A Donkey in the Meadow

by Derek Tangye

  I realised now that they would have been scared out of their wits when the advance party of the Life Saving team dashed down through the meadows, leaving the gate open no doubt, for they would hardly have expected to meet donkeys.

  ‘They’re probably miles away by now,’ I said to Jeannie, and as I spoke I saw in my imagination a bewildered Fred and a distraught Penny plodding along some distant road. ‘On the other hand,’ I added soothingly, ‘They may have only escaped to Pentewan.’ These were the neighbouring cliff meadows which we used to rent but gave up after a sequence of gale-ridden crop disasters. ‘I’ll go and have a look.’

  It was past eight o’clock and at the busy centre of Minack there was still no report of the whereabouts of the wreck. Aircraft were zooming overhead and as I made my way over to Pentewan I saw strung along a mile or more offshore a company of ships . . . the Trinity House vessel, the Stella, a Dutch tug which was spending the winter in Mount’s Bay at a second’s readiness to speed for salvage, a Fishery Protection boat and, close to the cliffs, as if they were searching the inlets, were the two lifeboats. The Sennen, which had been out since the beginning, the Penlee, which had been out since half past six.

  I looked over towards the Carn. The group which had set out from Minack were straddled around it. I saw no urgency in their movements. There did not appear to be any reason to believe that they had found the wreck. The only thing which did seem clear to me was that a large number of people other than all of us at Minack must by now know its exact location. The sea was calm, the visibility was excellent, both ships and aircraft must have inspected the length of the coast.

  I reached the Pentewan meadows and was passing through what we used to call the thirty lace meadow when I observed piles of driftwood, gulls sweeping and calling above it, drifting eastwards in an endless line towards Lamorna Cove. I had been joined in my walk by a stranger with an important air. ‘That settles it,’ I said, ‘the wreck is the other side of Pentewan cliffs, just beyond the top of that lane we can see. The wreckage is drifting with the tide.’

  ‘The tide has changed,’ the man said loftily.

  ‘You mean the wreckage having drifted one way is now drifting the other?’

  ‘I do.’

  I could not contest the views of such a seafaring-looking character. It was not my business to inform him that the tide did not change till ten o’clock. But I made up my own mind that the Juan Ferrer was on the rocks just over the point ahead.

  So it was.

  She had rammed the rocks at Boscawen Point within two miles of Minack, a five-hundred-ton cargo boat on passage from Bordeaux to Cardiff with a mixed cargo of onions, plywood made of cedar, and thousands of chestnut stakes destined for Welsh farms.

  She had gone ashore within four sea miles of the Penlee Lifeboat station; and so if her Mayday signal had been louder, if her position had been able to be plotted, rescuers would have reached her within an hour.

  Three survivors jumped ashore. Two men drifted with the tide and the wreckage, and were picked up by the helicopter we saw hovering off Lamorna Cove. Eleven were drowned, their bodies having also drifted with the tide.

  And the donkeys? Did they hear the last cries of those men as they drifted past our meadows? And those two who were saved?

  It was a special pleasure when all the excitement was over to find they never did run far. While it was still dark and I was dressing, they must have rushed away from the cliff, through the open gate which normally stopped them from cavorting in the garden, into the wood past Boris’s house, then on to the farther part of the wood.

  When it was all over, when the long adventure ended at nine and we had begun our breakfast, a banshee wail and a tenor-like trumpeting joined in a duet in the corner of the field overlooking the cottage.

  Everyone had gone. Minack belonged to its occupants again.

  Fred looks out to sea. In the background are the rocks where the Juan Ferrer was wrecked

  Helicoptors hover above the wreck

  14

  The Juan Ferrer shuddered on the rocks at Boscawen Point for a couple of days, half submerged, disgorging its cargo: and all along the coast men were busy salvaging the stakes and the squares of cedar plywood as they drifted forlornly ashore.

