Doreen Tovey - Donkey Work

It was two hours before we saw them again. Two hours during which we kept looking anxiously up the lane assuring ourselves that of course they were all right and we mustn't fuss. Two hours in which we kept imagining the children butted over banks or rolled on by a rioting donkey, Annabel with a broken leg or running lost among the hills, and the lot – when time went on and neither she nor they showed up even independently – down one of the local pot-holes.

When suddenly they were at the back gate, having done a complete circuit of the valley and come down the hill behind us. She hadn't, they informed us as they hitched her expertly to the gatepost, tried to roll or gallop or butt them once, and she'd walked absolutely for miles. She'd gone over the stream without a pause, they said – they couldn't think why we thought she wouldn't. Could they take her out again?

Annabel was doing very well for friends indeed, and it was a pity Miss Wellington couldn't know. Miss Wellington was on holiday, however. Staying with a friend near Clovelly. Sending us cards with donkeys on them, invariably in groups of two or more, with a message that had the postman positively mesmerised. SOME DAY, enquired the cards in large capital letters – THIS?

SIX

The Donkey Owners

They supposed, people sometimes commented in suitably saddened tones, that the cats were settling down now and that was why we'd bought a donkey.

Those were the people who didn't own a Siamese themselves; who took at its face-value the sight of Solomon sitting soberly on the field wall watching Annabel and of Sheba, who'd at last got round to acknowledging that there were such things as donkeys and we had one of them in the paddock, sitting equally soberly beside him. Bless their dear little hearts, they would sigh. Pity they got older, wasn't it?

Those two weren't getting any older. The fact that Solomon's normally orchid-spotted whiskers were temporarily snow-white and contrasted oddly against his seal-black face, and that Sheba had gone white too, all round her mouth and nose so that it looked as if she'd been dipped in face-powder, had nothing to do with age. Way back before we'd had Annabel they'd been ill, and the whiteness was part of the aftermath. They were six now and fighting fit again, and as fiendishly bad as ever. Even their illness had resulted from one of their escapades. One of Solomon's in point of fact, though Sheba encouraged him in it.

Solomon had decided he was a tom. He'd decided it some time previously, when a real stray ginger tom appeared on the scene and, to show there was a man around at last, started to spray about the valley. Solomon, not to be outdone, immediately started to spray back. An action not unknown in a jealous neuter, particularly in a Siamese, but which we had so far not experienced. He not only sprayed wherever the ginger tom had been… On our Rockery Wall, he would announce, examining it with dark suspicion as he passed and immediately backing up to it to effect his own contribution… On our Garage Door, he would add a second or two later while Sheba watched with admiration and said fancy his being able to do that... On our Loganberries, he informed us on one occasion and without more ado bang went the loganberry crop for the season before our very eyes... but he sniffed.

Round the garden, under the gate, up the lane – he followed the trail, being Solomon, with the sniff of a Hound of the Baskervilles and a spray with the force of a Flit gun. We tried to stop him, knowing the risk. We sprayed the lane ourselves with disinfectant till people stopped and sympathetically asked us whether our drains had gone wrong. It was no use. It was a hot dry summer, we couldn't disinfect the entire countryside though goodness knows we tried, Solomon followed the trail with gusto and the next thing we knew he had a germ and was lying, a sad small shadow in a blanket, with a temperature and a swollen tongue. He couldn't eat, he couldn't drink, he dribbled and he was very ill.

Our only consolation in the anxious days of nursing him was that Sheba was unlikely to get it. From the moment she walked wide-eyed into the room on the first day of his illness, sniffed cautiously at him over the top of his blanket and backed speedily away saying he was Catching, we weren't nearly so much worried about Sheba picking it up as unnerved by the precautions she took to see that she didn't.

Passing the invalid's couch in an exaggerated circle, for instance, presumably in case he leaned out and breathed on her. Leaping defensively on to the table when from time to time, not knowing quite what to do with himself, Solomon got feebly down and tottered across the room. Let them sleep together, said the Vet, because if it was infectious she was incubating it anyway and meanwhile she might comfort him. But when we put them in the spare room at night, laying Solomon tenderly on his favourite corner of the settee and inviting her to cuddle up to him, Sheba took up quarantine stations in the other corner, with a good big ridge of blanket between herself and the germy one, and refused to comfort anybody.

Five weeks after Solomon's outbreak, with Solomon himself convalescing nicely, the Vet declaring five weeks' incubation was unheard of and she couldn't possibly have it and Sheba looking sorrowfully at him saying she was afraid she did, she began to dribble too.

At that stage we had the further complication of Solomon, now he was on his feet again and it wasn't him the Vet was coming to give injections to, taking such an interest in medical affairs we were scared stiff he'd reinfect himself. Where Sheba had kept away from him, for instance, the moment he came into the room he strolled up and took deep diagnostic sniffs at her stomach. When we put cream round her mouth in an effort to get her to eat and she listlessly left it there he bounded forward, saying it was a pity to waste good stuff like that, and ate it off himself. When I gave her water with a teaspoon, trickling it gently into her mouth as she lay frailly in Charles's arms, he nipped up behind us and had a good long drink from the bowl in case it contained something special. And when we shut him out through one of the sitting-room doors to keep him away from the germs it was only a question of seconds before Solomon, having streaked like a black-faced hare through the kitchen, round the cottage and through the porch, was coming through the other door, agog with excitement to see what we were doing to her now.

He didn't reinfect himself, in due course we reached the happy day when two fit Siamese cats – one big, black and important-looking; one small, blue and extremely self-possessed – sat side by side in the cottage porch. We hoped, we informed Solomon as he sat looking interestedly round the garden, that this would be a lesson to him and we'd have no more of this business of being a tom. It was, of course, like water off a Siamese's back. The next stage in Solomon's campaign of being a tom was that he had to have a girl-friend.

Solomon didn't like girls. There was a blue one down the lane, a black and white one up the hill, Father Adams' Siamese Mimi if he felt like company of his own superior kind... Solomon never had liked girls. Silly, prissy things, he said. When he saw them he chased them as he did the toms, with the exception of Mimi who was apt to chase him back. For the demonstration of the next step in being a tom he chose, of all people, Sheba.

Both of them were neutered and it couldn't do any harm but it was embarrassing, to say the least, to be walking down the lane and several times en route have Solomon suddenly spring on Sheba, grab her by the neck, and start howling through a mouthful of fur to Look what He was Doing. Particularly since Sheba, after the first couple of times when she kicked him in the stomach and fled, decided to co-operate. There they posed, Sheba flat on her stomach uttering coy feminine cries with her nose in the dust, Solomon holding her manfully by the scruff and daring the ginger tom to get his Woman. Been seeing too much television, commented Sidney. Dear little friendies playing together, beamed Miss Wellington when they did it outside her gate. Absolutely disgraceful, said somebody one day who fortunately we didn't know.