Raining Cats and Donkeys

by Tovey, Doreen

  Peaceful as doves for six blasted years and now they had to blasted well start, said Alan. He hoped they sank at sea, he muttered savagely, listening night after night to the sawing. It was the hammering, however, that really got him. Hammering which in the normal way he'd never have noticed, but which, added to the clamour of the building, fell on his anguished ears like water torture.

  We called on them one Saturday afternoon and heard it ourselves. From one side came the powerful thud of the bulldozer. From the other, gentle, spasmodic tapping.

  'You wait a minute', said Alan sourly. 'In a second she'll start as well'. In a second she did. Rhythmically from over the fence came the sound of Maureen swinging practisedly into beat with Reggie, their hammers clanging merrily as a pair of Clydeside riveters while they dreamed of summer in their cruiser on the Broads. Up from the hillside echoed the shuddering of the bulldozer. Boom! in the background went the quarry detonators.

  'Swine!' roared Alan – suddenly, to our consternation, shaking his fist at the ceiling. 'Swinehounds!' he shouted fiercely, rushing out and kicking as hard as he could at the fence. Nobody could hear him, of course, which was just as well for local relationships. He did it every Saturday, his wife explained placidly. It lessened his tensions, he said.

  Our tensions at the time were concerned mainly with our septic tank which, for the umpteenth time since we'd bought the cottage, was waterlogged. It was partly the Spring, of course. The rain soaking the ground, the streams coming down from the hills, the fact that we lived in the Valley bottom where the water collected naturally. It was also, as we knew from experience, an undoubted fact that our outlet pipes were silted up. Had they been put in steeply sloping, as they should have been, they would have cleared themselves by gravity. Put in practically horizontally, as they were, over a period of time the silt built up, the water couldn't get through, the silt dried out like cement – and, as Sidney, our erstwhile handyman, cheerfully put it, there we were again, bunged up.

  Sidney could afford to be cheerful. The last time it had happened he'd been working for us at weekends and had the job of digging down to the pipes himself. Since then, however, Sidney had prospered. Become his ageing builder-employer's right-hand man, drove the lorry, acted as fore-man. Sidney was beyond the spare-time clearing of people's drains now, and who could blame him? The snag was, so now he was in charge of it – was Sidney's firm.

  'Have to wait a long time afore we'd get down to he', he informed us, checking off a list of waiting customers as long as the lane. 'You could do 'n yourself, though', he added, as though the thought had suddenly struck him. 'Dig down here' – indicating an area under the rockery. 'Rod 'n through there' – indicating the line of the pipes under the lawn. 'Do 'n in half a day, as easy as pie'.

  On the previous occasion it had taken Sidney a fortnight of spare-time work to get to the pipes, several hours of poking and prodding to clear out the silt, and ourselves (since at that stage Sidney had had enough and we didn't see sign of him for ages) a couple of months of personal endeavour to fill in the hole. Half a day – even though, as Sidney light-heartedly pointed out, we didn't need to dig the pipes right up this time; just find th' end and rod 'em along – seemed optimistic even at that stage. A fortnight later, with a positive slag-heap of earth on the lawn, Charles about eight feet deep down a hole like a churchyard vault and still no sign of the pipes, Charles turned purple when he thought of Sidney.

  It wasn't just digging the hole, he said with feeling. It was being down it when people came past. Miss Wellington peering over and asking what he was doing, for instance – to which Charles replied 'Digging a hole'. Father Adams enquiring whether he were practising to be Sexton, then to which Charles's reply was unrepeatable. The Rector coming in to introduce a friend – neither of them apparently the least perturbed about Charles being down below ground level, but what, demanded Charles, must it have looked like?

  What it looked like when he wasn't working, with the hole covered with sheets of corrugated iron on which sat two Siamese cats importantly mouse-hunting and, if she could possibly get at it, Annabel climbing the earth-mound for practice on her way back to her stable, was also a matter for speculation.

