We shuddered when she did shout. We worried when it was time for the next bray and she didn't. At one time instead of a bray a sort of gulping noise came through the night. What, enquired Charles anxiously, did it sound like to me? A strangled gasp I said as we bounded out of bed. Annabel was tethered on the advice of the donkey-man who said if we didn't, until we got the place wired she'd be on her knees and through the gaps in the hedge bottoms as soon as our backs were turned and we imagined her with her rope wrapped round a hawthorn bush choking herself to death.
We were saved from tearing up the lane in our dressing-gowns by the fact that Charles, who was only half awake, insisted on putting on his socks as well and while he was fastening his suspenders Annabel let out such a fanfare – probably at hearing him move, for she seemed to have very good hearing – that it was obvious there was nothing wrong with her. Charles took off his socks, rolled back into bed and started snoring with exhaustion. Annabel, hearing him from the paddock, sent forth an answering call which if it once more roused the neighbourhood at least roused Charles as well and stopped him snoring. From the cats' room came a succession of bumps and padding noises as they kept getting up to look out of the window. And so the night wore on.
We'd had nights like that before, of course. The night we acquired the squirrel. The night we acquired our first Siamese. The time we tried to add Samson the kitten to the household and Solomon and Sheba stayed up all night threatening to take him apart. Life always seemed more liveable the next morning and apart from the fact that when Charles opened the spare-room door this particular next morning the cats, instead of tumbling down the stairs with enthusiastic demands to be let out, filed silently past him into our room and got into bed with me – Tired through being up all night, said Solomon, subsiding heavily across my neck; got a Headache, said Sheba, vanishing crossly beneath the bedclothes – things weren't too bad at all.
Annabel was still there for one thing, with her fringe cocked raptly at us over the mowing grass. The sun was shining. Solomon, emboldened, no doubt, by the fact that he hadn't been murdered in his bed while he slept after all, came spying cautiously round a grass clump at her while we gave her breakfast and, when she looked at him, purred. By the evening, our confidence soaring like a temperature chart, we were taking her for a walk.
Like a temperature chart it pretty soon went down again. Annabel, plodding demurely up the lane with Charles and me beaming proudly on either side and Solomon trailing us interestedly in the rear, did the length of a sixpenny donkey ride – and that, she decided, was that. Turning determinedly for home she began, in approved donkey return-ride style, to trot. Never having given donkey-rides herself, of course, but just having accompanied Mum, she didn't realise she was supposed to stop at that. Within seconds the trot had become a gallop, the gallop – with Annabel kicking her heels light-heartedly behind her as she went – had become a charge, and I, holding frantically to the end of her rope and shouting to Charles for help, was going down the lane behind her like a kite.
Charles held her rope the next night, while Solomon and I followed behind. We needed firmness, he said, if we were going to train her like a sheepdog and sure enough when we got to the sixpenny mark and once more she stopped and we, putting our shoulders to her rump, were firm practically to the point where our arms dropped off, it worked. Once past that point and she ambled up the lane like a lark. Like a lark, too – to use Charles' description of her as he walked proudly at her side – she turned when directed at the forest gate and began to amble back. And like a lark, the moment she rounded the corner and could see the long straight stretch of lane ahead, she began to fly. Much faster than the previous night. Solomon and I were delayed only for a matter of seconds by his stopping to look down a mousehole en route and by the time we rounded the corner there was no sign of Charles or Annabel at all. Only a cloud of dust settling silently in the distance.
They were in the paddock when we got back – Annabel eating dandelions and Charles leaning breathlessly on the gate. Annabel, as she'd done the previous night with me, had frightened the daylights out of him by pretending to be set for a top-speed tour of the village and then zooming into her paddock at the last moment. Annabel, we were to discover in the days that followed, had that kind of sense of humour.
The next night, to avoid coming back each time as if we were practising for the Grand National, we took her on a circular tour. Up the valley. Over the stream. It took us twenty minutes to cross that on account of Mum having apparently warned her to keep away from water, and the only way we did it was by eventually going over ourselves, leaving her behind and commenting loudly that we didn't want her. Whereupon, with a snort to us that she was Coming and another one to the stream to be careful otherwise she'd deal with it – over she came. Stopping immediately to eat a plantain to show her independence, but nevertheless she was across.
After that we met a man with a dog and Annabel, towing Charles and me like a couple of tugboats, chased it. After that – while we explained that she liked dogs and was only playing and the man indignantly said it looked like it, didn't it, butting a poor little spaniel in the backside like that – she ate a foxglove.
At least, said Charles, as with aching arms and long past the time we'd expected to be back we turned at last on to the track leading down to the cottage, we wouldn't have to run back this time. Annabel didn't know the track from Adam.
Undoubtedly she didn't. Either she could smell her way, however, or donkeys have an amazing sense of location, for hardly were the words out of his mouth when she began to gallop. Down the hill in the gathering dusk like a sheepdog-sized toboggan. Mane flying, legs flying, Charles and I running frantically behind her. Past the cottage, with the cats watching round-eyed from the hall window. In at the paddock – when, Charles told everybody afterwards with pride, she might so easily have passed it in the twilight. Annabel knew her home now coming from any direction. Where, she demanded with a snort as Charles and I clung mopping our brows at the gate, was her supper?
FOUR
Annabel and Friends
We learned quite a lot about donkeys in those first few days, and Annabel learned things too. To drink water, for instance, which was quite a feat for previously she'd only had Mum's milk. When I offered her bread and milk she sniffed and said it was Cow. When, after a whole day when she didn't drink anything and we wondered once more whether we should call the Vet, she suddenly got the hang of it and we found her with her nose blissfully in the bowl sucking water, our joy really knew no bounds.
Solomon, who was with us when we made the discovery, knew no bounds either. Gazing incredulously from the shrinking water to her fur-lined ears – Solomon, when he drank, lapped with the sound of high seas smacking on the pier at Brighton and he couldn't understand why Annabel did it so quietly – he was quite unprepared for the bit at the end when she lifted her head with an appreciative slurp. Solomon, about six inquisitive inches from her nose when it happened, gave one big leap and was gone.
Solomon was doing a lot of leaping just then. Sheba, pursuing her usual course when she wasn't too sure of a thing, pretended Annabel didn't exist. She could be found imperturbably thinking on the garden wall, talking to Charles from the coal house roof or, if it was absolutely necessary to pass the paddock, marching down the middle of the lane with eyes fixed straight ahead as if following a Cats' Guild banner. Solomon, drawn by his insatiable curiosity as to a lodestar, could be found approaching the paddock from all directions on his stomach like a Mohawk, peering at her through grass clumps and – on occasions which nearly turned our hair white – sitting in her bed.