by Doreen Tovey
Henry was big and black and sleek with a tail that fell like a waterfall. Henry's mane had been clipped like a horse's but, presumably to take some sort of trapping, a stiff black tuft had been left on top like the scalp lock of a Mohawk Indian. Henry was a jennet all right – you could see it, though only faintly, in the sturdiness of his legs and the slightly long black ears. But Henry was very handsome. That Annabel realised it too was obvious from the way she was standing by his side. Coyly; femininely; emphasising with unmistakable deliberation the fact that she indeed only came up to his middle. Helen and Paris, said Charles, forgetting his apprehension in his admiration of the scene. Annabel and Henry, I said with equal pride. I put out my hand to pat him, and Annabel immediately kicked Henry.
Annabel kicked Henry a lot. Determinedly but coquettishly, obviously fully aware of her feminine prerogative. She kicked him when we tried to stroke him. She was our donkey – he wasn't Allowed, she said, pushing imperiously between us and Henry and giving a few sharp back-kicks to emphasise the fact. She kicked him when we gave him titbits. She was our donkey and everything was Hers, she said, interposing her bottom in so many directions at once to fend him off that at times she appeared to be doing the Charleston. We evolved a system of holding sugar or a piece of bread close to the fence for her and then, while she was eating it, surreptitiously handing another piece over her back to Henry. Henry, reaching equally surreptitiously over her to get it, soon cottoned on. So, unfortunately, did Annabel. Following a trick or two like that she only had to see the shadow of a hand pass over her head and Annabel kicked capriciously behind and clocked Henry on principle. She knew he was there and that'd teach him not to Sneak, she snorted into her bread and honey.
It wasn't that she didn't like Henry. She just intended to be boss. The first night he was there, for instance, Henry moved into the shelter at dusk as if it was his right. It was too small for him, being only Annabel size, so he stood up all night as if he was in a sentry box with his rump inside and his head and forefeet out. Annabel, presumably under the impression he was standing there on guard and had his eye on her, didn't attempt to throw him out that evening. She stood up too, under a nearby tree, looking warily across at him, pretending she was grazing, and working out a plan. There must have been a plan because the next night it was Annabel who got there first and stood Horatio-like in the doorway while Henry loitered under the tree. And the next night and the next night, till Henry got the idea it was Annabel's shelter and stopped trying to go in there himself, Annabel Frrmphed triumphantly and said she should think so, too – and the next thing we saw, going out one night with a torch to check on the position to date, was Henry standing under his tree and no sign of Annabel at all. Annabel, ascendancy established, had given up keeping guard. Annabel, when we looked inside her house, was back where she belonged. Asleep flat out in the straw with her hooves crossed, her cowlick over her eyes and a pout of triumph on her small white mouth. The only concession to watchfulness being that she had her head towards the door.
Banned from the shelter, kicked when he spoke to us – kicked, according to the neighbours, even when he spoke to them and the people up the lane said the way Annabel ate ginger-cake now was a revelation – Henry might have been excused for developing a temper. He did in fact kick me a couple of times. On account of their jealousy we fed them separately – oats and hay for Annabel outside her shelter, oats and hay for Henry under his tree – and still they squabbled. Annabel marched over to Henry's heap and said it was better than hers, Henry moved over to Annabel's heap and said very well he'd eat that, Annabel charged back in a towering temperament snorting That was hers as well, she'd have the Law on him... Feeding time in the paddock was less a matter of eating than of Annabel and Henry playing musical chairs and, when they stopped, Annabel standing truculently over whichever pile she fancied at the moment, snorting and threatening to kick Henry off.
At first Henry, being a gentleman, gave in to the lady and went. Eventually Henry, goaded beyond endurance, began to kick back in retaliation. Never, even then, to land. Simply thrashing out in a powerful arc to show her he could, if he wanted to, kick her over the cottage; missing her deliberately on account of she was a girl by a good six inches; and having no effect on Annabel the Wilful at all. Only on me, whom he kicked by accident in the stomach.
