Doreen Tovey - Donkey Work

There was nothing playful about this effort. Teeth bared, head jerking purposefully from side to side, Annabel was tugging away like Houdini. We confined her with chain and padlock after that. To offset any feeling of frustration that might give her – she must, said Charles, have wanted to be with us otherwise she wouldn't have been doing it – we gave her longer walks and time in the garden.

What Annabel wanted was to be out. Initially, at any rate, her one idea when she achieved that object was to dash past the cottage, half-way up the hill, and hover. Feeding blissfully on the roadside, lifting her head occasionally to see if we were watching, running a skittish few steps when we tried to approach her, and coming back like the clappers when a car came round the corner.

Time in the garden altered that, however. Time in the garden – beginning with half an hour on the days we went to town, when she was allowed at the kitchen door in the early morning, given bread and honey as a treat, and usually had to be pushed Atlas-fashion back to her paddock while we sweated on the top line about the hour – rapidly became the criterion of Annabel's existence.

It grew, when occasion permitted, to be several hours. Any time she got out of the paddock now, either by crawling under the wire or the more direct method of meeting us at the gate as we opened it and pushing past us like a steam-roller and Annabel was chez nous. Wheeling smartly up the drive. Chewing familiarly at one of Charles' plum trees. Rubbing her bottom appreciatively on a Cox's Orange – a low one under which her back fitted perfectly and it wasn't just that she pushed it from side to side, said Charles despairingly; it went up and down as well. And finally, Mecca of Meccas, achieving the kitchen.

When Annabel first discovered the existence of the kitchen she was quite overawed by it. All that Food, you could see her thinking as she stood, overwhelmed, outside. The place where the bread and honey came from, and the apples and chocolate biscuits. Even when she'd come down the garden like a tornado – a nip at the plum tree, a boomps-a-daisy on the apple and three times round the lawn for luck – she still, when she reached the kitchen door, sobered down to respectful silence.

Not for long, however. Within a day or so a small white nose was cautiously nudging the door open. Soon a familiar head was coming tentatively inside. Within a short time after that the Winged Mercury attitude with flattened-back ears, eyes like marbles and outstretched neck as, ready to run, she reached round the corner to the kitchen table, had changed to a sort of vacuum-sweeping action as, as nonchalantly as you liked, she nosed appraisingly over its surface. And eventually, to Charles' delight, she was coming right into the kitchen. Looking knowledgeably for apples in the dish, hunting familiarly for carrots in the vegetable rack, hitting the refrigerator a resounding thwack with her bottom as she turned. Who, said Charles gazing proudly upon her, would believe we'd tamed a donkey to that extent?

Nobody, said Sidney decidedly. 'Twas bad enough when everywhere you went you was tailed by a couple of cats. When you opened a kitchen door and came face to face with a donkey, 'twas time to take the pledge.

Some people apparently felt that way when they saw her wearing a sou'wester – an innovation of Charles, who put it on her one day for a joke, discovered that she liked it, and when it rained Annabel could now be seen plodding happily round the garden like Grace Darling. We felt like taking it ourselves when as the next item on Annabel's list of achievements with which to surprise us, she came boundingly into season.

We didn't know much about donkeys. Only that we'd been told she shouldn't be ridden till she was three, shouldn't be bred from till she was three, and in our innocence we naturally assumed she wouldn't grow up till she was three either. The discovery, after our Arcadian interlude of prancing on the lawn and dallying in the kitchen, that she was marriageable at a year and we didn't have a seraglio ready to put her in was one of our tenser moments in donkey keeping.

Charles went round strengthening the fence as if for an attack by Indians. Annabel followed him with a coy swish of her tail saying Funny if one came over from Weston, wouldn't it be. Father Adams said he wouldn't worry if he was us, his father never locked 'em up, and countered it immediately with the recollection of a cart-horse that had come clattering down the lane one night, jumped a six-foot hedge and given his father's mare twins. And at two in the morning we were roused by a mysterious noise up the valley.

We were expecting it, of course. A jack! cried Charles, who'd been lying there listening for one since midnight. Quick! I said, having been lying there with even deadlier visions of a carthorse coming down the hill. Even so Annabel was up before us. She had heard it too and wasn't it exciting? she demanded, coming to meet us at her gate.

As a matter of fact it was a cow. Bellowing for its calf in a field up the valley, as we realised when it called again. It might have been a boy though, Annabel snuffled happily. One might be coming any moment now and she was going to stay up and Wait for him, she called after us as we plodded back to the cottage. One might indeed. Half an hour on our sleepless pillows imagining jacks creeping down the lane every time a branch creaked and we were up again. Getting out the car. Locking Annabel in the garage. And twenty minutes later getting up once more because she was up there banging paint tins around.

Twice since then she'd been in season. No jack had so far materialised. On the strength of the opinion of the Vet who said he didn't suppose one would either at that time of year after a hard day's work on the sands, we no longer locked her in the garage at such times; we just lay awake and worried instead. Annabel had achieved a lot one way and another. What we hadn't got her to do was work.

We'd made one or two attempts. We'd failed to get the bracken off the orchard in time for her to graze up on our own land. Charles was building his fishpond and perpetually anticipating getting round to the orchard next week. Sidney said the snakes was worse than ever this year and we could count he out. I went up there with a hook and disturbed a wasp's nest, reporting it to Charles who thereupon completed the circuit by saying he'd deal with the wasp's nest next week too. But we'd lent her out to the neighbours.

Only for an hour or so, we stipulated, as they led her pleasurably away to eat down their weeds. We couldn't let our donkey go for long... She usually went for considerably less. Hardly, it seemed at times, had her demure little rump disappeared round the comer of the lane accompanied by a jovial neighbour than her demure little nose was coming back round it in the other direction accompanied by a neighbour who held her rigidly at arm's length, and was cool towards us for days after a recital of what she'd done.

Knocking down a rockery was one of the charges laid against her. Scratching her bottom on it, said its owner. The more he'd pulled her away and showed her the dandelions the more she'd backed stubbornly against a big loose stone and scratched, the rockery had come down like a pack of cards and she , he said, his voice rising indignantly at the thought of it, had looked reprovingly at him .

Eating an asparagus bed had been another accusation. Four years to grow and gone like a row of candles, announced her borrower on that occasion, handing her rope to us and depart­ing as if he were sleep-walking, with never a backward glance.

Jumped off a five-foot bank was another report and when we enquired worriedly had she hurt herself, were her legs all right, had she fallen , Mr Smithson said bitterly not on his nelly. Took off like a ruddy chamois, he said. Straight off the ruddy bank-top, straight into the air, and straight down into the cucumbers.