Actually there was no need. Just as Annabel had stood unmoving for the farrier, so she now stood like a slave in a Roman forum for Mr Harler. He examined her, cleaned her foot and gave her an anti-biotic injection in the rump. All we had to do now, he said, ruffling her fringe when he'd finished and telling her that she was a far better patient than a certain Siamese cat he knew, was to soak her foot three times a day in hot water to bring out the pus, and keep it covered to fend off the dirt.
All we had to do indeed. If he'd put her foot in a bucket she'd no doubt have stayed there batting her eyelashes at him till the water froze. When we attempted to do it she either took it out again and stuck it determinedly in the dirt, kicked the bucket over, or, if the fancy took her, strolled around the lawn while we strove to move the bucket with her like an outsize Wellington boot.
If we kept her foot in water for a minute we were lucky, and as for covering it afterwards – in the corner of an old nail-bag or something like that, said Mr Harler; heavy canvas so she could walk on it, and tied round her fetlock so she couldn't get it off – we managed that all right. The trouble was, Annabel kept wearing through the canvas.
Whether it was relief at being able to stand on the foot again or a desire to show off about having seen the Vet, she stumped up and down her field so solidly that in two days she went through both corners of the only nail-bag we could get and after that I was reduced to making her foot covers out of a piece of deck-chair canvas. These she went through even more quickly, until I hit on the idea of sewing a rubber heel to the bottom with string – back to front, like a miniature horseshoe, to fit the shape of her foot.
It worked. It was perfectly logical. Even Father Adams had to admit that when it was explained to him. Unfortunately we couldn't explain it to everybody, however, and when Annabel discovered that the rubber heel made a useful digging implement... It wasn't so much that she dug holes all over the lawn with it – what with molehills and drains our lawn was pretty well past praying for in any case. It was the fact that people saw her. In a green and orange-striped boot with a back-to-front rubber heel on it. You can guess what they thought about that. What Miss Wellington wanted to know when she heard we'd had the Vet was what he'd said about Annabel. 'About the baby', she urged insistently. 'Did you ask him if it was true?'
As a matter of fact I hadn't. For one thing I didn't think it was fair, having got him along to see to her foot, to ask him to throw in a confirmation that she was in foal – and for another I was perfectly certain she was. The way she bulged, the way she acted – only that very week Janet and I had watched entranced as she stood in the lane, her sides jumping like a Mexican bean with what we were sure was unquestionably Julius.
He would have thought I was nuts, asking him if a donkey bulging so much she looked as if she was wearing panniers under her skin was in foal, I replied to Charles when he in turn, on coming home that night, said but why hadn't I asked Harler to confirm it. All I'd done was tell him she was in foal, to make sure the injection wouldn't harm her, and he had said it wouldn't.
It was my fault entirely, therefore, that we still didn't definitely know. July came and went, but no Julius. August came and went, but no Augustus. One night in August I sat with her for ages in her stable, watching her sigh and stamp her feet as she ate and feeling her stomach at cautious intervals for signs of movement. We'd just been told that it took fifty-four weeks – a year and a fortnight – for a donkey to have a foal, as against a horse's eleven months. A year and a fortnight from the time Annabel had been mated would have been that very day and there were signs of movement now all right. Annabel's stomach twitched and she stamped her back feet irritably every time I touched her. Towards midnight, awed by the thought of what the morrow might bring, I went back down to Charles. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Augustus were here by morning, I told him.
He wasn't. Septimus wasn't there by September, either. We put off our holiday week by week just in case, but by mid-September we'd completely given up hope. We went on holiday and Annabel went to the farm. Not entirely uneventfully. She had her foot in a plaster casing.
FIFTEEN
Anniehaha
She'd trodden on another nail. He could believe it, said Mr Harler when I rang him once more to tell him. Nothing about our lot would ever surprise him. I reckon it would have done if I'd told him how she'd covered everything from eating Yorkshire pudding to side-twitching and still hadn't produced that foal, but I forbore. For his part, either he'd forgotten the foal, decided it was some time in the future – or could it have been, come to think of it, that he knew the story as well as we did and was being professionally tactful? Anyway, neither of us mentioned it.
There was no need for us to postpone our holiday, was all he said. He and his assistants would see that she was all right. So her foot was drained and dressed, swathed in bandage upon bandage like a gout-wrapping, painted with plaster of Paris to keep the bandages dry, and off she went to the farm where Mrs Pursey said anything the little soul wanted, she, too, would willingly do for her. In that case, said Annabel, hopefully pouting her mouth, she'd like some bread-and-butter like Mrs Pursey always gave her, and she got it on the spot.
So there we were again. A perfectly logical explanation about the plaster, but one which was of course quite unknown to the onlookers who saw a small, fat donkey trudging up the hill in what appeared to be a plaster cast, making the most of it as usual and playing the Wounded Donkey Heroine being Taken Into Captivity.
By the time we came back the bandages were off, her foot was completely healed, and our name was mud with the faction who, still under the impression that she was in foal, had decided that she'd had to have the plaster on to support her growing weight, and in that condition... Poor little donkey, said one of her sympathisers, at which Annabel snorted in soulful agreement... we'd gone away and heartlessly left her.