I thoughtlessly went too close behind him; he, lashing out in what was meant to be a warning to Annabel, caught me amid-ships and laid me flat; and Charles (it was one of my more off-moments in donkey-keeping) picked me winded from the grass and cheerily said No Harm Done. Fortunately not, as Henry didn't wear shoes. I only had a bruise the size of a plate on my stomach, and an assurance from Charles that he'd had that many a time playing cricket. Which I took leave to doubt because I used to play cricket myself at school and we never caught balls on our stomachs. Though, as Sidney said when he heard about it, you never knew with the Gaffer.
After that I stood carefully on one side when I was with Henry. Even then I got caught one night when I patted him on the rump at dusk; he thought it was Annabel up to her tricks and kicked out, and the bag of bread I was holding soared straight into the middle of the field. A magnificent, arching goal-kick, with the top of the bag still left in my hand. I ought to be more careful, said Charles reprovingly. Silly playing at donkeys when I didn't know how to kick, said Annabel, standing watching me from outside her house with a wisp of hay in her mouth. Wooooh! said Solomon apprehensively from his post by the fence. Which was how I felt myself.
Henry seemed liable to put me into orbit any day but there was no question of his hurting Annabel. That, illustrated by the way he carefully kicked to miss her and turned a paternal eye on the cats, was why we kept him. Not only did we have a feeling that, jealousies apart, Henry liked Annabel. We had no doubt about the fact that Annabel liked Henry.
We watched sometimes in the paddock when there was neither food nor us on their minds. Wherever Henry grazed, Annabel grazed as well. Not kicking now because the grass was free, but standing like a prim small toy at his side. Wherever Annabel wandered Henry followed, trailing amiably after her like a clumsy guardian giant. Occasionally we even saw them in a corner rubbing noses.
She kicked him, she grazed with him. She kicked him, she rubbed noses with him. The paddock grass vanished like snow in summer before Henry's formidable hooves and Henry's enormous mouth. The hay and oats vanished like snow in summer, too, what with Henry eating three times as much as Annabel and the pair of them eating twice as much as they normally would on account of rivalry. One moment we wondered whether we should ever have taken Henry. The next, smoothing his big black nose when Annabel wasn't looking, we assured him we wouldn't be without him. The one thing we could congratulate ourselves on was – as we were only agreeing with Miss Wellington one weekend when we'd had Henry with us for a fortnight – that Annabel was no longer lonely, and that she'd not since run away. I can see us saying it now, leaning on the paddock gate with Henry and Annabel plodding companionably towards us. Like Dignity and Impudence, said Miss Wellington ecstatically.
I can see us a little later. Taking Annabel for her first walk since we'd had Henry. Leaving him regretfully behind because we weren't quite certain how he'd handle on a walk with Annabel as yet, but assuring him that we'd take him, too, before long. Touched to the heart by the way he ran up and down the fence at being parted from Annabel, calling to her from the gate and watching her anxiously till she was out of sight. Quite unlike Annabel, who capered skittishly up the lane, never looked back at him once, and greeted him on her return with a vastly superior snuffle.
I can see myself at three the next morning, too, rolling down the stairs to answer the telephone. Wondering what catastrophe had hit the family now. Shivering unbelievingly in the cold November night while the riding mistress informed me that Annabel and Henry had eloped. They were over there with her, two miles away. She'd captured Annabel and tied her to the kitchen door. Henry was running about in the road and wo
uldn't be rounded up. She was in her pyjamas. And would we please come over at once.
TWELVE
The Elopement
We felt like Henry V before Agincourt that night, with everybody so patently abed and sleeping as we sped at panic stations through the lanes. Everybody, that was, except us and Miss Linley, keeping vigil in her pyjamas on the main road.
It was the moonlight, we thought, that had done it. The clear bright moonlight shining enticingly on the road that led out of the valley, and Henry made restless by the fact that Annabel had been taken for a walk and fancying one himself.