  And there were the sightseers. A wreck, like all disasters, has a morbid fascination for those who live safe lives. They heaped themselves on the cliffside, little groups staring in silence, breaking it occasionally to ask the lone policeman, incongruous in helmet, some question he had already answered many times before. Below them, like a whale in its death throes, the object of their entertainment floundered in the waves, sea spouted from the broken windows of the wheelhouse, a rope flopped about the deck, a bell clanged uselessly; and all the while the hulk was heaving this way and that, scraping and banging the rocks, an echoing orchestra of doom, giving a sad, despairing value to the gaping crowd before its inevitable end.

  Many of the sightseers came charging along the cliff through Minack meadows to reach their destination. A fanatical lot, a glint in their eyes, walking faster than usual, driving themselves through the undergrowth as if the hounds of hell were after them. ‘Where’s the wreck?’ they panted.

  Fred viewed this invasion first with suspicion and then, as the scope of its possibilities dawned upon him, with relish. Here were people galore to show off to. He could divert them from their object, lure from them the praises which would relieve an otherwise dull day. Flattery would be assured. His charm would be irresistible. I am a baby donkey, have you ever seen one before? Look how I can kick my heels and don’t you think my fluffy coat adorable? My nose is very soft if you would like to fondle it. Who is the other one? She’s my mother. Rather staid. What have you got in that bag?

  I might have moved them from the pathway of such attention into the isolation of some other field, but I was in fact delighted there was something to occupy their minds. They were doing no harm, and Fred had a whole series of toys apparently to play with. Each person who passed through was there for his entertainment, and I felt sure he would give value in return.

  I was happily believing that this was so when, as I sat at my desk, I saw through the window a hatless elderly man come puffing up the path from the direction of the field, followed a moment later by a formidable-looking lady. I dashed out of the cottage to meet them, sensing immediately that something had gone awry.

  ‘Can I help you?’ I said, using my usual method of introduction, smiling politely, and at the same time wondering what on earth had happened to cause such obvious excitement.

  ‘Are those your damned donkeys in the field we’ve just come through?’ barked the man. He was out of breath as if he had been running and as he spoke he mopped his bald head with a handkerchief.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied doubtfully, ‘anything wrong?’

  ‘Very much so,’ interrupted the lady grimly looking at me from under an old felt hat, ‘the young one snatched my husband’s cap and is running round the field with it.’

  How had Fred managed it? Had he sneaked up behind the couple as they hurried along, annoyed they had taken no notice of him, and then performed a ballet dancer’s leap to take the cap from the gentleman’s head?

  ‘Good gracious,’ I said, ‘I do apologise for this. I’ll go ahead straight away and catch him.’

  I ran away from them laughing, down the path to the field, asking myself what I would have to do if Fred had gobbled it up. But as I did so I suddenly saw a galloping Fred coming towards me, tweed cap in mouth, and just behind him a thundering, rollicking Penny; and the two of them gave such an impression of joyous, hilarious elation that I only wished that Jeannie had been with me to see them.

  The cap was intact, a little wet, but no sign of a tear; and when I thankfully returned it to its owner I asked what had happened. It was simple. It was almost as I imagined it. The couple had sat down on the grass for a rest; and then up behind them came Fred. And away went the cap.

  This episode, I
am afraid, set the tone of Fred’s behaviour towards other sightseers. The trouble, I reckon, was that they were too intent to reach the wreck for them to dally in the way Fred would have liked them to dally. They had no time to play with a donkey. The magnet of disaster destroyed any wish to pause on the way. Morbid curiosity displaced idle pleasure.

  Thus, when Fred discovered he was being ignored, he set out to tease. He would watch a group coming along the path from the Carn in the distance, then canter straight at them, scattering them in all directions. I found, for instance, three small boys way off the path and waist-high in undergrowth, and when I asked how they were there, one of them mournfully replied: ‘The donkey chased us, and we’re trying to get round.’ Of course I then escorted them through the zone of danger and Fred, satisfied with his moral victory, followed meekly behind us until we reached the end of Minack’s boundary. Then he scampered back with me, nuzzling me, no longer meek, impatient to play the game again.

