Doreen Tovey - Donkey Work

After that I stood carefully on one side when I was with Henry. Even then I got caught one night when I patted him on the rump at dusk; he thought it was Annabel up to her tricks and kicked out, and the bag of bread I was holding soared straight into the middle of the field. A magnificent, arching goal-kick, with the top of the bag still left in my hand. I ought to be more careful, said Charles reprovingly. Silly playing at donkeys when I didn't know how to kick, said Annabel, standing watching me from outside her house with a wisp of hay in her mouth. Wooooh! said Solomon apprehensively from his post by the fence. Which was how I felt myself.

Henry seemed liable to put me into orbit any day but there was no question of his hurting Annabel. That, illustrated by the way he carefully kicked to miss her and turned a paternal eye on the cats, was why we kept him. Not only did we have a feeling that, jealousies apart, Henry liked Annabel. We had no doubt about the fact that Annabel liked Henry.

We watched sometimes in the paddock when there was neither food nor us on their minds. Wherever Henry grazed, Annabel grazed as well. Not kicking now because the grass was free, but standing like a prim small toy at his side. Wherever Annabel wandered Henry followed, trailing amiably after her like a clumsy guardian giant. Occasionally we even saw them in a corner rubbing noses.

She kicked him, she grazed with him. She kicked him, she rubbed noses with him. The paddock grass vanished like snow in summer before Henry's formidable hooves and Henry's enormous mouth. The hay and oats vanished like snow in summer, too, what with Henry eating three times as much as Annabel and the pair of them eating twice as much as they normally would on account of rivalry. One moment we wondered whether we should ever have taken Henry. The next, smoothing his big black nose when Annabel wasn't looking, we assured him we wouldn't be without him. The one thing we could congratulate ourselves on was – as we were only agreeing with Miss Wellington one weekend when we'd had Henry with us for a fortnight – that Annabel was no longer lonely, and that she'd not since run away. I can see us saying it now, leaning on the paddock gate with Henry and Annabel plodding companionably towards us. Like Dignity and Impudence, said Miss Wellington ecstatically.

I can see us a little later. Taking Annabel for her first walk since we'd had Henry. Leaving him regretfully behind because we weren't quite certain how he'd handle on a walk with Annabel as yet, but assuring him that we'd take him, too, before long. Touched to the heart by the way he ran up and down the fence at being parted from Annabel, calling to her from the gate and watching her anxiously till she was out of sight. Quite unlike Annabel, who capered skittishly up the lane, never looked back at him once, and greeted him on her return with a vastly superior snuffle.

I can see myself at three the next morning, too, rolling down the stairs to answer the telephone. Wondering what catastrophe had hit the family now. Shivering unbelievingly in the cold November night while the riding mistress informed me that Annabel and Henry had eloped. They were over there with her, two miles away. She'd captured Annabel and tied her to the kitchen door. Henry was running about in the road and wouldn't be rounded up. She was in her pyjamas. And would we please come over at once.

TWELVE

The Elopement

We felt like Henry V before Agincourt that night, with everybody so patently abed and sleeping as we sped at panic stations through the lanes. Everybody, that was, except us and Miss Linley, keeping vigil in her pyjamas on the main road.

It was the moonlight, we thought, that had done it. The clear bright moonlight shining enticingly on the road that led out of the valley, and Henry made restless by the fact that Annabel had been taken for a walk and fancying one himself.

The moonlight, the night before, had enticed another local pony from his field. He, too, had broken out and gone clattering down the road and woken Miss Linley who, alone perhaps in the whole district, was attuned to hearing horses in her sleep. He, she said, had been going too fast. Almost before she was out of the house and running after him, he'd run into a lorry and been killed.

That was why she was worried about Henry. That was why we were worried, too. That; the fact that he didn't belong to us so that we had an added responsibility as his guardians; and the heart-sinking realisation that once we did succeed in rounding him up we were faced with the prospect of leaving the car at the stables and walking him and Annabel the two miles home.

There was an air of unreality about the journey. The silence; the silver landscape in which nothing moved; the cardboard shadows of the trees across the lanes. Miss Linley, waiting by the roadside in a hastily pulled-on coat, seemed more like part of a dream. So – except that it was more like part of a nightmare – did a familiar voice shouting advisorily over the wall when she heard us that she was Tied up in Here and not to believe them if they said she Wasn't. And the lights, following that sleep-shattering outburst, that immediately went on like lighthouse lanterns in bedroom windows all around us. And Miss Linley telling us she'd managed to round Henry up after all and chase him into the Plaices' drive and shut their gates behind him.

We could have fallen on her neck with relief. We haltered Henry, who by this time had spotted a mare and foal in the Plaices' paddock and was gazing fascinatedly at them over the fence. We led him back to the stables, where Annabel was standing unrepentantly by the kitchen door in the first professionally put-on halter she'd ever had, looking exactly like a circus Shetland.

Wasn't she a poppet? demanded Miss Linley. We'd never think, would we, that when she caught her the little minx wouldn't move out of the road, and she'd had to call her mother down to help, and between them they'd practically carried her into the yard.

Neither, seeing her standing there so innocently, would anybody guess what else she'd done. Annabel at home was most particular. She never used the garden as a lavatory and only certain parts of her paddock. Annabel at the stables, to show her opinion of having a halter put on her, had gone as far into the kitchen as her rope would allow and misbehaved on the rug.

Miss Linley only laughed. They might as well stay in her paddock for the night now, she said. We could fetch them back tomorrow.

We enjoyed that part of it very much. The walk over to the stables on a morning that was more like spring than autumn. The sight of Henry lying stretched out in the paddock when we got there – resting, we supposed, after his night's adventures. The sight of Annabel – after an initial shock when we couldn't see her at all and thought she was missing again – stretched out similarly a short distance away. Almost invisible in the grass, obviously imitating Henry – wasn't it marvellous, we said, the way they'd taken to one another? Even – if one overlooked the shock they'd given us – the way they'd run away together, just like Hansel and Gretel.

We went home pack-horse style. Henry first, led by Charles and walking as ponderously as a police horse up the busy main road. Annabel behind, led by me and for the first time in her life acting neither like a yo-yo nor a sheet anchor on the end of her rope but walking equally ponderously in the rear in imitation of Henry. Charming it was, apart from an undoubted resemblance to a procession en route for the sands with us in the role of donkey boys. Really quite touching when we turned off the road into the valley and whenever Henry disappeared round a bend ahead Annabel ran like mad till she had him in sight again, while every now and again Henry himself stopped and turned deliberately round to make sure that Annabel was following.