A Donkey in the Meadow (10 page)

Even this was not the end of it. Indifferent to my anger, oblivious that Jeannie had now joined in the attack, he took the dog by the scruff of the neck and began to climb down into the garden from the point where the donkeys liked to stand.

‘Not that way!’

I had visions of the dog breaking free, and indulging his stupidity by wringing the necks of Lama and Boris.

‘But I want to get to Lamorna,’ said the man plaintively, ‘and surely I can go up that lane?’

‘You can’t, and that’s that. You can go back to wherever you came from, and go quick!’

It always surprises me why so many dog owners are dull-minded. They thrust the bad manners of their dogs upon the rest of us. They ignore the possibility of damage that dogs can inflict. They are deaf. I have known a dog which would bark for two hours on end, its owner close by insensitive to the people miles around who were cursing. I like dogs. I only blame their owners. I might even have liked the boxer.

The attachment between Penny and Fred was intense. If a gate was shut and Penny was one side of it, Fred the other, both would show signs of great distress. There was never any question of taking them out each on their own. In the meadows they were always within a few yards of each other; and when Fred lay down for a sleep, Penny would stand guard beside him.

Fred was always particularly perturbed by Penny’s six-weekly pedicure. Along would come the blacksmith armed with a massive pair of cutters and a large file, and Penny would be ushered into the stables while Fred remained outside. He was certain something awful was happening to his mother, and this was not helped by the tantrums Penny sometimes displayed. On one side of the stable door the blacksmith was holding the leg of a plunging Penny; on the other, Fred was behaving as if he were never going to see her again.

These should have been signs enough to put Jeannie and me on our guard. The uncontrollable affection was a potential explosion. We only had to provide the opportunity by testing it to breaking point, for a situation to arise in which someone was hurt. And this is exactly what happened.

We decided one evening to take the donkeys for a walk up the lane, and into a field which led through the top end of our wood. Jeannie, because she has always maintained a wondrous, innocent, totally trusting attitude towards the behaviour of all animals, was not only riding Penny but carrying Lama as well. She had done it a number of times before. She held the rope of the halter as a single-sided rein while a comfortable Lama sat snugly with her two front paws around Penny’s mane. Lama enjoyed it, Penny displayed no objection while I, though appreciating the pleasant sight of cat, donkey and my pretty wife, also viewed the whole affair with a tolerant suspicion. It seemed to be asking for trouble. My weakness, however, was that I did not feel strongly enough about this to complain.

We were in the field and were on the way back, a pastoral scene. Jeannie in pink pants astride Penny, Lama beatific and merging into Penny’s glossy coat. Fred and I a few yards ahead. Nothing untoward seemed about to happen. We were all enjoying ourselves. Jeannie was telling me that Lama was purring, Penny was pausing at intervals to snatch a mouthful of grass, Fred wearing his bright, white halter, was taking a great interest in all around. Why this? What’s that? In every glance one sensed the gay inquisitiveness of the very young.

Fred and I reached the open gateway of the field, then turned right down the sloping lane leading for the cottage. It was, on my part, a thoughtless mistake. I was so amused by the way Fred was enjoying himself, leading me by his halter instead of me leading him, that I never thought of waiting for Jeannie. The setting was too normal and peaceful for me to imagine that Penny might panic when Fred disappeared out of her sight.

Suddenly I heard Jeannie shout. Then I saw Penny come out of the field at the gallop, jump a ditch, and in an instant she was dashing towards me. Her head was down, she looked wild, and had she been by herself I would have jumped aside and let her race on. But to my horror Jeannie was still astride her, vainly trying to grip with her legs . . . for in her hands she held Lama.

She said afterwards that her only concern was to save Lama. Lama, she visioned, would be trampled on. Lama was the only one in danger, not herself. But for me who was standing there in her path, a flash of my life which seemed an eternity, her fall at speed to the granite-based, jagged stone surface of the lane was inevitable. Lama, as far as I was concerned, could look after herself.

Jeannie was slipping to the side on my right. She was silent, no calling out for help.

‘I’m going to the right,’ I shouted.

