Free A Donkey in the Meadow by Derek Tangye Page A

inane remark. The shyest visitor was filled with rapturous excitement as soon as I said: ‘Have you ever seen a baby donkey?’
    I thereupon led the way to the meadow, and it was usually the stable meadow, where Penny and Fred were perusing the green grass around them.
    ‘Penny! Fred!’ I would call out authoritatively, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them immediately to obey me.
    ‘Penny! Fred!’
    They would stare from afar and make no move.
    ‘Come on, Penny!’ I would shout again, wanting to prove to my visitors that I was in command. ‘ COME ON !’
    I soon noticed, before he was even a month old, that Fred was usually the first to react. He could be in deep slumber, lying flat on the ground with Penny standing on guard beside him; but when I called he would wake up, raise his head in query, scramble to his feet, pause while looking in my direction, then advance towards me. First a walk, then a scamper.
    ‘He’s a very intelligent donkey,’ I would then say proudly. A sop to the fact that Penny had ignored me.
    But Penny at this time was still a sorry sight, the sores had gone but her coat was still thin. We had to excuse her appearance by repeating the story of how we had found her. We explained her elongated feet by telling how we had waited for Fred to be born before dealing with them, and that now we were waiting for the blacksmith. We chattered on with our excuses and then realised no one was listening. All anyone wanted to do was to fuss over Fred.
    ‘Aren’t his ears huge?’
    ‘I love his nose.’
    ‘Look at his feet! Like a ballet dancer’s!’
    ‘What eyelashes!’
    ‘Does he hee-haw?’
    I remember both his first hee-haw and his first buttercup. He was a week old when he decided to copy his grazing mother, putting his nose to the grass without quite knowing what was expected of him. He roamed beside her sniffing importantly this grass and that; and then suddenly he saw the buttercup. A moment later he came scampering towards me with the buttercup sticking out of the corner of his mouth like a cigarette, and written all over his ridiculous face was: ‘Look what I’ve found!’
    The first hee-haw was to occur one afternoon in the autumn when Jeannie and I were weeding the garden. There was no apparent reason to prompt it. They were not far away from us in the meadow, and every now and then we had turned to watch them contentedly mooching around. And then came the sound.
    It was at first like someone’s maiden attempt to extract a note from a saxophone. It was a gasping moan. It then wavered a little, began to gain strength and confidence, started to rise in the scale, and then suddenly blossomed into a frenzied hiccuping tenor-like crescendo.
    ‘Heavens,’ I said, ‘What an excruciating noise!’
    ‘Fred!’ called out Jeannie, laughing, ‘what on earth’s the matter?’
    At this moment we saw Penny lifting up her head to the sky. And out of her mouth came the unladylike noise which we had already learnt to expect. No bold brassy hee-haw from her. It was a wheezy groan which at intervals went into a falsetto. Here was a donkey, it seemed, who longed to hee-haw but couldn’t. All she could do was to struggle out inhuman noises as her contribution to the duet. It was painful not only to listen to, but also to watch. This was donkey frustration. The terrible trumpet of her son had reawakened ambitions. She wanted to compete with him, but she hadn’t a ghost of a chance.
    Meanwhile, as the summer advanced, Penny had developed a role of her own towards the visitors. She was clearly, for instance, used to children and although it was Fred who received the initial caressing attention it was only Penny, because she was full grown, who could give them a ride. Ignored during the first ten minutes, she then became a queen in importance, and she would patiently allow a child to be hoisted on her back, and a ride would begin.
    But Jeannie and I soon found that her job was far