A Donkey in the Meadow (16 page)

But when the month had gone, there slowly began to build up an unexpected dimension in our lives. Our consciences started to prick. We found, for instance, that a greenhouse that is left empty when by natural right it should be occupied, develops an air of resentment; and we had six greenhouses. They stared at us day after day, huge canopies of glass, and although we tried to keep our eyes averted as we passed them, they forced us to look; and we shuddered increasingly at the sight of the weeds growing with lush abandon. At the end of the month the contents resembled a section of the South American jungle.

A further discomfiture was not only did we feel guilty, but we were publicly proved guilty. When callers arrived we of course could not prevent them from observing what was happening, or coming to their own conclusions; and so we imagined their eyes became shifty, as if they believed they had discovered the skeleton in our cupboard; and that we were now playing at flower farming because we had been seduced by the shadowy rewards from the city. We became increasingly uncomfortable. We shuddered in guilty anticipation as soon as we saw a car coming down the lane. And every day the weeds prospered abundantly.

Callers reserved their comments until they had left us. Friends didn’t. Sage advice has often been heaped upon us by friends enjoying a Cornish holiday. Normally the safety of an office protects one from the amateur, but in our case the office was there for all to see. Everyone could participate. And often we have been maddeningly irritated when friends, having absorbed our time, have innocently commented on some feature of the flower farm with which, in any case, we ourselves were dissatisfied. A question of rubbing salt in a wound.

This time, however, our friends were blunt. And in the wake of their remarks, however unreasonable they may have been, we found ourselves wallowing in wordy explanations.

‘It is beyond me why you’ve left these greenhouses empty. They look a mess.’

‘What is in that meadow over there, the one with all the nettles in it?’

‘Surely you could find time to grow cucumbers. My aunt grows them and finds them very easy.’

‘I hope you realise that these greenhouses are depreciating all the time, and you’re not getting a penny interest on your capital.’

In other years we would have loftily dismissed these strictures as an unasked-for interference, grumbled together privately, then forgotten them. This summer, however, with our consciences pricking, we were peculiarly sensitive to criticism and so sometimes we accompanied our wordy explanations with a dash of bad temper. The truth is that the honeymoon of doing nothing about the flower farm was soon over. Worry took its place again.

I am among those who can be down in the depths one moment and up in the heights the next. I also wilt, my imagination becomes stifled, when faced by people who show no likelihood of ever sharing my wavelength; and the fact they so obviously believe in their superiority over me only increases my frustrated fury. But I take wings when I meet someone who possesses the gift of enthusiasm and who distributes it among those with whom he has dealings. My mind awakes. I am willing to climb Everest.

One hot afternoon we had a caller who was the salesman for our flowers in Covent Garden. Of all the businesspeople I have ever met, flower salesmen are the most genial, despite the early morning hours they have to keep, and the dark, cold conditions of the market in which they work; and for the 10 per cent they receive from sales, they also give the grower much enthusiasm and very helpful advice. This, at any rate, is what Jeannie and I have found over the years in sending all our flowers to the same firm in Covent Garden. Moreover, they took such a personal interest in the flowers they received, that once a year, during the daffodil season, the head of the firm paid Cornwall a visit; and later on, between seasons, his representative. And it was his representative who arrived on that hot afternoon when Jeannie and I were despondent.

He was in a hurry. He had another appointment for which he was already late, and he said he knew we would understand. A brushoff possibly, almost inevitably, if spoken by another kind of person. He knew we would understand, he said, because never from the beginning of the season to the end were there ever any complaints about our flowers. They ask for them specially, he said, and it is always a pleasure to open your boxes and show them.

‘You give something to the flower trade, you two.’

I believe when he said this that both of us felt so emotional that we wanted forcibly to restrain him from leaving us. He had given us the key. He had made no deliberate effort to do so but his antennae, without which a talented person will be ordinary, had sensed we needed a lift. And we were able excitedly and so happily to respond. Here was an instant of good luck without which no endeavour can succeed; and the only issue at stake was taking advantage of it. The hot afternoon, after he had left, had to be made to work.