  His most embarrassing moment was my fault, however. It was a Saturday afternoon when Charles, after a particularly frustrating morning, said he wasn't going out again; he'd finished. We'd get another contractor, he said. One out from town if necessary. Him all the time in dirty clothes, he said. People coming by and staring at him. That cat, he said, with a glare at Solomon, getting down the hole and under his feet as fast as he dug it – to which Solomon aggrievedly replied that he didn't want the mice down there biting him, did he?

  It was I who said oh come now, just an inch or two more and he was bound to find the pipe, and if anybody came by he could duck. It was I, therefore, who was responsible for the fact that when a short while later the riding school came past – the only people who, from the backs of their horses, could look over the gate and down the hole and see him – Charles was there once more in the bottom of the trench.

  It was a good thing he was, because at that moment he noticed something he hadn't seen before. Two feet up from the floor of the hole, there in the hard-packed earth wall, solid with silt itself which was why we hadn't spotted it, was the round clay rim of the outlet pipe. He'd been digging on beyond it for at least a week.

  I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that I heard voices and looked out to see the riding teacher conversing as imperturbably with Charles, in the bowels of the earth, as if he'd been sitting on a horse at her side, while surrounding her in a parade-style semi-circle, gazing down upon him with the greatest of interest, were ten round-eyed children and their ponies.

  I wasn't surprised that his face was red when they'd gone and he clambered out. I forgot that, though, in the excitement of the discovery of the outlet. We fetched the drain-rods; pushed them up the pipes; Charles took off the cover of the septic tank to check the level, at which the cats appeared across the lawn as if by magic... Sheba to be immediately retrieved, wailing that she only wanted to look, from hanging head-first down the septic tank; Solomon to be hauled, howling about the mice he knew were there, from the by now highly vulnerable bottom of the hole. Just in time, too, for a moment later the silt gave way and four feet of drainage water shot into the hole with a roar. The operation, at last, was a success.

  It was some days later that I was in the garden when the riding school went by again and the teacher heartily enquired as to whether I was pregnant. 'Huh?' I enquired open-mouthed, sure I must have misheard. 'I said are you PREGNANT?' she shouted stentorially. 'ANNABEL I mean', she yelled as she cantered past.

  I said we hoped she was. Honestly, I said to Charles when I went indoors. Was my face red! Supposing Miss Wellington had heard, or Father Adams, or Janet and Jim? Now I knew why he'd turned red, said Charles resignedly. That was what she'd said to him.

  Interest in Annabel was growing rapidly now. People kept stopping to ask when she was due to foal; were we going to keep it; what were we going to call it. Our own chief interest was whether it was there at all. We couldn't feel anything or was it significant that when we tried, Annabel walked pettishly away saying she didn't like being touched just there? Her waist measurement didn't reveal anything. Fifty-eight inches by now – which, though that, it was interesting to note, was exactly the same circumference as the top of our rain-barrel, was only four inches in seven months beyond normal, and could have been accounted for by the amount of food she'd eaten.

  Miss Wellington, purveyor of Yorkshire puddings to Annabel, was sure beyond possible doubt. There was a look on her dear little face, she said. Indigestion, said Charles, sotto voce, and her face was the last thing to go by.

  That was the opinion at the farm. Annabel stayed there for a week that spring, while we went for a short sailing holiday. We came back, went up to fetch her, I was discussing the weather with Mrs Pursey... I was holding Annabel on her halte
r while we talked and I was most surprised when I looked round to see Charles and Farmer Pursey bending down to peer under her stomach.

  What they were looking for I hadn't a clue, but Annabel obviously knew. In the middle of the yard. In front of other people. No thought for a donkey's feelings. I knew what that expression meant, as I'd known at the racehorse stable.

  'Her teats', said Charles, when, as we went down the hill, I asked what they had been looking for. 'Farmer Pursey said when they begin to swell it's the surest sign with cows.'

