Doreen Tovey - Donkey Work

Then the stream – which normally disappears down a swallet-hole up the lane – rose as it always does in the January rains, ran down to us, couldn't get through our ditch on account of the rubble from the fireplace, and no doubt we were the only people in England doing that. Digging the darned stuff out again. With the stream gushing down the middle of the road. The cats sitting happily on the coalhouse roof advising everybody who passed that we were digging it out fast before the policeman saw us. Annabel informing the world from up the lane that she didn't do it and could she please be moved to a place of safety. And Timothy, engaged to help us in return for cash towards a racing bike, leaving us goggle-eyed with his account of every day getting his jean-legs shrunk in the stream, every night hanging them up to dry over his mother's Aga with the legs tied at the ends with string and filled with stones – and every morning, our helper assured us with aplomb, the jeans as good as new again and the legs stretched back to normal.

We had a morning when we sat up in bed to find a heron on our garden path. Following the stream, no doubt; coming down to land when he spotted the outline of our fish pool; flapping off as cross as a crow when he found that Charles hadn't finished it yet and there were still no goldfish in it. We had a morning when we sat up in bed to find a squirrel on the lawn. Digging under an apple tree, coming up triumphantly with a brace of our biggest cob-nuts and we'd wondered where they'd got to in the previous autumn. We had also, recurring like an echo through the tempo of our activities, the question of whether Annabel was to be a mother.

If faddiness was anything to go by she was probably having triplets. She still ate bran in preference to oats. She rejected two entire bales of hay on the grounds that she didn't like that kind and we had to get some more. She announced that she wanted her drinking water hot. A decision understandable in January, when we'd heated the water to prevent it freezing, but slightly suspicious come April, when the sun shone, the cats sunbathed on her shelter roof and Annabel, confronted by a pail of fresh cold water, pouted her lips at it and said she still required it Hot.

What with that, a liking for carrots and a sudden passion for orange peel – she found some on the hill one day, savoured it as if it were caviare, and thereafter a customs inspector had nothing on Annabel going through the waste-basket at the bus-stop every time she passed – things looked pretty black indeed.

There was no point in consulting the Vet. That became obvious as Spring rolled on and practically every day we opened the papers to read of unexpected foals.

A twenty-year old donkey whose owner said he couldn't think how she'd managed it had had a little blackjack. A small bay mare, bought for a greengrocer's round by a man with a lifetime's experience of horses, had scared the daylights out of him by lying down in the shafts on her first trip out with the cauliflowers and producing a small bay filly. A little girl's riding pony, whose owner could only inform reporters that recently Polly hadn't seemed keen on going to pony-club meetings though previously she'd liked the other ponies, had had a white one with spots... The papers quoted veterinary experts as saying you often couldn't tell with horses.

We certainly couldn't tell with Annabel. One minute we thought she was and prescribed plenty of greens for vitamins. Her own paddock being threadbare after the winter's eating we tethered her up on the hill to get them, trekked leisurely back to the cottage – and within minutes were running back up again like mad. Annabel, by way of amusement and pre­sumably trying to snap her tether at the same time, was up there galloping furiously down the slope like the Charge of the Light Brigade, pulling taut on the end of her rope with a jerk that must be knocking the triplets for six if she had them, plod­ding steadfastly back to the starting point like a skier returning up a ski-run, and doing it over again.

Later we decided she couldn't possibly be in foal, the trouble was she was eating too much and we ought to cut her rations down. The result of that was that Annabel's stomach, which despite her non-stop eating habits had rumbled at intervals ever since we'd known her like a distant train on the Underground, now began to rumble more loudly, like an incipiently active volcano. The day we gave her a reduced allowance of hay, stayed to clean out her house, heard what we thought was Timothy trundling his go-cart down the lane and looked up to discover that it wasn't Timothy at all but Annabel's stomach rumbling, we gave up putting her on a diet. We decided to let nature take its course, fed her so that her stomach remained muted though steadfastly barrel-shaped, and waited. For what looked like being rather a long wait, seeing that it takes a horse eleven months to foal; presumably (though we couldn't find it even in Britannica) it takes a donkey the same; and it would be October before we knew.

Meanwhile, so that we wouldn't get ennuied while we waited, the bird-mating season set in at the cottage. Missel thrushes nested trustingly in the damson tree, we showed them by way of a treat to Miss Wellington, and created a ripe old situation there. We had Miss Wellington hovering constantly by our gate in case when the young were hatched they fell out on to our path. Miss Wellington nipping smartly across to the hedge to pick dandelions when anybody passed – 'To make wine,' she informed passers-by; 'To put them off the scent,' she advised us; with the result that after being put off the scent daily for a week Father Adams enquired interestedly of us what th'old girl was making as much wine as that for; planning a Batchanalia? When the birds hatched they did start falling out, too, and, as nutty as Miss Wellington, we put straw down for them to fall on and kept going out when she wasn't around to return them to the nest.

How they escaped the cats was a miracle, said Miss Wellington. Actually it was because the mouse-hunting season had started also and our March of the Siamese Cats was returning, not, as it often did, via the front gate with an excursion up the damson tree for exercise, but in a crow's flight line from the paddock. Over the wall, down the path, up the stairs to our bedroom where they usually stored their catches and where one day, to our horror, we found they had stored a rat. Only a young one, stone-cold dead on its back, but where there was one there were others.

There were, when we started to look for them, dozens. Multiplying like flies, no doubt, with the warmer weather; attracted by Annabel's bread; and coming not only from the walls of her house but trekking, at feeding time, down the valley. Like a portage procession through the Khyber Pass, said Charles, who watched astounded one morning from across on the hillside as they filed familiarly down a track from some ruins in a neighbouring field, disappeared into Annabel's house, and a second or two later filed familiarly back up again carrying whacking great lumps of bread.

Something had to be done, of course. We couldn't leave the cats to deal with them – otherwise, as we knew full well, one day they'd come up against a big one and somebody would be bitten. We couldn't trap them on account of the danger to the birds and cats. We couldn't call in the Pest Officer and have them poisoned for the same reason. On the other hand, for our own sakes and everybody else's, we couldn't have them multiplying like this. So Charles, with the cats shut in the cottage, Annabel on the lawn and a bowl of bread in her house for bait, shot them. Not before we'd noticed something interesting, however. On the whole the rats made Annabel nervous. She stamped her feet at them; kicked when she was eating and they rustled in the straw; looked worried from time to time at their entrance holes in the corners. Not, however, when it came to a certain light-brown rat. A rat whom we, too, recognised.