As soon as his car disappeared up the lane, we realised too where lay our friends; and although our connection with them might be by the tenous communication of newly turned soil, daffodil bulbs, flowers, picking and bunching them, rushing them to the station, and awaiting the post for the envelope containing the prices, the world they lived in was indeed a real world.

We knew also that we must not betray all the struggle, sacrifice, and enthusiasm which led the way to us receiving such a compliment. We must attack. This collision between despondency and the praise we had received was a reflection of all the years we had been at Minack. The earth and the rain and the wind may have hurt us but they had never, I felt, dimmed the truth of our optimism. We struggled where we loved. Failure was in the hands of the gods, not in the hands of human beings. When we fought for our survival, we did not have to weary ourselves waiting upon the whims of other people. We were alone. We were together.

‘Jeannie,’ I said, such relief in my mind and the enthusiasm simmering again which had been curbed in the tight circle of wavering defeatism, ‘let’s give ourselves one more chance!’

‘Oh yes, I agree.’

‘I want to see Minack a show place of daffodils. I want to fight all those things which have been dulling our happiness.’

Jeannie was smiling at me.

‘Don’t get too fierce!’

‘Oh, I know I sound melodramatic, but that’s how I feel. For better or for worse I want to slam them all!’

‘You will.’

‘And so I’m going to play a hunch. The only person I know who can help us to achieve what we want is Geoffrey. I saw his father the other day and it is just possible Geoffrey wants to return to Minack.’

‘He loved the cliffs.’

‘I’ll write to him. and ask him whether he will come and see us on Wednesday evening.’

Wednesday was the day after the morrow. It was also Fred’s birthday.

I was up early in the morning, a glorious, hazy, warm May morning, and went down to the rocks for a bathe. Fishing boats, a half-mile offshore, were hurrying to Newlyn market and gulls swirled in their wake. Two cormorants on the other side of the little bay, black sentinels in the sunlight, were standing on a rock regally surveying the scene; and on my left, up in the woods of the cliff, wood pigeons cooed. The scent of the sea filled the air, crystals sparkled the water, and the sound of the lazy, lapping waves was like a chorus of ghosts telling the world to hush. No angry engines in the sky disturbed the peace of it. No roar of traffic dulled the senses. Here was the original freedom. Here was poised a fragment of time when the world was young.

When I returned to the cottage, Fred and Penny were standing in the field looking down into the garden, and Jeannie was at the door.

‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ she said, laughing, ‘Fred’s been getting impatient.’

He began to whimper, nostrils quivering, the prelude to a bellow. ‘Hold it, Fred, hold it,’ I called, ‘we’ve got a present for you!’ Then Jeannie went inside and brought back a huge bunch of carrots. ‘Happy birthday!’ we said, holding the bunch in front of him.

Fred, and Penny for that matter, were clearly surprised at such an array of carrots so early in the morning. They were even more surprised when ten minutes later two children’s voices came singing round the corner; ‘Happy birthday to you!’ Susan and Janet from the farm at the top had arrived, like Cornish pixies, with their presents. More carrots! And it was not yet eight o’clock.

Fred, in a way, had become a mascot to the children of St Buryan parish in which we lived. They had been told of the days when donkeys clip-clopped the lanes of the district; and how the fishermen of Sennen Cove had the finest collection of donkeys in Cornwall, racing each other through St Buryan village on the way to Newlyn with their catches; but these seemed like fairy stories to those who had never seen a donkey. An old doctor on his rounds, before the first world war, was the last to be remembered using a donkey cart in St Buryan parish; but no one could remember when a donkey was last born. Fred, therefore, was a character of the imagination which had become real. His birthday, his first birthday, was an occasion. And the children were going to celebrate it.

Fred now had time to digest his early-morning presents. There was a pause in his festivities and he roamed around the field flicking his tail and nibbling the grass, then suddenly appeared again to look down into the garden.

‘Fred seems to be hinting at something,’ said Jeannie.

I looked up at him. Fluffy brown coat, a brown pillow of a fringe between his two big ears and the white of his nose, a sturdy, slightly arched little back, the black cross easy to see, and a pair of intelligent eyes which were saying: ‘She’s right. I am!’

