A Donkey in the Meadow (11 page)

He was charming, and had a special wish to live in Cornwall. He won my sympathy because he had been a prisoner of the Japanese. He showed me photographs of his three pretty children. A reference from the market garden where he had been employed for some years was excellent. He liked the cottage I was to rent specially for him. He said he would bring his car over from the Channel Islands and so I took it for granted that he could drive; and of course a driving licence was essential if Jeannie and I were to be spared the time-consuming task of driving the Land Rover whenever a routine journey was necessary. But the day after I had given him his written contract, and I had suggested he collected some things in Penzance, he looked at me with a smile. ‘Oh, I don’t drive myself,’ he said disarmingly, ‘my wife does all the driving in our family.’

It was an ominous beginning to our plans for rescuing the flower farm.

Lama contemplates . . .

. . . making friends with Fred . . .

. . . and here are the three of them together

When the foghorns of passing boats hooted in Mount’s Bay, the donkeys answered them. They were half believing, I suppose, that somewhere out in the fog were other donkeys. Penny would thrust her head forward and upward and emit the excruciating warble which was her speciality, a wailing saw, a falsetto groan. Fred, still so small that the top of his fluffy back was only just above the level of Penny’s rotund belly, followed in a more dignified manner; a real genuine hee-haw, in fact a whole series of hee-haws rising to a crescendo then descending again until it ended quietly in a grunt.

‘I laughed out loud alone in my boat,’ a fisherman said to me one day, ‘listening to your donkeys in the fog yesterday.’

They had, of course, other more subtle forms of communication than their bellows. The snort was a joyous affair much used when they were released in a meadow they hadn’t been in for a while; a scamper, a kicking of heels, a friendly dash at each other, heads down and snorts. It was a rich sound. A quick roll of bass drums. A proclamation that they were happy. At other times, I fear, the snort was only a tickle in the nose, grass seeds in a nostril; and then they would stand looking at us by a gate, or peering down at us from the field above the cottage, shaking their heads and snorting, as if they were blaming us for their temporary vexation.

A persuasive, eloquent sound was their whimper. There was nothing obsequious about it. It was a means of making known the fact they had observed us pass by and would appreciate attention or a titbit. They would stand side by side, Penny’s white nose topping Fred’s white nose, trilling away like birds in a bush; and when we responded, when we advanced towards them speaking words of affection, they changed their whimper into a series of rapid sigh-like sounds. A rush of breath through their nostrils. A curious, puffing method, it seemed, of saying thank you.

They had wonderful eyesight. Sometimes Jeannie and I would go out on a walk to the Carn that we can see from the cottage, a jagged pile of rocks like an ancient castle falling down to the sea. It was a walk on which they generally accompanied us, but as there were succulent grasses all the way on either side of the narrow path, such a walk took a long time. So sometimes we liked to go on our own. Their revenge was to stand in a meadow and watch us, so that when we looked back we could plainly see two reproachful donkeys, ears pricked, staring in our direction.

‘They make me feel awful,’ Jeannie would say inevitably, yielding them their victory.

Their eyesight and their acute sense of hearing made them wonderful sentries. Time and again they would warn us by their alertness that a car was coming down the lane long before we heard the tyres on the gravel or that there were voices in the distance. They would point like a gamedog.

‘On guard, Jeannie! Look at the donkeys!’

And thereby we had a few minutes’ grace before the visitor arrived.

One October night, a still, unusually warm night of dense fog, the watchfulness of the donkeys was challenged by an event of great drama. We had left them down in the cliff meadows and this in itself was an adventure for them. They loved these meadows. Not only was there a profusion of their favourite grasses in various stages of growth, but there were also the evergreen privet and escallonia. I had taken them there many times during the daytime but this was the first occasion they had been allowed to stay for the night; and I had done so because when at nightfall I had called them from the gate to come up, they had not taken the slightest notice. They were steep, pocket-sized meadows intertwining one into the other, cascading like stepping stones downwards to the rocks and the sea. Once I used many of them for early potatoes, heaving the sacks up the cliff path; but now they were our daffodil meadows, and in January and February they danced with yellow, the splash of waves on rocks their orchestra. As yet, in October, not even the spikes of green had appeared; and we even, flatteringly, praised the donkeys for being useful. They at least were helping towards keeping the grass trimmed.

I will always wonder whether they were frightened by what happened. Did Fred, more highly strung than Penny, begin immediately to hee-haw? And was he heard by any of the men hanging to the driftwood? It seems certain that he was. And did Penny join in, so that the two of them tolled for the doomed? I can see them in my mind, ears upright like Churchill’s victory sign, keen eyes blind in the darkness, noses quivering, listening to the mysterious noises, useless sentinels of disaster.

Jeannie and I were sound asleep with Lama curled at the bottom of the bed. The window was open and as usual, before I went to bed, I had fixed the contraption which we had used ever since, years ago, Monty was nearly caught by a fox as he jumped out of the window on a nightly jaunt. It consisted of wire meshing fitted to a wooden frame the exact size of the window; and so although we could see out and also have the fresh air, Lama was contained in the cottage. It was unsightly but useful; and as soon as we got up it was whisked away.

