Doreen Tovey - Donkey Work

Sidney told us about the maypole. Sidney, on his visits to raise or lower the maypole at the guest house, told Mrs. Reynolds about us and Annabel...

It was the fault of the season, of course. People singing Little Donkey on the radio. Miss Wellington coming by while we were giving Annabel supper in her house saying what a picture she made by lantern-light. The Rector recalling the year the choirboys, in scarlet cassocks and ruffs, toured the village singing carols with lanterns slung on poles. Coming over the hill in procession like a mediaeval picture, he said. Singing so sweetly it brought the tears to one's eyes. The only year they'd done it, alas, for most of them caught colds...

When after that Mrs. Reynolds rang us to say could she – with memories of Dolly and Desmond – have Annabel in her Christmas entertainment, what could we say but yes.

FOURTEEN

A Quiet Country Christmas

What could we say but yes, either, when the carol party got wind of Mrs. Reynolds' venture and asked if Annabel could accompany them as well. To brighten things up, they said, as the carol party, since the year the choir caught cold, was now a sober, adult affair with everybody in headscarves and gum-boots. The only concession to a Dickensian atmosphere was the lantern borrowed from the choir and borne aloft on its pole by Mr Smithson – and that, said the carol party organiser resignedly, couldn't look very romantic, could it, when one opened one's front door and saw him holding it in a homburg and woollen gloves.

So Annabel went carol-singing, wearing a yellow wool scarf with bobbles to add colour to the occasion, padding virtuously along the lanes beneath the lantern, insisting on being first up people's paths and occasionally getting jammed in gateways with Mr Smithson, who was also used to being first in with his pole.

There were minor difficulties, as there always are on such occasions. Annabel going the wrong side of telegraph poles on her lead, for instance, and continually bringing the party to a kaleidoscopic halt. And the incident at the Duggans' bungalow, blocked by what in the flickering lantern-light appeared to be Mr Duggan having suddenly gone mad and erected Glastonbury Tor across his drive. We nearly dropped when the lights went on and it turned out to be ten tons of manure ordered by Mr Duggan for his garden and delivered in his absence by a man who, with nobody around to stop him had deposited it with alacrity on the doorstep and departed. We pulled ourselves together. We sang Noel on one side of the manure heap. The Duggans joined in invisibly on the other a trifle dispiritedly, perhaps, at the prospect of having to get up next day and shovel it all away, but the tradition of singing in one's porch with the carollers has to be kept up. And Annabel Aaaw-Hoooed at the end to let them know she was with us and got a mince pie over the top. Annabel's personal tradition about carol-singing, this; she'd already achieved six since starting out.

Wonderful how people rose to the occasion in the country, wasn't it? enthused a three-months-out-from-town member of the party as we plodded up the hill. Hardly were the words out of his mouth than a situation arose to which it was practically impossible to rise, however, and Annabel stopped. Faced with what she recognised as a long dark trek across to the other part of the village, whereas behind her was a lane of houses with mince pies in, she said she'd done enough carol-singing for the night. She was going back the way she came. Possibly visiting friends on the Way, she insisted, pulling back so stubbornly on her haunches it was like trying to move the Rock of Gibraltar.

Charles and I pulled. Some of the others pushed. Mr Smithson stood self-consciously by with the lantern. A wit passing by to the Rose and Crown remarked on the resemblance to Uncle Tom Cobleigh and asked which fair we were going to this time.

We made it in the end with the aid of peppermints donated by the pub. Annabel completed her rounds smelling alternately of peppermint and mince pies; looked angelic in her scarf when people came to their doors and petted her; walked alongside us – except for her lapse on the hilltop and the occasional sorties round telegraph poles – as if she was one of the gang; looked suitably modest when at the end the organiser counted up the takings and said it was more, thanks to our dear little donkey, than ever before.

Annabel, said Charles as we ambled glowingly back down to the cottage with her, was wonderful. One could do anything with that donkey. He'd been thinking while he was singing, he said, and he knew what we could do with her for Mrs Reynolds' entertainment. He'd go as an Arab in a burnous.

You could have knocked me down with a manure heap. Mrs Reynolds wasn't doing a Christmas play. She was this year – hence the maypole – doing Ye Olde Englishe Village. In, presumably, Springtime. Admittedly no specific part had been laid on for Annabel other than to generally charm the audience, but we might, I thought, have found something more in keeping with the general theme than Charles in a burnous.

Charles, alas, with his predilection for unusual headgear, fancied a burnous. He'd look much more appropriate with a donkey as an Arab, he said, than a farmhand with a smock and hayfork. He also, as I knew full well, had once had his photograph taken in a burnous in the Middle East and rather fancied himself as Lawrence of Arabia. So he got busy with a couple of sheets and one of those thick woollen cords with tassels used for looping back old-fashioned curtains which he borrowed from Mrs Adams; frightened Sheba out of her wits by coming down the stairs in it just when she was going up to see what he was doing; pronounced himself all set for the fray...

The entertainment was planned for Boxing Day. It might have been all right even then had Charles been able to do what he intended and practise with Annabel on Boxing Morning. On Christmas night, however, Solomon disorganised the house completely with a bilious attack.

It began with the cats – Charles' Aunt Ethel being in temporary possession of the spare room – being put to bed, complete with earth-boxes, in the sitting-room. It continued with Solomon deciding to use his earth-box before he went to sleep – magnificent he looked, too, posed majestically in his yellow plastic bowl on a plum-coloured carpet behind a turquoise door – and discovering that he couldn't. Sick! he howled, panicking immediately as Solomon always does. Call the Vet! Fetch the Doctor! Tum Wouldn't Work, he explained woefully as we came running to see what was wrong.

Nobody but Solomon would get his stomach stuck on Christmas night. Nobody but Solomon, either, would have eaten so much all day – turkey, cream and caramel blancmange in a practically non-stop round since lunchtime – that the effort of trying to use his box made him sick. He kept getting into his box, howling about his stomach, getting out again, being sick. Long after we'd put the lights out and crept quietly to bed in the hope that he might stop worrying in the darkness and go to bed himself, we could still hear him complaining down below.

We came down to him three times in the night. We were up again at dawn. His stomach, he informed us, still wouldn't work. He'd been sick six times on the carpet. A fine Christmas night this had been, we said wearily, sitting there waiting for daylight and the time to call the Vet.

Actually Solomon resolved the problem himself. As daylight grew and presumably he imagined Aunt Ethel would be awake he went upstairs, scratched tearfully at the spare room door and demanded to be let in. Wanted to use his Box, he shouted when she asked who was there. In his Corner where he was Used to it, he insisted, flatly refusing to consider it when we put it placatingly on the landing.