  Annabel snorted indignantly when he added that they couldn't find hers at all. Of course they couldn't, she said. She wasn't a cow. She was a Lady.

  FOURTEEN

  Putting a Foot in It

  As far as her undercarriage was concerned, Annabel went on being a lady. Her teats were there all right, hidden in the thick cream fur that covered her stomach, but they didn't swell. Perhaps with a little donkey they wouldn't said someone else – or maybe not until she actually foaled.

  As the months went by there were other signs, however. One morning we noticed Annabel, as we thought, looking persistently in at us through the kitchen window – the one that faced on to the yard. She was there when we had our coffee. She was there when I went out to get the lunch, nuzzling round the frame and wasn't she clever, I said, to realise she could watch us through that?

  What she was actually doing was eating the putty. Charles had recently renewed it and presumably it still tasted of linseed, but it was an odd thing to do, nevertheless. Other than Charles's anguished outcry when he saw the tooth-marks – that dam blasted donkey ate everything, he said; it was a wonder she didn't eat us – undoubtedly it was significant of something.

  So it appeared when, for the first time ever, she jibbed at climbing the steep track up into the Forestry estate. It was safe to let her run free there and normally, full of excitement at going for a walk, she galloped it like a Derby winner – up and back at least six times while we climbed it ourselves, kicking skittishly sideways at us when we laughed. Lately, though, she'd taken to walking it and this time, at the steepest part, she stopped. She sighed, eyed the track and visibly rested. We would have taken her back but for the fact that when we tried to turn her, being Annabel she immediately insisted in going on up. If she stumbled by the wayside we weren't to worry, she assured us. She knew donkeys were only beasts of burden. If Julius fell right out she'd carry on.

  Having reached the top without this calamity happening she announced that it was all right this time but now Julius would like some grass, and started grazing. She always did up here, where the grass was green and lush. She'd stay there for hours if we let her, and normally we chivied her on. This time, however, we left her, slipped quietly round the corner, and continued our walk alone. We'd go just to the gate at the bottom to give Julius time to settle, we decided, and then come back, put her on her halter and take her home. No more up the hill for her, we said. One shock like that was enough.

  We got our second shock ten minutes later, when, while we were at the gate, leaning on it and gazing, still sweating slightly, at the scenery, we heard the sound of determinedly galloping hooves. 'Annabel!' I gasped in horror, recognising the beat. 'It can't be!' groaned Charles. But it was.

  Round the corner she came, like a four-footed avenging angel. Downhill now, so there was nothing to hold her up. Wheezing like a bellows with the exertion and shaking Julius roundly at every thud. Leaving her behind and trying to lose her, she snorted when she caught up with us – and, when we tried to placate her, she kicked petulantly out at us and promptly lost her footing in the mud.

  We expected Julius to appear at any moment on the way back, but he didn't. Even so we didn't take her up the hill again. She stayed in the Valley now. Receiving her many callers; bulging, so it seemed to me, daily; and beset, as soon as the summer came, by flies.

  It so happened that Aunt Louisa had given me some old lace curtains of my grandmother's to put over the rasp­berries, and when Charles came in one day and said the flies were pestering her badly, couldn't we find something to cover her head and eyes, I said I had the very thing. I got a piece of lace curtain long enough to hang over her nose, cut two holes in it for her ears, put it on and tied it firmly behind her head.

  It worked wonders. Admittedly she looked like a Spanish duenna wearing her mantilla back to front – but who, I said, was going to see that, if we kept her grazing quietly on the lawn? The answer was the riding school, who appeared within minutes as if summoned by a bugle. Annabel sauntered over to greet them, putting her head, curtain and all, over the wall; there was a chorus of 'Oooohs' from the children... 'Look Miss Linley, Annabel's getting married' called one excited voice. There was no answer from Miss Linley this time. She was quite at a loss for words.

