Tovey, Doreen - Raining Cats and Donkeys

I said we hoped she was. Honestly , I said to Charles when I went indoors. Was my face red ! Supposing Miss Wellington had heard, or Father Adams, or Janet and Jim? Now I knew why he'd turned red, said Charles resignedly. That was what she'd said to him .

Interest in Annabel was growing rapidly now. People kept stopping to ask when she was due to foal; were we going to keep it; what were we going to call it. Our own chief interest was whether it was there at all. We couldn't feel anything or was it significant that when we tried, Annabel walked pettishly away saying she didn't like being touched just there? Her waist measurement didn't reveal anything. Fifty-eight inches by now – which, though that, it was interesting to note, was exactly the same circumference as the top of our rain-barrel, was only four inches in seven months beyond normal, and could have been accounted for by the amount of food she'd eaten.

Miss Wellington, purveyor of Yorkshire puddings to Annabel, was sure beyond possible doubt. There was a look on her dear little face, she said. Indigestion, said Charles, sotto voce, and her face was the last thing to go by.

That was the opinion at the farm. Annabel stayed there for a week that spring, while we went for a short sailing holiday. We came back, went up to fetch her, I was discussing the weather with Mrs Pursey... I was holding Annabel on her halter while we talked and I was most surprised when I looked round to see Charles and Farmer Pursey bending down to peer under her stomach.

What they were looking for I hadn't a clue, but Annabel obviously knew. In the middle of the yard. In front of other people. No thought for a donkey's feelings. I knew what that expression meant, as I'd known at the racehorse stable.

'Her teats', said Charles, when, as we went down the hill, I asked what they had been looking for. 'Farmer Pursey said when they begin to swell it's the surest sign with cows.'

Annabel snorted indignantly when he added that they couldn't find hers at all. Of course they couldn't, she said. She wasn't a cow. She was a Lady.

FOURTEEN

Putting a Foot in It

As far as her undercarriage was concerned, Annabel went on being a lady. Her teats were there all right, hidden in the thick cream fur that covered her stomach, but they didn't swell. Perhaps with a little donkey they wouldn't said someone else – or maybe not until she actually foaled.

As the months went by there were other signs, however. One morning we noticed Annabel, as we thought, looking persistently in at us through the kitchen window – the one that faced on to the yard. She was there when we had our coffee. She was there when I went out to get the lunch, nuzzling round the frame and wasn't she clever, I said, to realise she could watch us through that?

What she was actually doing was eating the putty. Charles had recently renewed it and presumably it still tasted of linseed, but it was an odd thing to do, nevertheless. Other than Charles's anguished outcry when he saw the tooth-marks – that dam blasted donkey ate everything, he said; it was a wonder she didn't eat us – undoubtedly it was significant of something.

So it appeared when, for the first time ever, she jibbed at climbing the steep track up into the Forestry estate. It was safe to let her run free there and normally, full of excitement at going for a walk, she galloped it like a Derby winner – up and back at least six times while we climbed it ourselves, kicking skittishly sideways at us when we laughed. Lately, though, she'd taken to walking it and this time, at the steepest part, she stopped. She sighed, eyed the track and visibly rested. We would have taken her back but for the fact that when we tried to turn her, being Annabel she immediately insisted in going on up. If she stumbled by the wayside we weren't to worry, she assured us. She knew donkeys were only beasts of burden. If Julius fell right out she'd carry on.

Having reached the top without this calamity happening she announced that it was all right this time but now Julius would like some grass, and started grazing. She always did up here, where the grass was green and lush. She'd stay there for hours if we let her, and normally we chivied her on. This time, however, we left her, slipped quietly round the corner, and continued our walk alone. We'd go just to the gate at the bottom to give Julius time to settle, we decided, and then come back, put her on her halter and take her home. No more up the hill for her, we said. One shock like that was enough.

We got our second shock ten minutes later, when, while we were at the gate, leaning on it and gazing, still sweating slightly, at the scenery, we heard the sound of determinedly galloping hooves. 'Annabel!' I gasped in horror, recognising the beat. 'It can't be!' groaned Charles. But it was.

Round the corner she came, like a four-footed avenging angel. Downhill now, so there was nothing to hold her up. Wheezing like a bellows with the exertion and shaking Julius roundly at every thud. Leaving her behind and trying to lose her, she snorted when she caught up with us – and, when we tried to placate her, she kicked petulantly out at us and promptly lost her footing in the mud.

We expected Julius to appear at any moment on the way back, but he didn't. Even so we didn't take her up the hill again. She stayed in the Valley now. Receiving her many callers; bulging, so it seemed to me, daily; and beset, as soon as the summer came, by flies.

It so happened that Aunt Louisa had given me some old lace curtains of my grandmother's to put over the rasp­berries, and when Charles came in one day and said the flies were pestering her badly, couldn't we find something to cover her head and eyes, I said I had the very thing. I got a piece of lace curtain long enough to hang over her nose, cut two holes in it for her ears, put it on and tied it firmly behind her head.

It worked wonders. Admittedly she looked like a Spanish duenna wearing her mantilla back to front – but who, I said, was going to see that, if we kept her grazing quietly on the lawn? The answer was the riding school, who appeared within minutes as if summoned by a bugle. Annabel sauntered over to greet them, putting her head, curtain and all, over the wall; there was a chorus of 'Oooohs' from the children... 'Look Miss Linley, Annabel's getting married' called one excited voice. There was no answer from Miss Linley this time. She was quite at a loss for words.

Before long the flies involved us in a far more serious situation, however. By this time we'd discovered a fly repellent made specially for horses, which we sprayed on her back and legs and – since she objected to the hissing at too close quarters – rubbed by hand round her nose and ears. One warm morning I sprayed her thoroughly as usual, put her to graze on the slope behind the cottage – not far enough to involve her in any real climbing but enough to give her a change of grass – and was coming back down with the fly spray when I suddenly realised that I had the wrong tin. Not the fly repellent for horses but a tin of household fly killer containing Pybuthrin.

I knew what the instructions said without looking at them.

'Remove birdcages and fishbowls... cover children's cots... not to be used on cats and dogs...' We never used it at home ourselves. The only reason we had it was that we'd taken it on a trip to the Camargue in the mosquito season – and the only reason it happened to be on hand, which was how I'd picked it up, was that I'd got it out the previous day to give the name of it to Louisa, who was going on her first-ever trip abroad and had visions of deadly insects everywhere from Calais onwards.