A Donkey in the Meadow (12 page)

A field opposite, the one with the gate where the lane turns right for the last hundred yards to Minack, had been turned into a car park. First one car, then ten, then thirty, their wheels slithering as they turned on the unfamiliar grass. Press photographers and reporters, overdressed for the occasion in neat suits and shiny black shoes, hastened to the cottage. Can we borrow your phone? Sorry, we haven’t got one.

And now helicopters from the naval station across the bay at Culdrose began to roar and to hover, up and down the coast. We stood and stared. There in the sky the mid-twentieth-century rescue service, here in the shadow of the ancient cottage standing around me the rescue tradition of centuries. ‘I dearly love a wreck,’ I heard a man say.

At half past seven someone pointed to a helicopter that was hovering low down off the entrance to Lamorna Cove, a mile or two away, and on the other side of the Carn. ‘She’s gone in there,’ a man said brightly, ‘that’s what it is. She’s gone in the other side of the Carn.’

I felt the sense of relief around me that something positive had been suggested. The men in skullcaps lifted their weighty boxes once again and staggered off. A constable went ahead. Pressmen conscientiously set out to wade through the undergrowth. The sun was out, the sea was lazy, shimmering no hint of danger, a robin sang in the wood and a woodpecker laughed, and over everything lingered the smell of oil.

Jeannie suddenly appeared beside me. ‘Have you seen the donkeys?’ she asked, ‘I’ve been down the cliff and there isn’t a sign of them.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said, ‘I’d forgotten about them.’

A policeman on a motorcycle rode up at that moment, stopped and with measured dignity got off. ‘Did you see any donkeys up the lane?’ I asked. He looked surprised. ‘No sir. I didn’t.’

I realised now that they would have been scared out of their wits when the advance party of the Life Saving team dashed down through the meadows, leaving the gate open no doubt, for they would hardly have expected to meet donkeys.

‘They’re probably miles away by now,’ I said to Jeannie, and as I spoke I saw in my imagination a bewildered Fred and a distraught Penny plodding along some distant road. ‘On the other hand,’ I added soothingly, ‘They may have only escaped to Pentewan.’ These were the neighbouring cliff meadows which we used to rent but gave up after a sequence of gale-ridden crop disasters. ‘I’ll go and have a look.’

It was past eight o’clock and at the busy centre of Minack there was still no report of the whereabouts of the wreck. Aircraft were zooming overhead and as I made my way over to Pentewan I saw strung along a mile or more offshore a company of ships . . . the Trinity House vessel, the
Stella
, a Dutch tug which was spending the winter in Mount’s Bay at a second’s readiness to speed for salvage, a Fishery Protection boat and, close to the cliffs, as if they were searching the inlets, were the two lifeboats. The Sennen, which had been out since the beginning, the Penlee, which had been out since half past six.

I looked over towards the Carn. The group which had set out from Minack were straddled around it. I saw no urgency in their movements. There did not appear to be any reason to believe that they had found the wreck. The only thing which did seem clear to me was that a large number of people other than all of us at Minack must by now know its exact location. The sea was calm, the visibility was excellent, both ships and aircraft must have inspected the length of the coast.

I reached the Pentewan meadows and was passing through what we used to call the thirty lace meadow when I observed piles of driftwood, gulls sweeping and calling above it, drifting eastwards in an endless line towards Lamorna Cove. I had been joined in my walk by a stranger with an important air. ‘That settles it,’ I said, ‘the wreck is the other side of Pentewan cliffs, just beyond the top of that lane we can see. The wreckage is drifting with the tide.’

‘The tide has changed,’ the man said loftily.

‘You mean the wreckage having drifted one way is now drifting the other?’

‘I do.’

I could not contest the views of such a seafaring-looking character. It was not my business to inform him that the tide did not change till ten o’clock. But I made up my own mind that the
Juan Ferrer
was on the rocks just over the point ahead.

So it was.

She had rammed the rocks at Boscawen Point within two miles of Minack, a five-hundred-ton cargo boat on passage from Bordeaux to Cardiff with a mixed cargo of onions, plywood made of cedar, and thousands of chestnut stakes destined for Welsh farms.

She had gone ashore within four sea miles of the Penlee Lifeboat station; and so if her Mayday signal had been louder, if her position had been able to be plotted, rescuers would have reached her within an hour.

Three survivors jumped ashore. Two men drifted with the tide and the wreckage, and were picked up by the helicopter we saw hovering off Lamorna Cove. Eleven were drowned, their bodies having also drifted with the tide.

And the donkeys? Did they hear the last cries of those men as they drifted past our meadows? And those two who were saved?

It was a special pleasure when all the excitement was over to find they never did run far. While it was still dark and I was dressing, they must have rushed away from the cliff, through the open gate which normally stopped them from cavorting in the garden, into the wood past Boris’s house, then on to the farther part of the wood.

When it was all over, when the long adventure ended at nine and we had begun our breakfast, a banshee wail and a tenor-like trumpeting joined in a duet in the corner of the field overlooking the cottage.

Everyone had gone. Minack belonged to its occupants again.

Fred looks out to sea. In the background are the rocks where the
Juan Ferrer
was wrecked

Helicoptors hover above the wreck

The
Juan Ferrer
shuddered on the rocks at Boscawen Point for a couple of days, half submerged, disgorging its cargo: and all along the coast men were busy salvaging the stakes and the squares of cedar plywood as they drifted forlornly ashore.

