They didn't push people in pianos, like a Siamese we knew called Soraya. She, a complete disgrace to her name, leapt on the back of a tuner one day when he was looking into a Bechstein Grand, laid him flat with surprise in the works, and fled. The worst of that was that when the tuner came out again he wouldn't believe a cat was responsible. He'd heard a terrible Yell, he kept insisting. And as there was nobody else in the house at the time but Soraya's owner, undoubtedly she went down in his works report as having done it. Had a sudden mad moment and pushed him in the piano.
Ours weren't particularly temperamental, either. Sheba wouldn't eat if you were looking at her, Solomon created hell and howled if, summer and winter, I didn't wear a particular skirt he liked at night so that he could sit on it, but that was normal Siamese behaviour. Not, for instance, like a cat we knew called Sabre, who had such attacks of nerves when people rang the doorbell that his owners disconnected it. After that people used the knocker. That made him nervous too, so they took the knocker off. A rather drastic step, but the alternative was a cat who spent most of his time hiding traumatically under the gas-stove. So, following complaints from callers who now couldn't make themselves heard at all, they'd connected the doorbell button to a series of lights placed strategically in the hall, the kitchen and over the television set. Red they were, going on and off in ghostly silence. An ingenious invention it was, too. Save for the fact that, apart from their effect on human beings, the last we heard of him Sabre was staring traumatically at the lights as well.
Annabel, similarly, wasn't a particularly wicked donkey, compared with the tales we heard of donkeys who bit, donkeys who kicked carts out of shafts and the donkey who lay at the roadside and pretended to be dead. Father Adams told us that one, and if we'd thought we were unique in introducing a donkey into the valley that, we understood, was where we were wrong. William his name were, Father Adams informed us reminiscently, and sixty years earlier William had been a familiar sight plodding up and down the hill with his little ironmonger's cart. Until the day when, it seemed, William had stumbled at the bottom of the hill, sagged dramatically to his knees and lain down, saucepans and all, in the gutter.
Considerable fuss had been made of William. Once they'd discovered he wasn't dead he'd been lifted wiltingly from the shafts, given whisky in hot water, led gently up the hill when he recovered while the villagers hauled up his cart. The Vet could find nothing wrong with him. He'd lived for another twenty years. What had caused him to collapse initially no one knew. Except that thereafter William collapsed so often at the same spot, to be revived only by whisky and water or the sound of his cart being dragged up the hill by volunteers, that in the end his owner gave up bringing him down. William waited seraphically at the top, the ironmonger trudged blisteringly up and down with a basket, and William never fainted again. You couldn't put one over on a donkey, Father Adams advised us repeatedly when he saw us with Annabel.
We'd learned that for ourselves. Annabel's gate, for instance, fastened with a strap. Annabel playing with the strap when we were there was one thing – nuzzling at the end, tossing her head good-humouredly at us through the fence, indicating that she knew this was the way out and what about a walk. Annabel going at it when our backs were turned was another. We spotted her one day when, in leisurely mood, we were watching swallows on our telephone wire through binoculars. Four swallow fledglings they were, sitting obediently in a row while their parents hunted for food. There was an obvious pattern to the business. Absolute silence while Mum and Dad hunted; a fluttering of wings like a Parisian chorus as Mum and Dad returned; shrieks, gaping beaks and clamours for more as Mum and Dad stuffed the food down their throats; and finally, quiet again as Mum and Dad took off for the next instalment. What intrigued us was the bird sitting on the wire alongside them – fluttering his wings, opening his beak, stretching out his neck at the appropriate moments but quite obviously not a swallow. He, announced Charles, inspecting him knowledgeably through the binoculars, was a whitethroat and obviously one of the valley's wide boys. Trying to horn in on feeding time but the parent birds weren't having any. Wasn't Nature marvellous? demanded Charles enthusiastically. Weren't these creatures characters? Whereupon he brought the glasses downwards from the telephone wire, swept them by way of interest across the paddock, and lit quite by accident upon another character. Annabel – with no one, so she thought, to see her working doggedly away at her strap.
There was nothing playful about this effort. Teeth bared, head jerking purposefully from side to side, Annabel was tugging away like Houdini. We confined her with chain and padlock after that. To offset any feeling of frustration that might give her – she must, said Charles, have wanted to be with us otherwise she wouldn't have been doing it – we gave her longer walks and time in the garden.
What Annabel wanted was to be out. Initially, at any rate, her one idea when she achieved that object was to dash past the cottage, half-way up the hill, and hover. Feeding blissfully on the roadside, lifting her head occasionally to see if we were watching, running a skittish few steps when we tried to approach her, and coming back like the clappers when a car came round the corner.
Time in the garden altered that, however. Time in the garden – beginning with half an hour on the days we went to town, when she was allowed at the kitchen door in the early morning, given bread and honey as a treat, and usually had to be pushed Atlas-fashion back to her paddock while we sweated on the top line about the hour – rapidly became the criterion of Annabel's existence.
It grew, when occasion permitted, to be several hours. Any time she got out of the paddock now, either by crawling under the wire or the more direct method of meeting us at the gate as we opened it and pushing past us like a steam-roller and Annabel was chez nous. Wheeling smartly up the drive. Chewing familiarly at one of Charles' plum trees. Rubbing her bottom appreciatively on a Cox's Orange – a low one under which her back fitted perfectly and it wasn't just that she pushed it from side to side, said Charles despairingly; it went up and down as well. And finally, Mecca of Meccas, achieving the kitchen.
When Annabel first discovered the existence of the kitchen she was quite overawed by it. All that Food, you could see her thinking as she stood, overwhelmed, outside. The place where the bread and honey came from, and the apples and chocolate biscuits. Even when she'd come down the garden like a tornado – a nip at the plum tree, a boomps-a-daisy on the apple and three times round the lawn for luck – she still, when she reached the kitchen door, sobered down to respectful silence.
Not for long, however. Within a day or so a small white nose was cautiously nudging the door open. Soon a familiar head was coming tentatively inside. Within a short time after that the Winged Mercury attitude with flattened-back ears, eyes like marbles and outstretched neck as, ready to run, she reached round the corner to the kitchen table, had changed to a sort of vacuum-sweeping action as, as nonchalantly as you liked, she nosed appraisingly over its surface. And eventually, to Charles' delight, she was coming right into the kitchen. Looking knowledgeably for apples in the dish, hunting familiarly for carrots in the vegetable rack, hitting the refrigerator a resounding thwack with her bottom as she turned. Who, said Charles gazing proudly upon her, would believe we'd tamed a donkey to that extent?