My instinct was to try to catch her, cowboy fashion, taking her as she fell, leaving Penny to gallop on. I let Fred go and held out my arms.

I do not now think I had a chance to succeed. Penny was moving too fast, too heavy for me to check her, and indeed the very fact that I was standing there made her swerve as she reached me; and that was the moment when Jeannie fell.

My right hand seemed to clasp her for a brief instant, and then I was buffeted as Penny raced past me. The sound of the hooves disappeared. Incongruously I was aware of a lark singing. A rattle of a tractor came from a distance. All was normal again, quiet and peaceful and pastoral, as it had been five minutes before.

I knelt down beside Jeannie, quite still and eyes shut, and cupped her head in my hands.

Jeannie was unconscious for three or four minutes, and I was at a loss to know whether to stay with her or leave her and hurry for help. I took off my jersey and made it a pillow under her head. And I had just decided to rush up to the farm, when she opened her eyes.

‘Where’s Lama?’ she murmured.

Hell, I said to myself, here I am frantic with worry and all she thinks of is Lama.

‘Lama’s all right,’ I said soothingly, ‘what about you?’

As it happened I hadn’t a notion what had happened to Lama. I remembered that as Jeannie fell she flung Lama forward so that Lama flew past me like a small black football. Then she disappeared into the pandemonium of Penny’s gallop.

The fact, however, that Jeannie had spoken sent bells ringing through me. The question of Lama could wait, so also the whereabouts of the donkeys.

‘I had better get you to hospital.’

‘No fear.’

‘Come on, no argument, please.’

I was delighted, of course, that she did choose to argue. Here was the good sign. The bossy, if faint, contradiction. Her injury could not be serious.

I helped her to her feet and I walked with her leaning on me, slowly back to the cottage.

‘Please don’t take me to hospital.’

Her chin was cut and bleeding.

‘All right,’ I said, thankful for the alertness she was showing, ‘we’ll compromise. We’ll see if we can find an off-duty doctor.’

We had reached Monty’s Leap. A few yards further on there was a grass verge, just big enough for us to park the Land Rover sometimes during the daffodil season. It was opposite that section of the stables we used as a packing shed.

‘Now look . . .’ And I couldn’t help smiling.

‘Donkeys!’ said Jeannie. And she too smiled.

Two shamefaced donkeys. Halters still harnessing their heads, the ropes dragging the ground. They stood there waiting patiently for us to come to them, Fred so close to Penny that they were touching.

‘Wasn’t really our fault, was it, Mum?’

‘Quiet, son.’

We saw no sign of Lama, and as it was growing late I decided I had to wait until we got back before I searched for her, and search I did when an hour and a half later we returned from the doctor. It was dark. Jeannie, with a bandaged chin and mild concussion, had gone to bed. And for the life of me I could not find Lama.

‘Lama! Lama!’

Lama was usually an obedient cat, if it is possible to call any cat obedient. She obeyed because I would choose a moment to call her when I guessed she was in the mood to respond. If my guess was wrong, if my echoing voice reached her while she was on sentry duty beside a tuft of grass or a hole in the hedge, she, of course, ignored me. Thus her reputation of being obedient depended on me; and a reliable occasion when our minds coincided was at night. She always came home to the comfort of the cottage, to a saucer of milk, to a Jeannie-prepared plate of some delicacy, to a deep slumber on our bed. What, then, had happened to her?

I searched the customary hunting grounds, went into the wood flashing my torch, walked round the greenhouses, came back by a bank where for two or three days she had been picking off a family of mice one by one. Then down the track towards the sea, back again to the cottage and up the path to the well. No sign whatsoever, and I began to worry whether Penny in her mad gallop had kicked her; and Lama was lying injured and unable to move. If that were the case she would probably have dragged herself into the undergrowth near where the accident occurred.

I had now been searching for over an hour, and I wasn’t surprised when Jeannie opened a window and called out for news. Nor was I surprised that such was her anxiety she dressed and joined me. Nothing would stop her staying up all night whatever the doctor’s orders unless Lama was found.