  Before long the flies involved us in a far more serious situation, however. By this time we'd discovered a fly repellent made specially for horses, which we sprayed on her back and legs and – since she objected to the hissing at too close quarters – rubbed by hand round her nose and ears. One warm morning I sprayed her thoroughly as usual, put her to graze on the slope behind the cottage – not far enough to involve her in any real climbing but enough to give her a change of grass – and was coming back down with the fly spray when I suddenly realised that I had the wrong tin. Not the fly repellent for horses but a tin of household fly killer containing Pybuthrin.

  I knew what the instructions said without looking at them.

  'Remove birdcages and fishbowls... cover children's cots... not to be used on cats and dogs...' We never used it at home ourselves. The only reason we had it was that we'd taken it on a trip to the Camargue in the mosquito season – and the only reason it happened to be on hand, which was how I'd picked it up, was that I'd got it out the previous day to give the name of it to Louisa, who was going on her first-ever trip abroad and had visions of deadly insects everywhere from Calais onwards.

  When I told Charles what I'd done, his opinion, based on the observation that I'd used it enough on the old etangs and he was still around himself, was that it probably wouldn't hurt her at all. She was big, he said. She didn't lick herself as a cat or dog would. Better just watch her for a while, he advised. There was nothing else we could do.

  There was, though. After ten minutes of waiting for her to collapse – sure at one moment that she had because I couldn't see her, but it was all right, she was only hidden temporarily behind a tree – I rang up Boots in the nearest town and asked to speak to one of their chemists.

  'A what?' was the astonished comment when I told him what I'd done. 'A donkey', I worriedly confirmed. It was like confiding one's troubles to a policeman. When he said hold on a moment while he consulted his colleagues and incredulous voices saying 'She's sprayed a what?' came from the room behind him, the equanimity with which he in turn replied 'A donkey' was really magnificent. There was a muttered conference, after which he returned to the phone to report that the general opinion was that if she were their donkey they'd wash her. 'With what?' I enquired puzzledly. 'Oh, the usual thing – soapflakes or detergent and plenty of hot water', he said, speaking by now as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  It wasn't, of course. I thanked him, told Charles, and the pair of us started slogging up behind the cottage with buckets of detergent. Better to do the job up there, we decided, where the water could sink into the ground, instead of in the yard where the next thing would be Solomon paddling in it and we'd be ringing up Boots about him.

  Which was how – elevated on the hillside as on a stage we were next to be seen industriously bathing a donkey. Rubbing in the detergent till she foamed; running up with buckets of water to rinse her; running up again with the proper fly spray when we'd finished because, having got off all the original repellent, the horse-flies were pitching on her in hundreds as she was now so attractively wet.

  'What be doin' up there then?' came Father Adams's voice inevitably, in due course, from the bottom, and w
hen we told him he said we fair beat cock-fighting. When, a few weeks later, he looked over the wall one day and saw me fitting a striped canvas bag with a rubber sole over one of Annabel's feet it was too much even for him, however. 'Don't tell I thee bist making her boots!' he declared. And when I confessed that as a matter of fact I was – 'God Almighty!' he breathed incredulously.

  There was a logical explanation, of course. There was for most of our actions. It was just the appearance of what we were doing that so often looked peculiar – the snag being that in most cases it is the appearance by which one is judged.

  In this case I'd noticed Annabel limping and, thinking maybe one of her hooves needed trimming, I'd called in the farrier. Twudn't her hooves, he reported after his examination. The little old girl had trodden on a nail. He'd never known it afore with a donkey, he said. Horses, yes – but not donkeys, who usually trod so lightly. There were the hole though, he said, gently squeezing the upturned hoof at which pus came out of it and Annabel whimpered with pain. Us had better get the Vet.

  I did. Harler, when he came, expressed no surprise at all on hearing that Annabel was the first donkey the farrier had ever known to get a nail in her foot. He'd never known of one either, he said, but if anybody was going to be first it would undoubtedly be her. Would I mind holding her head?