Tovey, Doreen - Raining Cats and Donkeys

FIFTEEN

Anniehaha

She'd trodden on another nail. He could believe it, said Mr Harler when I rang him once more to tell him. Nothing about our lot would ever surprise him . I reckon it would have done if I'd told him how she'd covered everything from eating Yorkshire pudding to side-twitching and still hadn't produced that foal, but I forbore. For his part, either he'd forgotten the foal, decided it was some time in the future – or could it have been, come to think of it, that he knew the story as well as we did and was being professionally tactful? Anyway, neither of us mentioned it.

There was no need for us to postpone our holiday, was all he said. He and his assistants would see that she was all right. So her foot was drained and dressed, swathed in bandage upon bandage like a gout-wrapping, painted with plaster of Paris to keep the bandages dry, and off she went to the farm where Mrs Pursey said anything the little soul wanted, she, too, would willingly do for her. In that case, said Annabel, hopefully pouting her mouth, she'd like some bread-and-butter like Mrs Pursey always gave her, and she got it on the spot.

So there we were again. A perfectly logical explanation about the plaster, but one which was of course quite un­known to the onlookers who saw a small, fat donkey trudging up the hill in what appeared to be a plaster cast, making the most of it as usual and playing the Wounded Donkey Heroine being Taken Into Captivity.

By the time we came back the bandages were off, her foot was completely healed, and our name was mud with the faction who, still under the impression that she was in foal, had decided that she'd had to have the plaster on to support her growing weight, and in that condition... Poor little donkey, said one of her sympathisers, at which Annabel snorted in soulful agreement... we'd gone away and heartlessly left her.

Time proved that wrong, as the weeks went by, no foal appeared, and Annabel remained as bulgingly plump as ever. We just couldn't win, though – and neither, so far as that period was concerned, could the Duggans. On one side of them the boat was almost finished, the hammering had long since stopped, everybody was admiring the trim little craft that sat buoyantly in the driveway – and Alan was now worrying in case someone wanted to buy it and the Foots started boat-building all over again. On the other, though the bulldozer was silent at last, the Duggans were now suffering heavily from bonfires as the builder and his helpers cleared the undergrowth.

Not only from the smoke, either. Alan swore that one afternoon he and Carrie were sitting on the lawn – used by now, he said, to being kippered – when an adder four feet long came travelling across it at speed. Definitely an adder, he said, when we queried whether it might not perhaps have been a grass snake. Coming straight for them with its head raised, and by Harry it was touch and go, when he got up and shooed it off, as to whether it jumped at him or not. His theory was that it had been annoyed by the bonfire. It had hissed at him angrily, he said, and then turned tail and slid into the rockery. How many more of the perishing things, he wanted to know, might be there, lying in wait, ready to attack?

None so far as we heard. With the Duggans' star in such temporary eclipse, however, we should have known better than to ask them to look after our garden while we were away. Since everything happened to us, and what didn't happen to us appeared to be happening at the moment to them, it was obviously asking for trouble.

It was, too. We came back to find that Carrie had of all things fallen on our path and dislocated her elbow, and scarcely had we digested that catastrophe – it wasn't our fault, she kept heroically telling us; she hadn't tripped or anything; just one moment she was putting down her basket at the conservatory door and the next she was flat on her face – when I happened to mention Alan and we heard the news about him. He'd nearly poleaxed himself on our plum tree.

It was the very first morning we'd gone, she said. Alan had gone down to open the tomato house, and near the garage he too had fallen down. Why she couldn't imagine, unless it was all that smoke affecting him. Anyway, getting up, irate as anybody would be in the circumstances and with a badly grazed knee, he'd forgotten for the moment where he was and, coming up directly under the plum tree, had caught himself a thumping crack on an overhanging branch and gone down again practically for the count.

Carrie was annoyed with him when he got back. All he'd been asked to do was open the greenhouse door, she said, and he came back limping, mud on his trousers, a cut on his bald head and moss off the plum tree all over him like woad. Just like a man, she'd informed him; she'd much better go herself.

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.