Raining Cats and Donkeys (17 page)

  That night she did go herself. Fortunately Alan had taken her down in the car and was sitting in it glowering balefully at the plum tree when she, too, fell down. Nowhere near where he had tripped, she said, and she was standing still and the path was dry and she couldn't for the life of her understand it. He was there, anyway. On hand to run her to the doctor, and then to the nearest hospital, where they'd put her elbow straight under anaesthetic.

  She'd never forget it, she said. She'd come round at eleven o'clock at night. There she was with her elbow bandaged and Alan sitting gloomily beside her holding his head... They'd put him to watch her to see that she came round all right and his first heartfelt words, when he saw her open her eyes, were 'And those two so-and-so's are on
holiday
!'

  We didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Carrie's accident was awful, and we felt dreadfully sorry about that. But Alan's was so like something out of the
Keystone Cops
... We tried hard to keep our faces straight, and then Carrie started to giggle. If we could have
seen
him, she choked, sitting there in the cubicle with a face as long as a fiddle. 'Bouncing off the plum tree', I chortled. 'Covered all over with mildew', roared Charles. 'Lot of unfeeling heathens', growled Alan.

  Meanwhile, having brought Annabel home again, we had to consider her future. To mate or not to mate was the operative question. Normally, if a mating fails, one is entitled to a free re-mating with the original stallion. But Peter had by this time been sold – and even if he hadn't I doubt whether we would have considered it. One thing we'd learned, discussing it in many quarters over recent weeks, was that that particular cross is very difficult. A donkey stallion with a mare, yes. You get mules as easy as winking. A horse with a donkey mare – no. It is something to do with the lack of matching chromosomes. Jennets are rare as roses in April.

  There was still no jack donkey around. Even if there had been, said Farmer Pursey, he wouldn't advise us on that. May was the time for mating. We'd be wasting our time in October. So we concentrated on getting Annabel's weight down. Sixty inches she'd measured at the final stretch – round with the tape measure – mostly consisting of Yorkshire Pudding, as we could see it now. Getting so fat had been why she'd baulked at the hill. Keeping her down in the Valley so as not to tire her had made her even fatter. And as for Julius moving... he'd always had his doubts about that, said Charles; he reckoned it was the flies making her stomach twitch.

  It
had
been Julius too, Annabel insisted indignantly. Hurting her foot had put him off. She wouldn't have him at all, mind, she threatened, when we took her for her first reducing walk. As she wasn't having him anyway we took no notice of her objection, got out the bridle we'd bought some months before but had never used because we hadn't wanted, in what we'd thought was her delicate state, to upset her ­and We put it on.

  Farmer Pursey had advised it. A donkey bridle with a little snaffle bit, he'd said. Nothing to hurt her, but we'd control her a lot better on that than with a halter. Let her wear it for a few days for an hour or so on the lawn to get used to it, lead her gently so it didn't pull her mouth – in no time at all we wouldn't know ourselves when we took her out.

  After the first couple of times, when we wondered why people were laughing and discovered, when we looked back, that our status symbol was marching along behind us with her mouth wide open, it really worked very well. The bridle had a head-band with red and white triangles on it, and, being Annabel, it was always lopsided so that the effect was that of a slightly tipsy Red Indian squaw, but it suited her. Annabel knew it too, jingling her bit rings with the best of them and regarding the bigger horses, when we met, with the air of being just as good as they were and with a harness like they had, too.

  On outward journeys, once she got into the routine again, she still ran loose, gambolling and capering and pretending to kick us as ever. On homeward journeys, however, where in the old days she dallied and dawdled and at times I swear my arm stretched to three times its length trying to get her home, she now walked demurely on her bridle as to the manner born. When I took her to the village she was on her bridle all the time, of course, and it was thus – with Annabel on the lawn one morning harnessed ready for the Post Office and Sheba bawling from the garden wall about brushing her too, she was prettier than silly old donkeys – that I had an idea and put Sheba on her back.

  For a moment Sheba looked wildly for the safest way to jump. Then, feeling the warmth coming through to her paws, she settled happily down on Annabel and curled her tail. Why hadn't we thought of this before? she demanded. We knew how her feet got cold.

  We led Annabel half a dozen or so steps on her bridle, Sheba squatting happily on her like a little blue-point hen. At that point Annabel, having had enough, buckled her knees to roll and Sheba departed precipitately, but it was a start. After that we often put Sheba on her back and Annabel got used to carrying her for longer and longer distances. The effect would have been quite impressive but for the fact that Sheba didn't mind which way she rode and was more often than not to be seen blissfully proceeding back to front. Even at that it was quite something. We couldn't get Solomon to do it. Only girls liked riding, he informed us, leaping from Annabel's back as though she were a sinking ship the moment we tried to put him on her. Boys preferred eating and fighting.

  We had a feeling that Annabel liked Sheba. Perhaps because she was another girl. Perhaps because she was smaller and less boisterous than Solomon. At any rate, Sheba talking to Annabel and Annabel looking down at her with the benevolent big-sister expression on her face with which the larger horses in turn looked down at Annabel was quite a feature of our domestic scene these days. So were the pair of magpies who also struck up a friendship with her and, wherever she was tethered up on the hill, could be depended on to track her down within minutes, pottering companionably about her feet as she grazed, while occasionally – had they spotted Sheba doing it? we wondered – one of them perched on her back and sat there talking quietly to her as she moved about. Only one. Presumably the other one was like Solomon and not in favour of riding. Really there seemed no end to Annabel's friends.