We had had, of course, these alarms before, and each one had a freshness, an original urgency, a sense that this particular one was at last going to justify our most terrible fears. From a gentle call to a cross one, from a cross call to an anxious one, from an anxious call to loud bleats at the top of our voices: ‘Lama! Lama!’ And when there was no response, no welcoming small shadow to light up the darkness, we wondered secretly in ourselves in what way the fox had caught her. Had the end been quick or had he carried her away to his earth?

Such foolish fancies vanished like childish nightmares as soon as Lama, having heard us all the time, displaying no remorse, confident of her charms to secure instant forgiveness, suddenly appeared at our feet.

‘I’ve got her!’ the favoured one would shout.

The pattern was the same on this occasion. The difference was in the location. The incident of the lane, her flight through the air as Jeannie was falling, her crash among Penny’s galloping hooves, had deposited her into a new hunting ground. Never a wanderer far from home, circumstances had forced upon her the opportunity to explore a forbidden land; and when we found her, when my torch shone on her crouching figure, she was awaiting adventure on the edge of a track which Jeannie and I had known since we first came to Minack, as a highroad for foxes.

The accident, understandably, had a salutary effect upon us. When next day we held an inquest we admitted we had been growing overconfident, and that the donkeys in future had to be treated with greater respect. We had been behaving towards Penny as if she were an amiable lady without any emotion, and towards Fred as if he were the equivalent of a cuddly puppy. An amateur’s attitude. It was high time we imposed discipline upon ourselves in the way we dealt with them.

The first step I took was to ban them from the greenhouse field; and I do not now understand how I had allowed them there in the first place. Four large mobile greenhouses looking like aeroplane hangars were at the mercy of their kicks; and it was a miracle that the only near-damage they ever did was the result of a comical sortie by Fred. One of the mobiles was covering a crop of Christmas lettuce. One day we noticed a series of indentations in the soil and we quickly came to the conclusion that mice had been at work. No plants had been damaged. There were only these holes between the rows.

But Fred was the culprit. He had managed to squeeze through the partly open glass door, and later that day I discovered him making a tour of inspection within. Heaven knows why he did not step on the plants themselves.

The student had left us by the time of this incident and in his place we had a manager; and the object of such a high-sounding title was to employ an expert who could steer us away from the confusion in which we were becoming increasingly enmeshed. We had been continuing to lose grip of the flower farm. In the old days when Jane and Shelagh had worked for us, and reliable Geoffrey who had left to go into the building trade, there were no outside commitments to disturb us. We all joined together in the volume of work to do, the slow, meticulous work of a flower farm which has to be done by hand because it cannot be mechanised; and we were, in a sense, all partners. We now looked back with nostalgia to their loyalty and enthusiasm as we struggled to find a way out of our problem. The slow, meticulous work still remained but there was little time to spend on it; and when such work is not regularly and carefully performed, the seasons begin to catch up on each other, crops are planted too late and weeds flourish. I had been seduced from the steady tempo of the past. I was now divided between a life controlled from the city and the life of the peasant which had made Jeannie and me so happy; and what I gained from the one, I lost in the sacrifice of the other. I sat at my desk when my hands should have been in the soil.

We had therefore decided that if we could find a manager, someone so experienced in horticulture that he would demand a high salary, he would take control of the flower farm while I continued with my other work. I would be spared the day-to-day problems and activities but at the same time have the satisfaction of knowing that the flower farm was going to flourish; and of course Jeannie would continue to help with the flowers while I would be there whenever I was needed. In the peak months of the daffodil season, for instance, we would both be happily rushing the flowers away to market as quickly as possible.

I had realised that the type of person we required would be difficult to find. I was warned in fact that the person did not exist; and so I was greatly impressed by the gesture of an applicant who made a special visit from the Channel Islands to see me. He was the only applicant I saw. Because he was so keen to start working at once I engaged him immediately. True enough I was, in any case, in a hurry. The programme of the flower farm had to be kept in motion and there was no time to lose; but I made the error of willing myself to believe he was the man who would suit us, instead of giving time for my head to decide.