A Donkey in the Meadow (2 page)

We were able easily to reject such an attitude, but in doing so we made a miscalculation. We still imagined we could remain in isolation spiritually, if not materially, from the force of twentieth-century progress, and from the consortium of greed, envy and guile which sponsors the rat race.

Such a foolish error was due to the rawness of the life we led. Our pleasures were not designed for us at great expense by others. We had only to go and look out of the door, and whether the sun shimmered the Lizard in haze, or a raging storm thrust the foam and the waves into a darkening, winter sky, or the moon silvered the grey rocks that heaped around the cottage into the illusion of fairyland, we had only to see these things to shout to the heavens that we were alive. The sea breathed into our souls, the wind talked. We were part of the ageless striving of the human being. There around us, reflecting from the rough granite grey stones fingering up the walls of the cottage, were the calls of haymakers and the echo of carthorses, fishermen bringing their catch to the door, centuries of truthful endeavour, blazing summers, gales sweeping in from the south, justice in uncomplicated judgement, babies born and wagons carrying the old. All this we were aware of. All this elated every moment of our life at Minack. All this was our stronghold.

We had yet to learn that no one can escape from his shadow, and in order to survive in our new kind of life we had to compromise. We had to pay court to those who project the success of others. We had to flirt with the sponsors of the rat race. And by embracing the slippery, transient applause we faced losing what we had set out at Minack to achieve.

April is the between-time of a Cornish flower farm. Where once bloomed violets, anemones and daffodils, there are wastes of green. Soon the anemone plants are ploughed into the ground, and those of the violets split up into runners and planted again to flower the following winter. Only the daffodil beds remain and the foliage, as the summer advances, withers to yellow, pointing to the moment when the bulbs, if need be, are dug, separated, sterilised and planted again.

It is a time of planning. Shall we have the violets again this year? They take much time to pick and to bunch. If the weather is kind they flower profusely and a glut is inevitable. If it is bad, prices may be high but there are few blooms. And anemones? They, too, are at the mercy of the weather, so could not the time involved in looking after them be better employed in other ways?

We had decided this April to streamline our programme. We would concentrate on crops in the greenhouses, except for the outdoor daffodils. Thus tomatoes were already planted in neat rows in the greenhouses, two thousand five hundred of them; and by the beginning of May we would have planted the freesia seeds. Some would go in a couple of thousand whalehide pots, and the rest would be planted in the open sites of two mobiles; and they would all be covered by glass as soon as the tomatoes were finished.

‘Obviously,’ I said firmly, ‘this is the time to go for the holiday. Now. Immediately.’

‘Hey!’ said Jeannie, ‘you take eight years to decide on going away, and now everything has to be arranged overnight.’

‘I’ve got myself excited about it,’ I said, ‘I want to get away before any doubts set in.’

‘Why should there be any doubts?’

‘Doubts always set in if you stop to think.’

‘Don’t think then.’

‘I’m not going to, but I have to plan. I have to plan the work for the student and arrange how he and his wife are going to look after Lama, Boris and the others.’

The student came from an agricultural college and was working for us while he looked for a place of his own to go to. He was the only help we had.

‘What are you going to do about Lama, for instance?’ I asked, ‘she’s never been left on her own before, and without us she might go wild again.’

‘I think the best thing is to give her plenty of her favourite foods,’ said Jeannie, ‘and then we can hope that she will sleep most of the day.’

Lama came into our lives three years before. A mysterious arrival. The vet who then examined her said she was three months old, an exquisite little black kitten with one white whisker. It should have been easy to trace where she had come from because farms and cottages in our district are so few and far between. We visited each one for miles around. Nobody owned up to her. So where had she spent her first three months?

My first sight of her was at the beginning of that daffodil season, a black spot in the distance; but a couple of weeks later I was passing by a meadow of marigolds when I suddenly became aware of her scrutiny. She was three-quarters hidden within a mass of orange flowers, a small black velvet cushion with a pair of yellow eyes which followed me as I went by. I was acutely conscious of her steady stare; and I felt I was being assessed by a possible employer as to my qualifications in regard to a job.