And there were the sightseers. A wreck, like all disasters, has a morbid fascination for those who live safe lives. They heaped themselves on the cliffside, little groups staring in silence, breaking it occasionally to ask the lone policeman, incongruous in helmet, some question he had already answered many times before. Below them, like a whale in its death throes, the object of their entertainment floundered in the waves, sea spouted from the broken windows of the wheelhouse, a rope flopped about the deck, a bell clanged uselessly; and all the while the hulk was heaving this way and that, scraping and banging the rocks, an echoing orchestra of doom, giving a sad, despairing value to the gaping crowd before its inevitable end.

Many of the sightseers came charging along the cliff through Minack meadows to reach their destination. A fanatical lot, a glint in their eyes, walking faster than usual, driving themselves through the undergrowth as if the hounds of hell were after them. ‘Where’s the wreck?’ they panted.

Fred viewed this invasion first with suspicion and then, as the scope of its possibilities dawned upon him, with relish. Here were people galore to show off to. He could divert them from their object, lure from them the praises which would relieve an otherwise dull day. Flattery would be assured. His charm would be irresistible. I am a baby donkey, have you ever seen one before? Look how I can kick my heels and don’t you think my fluffy coat adorable? My nose is very soft if you would like to fondle it. Who is the other one? She’s my mother. Rather staid. What have you got in that bag?

I might have moved them from the pathway of such attention into the isolation of some other field, but I was in fact delighted there was something to occupy their minds. They were doing no harm, and Fred had a whole series of toys apparently to play with. Each person who passed through was there for his entertainment, and I felt sure he would give value in return.

I was happily believing that this was so when, as I sat at my desk, I saw through the window a hatless elderly man come puffing up the path from the direction of the field, followed a moment later by a formidable-looking lady. I dashed out of the cottage to meet them, sensing immediately that something had gone awry.

‘Can I help you?’ I said, using my usual method of introduction, smiling politely, and at the same time wondering what on earth had happened to cause such obvious excitement.

‘Are those your damned donkeys in the field we’ve just come through?’ barked the man. He was out of breath as if he had been running and as he spoke he mopped his bald head with a handkerchief.

‘Yes,’ I replied doubtfully, ‘anything wrong?’

‘Very much so,’ interrupted the lady grimly looking at me from under an old felt hat, ‘the young one snatched my husband’s cap and is running round the field with it.’

How had Fred managed it? Had he sneaked up behind the couple as they hurried along, annoyed they had taken no notice of him, and then performed a ballet dancer’s leap to take the cap from the gentleman’s head?

‘Good gracious,’ I said, ‘I do apologise for this. I’ll go ahead straight away and catch him.’

I ran away from them laughing, down the path to the field, asking myself what I would have to do if Fred had gobbled it up. But as I did so I suddenly saw a galloping Fred coming towards me, tweed cap in mouth, and just behind him a thundering, rollicking Penny; and the two of them gave such an impression of joyous, hilarious elation that I only wished that Jeannie had been with me to see them.

The cap was intact, a little wet, but no sign of a tear; and when I thankfully returned it to its owner I asked what had happened. It was simple. It was almost as I imagined it. The couple had sat down on the grass for a rest; and then up behind them came Fred. And away went the cap.

This episode, I am afraid, set the tone of Fred’s behaviour towards other sightseers. The trouble, I reckon, was that they were too intent to reach the wreck for them to dally in the way Fred would have liked them to dally. They had no time to play with a donkey. The magnet of disaster destroyed any wish to pause on the way. Morbid curiosity displaced idle pleasure.

Thus, when Fred discovered he was being ignored, he set out to tease. He would watch a group coming along the path from the Carn in the distance, then canter straight at them, scattering them in all directions. I found, for instance, three small boys way off the path and waist-high in undergrowth, and when I asked how they were there, one of them mournfully replied: ‘The donkey chased us, and we’re trying to get round.’ Of course I then escorted them through the zone of danger and Fred, satisfied with his moral victory, followed meekly behind us until we reached the end of Minack’s boundary. Then he scampered back with me, nuzzling me, no longer meek, impatient to play the game again.

He later inveigled me to act as an ally. I began to dislike the ghoulish groups as they strode through Minack private land, not caring about its beauty or that they were there by courtesy, and so I devised a game to play with Fred. He and I would stand in a corner of the field, waiting and watching for a group who looked as if they deserved a surprise. Then, when the chosen victims had reached halfway up the field I would give my order: ‘See ’em off, boy!’ Away Fred careered, not in an unimaginative dash straight at them, but in a circular movement like a dog rounding up sheep. And after a pause I would hasten after him to reassure our victims that there was nothing really to be scared of in the cavalry charge of a baby donkey.

While the
Juan Ferrer
settled on the bottom of the sea, emotionalism went into action. I have often marvelled how emotionalism, skilfully conducted, can achieve results which the basic facts do not warrant, while other campaigns more worthy but less imaginative in appeal stutter into failure. It is, I suppose, mainly a question of timing. If the perimeter influences are favourable, if the event concerned is sufficiently vivid to act as a flag on a masthead, if worthy people are interested who want an outlet for their energy, if there is a chance for a few to achieve a personal advantage, if all these factors combine to push a cause which appears superficially justified, then the chances are that emotionalism will succeed at the expense of realism.