The moonlight, the night before, had enticed another local pony from his field. He, too, had broken out and gone clattering down the road and woken Miss Linley who, alone perhaps in the whole district, was attuned to hearing horses in her sleep. He, she said, had been going too fast. Almost before she was out of the house and running after him, he'd run into a lorry and been killed.
That was why she was worried about Henry. That was why we were worried, too. That; the fact that he didn't belong to us so that we had an added responsibility as his guardians; and the heart-sinking realisation that once we did succeed in rounding him up we were faced with the prospect of leaving the car at the stables and walking him and Annabel the two miles home.
There was an air of unreality about the journey. The silence; the silver landscape in which nothing moved; the cardboard shadows of the trees across the lanes. Miss Linley, waiting by the roadside in a hastily pulled-on coat, seemed more like part of a dream. So – except that it was more like part of a nightmare – did a familiar voice shouting advisorily over the wall when she heard us that she was Tied up in Here and not to believe them if they said she Wasn't. And the lights, following that sleep-shattering outburst, that immediately went on like lighthouse lanterns in bedroom windows all around us. And Miss Linley telling us she'd managed to round Henry up after all and chase him into the Plaices' drive and shut their gates behind him.
We could have fallen on her neck with relief. We haltered Henry, who by this time had spotted a mare and foal in the Plaices' paddock and was gazing fascinatedly at them over the fence. We led him back to the stables, where Annabel was standing unrepentantly by the kitchen door in the first professionally put-on halter she'd ever had, looking exactly like a circus Shetland.
Wasn't she a poppet? demanded Miss Linley. We'd never think, would we, that when she caught her the little minx wouldn't move out of the road, and she'd had to call her mother down to help, and between them they'd practically carried her into the yard.
Neither, seeing her standing there so innocently, would anybody guess what else she'd done. Annabel at home was most particular. She never used the garden as a lavatory and only certain parts of her paddock. Annabel at the stables, to show her opinion of having a halter put on her, had gone as far into the kitchen as her rope would allow and misbehaved on the rug.
Miss Linley only laughed. They might as well stay in her paddock for the night now, she said. We could fetch them back tomorrow.
We enjoyed that part of it very much. The walk over to the stables on a morning that was more like spring than autumn. The sight of Henry lying stretched out in the paddock when we got there – resting, we supposed, after his night's adventures. The sight of Annabel – after an initial shock when we couldn't see her at all and thought she was missing again – stretched out similarly a short distance away. Almost invisible in the grass, obviously imitating Henry – wasn't it marvellous, we said, the way they'd taken to one another? Even – if one overlooked the shock they'd given us – the way they'd run away together, just like Hansel and Gretel.
We went home pack-horse style. Henry first, led by Charles and walking as ponderously as a police horse up the busy main road. Annabel behind, led by me and for the first time in her life acting neither like a yo-yo nor a sheet anchor on the end of her rope but walking equally ponderously in the rear in imitation of Henry. Charming it was, apart from an undoubted resemblance to a procession en route for the sands with us in the role of donkey boys. Really quite touching when we turned off the road into the valley and whenever Henry disappeared round a bend ahead Annabel ran like mad till she had him in sight again, while every now and again Henry himself stopped and turned deliberately round to make sure that Annabel was following.
We tethered them in a nearby field while we carried out repair work on the paddock. Inspiring though it was to see the latest development in their relationship, we could work a whole lot faster without the prospect of being kicked to the boundary if anything upset Henry, or of Annabel's latest little trick of leaning innocently on the fence wire while we were stringing it so that when she stood upright again it hung in loops and was – as she archly demonstrated by lifting it with her nose – absolutely useless.
All day long it took us. Strengthening the fence. Enlarging Annabel's house with the help of Timothy so we could lock them in at night. Roofing it with hurdles and a huge tarpaulin and filling it with straw. We brought back Heloise and Abelard. Put them in the house and fed them. Fastened them in as it was now nightfall. Looked through the hurdle door a little later to see Henry stretched out like a great black sultan in the straw and Annabel contentedly eating hay...