My first touch of her was nearly disastrous. I found her one morning in the chicken run, and foolishly believing we could be friends I advanced to pick her up. Instead she hurtled herself against the wire netting, crazily tried to thrust her head through the small holes, then escaped from my fumbling hands by shooting up a tree and leaping like a monkey from one branch to another until she jumped clear, and disappeared into the wood.

Jeannie’s approach was more subtle. She wooed her by placing saucers of milk at strategic places distant from the cottage, then reporting excitedly when the saucers were found to be empty. This courtship, this fencing between Lama and ourselves, continued until Easter Sunday afternoon when a tremendous storm blew in from the sea.

We were sitting in the cottage, the roar of the gale battering the walls and the roof, and Jeannie was reading her diary of almost exactly the year before. Monty, our old cat, was then dying and she read from her diary the account of the efforts she had made to save him. She also recalled what I had said to her at the time. I had said that as far as I was concerned, and she agreed, we would never have a cat again because we would never be able to repeat the love we had for Monty. Then I added, and this she also recalled, I would be ready to make one possible exception to this decision. That was if a cat, uninvited and untraceable, came crying to the door in a storm; but it had to be
black
.

Here we were then, on that Easter Sunday, sitting in the cottage when above the noise of the gale I heard a miaow, and another, and another. I leapt from my chair, opened the cottage door; and into our lives came Lama.

Lama, therefore, while we were away, had to be suitably cared for, and so Jeannie decided she would have her favourites. Cod and whiting would be in the deep freeze, an emergency packet of Felix would be in the pantry; and to launch our departure there would be a special supply of pig’s liver. Fed at steady intervals by the student and his wife, Lama would sleep and forget us. That, at any rate, was the aim.

There remained Boris, Knocker, Squeaker and Peter. Boris, the muscovy drake, had measured habits which had to be adhered to. He was a strong character who lived alone in the large one-time chicken house deep in the wood to which he retired without persuasion every evening as dusk was falling. He would waddle there, taking his time, then fly ponderously up on to his perch; and later we would come along to lock up his door and safeguard him from any prowling dangers of the night.

In the morning he could be difficult. He would explode in wrath if we were late in letting him out, hissing his fury and flapping his wings, charging after us as we returned to the cottage so that sometimes I have found myself murmuring: ‘I’m sorry, Boris.’

He had arrived at Minack three years before in the arms of Jane, the young girl who then worked for us. A young farmer had attempted to woo her by bringing Boris in a sack to her cottage, and offering him for her dinner.

Her response was to burst out in anger, remove Boris quickly from the sack, and take him up to her bedroom, where he remained for two days. Then her mother thought it was time for him to move, and Jane brought him to Minack.

His sense of independence, however, would make it easy to leave him. He enjoyed being undisturbed. He pottered about in the grass, dipped his yellow beak frequently in the pail of water kept full for the purpose, and two or three times a day plodded up the steep path to the door of the cottage for any titbits that might be available. He would, of course, miss these rewards, and Jeannie decided to compensate him by preparing a plentiful supply of his favourite home-made bread.

Knocker, Squeaker and Peter were the gulls. The first two were the owners of the roof, the latter a friendly, intelligent gull who arrived when the others were absent. Knocker and Squeaker fiercely defended their territory, and Peter would wait far off in a field until he saw the roof was clear; then sweep majestically towards us. I had a special fondness for Peter and he would sometimes go for walks with me. He would fly and swoop over my head, alight on a boulder a few yards ahead of me, then surge into the sky again when I reached him. Knocker and Squeaker were more opportunist. They would parade the apex of the roof day after day, and in the winter would squat side by side on the chimney, content with its warmth. When they were hungry, if we had failed to attend to their needs, Squeaker would squeak and Knocker would bang on the roof with his beak. Many a time he has deceived us into thinking there was someone at the door, so insistent, so loud has been his knock. These three also had to be looked after. They were not, however, going to be pampered. They did not like shop bread but they would have to put up with it.

