by Doreen Tovey
When after that Mrs. Reynolds rang us to say could she – with memories of Dolly and Desmond – have Annabel in her Christmas entertainment, what could we say but yes.
FOURTEEN
A Quiet Country Christmas
What could we say but yes, either, when the carol party got wind of Mrs. Reynolds' venture and asked if Annabel could accompany them as well. To brighten things up, they said, as the carol party, since the year the choir caught cold, was now a sober, adult affair with everybody in headscarves and gum-boots. The only concession to a Dickensian atmosphere was the lantern borrowed from the choir and borne aloft on its pole by Mr Smithson – and that, said the carol party organiser resignedly, couldn't look very romantic, could it, when one opened one's front door and saw him holding it in a homburg and woollen gloves.
So Annabel went carol-singing, wearing a yellow wool scarf with bobbles to add colour to the occasion, padding virtuously along the lanes beneath the lantern, insisting on being first up people's paths and occasionally getting jammed in gateways with Mr Smithson, who was also used to being first in with his pole.
There were minor difficulties, as there always are on such occasions. Annabel going the wrong side of telegraph poles on her lead, for instance, and continually bringing the party to a kaleidoscopic halt. And the incident at the Duggans' bungalow, blocked by what in the flickering lantern-light appeared to be Mr Duggan having suddenly gone mad and erected Glastonbury Tor across his drive. We nearly dropped when the lights went on and it turned out to be ten tons of manure ordered by Mr Duggan for his garden and delivered in his absence by a man who, with nobody around to stop him had deposited it with alacrity on the doorstep and departed. We pulled ourselves together. We sang Noel on one side of the manure heap. The Duggans joined in invisibly on the other a trifle dispiritedly, perhaps, at the prospect of having to get up next day and shovel it all away, but the tradition of singing in one's porch with the carollers has to be kept up. And Annabel Aaaw-Hoooed at the end to let them know she was with us and got a mince pie over the top. Annabel's personal tradition about carol-singing, this; she'd already achieved six since starting out.
Wonderful how people rose to the occasion in the country, wasn't it? enthused a three-months-out-from-town member of the party as we plodded up the hill. Hardly were the words out of his mouth than a situation arose to which it was practically impossible to rise, however, and Annabel stopped. Faced with what she recognised as a long dark trek across to the other part of the village, whereas behind her was a lane of houses with mince pies in, she said she'd done enough carol-singing for the night. She was going back the way she came. Possibly visiting friends on the Way, she insisted, pulling back so stubbornly on her haunches it was like trying to move the Rock of Gibraltar.
Charles and I pulled. Some of the others pushed. Mr Smithson stood self-consciously by with the lantern. A wit passing by to the Rose and Crown remarked on the resemblance to Uncle Tom Cobleigh and asked which fair we were going to this time.
We made it in the end with the aid of peppermints donated by the pub. Annabel completed her rounds smelling alternately of peppermint and mince pies; looked angelic in her scarf when people came to their doors and petted her; walked alongside us – except for her lapse on the hilltop and the occasional sorties round telegraph poles – as if she was one of the gang; looked suitably modest when at the end the organiser counted up the takings and said it was more, thanks to our dear little donkey, than ever before.
Annabel, said Charles as we ambled glowingly back down to the cottage with her, was wonderful. One could do anything with that donkey. He'd been thinking while he was singing, he said, and he knew what we could do with her for Mrs Reynolds' entertainment. He'd go as an Arab in a burnous.
You could have knocked me down with a manure heap. Mrs Reynolds wasn't doing a Christmas play. She was this year – hence the maypole – doing Ye Olde Englishe Village. In, presumably, Springtime. Admittedly no specific part had been laid on for Annabel other than to generally charm the audience, but we might, I thought, have found something more in keeping with the general theme than Charles in a burnous.
Charles, alas, with his predilection for unusual headgear, fancied a burnous. He'd look much more appropriate with a donkey as an Arab, he said, than a farmhand with a smock and hayfork. He also, as I knew full well, had once had his photograph taken in a burnous in the Middle East and rather fancied himself as Lawrence of Arabia. So he got busy with a couple of sheets and one of those thick woollen cords with tassels used for looping back old-fashioned curtains which he borrowed from Mrs Adams; frightened Sheba out of her wits by coming down the stairs in it just when she was going up to see what he was doing; pronounced himself all set for the fray...
The entertainment was planned for Boxing Day. It might have been all right even then had Charles been able to do what he intended and practise with Annabel on Boxing Morning. On Christmas night, however, Solomon disorganised the house completely with a bilious attack.
It began with the cats – Charles' Aunt Ethel being in temporary possession of the spare room – being put to bed, complete with earth-boxes, in the sitting-room. It continued with Solomon deciding to use his earth-box before he went to sleep – magnificent he looked, too, posed majestically in his yellow plastic bowl on a plum-coloured carpet behind a turquoise door – and discovering that he couldn't. Sick! he howled, panicking immediately as Solomon always does. Call the Vet! Fetch the Doctor! Tum Wouldn't Work, he explained woefully as we came running to see what was wrong.