  He later inveigled me to act as an ally. I began to dislike the ghoulish groups as they strode through Minack private land, not caring about its beauty or that they were there by courtesy, and so I devised a game to play with Fred. He and I would stand in a corner of the field, waiting and watching for a group who looked as if they deserved a surprise. Then, when the chosen victims had reached halfway up the field I would give my order: ‘See ’em off, boy!’ Away Fred careered, not in an unimaginative dash straight at them, but in a circular movement like a dog rounding up sheep. And after a pause I would hasten after him to reassure our victims that there was nothing really to be scared of in the cavalry charge of a baby donkey.

  While the Juan Ferrer settled on the bottom of the sea, emotionalism went into action. I have often marvelled how emotionalism, skilfully conducted, can achieve results which the basic facts do not warrant, while other campaigns more worthy but less imaginative in appeal stutter into failure. It is, I suppose, mainly a question of timing. If the perimeter influences are favourable, if the event concerned is sufficiently vivid to act as a flag on a masthead, if worthy people are interested who want an outlet for their energy, if there is a chance for a few to achieve a personal advantage, if all these factors combine to push a cause which appears superficially justified, then the chances are that emotionalism will succeed at the expense of realism.

  The object of this particular campaign was to persuade the authorities to build an ocean-type lighthouse a short distance away from Minack in the area Jeannie and I called the Pentewan cliffs. These cliffs and meadows belonged to one of the few remaining unspoilt stretches of the Cornish coast. You could see it best from the Carn with the rocks like an ancient castle, and people would stand there and marvel that they could look upon a scene that had been the same since the beginning of time. No man-made ugliness, no breeze-block buildings to offend them.

  ‘Every day of our lives,’ I wrote in A Drake At The Door, ‘was spent in unison with this coast, the rage of the gales, salt smearing our faces as we walked, east winds, south winds, calm summer early mornings, the first cubs, a badger in the moonlight, wild violets, the glory of the first daffodil, the blustering madness of making a living on land that faced the roar of the ages.

  ‘The cliffs fall to rocks black and grey where the sea ceaselessly churns, splashing its foam, clutching a rock then releasing it, smothering it suddenly in bad temper, caressing it, slapping it as if in play, sometimes kind with the sun shining on the white ribbon of a wave, a laughing sea throwing spray like confetti, sometimes grey and sullen, then suddenly a sea of ungovernable fury lashing the cliffs; enraged that for ever and for ever the cliffs look down.

  ‘And among the rocks are the pools; some that tempt yet are vicious, beckoning innocently then in a flash a cauldron of currents, pools that are shallow so that the minnow fish ripple the surface as they dash from view, pools so deep that the seaweed looks like a forest far below, inaccessible pools, pools which hide from everyone except those who belong to them.

  ‘High above, the little meadows dodge the boulders, and where the land is too rough for cultivation the bracken, the hawthorn, the brambles, the gorse which sparks its yellow the year round, reign supreme. This is no place for interlopers. The walkers tamed by pavements, faced by the struggling undergrowth, turn back or become angry, their standardised minds piqued that they have to trace a way through; and it is left to the few, the odd man or woman, to marvel that there is a corner of England still free from the dead hand of the busybody.

  ‘Here, on our stretch of the coast, man has not yet brought his conceit.’

  For some years there had been murmurs about erecting a small, harbour-type light and fog signal near Lamorna Cove to act like a street lamp for the benefit of local fishermen on their way to and fro from Mousehole or Newlyn; and this indeed was a reasonable proposition. But the wreck of the Juan Ferrer gave a new twist to this idea, and the cry went up for an ocean-type lighthouse, as powerful as that on the Wolf Rock and the Lizard; and the cries became louder after a television film was compiled called Cornish Wrecks. It was a stirring production and somehow succeeded in giving the impression that there had been twenty-three wrecks in twelve years on this southern coast of the Lands End peninsula which the new lighthouse would serve. Almost two wrecks a year within a distance of ten miles! The film caused a furore.