Time proved that wrong, as the weeks went by, no foal appeared, and Annabel remained as bulgingly plump as ever. We just couldn't win, though – and neither, so far as that period was concerned, could the Duggans. On one side of them the boat was almost finished, the hammering had long since stopped, everybody was admiring the trim little craft that sat buoyantly in the driveway – and Alan was now worrying in case someone wanted to buy it and the Foots started boat-building all over again. On the other, though the bulldozer was silent at last, the Duggans were now suffering heavily from bonfires as the builder and his helpers cleared the undergrowth.
Not only from the smoke, either. Alan swore that one afternoon he and Carrie were sitting on the lawn – used by now, he said, to being kippered – when an adder four feet long came travelling across it at speed. Definitely an adder, he said, when we queried whether it might not perhaps have been a grass snake. Coming straight for them with its head raised, and by Harry it was touch and go, when he got up and shooed it off, as to whether it jumped at him or not. His theory was that it had been annoyed by the bonfire. It had hissed at him angrily, he said, and then turned tail and slid into the rockery. How many more of the perishing things, he wanted to know, might be there, lying in wait, ready to attack?
None so far as we heard. With the Duggans' star in such temporary eclipse, however, we should have known better than to ask them to look after our garden while we were away. Since everything happened to us, and what didn't happen to us appeared to be happening at the moment to them, it was obviously asking for trouble.
It was, too. We came back to find that Carrie had of all things fallen on our path and dislocated her elbow, and scarcely had we digested that catastrophe – it wasn't our fault, she kept heroically telling us; she hadn't tripped or anything; just one moment she was putting down her basket at the conservatory door and the next she was flat on her face – when I happened to mention Alan and we heard the news about him. He'd nearly poleaxed himself on our plum tree.
It was the very first morning we'd gone, she said. Alan had gone down to open the tomato house, and near the garage h
e too had fallen down. Why she couldn't imagine, unless it was all that smoke affecting him. Anyway, getting up, irate as anybody would be in the circumstances and with a badly grazed knee, he'd forgotten for the moment where he was and, coming up directly under the plum tree, had caught himself a thumping crack on an overhanging branch and gone down again practically for the count.
Carrie was annoyed with him when he got back. All he'd been asked to do was open the greenhouse door, she said, and he came back limping, mud on his trousers, a cut on his bald head and moss off the plum tree all over him like woad. Just like a man, she'd informed him; she'd much better go herself.
That night she did go herself. Fortunately Alan had taken her down in the car and was sitting in it glowering balefully at the plum tree when she, too, fell down. Nowhere near where he had tripped, she said, and she was standing still and the path was dry and she couldn't for the life of her understand it. He was there, anyway. On hand to run her to the doctor, and then to the nearest hospital, where they'd put her elbow straight under anaesthetic.
She'd never forget it, she said. She'd come round at eleven o'clock at night. There she was with her elbow bandaged and Alan sitting gloomily beside her holding his head... They'd put him to watch her to see that she came round all right and his first heartfelt words, when he saw her open her eyes, were 'And those two so-and-so's are on holiday!'
We didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Carrie's accident was awful, and we felt dreadfully sorry about that. But Alan's was so like something out of the Keystone Cops... We tried hard to keep our faces straight, and then Carrie started to giggle. If we could have seen him, she choked, sitting there in the cubicle with a face as long as a fiddle. 'Bouncing off the plum tree', I chortled. 'Covered all over with mildew', roared Charles. 'Lot of unfeeling heathens', growled Alan.
Meanwhile, having brought Annabel home again, we had to consider her future. To mate or not to mate was the operative question. Normally, if a mating fails, one is entitled to a free re-mating with the original stallion. But Peter had by this time been sold – and even if he hadn't I doubt whether we would have considered it. One thing we'd learned, discussing it in many quarters over recent weeks, was that that particular cross is very difficult. A donkey stallion with a mare, yes. You get mules as easy as winking. A horse with a donkey mare – no. It is something to do with the lack of matching chromosomes. Jennets are rare as roses in April.
There was still no jack donkey around. Even if there had been, said Farmer Pursey, he wouldn't advise us on that. May was the time for mating. We'd be wasting our time in October. So we concentrated on getting Annabel's weight down. Sixty inches she'd measured at the final stretch – round with the tape measure – mostly consisting of Yorkshire Pudding, as we could see it now. Getting so fat had been why she'd baulked at the hill. Keeping her down in the Valley so as not to tire her had made her even fatter. And as for Julius moving... he'd always had his doubts about that, said Charles; he reckoned it was the flies making her stomach twitch.
It had been Julius too, Annabel insisted indignantly. Hurting her foot had put him off. She wouldn't have him at all, mind, she threatened, when we took her for her first reducing walk. As she wasn't having him anyway we took no notice of her objection, got out the bridle we'd bought some months before but had never used because we hadn't wanted, in what we'd thought was her delicate state, to upset her and We put it on.