Nobody but Solomon would get his stomach stuck on Christmas night. Nobody but Solomon, either, would have eaten so much all day – turkey, cream and caramel blancmange in a practically non-stop round since lunchtime – that the effort of trying to use his box made him sick. He kept getting into his box, howling about his stomach, getting out again, being sick. Long after we'd put the lights out and crept quietly to bed in the hope that he might stop worrying in the darkness and go to bed himself, we could still hear him complaining down below.
We came down to him three times in the night. We were up again at dawn. His stomach, he informed us, still wouldn't work. He'd been sick six times on the carpet. A fine Christmas night this had been, we said wearily, sitting there waiting for daylight and the time to call the Vet.
Actually Solomon resolved the problem himself. As daylight grew and presumably he imagined Aunt Ethel would be awake he went upstairs, scratched tearfully at the spare room door and demanded to be let in. Wanted to use his Box, he shouted when she asked who was there. In his Corner where he was Used to it, he insisted, flatly refusing to consider it when we put it placatingly on the landing.
It was a good thing she was one of the family. What anyone else would have said – to be turned out of bed at daybreak on Boxing Morning while we marched in with an earth-box and Solomon seated himself with a reproachful wail that it was all her fault and how'd she like it if somebody slept in her bathroom when she wanted to use it – I cannot think. As it was, we all went down for a cup of tea, ten minutes later there was a howl at which we leapt for the hall thinking that at the very least Solomon had turned himself inside out – and there he was coming down the stairs. All Right Now, he advised us, with a lighthearted spring at Sheba by way of celebration. Anybody for Breakfast? he roared, taking up position by the refrigerator.
Which was all very well, but after that we were exhausted. We lay in chairs most of the morning recovering our nerves. By the time the van came to take Annabel and us to the entertainment Charles hadn't done any practising at all at being an Arab and we were still half asleep on our feet. Which was how Charles came to be kicked.
I held our little donkey at the guest house while Charles put on his costume. Annabel, when Charles strode billowingly from the changing room looking like the Red Shadow, got the wind up and said – too late I remembered she didn't like white things – that he was a Ghost. Charles said Come on, Annabel, not to be silly. Annabel said she wasn'
t silly, he was a Ghost and she was going to kick him. Charles, half asleep and incommoded by the trailing sheets, didn't jump fast enough. And when she caught him on the shinbone he yelled louder than Solomon.
We let her go after that. She roamed amiably around the room among the guests. Ate enough tea for six. Stood winsomely at the foot of the maypole with mistletoe behind her ears while the children danced around it and everybody sighed and wished for cameras. Wonderfully tame, our little donkey, said a visitor, coming over to where, with Charles still soulfully rubbing his shin, we waited by the sideline. He expected we were fond of her. What, he enquired, gazing interestedly at Charles's get-up, was he supposed to be? A Druid?
Our major Christmas adventure was yet to come, however. Two nights later, with a mist lying low over the valley and the trees dripping wetly in the darkness, we woke around four o'clock in the morning to hear a car outside our gate. It stopped, waited for a while, turned and went back up again. An unusual occurrence at that hour in our isolated part of the world, and doubly so when half an hour later what was apparently the same car drove at top speed down the hill, passed the cottage, and jolted on up the lane. When a few minutes later there was a thud as the car went into the ditch, followed immediately by a frantic whirring of the back wheels as somebody tried to get it out again, we were even more perturbed.
I, quite frankly, was scared practically rigid. Charles was for going up to see what it was – armed, he assured me, with a tyre lever – but I wasn't having any. Supposing it was a desperado, I said. Somebody having committed a bank robbery, for instance. Trying to get away into the hills, for nobody would go rattling up an isolated track at four in the morning for any normal reason. The man wasn't injured otherwise he wouldn't be trying to get the car out. On the other hand, why was he trying so frantically to get it out himself instead of coming to ask for help? I, I said determinedly, was going to call the police.
It is surprising how clearly one's mind works in an emergency. Like a member of MI5 I felt, creeping down the stairs in the darkness (better not to show a light); sitting with the telephone on the hall floor (sometimes they shoot at one through windows); dialling 999. That was a bit difficult because I couldn't, what with the darkness and my trembling like an aspen, remember which end of the dial the 9 was, but I got it in the end. Whispered my message into the mouthpiece and received instructions not to go out of doors on any account; they'd be with us as soon as possible...
The driver was still reversing hysterically when I went back to the window. It was a nerve-racking business, keeping watch through the swirling mist. I jumped like a grasshopper when there was a scuffling sound from the spare room but it was only the cats, disturbed by the noise, getting up to look out of their window. My heart nearly stopped entirely when a second or two later Annabel, whom I'd quite forgotten, let out a mighty blast complaining that she, too, had been disturbed. It frightened me, used to her as I was. What it did to the driver goodness knew, except after that there was no more revving.
When the police car arrived, sweeping silently down the hill with its roof-light flashing, there was no man either. Only a car tilted into the ditch; our assurance that the driver hadn't come back past the cottage; and a report from a second patrol car which arrived a short while later that there was no sign of him around the village.