All the instructions for the student and his wife were neatly typed. We had bought our tickets to Paddington. We had decided to stay at the Savoy, the first time together there since Jeannie had written
Meet Me At The Savoy
. We both had a pleasant sense of anticipation of the gay time ahead. It was Friday and we were going to leave by the Sunday night train. Everything, in fact, about the holiday was organised, when the Lamorna postmaster strode down the lane with a telegram. The message said simply:

‘Got donkey.
          Teague.’

I looked at the telegram in dismay.

‘Heavens, Jeannie,’ I said, ‘now what do we do?’

Mr Teague, a Dickensian toby jug of a man, kept the Plume of Feathers at Scorrier near Redruth. He was also a cattle dealer, a horse dealer, a dealer in any kind of animal. We had had a drink with him a couple of weeks previously.

‘I never said
definitely
I wanted one,’ she murmured. ‘I only
talked
to him about it. I never thought he had taken me seriously.’

I glanced at her suspiciously.

‘You promise you didn’t make some secret plan with him? . . . arrange for him to produce a donkey just as you arranged with your mother to give us Monty? . . . presenting me with a
fait accompli
?’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘You’ve always been so dotty about donkeys that I could believe anything.’

Her addiction to donkeys began when she first learnt to toddle. Her family were living in Scotland, and they used to take their holidays at Troon; here on the sands Jeannie was given her first donkey ride. Her mother looked back on the event as a mixed blessing; for the ride was such a success that every morning when Jeannie woke up her first words were: ‘I want a donkey ride.’ She would have first one ride, then another, and when her mother, aiming at discipline, refused to allow a third, Jeannie would howl. Her mother, in a desperate need to silence her, would offer a compromise, a visit after the morning play on the sands to where the donkeys were tethered. Jeannie used to arrive at the spot, look up at them high above her, then put out a tiny hand to stroke their soft noses.

Her next encounter with donkeys was when her family began taking their holidays in the Isles of Scilly. The islands in those days had the remoteness associated with islands. There was no mass invasion of holidaymakers. There were no telephone kiosks or cars, and electricity was limited to those who made their own. It was a magical place to visit, sailing, fishing, lying in the sun on deserted beaches, somewhere in which time seemed to be poised in space. The war was close, but Jeannie and her friends used to play there, deaf to the noise of the dictators, gloriously believing there was no end to any day, bronzed youth swimming in still blue water, shouting to the heavens their relish of living.

She used to stay in those days in the Atlantic Hotel on St Mary’s overlooking the harbour. And when she was there in the spring she used to lean out of her bedroom window in the early morning and watch entranced the sight of the donkeys and their little green carts bringing the daffodil boxes to the quay. Then she dressed and went down to the breakfast tables and took lumps of sugar from the bowls. Many a donkey was pleased to see her as it waited for its cart to be unloaded.

And later in the day she used to make a regular sortie to a field where a favourite donkey was put out to graze. First there was one donkey, then another and another. She had the childish delight in fancying that the donkeys had gossiped as they stood by the quay, spreading the news that a girl visited a certain field with a pocketful of sugar. Then one day there were more than twenty donkeys in the field, and it was not fun any more. They barged their noses into her pockets, pushed and shoved her, until she became frightened and began to run away from them. Her father, who was watching her, said it was a very funny sight . . . the Florence Nightingale of the donkeys racing across the grass and twenty sugar-mad donkeys close behind her.

I also had been chased by a donkey.

My earliest memory, so distant that I sometimes wonder whether it may be my imagination at work, is lying in a steep grass field staring up at the grey underbelly of a donkey. The field itself, and this I remember clearly, fell from the road to the seashore at the river end of Porth beach near my childhood home at Newquay. I was very small, and in my haste and terror as I ran from the donkey I had tripped, tumbling over into the grass, desperately aware that my future lay at the mercy of the beast that was soon upon me.