If only it could have continued like that. Annabel and Henry together for the winter. Miss Wellington happy at last. Ourselves sleeping blissfully at night with the thought of all our animals under lock and key. But the next night Henry broke out again. At dusk this time, before we'd even thought of shutting them in. Fortunately we heard the twanging of the paddock wires as he squirmed his way through and the sound of his hoof-beats going like coconuts on the hill. Fortunately the wiring was too complicated this time for anybody but an expert to get through it and Annabel was unable to follow him. Even more fortunately, as we panted desperately up the hill in his wake Farmer Pursey came round the corner in his land-rover and headed him back to the valley.
That was the end as far as Henry was concerned. Obviously he was a bolter and had escaping in his blood. Keep him, said Farmer Pursey, and not only would we never, however much we wired the place, fence him in, but he'd teach Annabel his tricks as well. Keep him, he said, and we'd probably have the pair of them killed. What Henry wanted was exercise to tire him out, not mooning round a field with Annabel.
So Henry went back to his owner. To our regret because we liked him. With such regret on Miss Wellington's part that she turned up two days later with the news that she'd seen several donkeys in a field from a bus window and had got off at the next stop to enquire. The man, she said, was perfectly willing for us to have one of his little donkeys to keep Annabel company, and when Charles said he bet he was – one of his little bolters too, he expected, and if anybody brought any more donkeys here we were emigrating to Jamaica – she went off us again for days.
Annabel, to our surprise, showed no concern at all. She snorted contentedly when we fed her, lingering gloatingly over her bowl with the intimation that it was all hers wasn't it and nobody to have to share it with. She pranced so joyously out at Charles when he unbarred her door in the mornings that there was no mistaking the inference that there was Much more room for fun now, with old Big Feet out of the way. Despite the morning when she'd trailed Henry up the valley, acting as though the skies would fall if she lost sight of him for an instant, there was such an air of Things being like they Used to be, Annabel having Triumphed, and it was Hoped we realised now who was the best donkey around here, that we wondered if we'd been mistaken in taking him on in the first place.
The cats, who'd kept strictly to the outside of the fence for the past few weeks, appeared in the paddock again like Spring crocuses. Sheba rolling celebratorily on Annabel's new roof, Solomon getting so excited that when I was playing tag with him with Annabel's empty halter he seized the end of it in his mouth and ran away with it, as he sometimes did with string. I yelled in case the loop end of it caught on something and pulled out Solomon's teeth. Father Adams, blissf
ully en route from a mid-day session at the Rose and Crown, nearly dropped. God Almighty, he said, mopping his brow. He thought he was used to us by now. But when I shouted like that and a cat tore down the lane like a thunderbolt carrying a halter-now he'd seen everything, he said.
Not quite everything he hadn't. A few nights later I was sitting in the shed across the lane with Solomon. Guarding him against foxes, as a matter of fact. We never let them out unsupervised on winter evenings and when somebody roared for air or a desire to see the great outdoors one or other of us always went with them. This evening it was raining. Instead of walking up the lane Solomon and I were sitting in the open-fronted shed. I, to pass the ten minutes or so allocated to Fatso's airing, was shining my torch on the falling rain saying 'Look at the rain, Solomon'. At which moment Father Adams walked past, shone his torch on me and a Siamese sitting talking in the dark on a sand-heap, and demanded apprehensively 'Bist thee feelin' all right?'
Things having a habit of happening in threes, he strolled up the lane the following day and nearly stopped breathing altogether. The people in the modernised cottage had moved in some time before. One of their innovations had been a long, low lounge in stone with picture windows, built on at the side. Another had been a bridge over the stream to get their car across which Father Adams forecast would collapse at any moment – not for any structural reason but just because there hadn't been one there before – and kept going up to see if it had.