Farmer Pursey had advised it. A donkey bridle with a little snaffle bit, he'd said. Nothing to hurt her, but we'd control her a lot better on that than with a halter. Let her wear it for a few days for an hour or so on the lawn to get used to it, lead her gently so it didn't pull her mouth – in no time at all we wouldn't know ourselves when we took her out.
After the first couple of times, when we wondered why people were laughing and discovered, when we looked back, that our status symbol was marching along behind us with her mouth wide open, it really worked very well. The bridle had a head-band with red and white triangles on it, and, being Annabel, it was always lopsided so that the effect was that of a slightly tipsy Red Indian squaw, but it suited her. Annabel knew it too, jingling her bit rings with the best of them and regarding the bigger horses, when we met, with the air of being just as good as they were and with a harness like they had, too.
On outward journeys, once she got into the routine again, she still ran loose, gambolling and capering and pretending to kick us as ever. On homeward journeys, however, where in the old days she dallied and dawdled and at times I swear my arm stretched to three times its length trying to get her home, she now walked demurely on her bridle as to the manner born. When I took her to the village she was on her bridle all the time, of course, and it was thus – with Annabel on the lawn one morning harnessed ready for the Post Office and Sheba bawling from the garden wall about brushing her too, she was prettier than silly old donkeys – that I had an idea and put Sheba on her back.
For a moment Sheba looked wildly for the safest way to jump. Then, feeling the warmth coming through to her paws, she settled happily down on Annabel and curled her tail. Why hadn't we thought of this before? she demanded. We knew how her feet got cold.
We led Annabel half a dozen or so steps on her bridle, Sheba squatting happily on her like a little blue-point hen. At that point Annabel, having had enough, buckled her knees to roll and Sheba departed precipitately, but it was a start. After that we often put Sheba on her back and Annabel got used to carrying her for longer and longer distances. The effect would have been quite impressive but for the fact that Sheba didn't mind which way she rode and was more often than not to be seen blissfully proceeding back to front. Even at that it was quite something. We couldn't get Solomon to do it. Only girls liked riding, he informed us, leaping from Annabel's back as though she were a sinking ship the moment we tried to put him on her. Boys preferred eating and fighting.
We had a feeling that Annabel liked Sheba. Perhaps because she was another girl. Perhaps because she was smaller and less boisterous than Solomon. At any rate, Sheba talking to Annabel and Annabel looking down at her with the benevolent big-sister expression on her face with which the larger horses in turn looked down at Annabel was quite a feature of our domestic scene these days. So were the pair of magpies who also struck up a friendship with her and, wherever she was tethered up on the hill, could be depended on to track her down within minutes, pottering companionably about her feet as she grazed, while occasionally – had they spotted Sheba doing it? we wondered – one of them perched on her back and sat there talking quietly to her as she moved about. Only one. Presumably the other one was like Solomon and not in favour of riding. Really there seemed no end to Annabel's friends.
She'd always had plenty of human friends, of course. Miss Wellington, Father Adams, Janet, Mrs Farrell who toasted all the bread she brought with the observation that it was better for Annabel's stomach, and was rewarded by the fact that from her Annabel would take nothing but toasted bread. On the odd occasions Mrs Farrell brought a piece untoasted, Annabel snorted and blew it back at her.
There were also the countless mothers and grandmothers who trekked regularly down with small children, pushing prams valiantly through the mud to her gate with offerings of sweets and apples and pacifying the wails of sorrow if our heroine herself were not on view. And later, as they grew up, there were the children themselves, unaccompanied.
There was a trio who came regularly that autumn. Two boys and a girl, all about eight years old. Like angels straight from heaven they looked, though we soon learned to nip out smartly when they were about since they had a most unangelic habit of damming our stream with stones as they passed, so that it flooded straight down the lane.
This presumably was to deter imaginary pursuers, since they then proceeded up on to the hill behind the cottage where, if Annabel was on her tether, she became the centre of a game of cowboys and Indians. Annabel joined in with a will, following them into ambush under the trees, occasionally knocking som
ebody's feet from under them with her rope, which was the signal for shrieks of laughter from the children and a complacent snort from Annabel, and looking out as warily as they did when someone passed along the track below.
Alas for our belief that she was probably supposed to be Trigger. They were up there one day with her under a pine tree, pretending to make camp, unloading a couple of make-believe tents from her back... 'Now we'll go and prospect up the hill', said one of them. 'And mind you keep her hidden from the cowboys', he instructed the diminutive squaw. 'But aren't we the cowboys?' came a bewildered feminine voice. 'Of course not. We're Indians' was the scornful reply. 'And Anniehaha's our Indian pony'.
All it needed was for them to see Anniehaha going out on her diamond-patterned bridle, of course, and they were on to it at once. Could they take her out? they enquired hopefully. Just up the hill and back? 'I go to riding lessons and I know how to handle her', said the leader of the trio persuasively.
We let her go. She could do with all the exercise she could get to slim down that waistline, we reasoned; and when we first had her children often used to take her out on her halter. It was just a question of her now being on a bridle and the fact that nobody but ourselves had taken her out for more than a year.
Raining Cats and Donkeys Page 12