‘Nothing doing, Fred,’ I said, ‘you must wait for the party this afternoon.’

At that moment I heard the postman singing his way down the lane on his bicycle. Part-time postman, cobbler, hairdresser, fish-and-chip merchant, he had a key part to play in the coming events. He also sold ice creams. And he also always arrived at Minack happily smiling, whatever the gales, the rain or the snow.

‘Lovely morning, Mr Gilbert,’ I said.

‘And a lovely morning for a donkey’s birthday,’ he replied. He began to search through his satchel. ‘I’ve got something here I’ve never carried before. A telegram for a donkey! And there’s a big envelope for Fred too. Birthday cards from the school. He paused, still searching. ‘Ah, here they are . . .’ Then he added when he had handed them to me: ‘I’ve seen the schoolmaster. Thirty-two will be coming from the school, and so what with the grown-ups I reckon forty comets will see it through.’

‘Leave it to you,’ I said.

‘I’ll be down soon after half past three.’

A telegram and, within the envelope, thirty-two birthday cards! We were under an obligation to play the game with respect. Much earnest thought and trouble had gone into the making of it. A ritual had to be observed. Whether Fred was personally interested or not, each greeting had to be read to him; and in any case Jeannie and I were exceedingly touched that the children should have remembered him.

‘Many happy returns to Freddie. Love Sally and Linda,’ said the telegram. How had they remembered the date? Two schoolgirls from London who had come to Minack as strangers to see if they could meet the gull on the roof; and then had spent the afternoon playing with Penny and Fred. I held the telegram up to him and he pushed his nose into it. ‘Do you remember how Sally spent an hour grooming you and you loved it?’

There were carrots galore on the birthday cards. Each card had been individually drawn in coloured crayon, imaginative, primitive drawings, the figure one prominent in all of them, some with poems attached, cut-outs of other donkeys painstakingly pasted on thick paper, messages of good wishes in carefully written script, joke drawings like donkeys fishing (‘I hope you catch your carrot.’), romantic drawings of a donkey ruminating in a pasture, another with ships as a background; all kindly and thoughtful and original. Something so much more important was there than the cards themselves, and we now awaited the arrival of those who had sent them. And so did Fred.

When they came he could have been excused if he had been startled by their number. He had never seen so many children before, so many gay, shouting children who tumbled out of cars, running up the path to the field, calling: ‘Happy birthday, Freddie!’ This was a carnival of a party, a boy was dressed as the Mad Hatter, battered top hat and tails too big for him, another wore a huge mask of the March Hare, girls in party frocks with ribbons in their hair, boys chasing each other, all converging on Fred who stood his ground halfway up the slope of the field with ears pricked; and I would have forgiven him if he had turned and fled. Thirty-two children swarming towards him, screams of laughter, yells of glee, this cacophony of happiness made noise enough to scare him into leaping into the next field. He did not budge. He awaited the onslaught of arms being flung around him, ears pulled, mane ruffled, nose kissed and kissed again, pats on the back, tail tugged, as if it were an experience to which he had long been accustomed. All through the afternoon he allowed himself to be treated as a toy, and not once did he show impatience. Dear one-year-old Fred. This was indeed his hour of glory.

There were rewards, of course. His guests, for instance, vied with each other in their generosity, eating part of their ice-cream cornets then pushing them towards a large, welcoming mouth. He had always loved ice cream. And there were the sticky lollipops, the shape and colour of carrots, which Jeannie had bought; and these too were dangled before him in such a way that when accepted, kudos was obtained.

Penny, meanwhile, was having her own passage of fame. Fred being too young to carry anyone, Penny had to play the role of the patient beach donkey. Can I have a ride? Can I? Can I? Up and down the field she went, solemnly and safely. Sometimes two astride her back, sometimes even three. She plodded on in the manner of a donkey who knew how to earn its living. She waited quietly as someone was heaved upon her back, she moved on at the right moment, she halted as soon as a fair ride had been completed. Can I have a ride? Can I? Can I?