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.