We gathered, from snatches of conversation, that they knew who they were looking for. We gathered so even more when we got up next morning and there outside the cottage were three police cars, an Inspector and two Sergeants conferring over a map, a couple of men with walkie-talkie outfits and a handler with a tracker dog.
Excitement followed excitement. Footprints were found under a tree up the lane and, while the police slapped chagrinedly at their helmets, turned out to be ours, where we'd taken the cats for a walk the previous evening. The cats, unable to go out on account of the dog, sat rubbernecking at him from the hall window with ears stuck up like radar aerials. Annabel paraded importantly back and forth along her fence – ten paces, right wheel; ten paces, left wheel – till a constable said she looked like a top-cop on patrol duty. Half the village gathered outside our gate, including Miss Wellington who pushed worriedly through the crowd to ask the Inspector who was missing, was it Annabel?
We weren't a bit surprised when we heard on the one o'clock news that some men were missing from a local prison. It was a bit of an anti-climax, however, when it transpired that our man wasn't one of them. That someone in the village had given a party. The first car we'd heard, at four in the morning, was bringing home a girl who'd helped at the party. The second car, a short while later, had contained a guest from town who, mistaking his way in the fog, had landed in our lane instead of on the main road. He'd tried – probably being a little merrier than he should have been – to get the car out of the ditch himself and had failed. He'd been frightened clean out of his wits when Annabel brayed at him, had gone haring back by a track through the woods to his friend's house and then, feeling a little braver by that time and not liking on second thoughts to disturb him, had found a nearby barn and slept it off till lunchtime.
Might have been a criminal though, said Father Adams sagely. Nice to know we knew our onions and the police were so quick off the mark. It was indeed. Except that Charles, after that, got the idea of keeping a tyre-lever permanently under the bedroom carpet in case we ever needed to know our onions again.
There, he assured me, it was invisible but handy. There it clonked hollowly under my feet every time I made the bed. And there, going up to repair a floorboard and me not remembering to remove it first, Sidney incredulously discovered it one morning and a fresh bit of news went round the village. That we kept tyre levers for burglar protection under our carpets.
FIFTEEN
To Be or Not to Be
One might have expected life to be a little humdrum after that, but we had our diversions. A tile blowing off the roof in a gale, for instance, and Charles going up in the dark to replace it and coming resignedly down with the cause. A marsh tit's nest. Built under the roof in the previous spring. Swollen with winter rain, which was why it had pushed up the tiles. Made, Charles pointed out, of donkey hair, and he bet we were the only people in England who adopted a donkey and got their tiles blown off as a result.
Then the stream – which normally disappears down a swallet-hole up the lane – rose as it always does in the January rains, ran down to us, couldn't get through our ditch on account of the rubble from the fireplace, and no doubt we were the only people in England doing that. Digging the darned stuff out again. With the stream gushing down the middle of the road. The cats sitting happily on the coalhouse roof advising everybody who passed that we were digging it out fast before the policeman saw us. Annabel informing the world from up the lane that she didn't do it and could she please be moved to a place of safety. And Timothy, engaged to help us in return for cash towards a racing bike, leaving us goggle-eyed with his account of every day getting his jean-legs shrunk in the stream, every night hanging them up to dry over his mother's Aga with the legs tied at the ends with string and filled with stones – and every morning, our helper assured us with aplomb, the jeans as good as new again and the legs stretched back to normal.
We had a morning when we sat up in bed to find a heron on our garden path. Following the stream, no doubt; coming down to land when he spotted the outline of our fish pool; flapping off as cross as a crow when he found that Charles hadn't finished it yet and there were still no goldfish in it. We had a morning when we sat up in bed to find a squirrel on the lawn. Digging under an apple tree, coming up triumphantly with a brace of our biggest cob-nuts and we'd wondered where they'd got to in the previous autumn. We had also, recurring like an echo through the tempo of our activities, the question of whether Annabel was to be a mother.
If faddiness was anything to go by she was probably having triplets. She still ate bran in preference to oats. She rejected two entire bales of hay on the grounds that she didn't
like that kind and we had to get some more. She announced that she wanted her drinking water hot. A decision understandable in January, when we'd heated the water to prevent it freezing, but slightly suspicious come April, when the sun shone, the cats sunbathed on her shelter roof and Annabel, confronted by a pail of fresh cold water, pouted her lips at it and said she still required it Hot.
What with that, a liking for carrots and a sudden passion for orange peel – she found some on the hill one day, savoured it as if it were caviare, and thereafter a customs inspector had nothing on Annabel going through the waste-basket at the bus-stop every time she passed – things looked pretty black indeed.
There was no point in consulting the Vet. That became obvious as Spring rolled on and practically every day we opened the papers to read of unexpected foals.
A twenty-year old donkey whose owner said he couldn't think how she'd managed it had had a little blackjack. A small bay mare, bought for a greengrocer's round by a man with a lifetime's experience of horses, had scared the daylights out of him by lying down in the shafts on her first trip out with the cauliflowers and producing a small bay filly. A little girl's riding pony, whose owner could only inform reporters that recently Polly hadn't seemed keen on going to pony-club meetings though previously she'd liked the other ponies, had had a white one with spots... The papers quoted veterinary experts as saying you often couldn't tell with horses.