Anyhow there we were when suddenly I began climbing out of a deep dream, fighting my way reluctantly, until I reached the nightmarish reality of the sound of a car outside the cottage. It was pitch-dark, and the car arrived at such speed that when it drew up it woke me by the screech of its brakes. Never before, not even in daylight, had a car arrived so fast. It shot me out of bed. It shot Lama off.

‘What’s happened?’ asked Jeannie dreamily, and in such a tone that I half expected her to tick me off for leaping out of bed and waking her.

‘A wreck!’ I knew this immediately.

I heard the voices of the men in the first car disappear down the path towards the sea, high chatter folding into silence. Then, as I was struggling into my trousers, another car arrived, then another and another. There were shouts, and orders and counter orders; and when I got outside headlights lit up the grey rocks and the old barn, and pushed their beams at the cottage.

‘Here they come,’ someone shouted.

There in front of me lurching through the dip of Monty’s Leap came an old jalopy of a van, no, not a van for it had no sides and no ends. Was it a converted hearse? It had a top supported by metal posts at each corner of its chassis, and it carried huge boxes like coffins, and clinging to the sides and heaped on the boxes, there seemed to be a legion of swarthy men in woollen skullcaps. Heavens, I said to myself, if this weren’t the twentieth century these would be pirates. The old jalopy roared up from the Leap, rattling like a hundred clanking tins, a Genevieve of a vehicle, and pulled up inches from a flower bed. The Life Saving team had arrived.

At this moment I smelled the oil.

I wondered why I had not noticed it before as soon as I had woken up. It was not just a whiff of diesel oil. It was as heavy and persistent as night scented stock on a hot summer’s night. It filled the air like wood smoke. A ghostly smell, a smell of death, the marker buoy of a wreck. And the reason why I hadn’t noticed it before was because, as I learnt later, for over three hours I had been breathing it as I slept. I had become used to it.

It was now half past six and the fog had gone. A glimmer of light wavered behind the Lizard peninsula and as I looked at it, knowing that within half an hour it would be light and rescue made more simple, a plane roared overhead.

‘Where is the wreck?’ I asked a man in coastguard’s uniform; and as I spoke I thought how absurdly remote I sounded. Here was Minack the hub of the rescue, and I did not belong. I was an onlooker, and I was asking the onlooker’s feeble questions.

‘We think on the Bucks.’

There was an Inner Buck and an Outer Buck, and in days of sail the scene of many wrecks. They were half a mile offshore from our cliff, small hillocks at low tide, obscured at high tide.

‘What kind of boat?’

‘Don’t know. We’ve been looking for her since three this morning.’

At a quarter to three Lands End radio had picked up a Mayday signal. It was very feeble and did not last for long. The operator heard enough to learn it was a Spanish ship called the
Juan Ferrer
, but the sender of the signal did not know where he was. He thought, he said, he was near Lands End and he added that the ship was breaking up on the rocks and the captain had ordered her to be abandoned.

Those in charge of the rescue operations were in a quandary. How do we find her? They decided to order the launching of the Sennen lifeboat with instructions she should search the coast between Cape Cornwall and Gwennap Head, the head that is, in fact, the southerly corner of Cornwall, about five miles up the coast from Minack. They also sent out scouts to scour the cliffs, alerted the Mousehole-based Penlee lifeboat but did not order her to be launched, and instructed the Life Saving team with their heavy equipment to concentrate in the Lands End car park where the head-quarters of the rescue operations were set up. For over three hours, therefore, the main rescue services waited patiently in the fog in the car park, no news from the Sennen lifeboat, no news from the scouts, until at last a report came in that the
Juan Ferrer
was disintegrating on the Bucks.

But the report was wrong. The Life Saving team had already unloaded their equipment from the jalopy and were heaving it down the path, through our big field to the top of the cliff meadows, when one of their number who had gone ahead shouted back that there was no sign whatsoever of a wreck on the Bucks.

The sun behind the Lizard was now brimming over into a canopy of sky, familiar places were becoming recognisable again. I could see the long stretch of sand at Loo Bar, the crinkly cliffs round Mullion, the hills behind Prah Sands pushing like a clenched fist into a low cloud. Closer, I could see again the Carn and the outline of its rocks cascading down to the sea, and the elderberry tree which marked the biggest badger sett in the district. Car lights were switched off. Figures became faces. Torches were put into pockets. Cold realism began taking over from the intangible fantasies of darkness.

A police radio car was now parked opposite the flower house and I could hear distorted voices coming from its loudspeaker. Senior police officers in peaked caps, coastguard officers with weatherbeaten faces, the Life Saving team in their skullcaps, all stood around, disconsolate, puzzled, asking themselves over and over again: ‘Where’s the wreck?’