Raining Cats and Donkeys (6 page)

  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 own 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 saw.

  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.

  I wished him a weak good afternoon and, when he'd passed me, began to follow back behind him, hoping to meet up with Charles and Annabel and thus prove I wasn't loitering with intent. Alas, when I got to the corner where they should have been, there was no sign of either of them. I guessed at once where they were. Just beyond the corner was a deserted Forestry cottage. When people lived in it Annabel was always embarrassing us, if we didn't remember to put her on her halter first, by running through their back gate and galloping round their garden. She hadn't done it for ages, but I had no doubt that that was where she was now – and that Charles, not realising how suspicious it looked, had disappeared in there after her.

  I called to him – frightening the Forestry man, who hadn't realised how close I was behind him, practically out of his wits. Placatingly I explained that my husband had gone back to look for our donkey and now they'd both disappeared. Presumably into the cottage garden, I said, and I'd better go in and look for them.

  'I can see a bloke dodging about in the garden', was the reply. 'But I can't see no donkey'. I couldn't see no donkey either, until – yelling my head off to Charles and (which looked even more suspicious) getting not one peep in reply – I went round behind the cottage and there he was, too breathless to speak, chasing Annabel round and round the garden.

  Eventually, after a great deal of running, we rounded her up; I pantingly enquiring of Charles why on earth he had to go in there just when there was a patrol man about who no doubt thought he was concealing a stolen tree, while Charles panted back how the Devil else was he going to get her out?

  Things weren't improved meanwhile by my noticing the patrol man crouched behind the hedge and periodically peering over the top of it, undoubtedly checking on whether there really
was
a donkey in the garden with us.

  It was a very docile Annabel we led on her halter for the remainder of the trip – during which, needless to say, we met no further patrol men at all. Charles said of
course
we couldn't have looked suspicious. All I knew was that I hadn't seen that particular Forestry man before. He obviously didn't know us, either, or that we owned a donkey. And for safety's sake – though we always buy it from the greengrocer anyway – I insisted that we didn't have a tree that year. I had no wish to have my Christmas festivities interrupted – undoubtedly just when the Rector was with us, having an after-church sherry on Christmas morning by the local constable and Forestry chief coming to uproot it from its pot to check on its identity.

T
he snow started on Boxing night. We were on our way home from Charles's brother's party when the first few flakes began to fall. Congratulating ourselves that we'd got Christmas over before it started and there were still two days yet before we need think of getting through it to town, we swept down to the valley, put the car into the garage, and couldn't get it out again for a fortnight. Even after that we were only able to take advantage of a break in the weather to get it towed up to the farm at the top of the hill and use it, when practicable, from there. Six weeks in all we were snow-bound in the valley, and as a study in character it was fascinating.