. Charles, who'd been feeding Annabel, came hurrying down to meet him and in his haste didn't tie up Annabel's gate. He and the young man bent over the trailer to unfasten the lathe and the young man commented on what an isolated place we lived in. Didn't go much for the country himself, he said. Gave him the willies it did, particularly in this sort of weather.
At that point there was a tapping of hooves in the lane, a donkey appeared apparently supernaturally through the fog, and the young man had the willies in earnest. Even when we explained about Annabel – that she'd pushed her gate open and come to see what was going on and that standing there looking accusingly at us from under her fringe didn't mean that she was going to bite anybody... merely that she was letting us know she'd caught up with us – he still wasn't reassured. A lonely, fog-bound cottage. A donkey wandering the place like a Newfoundland dog. It obviously wouldn't have surprised him if we'd taken to our broomsticks at any moment. After delivering the least possible instruction on the vagaries of the lathe – even that with one eye over his shoulder in case there was anything behind him – he was off back to civilisation like a shot.
I could have done with a broomstick that afternoon. After lunch Charles put Annabel back in her paddock, came down to get her some hay, went into the woodshed en route for a quick look at his beloved lathe, and the next thing I knew, he was treadling happily away oblivious of anything, while Annabel – Charles having once more forgotten to fasten her gate – was again wandering happily along the lane.
Round the corner she went, past the cottage, through the Forestry gate and up the track towards the moor, with me in hot pursuit. Charles, engaged in a particularly intriguing piece of wood-turning, said he'd be with me in a second. Annabel, obviously feeling like a successful suffragette after getting out twice in one day and nobody was going to put her back in her paddock until she felt like it – kept me at bay all the way up the track with Pankhurst-like kicks. And at the top, where there was a field whose gate somebody had obligingly left open, she went in.
Easy, you may say. Shut the gate (which I did) and you've got your donkey. But she is a very fast donkey and it was a twenty-acre field. We began with Annabel pulling nonchalantly at a tuft of grass and then raising her head to study the view across to Wales. I crept quietly up behind her and, just as I stretched out my hand, Annabel decided the view was better a couple of yards away and strolled innocently across to look at it from there. We continued with the pair of us rambling round the field seemingly oblivious of each other and my making sudden dashes at her. At this Annabel made corresponding dashes, this time looking sideways at me as she ran with her head raised, which is the donkey equivalent of hearty laughter. Eventually I threw subterfuge to the wind and started to run after her openly – a mistake which ended with Annabel twenty acres away and me flat on my face over a furrow.
It was cold. It was getting dark. Annabel obviously had every intention of staying there all night – though if I had left her there and gone home Annabel's howls about there being ghosts up there and somebody fetch her home at once would, as I knew from experience, have rent the valley like a dinosaur. I got her in the end by climbing over the field fence into a coppice and pretending to study the undergrowth. Annabel immediately came and stuck her head over the fence to see what I was doing. I, bent to the ground, pottered disarmingly away from her. Annabel snorted to indicate where she thought people like me should be kept and moved away to graze in the field – with her back towards me to express disinterest but near enough for a front-row view in case I went completely bonkers – and I nipped stealthily back over the fence and grabbed her by the tail.
We took off then like John Gilpin's ride to York. Across the field we went, I hanging on like the tail end of a kite, till I realised I'd never stop her standing up. The only thing was to sit down – the way I stopped her when she was going too fast on her halter and sitting down, holding the rope with both hands, had the effect of suddenly dropping anchor.
I couldn't sit down holding her tail, however. It wasn't long enough. I had visions of it coming off in my hand. The ground was so muddy I didn't fancy being dragged across it on the seat of my pants, anyway, so I compromised by squatting. This resulted in Annabel slowing down but still making headway, and my following along in her wake as if I was doing a Cossack dance. The thought of what this must look like, up there in that lonely field at dusk, reduced me to such helpless laughter that Annabel stopped eventually from sheer astonishment. She looked round at me, still clinging to the end of her tail, snorted to indicate that if I was still there after that lot she might as well give in, and allowed me to work myself hand over hand along her back and put her halter on.
Well over an hour we'd been, but time means nothing to the craftsman. Charles was still treadling blissfully away when we got back. Another five minutes and he was coming to help me, he assured me. But he knew I wouldn't have any trouble...
Fortunately, before Charles's treadling leg grew as long as a stork's – as it must surely have done, over twenty-one or not, with all the practice he put in on the lathe in the next few weeks – winter set in early that year, and as it became too cold to work in the woodshed some of his initial enthusiasm wore off.
It was obvious there was something special about that winter. One afternoon we were bringing Annabel down a neighbouring valley at dusk and such an upsurge of birds flew up from the bushes as we passed – fieldfares resting in their hundreds on their migratory flight south – that Annabel, the rest of the winter, said there were ghosts along there and refused to go that way after dusk. A few nights later we were taking the cats for a walk by moonlight in our own valley and the same thing happened. One moment all was stillness and silver and shadow, and the next, up went such a rush of fieldfares they must have been roosting fifty to a tree. The cats, surprisingly, took no notice at all. Perhaps, with memories of little birds they'd ambushed singly in the past, they thought it wiser to pretend this army didn't exist. Not by so much as a twitch of her ears did Sheba show recognition, while Solomon, marching like a Colonel at the head of his troops through the Khyber Pass, looked neither to right nor to left.
Exist it did, though. Four days it took for the fieldfares, in such numbers as we'd never seen before, to clear our part of the country. 'Twas the sign of a long hard winter, said Father Adams sagely. And a long hard winter it was too – though not for a while yet. It didn't snow till Christmas. Which was why, that year, we didn't have a Christmas tree. A week before Christmas we had such a fine, sunny Sunday that we took our status symbol through the Forestry estate for an afternoon walk. At that time of year the Commission organises night patrols on its estates, to guard against gangs coming out from town with lorries to steal trees in bulk for the Christmas market. At weekends they patrol during the day as well, to contend with family parties out for a drive in the car with Grandma who are liable, if not watched, to return with Grandma sitting innocently on a pilfered Christmas tree cut down with a pruning sa
w.
This particular afternoon Annabel, who normally runs freely with us like a dog, was on her halter for the first part of the walk. The riding school was out and we didn't want her deciding to play with the horses, which was apt to result in people falling off in all directions. It was some time before we actually met up with the school, however, and performed our usual ritual of turning Annabel's face to a tree, as in the song about the smugglers, while the riding mistress trotted her lot past like a troop of US cavalry in the hope that they wouldn't spot her. In consequence it was some time before we could let Annabel off her halter, and Annabel was annoyed.
She loitered behind when we freed her, just to show us.
At first we didn't worry. She always caught up with us sooner or later. Then it began to get dark, and we decided perhaps we'd better round her up, otherwise, not liking to be on her own when daylight went, she might follow one of the Forestry patrol men who all this time had been passing us at regular intervals like Officers of the Watch.
Charles went back for her while I, idly swinging her halter, stood looking at the scenery. A few seconds later another of the Forestry patrol passed me and eyed me curiously. Only then did I realise how suspicious I must look – lingering there in the dusk eyeing the plantation of spruce trees, swinging in my hand what was actually a donkey halter but what, to the patrol man, must have looked very much like a rope brought to haul home a Christmas tree.
Raining Cats and Donkeys Page 4