  She'd always had plenty of human friends, of course. Miss Wellington, Father Adams, Janet, Mrs Farrell who toasted all the bread she brought with the observation that it was better for Annabel's stomach, and was rewarded by the fact that from her Annabel would take nothing
but
toasted bread. On the odd occasions Mrs Farrell brought a piece untoasted, Annabel snorted and blew it back at her.

  There were also the countless mothers and grandmothers who trekked regularly down with small children, pushing prams valiantly through the mud to her gate with offerings of sweets and apples and pacifying the wails of sorrow if our heroine herself were not on view. And later, as they grew up, there were the children themselves, unaccompanied.

  There was a trio who came regularly that autumn. Two boys and a girl, all about eight years old. Like angels straight from heaven they looked, though we soon learned to nip out smartly when they were about since they had a most unangelic habit of damming our stream with stones as they passed, so that it flooded straight down the lane.

  This presumably was to deter imaginary pursuers, since they then proceeded up on to the hill behind the cottage where, if Annabel was on her tether, she became the centre of a game of cowboys and Indians. Annabel joined in with a will, following them into ambush under the trees, occasionally knocking somebody's feet from under them with her rope, which was the signal for shrieks of laughter from the children and a complacent snort from Annabel, and looking out as warily as they did when someone passed along the track below.

  Alas for our belief that she was probably supposed to be Trigger. They were up there one day with her under a pine tree, pretending to make camp, unloading a couple of make-believe tents from her back... 'Now we'll go and prospect up the hill', said one of them. 'And mind you keep her hidden from the cowboys', he instructed the diminutive squaw. 'But aren't we the cowboys?' came a bewildered feminine voice. 'Of course not. We're
Indians
' was the scornful reply. 'And Anniehaha's our Indian pony'.

  All it needed was for them to see Anniehaha going out on her diamond-patterned bridle, of course, and they were on to it at once. Could
they
take her out? they enquired hopefully. Just up the hill and back? 'I go to riding lessons and I know how to handle her', said the leader of the trio persuasively.

  We let her go. She could do with all the exercise she could get to slim down that waistline, we reasoned; and when we first had her children often used to take her out on her halter. It was just a question of her now being on a bridle and the fact that nobody but ourselves had taken her out for more than a year.

  We undid her reins, turning them into a single lead-rein so that if she did run she couldn't trip. I trotted beside her myself for part of the way to encourage her to go. Then, instructing them to go no further than the Forestry house and back, I slipped quietly out of the procession and watched them trudging on up the hill. Like a group on a Christmas card, they looked. Two boys – the one holding the lead-rein still informing the others that he knew how to handle her because he went to riding-school – a girl, and a plump little donkey.

  It was a far different procession that returned some ten minutes later. In the lead was Annabel, going it like Arkle, with the boy who took riding lessons keeping valiantly up beside her like a Marathon runner. Far behind came the other two, also running, but nowhere in the picture with the leaders.

  'Let her go! Let go the rein! We'll field her!' yelled Charles, taking in the situation at once. And field her we did, Annabel snorting with satisfaction as she reached us, while the boy collapsed, completely breathless, on the bank.

  He'd run all the way from the Forestry house, he told us when at last he could speak. She'd looked round there, found that I wasn't with her and had decided to come back. He'd
said
he'd look after her, he replied with dignity when we asked but why hadn't he let go of the reins when she started to run. 'You rotters might have helped me though', he said indignantly to his two companions. The boy muttered sheepishly and kicked at a stone. 'But Roger, you're the one who takes the riding lessons', said the girl, with wide-eyed innocence.

S
o there we were. Annabel didn't seem to be doing so badly as a single unit. As if to make up for it, in fact, she seemed more domesticated than ever.

  Winter was setting in now. The leaves were off the trees, darkness was falling early, and often, about half-an-hour or so before sunset, we turned her loose in the Forestry lane. We'd proved she wouldn't chew the trees. We knew, from the way she'd come back from the Forestry house, that she wouldn't go far without us. There were rarely any riders about by then and it was good for her, we thought, to wander at random along the hedgerows.

  Actually she didn't do much wandering at random. As soon as the lights went on she could be found unfailingly at a point where the Forestry track overlooked a house, built below it into the hillside. There, once it was dusk, stood Annabel. Preserving the proprieties, of course. Pretending to eat most industriously from the hedge. But gawking so intently down through the window at the Pennys' supper preparations that we had practically to carry her home.

  Earlier than that she could be found up on the open patch at the top. Grazing along the verge, while she watched Farmer Pursey's cows in the field where I'd done my Cossack dance, and eyeing them between mouthfuls with the superiority of a donkey who, herself, was free to wander.

  The best way of getting her back from there was to hammer on her feeding bowl like a dinner gong. Down the hill she'd gallop, line up behind me at the gate and follow as obediently as Mary's lamb while I led her, entirely without halter or bridle, to her stable. True if anyone saw me I felt like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. True there were times when, on account of her being at the far end of the open patch and round the corner, she couldn't hear me banging and I had to trudge up the hill-track hammering lustily as I went. A bit of a nit I felt then, audible to the entire village and as like as not, when she did get wind of it, Annabel so intent on seeing what was in the bowl that we'd then run all the way home, I with the bowl held out so she couldn't get at it, she with her neck outstretched as she tried to reach it, so that anybody who saw us must have thought we were having an egg-and-spoon race.