  This was wonderful material for the campaigners and I watched with fascination how they reacted. Women’s organisations were roped in. A petition was organised and signatures were collected by door-to-door canvassers. A letter was sent to Sir Winston Churchill. A question was asked in the House of Commons. A special programme of the TV film was shown to Mr Marples as the man finally responsible for instructing Trinity House to build the lighthouse. Veiled accusations were made that Trinity House should have acted before. The Minister must act! Gradually, with the persistence of a steamroller, the illusion was fostered and believed that a new lighthouse would banish wrecks from the Cornish coast for ever.

  The snag of the illusion lay in the facts which the campaigners seemed to avoid. There had not been twenty-three wrecks in twelve years; there had been four wrecks in over fifteen years. And there were other facts which the campaigners ignored with aplomb as they hurried on their emotional way. Another four wrecks, in as many years, had occurred within a few hundred yards of lighthouses; two off the Longships near Lands End, two at Pendeen near Cape Cornwall. Seventeen had died in one of them the year before.

  The claim, therefore, that lighthouses provided immunity to those who sailed in their neighbourhood was unfortunately untrue; twentieth-century methods of safeguarding shipping were required, not those of the seventeenth. Moreover, in the case of the new lighthouse, it was to be situated at a position which many experienced sailors found incomprehensible. Tater-du, as the position is called, is five miles from the headland called Gwennap Head marking the southernmost point of the Lands End pensinsula; five miles, in fact, inside Mount’s Bay. ‘If they want one at all’, said an old fisherman to me who had sailed this coast all his life, ‘put it on Gwennap Head or close to it. There it might help shipping coming up the Channel or across from the Lizard. But it’s crazy to put it so far inside the Bay as Tater-du for a score of reasons.’

  The campaigners swept forward, irresistible, vociferous, unreal in their arguments, thriving on the unproven slogan they were saving lives; and there is today a lighthouse at Tater-du. In this age of electronics, of radio direction-finding and radar, a lighthouse of hideous utility design with huge electricity pylons marching across the skyline towards it, the first to be built in this country since the last century, costing many thousands of pounds, now climbs into the sky, a phalanx of concrete blocks, on this lovely once-lonely coast.

  A monument to what happens when emotionalism goes into action.

  15

  Fred met his first winter and viewed it with apprehension. No one to visit him. No flavour in the grass. Hedgerows bare. Long nights with nothing to do. Driving rain to flatten h
is fluffy coat. And gales.

  How he hated gales. Rain, however heavy, was only an inconvenience in comparison. He would stand in the rain hour after hour, spurning the welcoming open door of the stables, looking miserable nevertheless, taking apparently some kind of masochistic pleasure out of his discomfort. I was sorry for him in the rain but I did not feel I was under any obligation to take steps to protect him from it. A really persistent long day’s rain would put him in a stupor, and if I called him he would pause a moment or two before lifting his head dazedly to look at me. He seldom showed any wish to come to me; he and Penny, heads down, the rain dripping off their noses, bottoms towards the weather, would stand stoically content in what I would have thought were intolerable conditions.

  But in gales he needed protection. He became restless as soon as the first breeze, the scout of the gale, began hurrying across the field; and he would begin to hee-haw, lifting his head to the scurrying clouds so that a mournful bellow joined the swish of the wind in the trees. He would not stand still, racing round in small circles, then dashing off to another part of the field; and instead of following Penny dutifully about as was his usual custom. Penny would be hastening after him. He was the leader. It was as if he believed that something tangible was chasing him, not a gale but an enemy with plans to capture him. A foolish fantasy of the very young, faced by the unknown.

  Penny herself, with private memories of the Connemara mountains, was unperturbed. She felt, no doubt, that Fred’s fears were part of his education, and that repetition would dull them. She plodded after him as he ran hither and thither like an old nanny after a child, and when he grew tired she nudged him along to the shelter of a hedge. Penny was very weather-wise. She had mapped each meadow with a number of tactical positions to suit every variation of the wind; a series of well-worn patches on the ground disclosed them. Thus, if a westerly moved a few points to the east, resulting in her current position being exposed, she cunningly led the way to the next patch.