Troubles with a Donkey

(or two)

I live in an area of designated outstanding natural beauty. It contains a decrepit industrial estate in what is left of an old dairy, a sewage works, Nissan huts left over from the last war full of reclaimed house parts, a yard full of derelict and dismantled tractors, and a good old-fashioned scrapyard. The scrapyard and I are old friends, I have visited it for years, even before I moved to the area. I used to traipse around it during visits to sister and brothers who lived in that area, wandering peacefully through lines of old cars and vans and other assorted bits of rusting metal interspersed with fascinating oddities such as the old glass-fibre speedboat that used to scream "Save me, Save me!" every time I passed it. Now it just whimpers quietly, it knows I don't have the time or money.

The scrapyard has been here almost as long as there were cars to rust, and it has passed from the father to his sons. I love to walk along the road beside it on my way up to the rolling fields and wooded hills that are home to the flowers and the deer that I have been photographing. I set out yesterday with my camera and a water bottle, intending to climb the steep hill and visit some lakes I had noticed on the map. I was almost at the turning to the owner’s house when I met the donkeys, ambling quietly along the road towards me.



Once in a while the donkeys make their way out from behind the electric fence and go for a stroll. I have twice gone out at half past six in the morning to set off for work and found them happily chewing the plants in the next door front garden. Now, as then, I called up the owner and said I was chatting with his donkeys and shouldn’t they have a road tax disc on them if they were going to be on the public highway? I herded the donkeys onto the grass verge, but as always, that was as far as they would be driven. We waited for the owner to come along.




The donkeys have been with the scrapyard for as long as I have known it. They originally belonged to Reg, the crane driver who loaded the piles of crushed metal onto lorries and lived in an old double-decker bus on the more overgrown side, close to the pleading speedboat. His woman and her daughter lived nearby in a caravan, preferring a more normal home. Reg had the largest beer belly I had ever seen, and made sure it was always kept full. He died while I was up in London, and I only heard about the funeral from my brother when I paid my next visit. A large number of people had turned up to see him off, and not just drinking friends. Reg had been a county-class cross-country runner in his younger days.

He left his double-decker bus to the scrapyard, from whence it had originally came, and he also left the donkeys. The owner decided he couldn’t see them go to a sanctuary or other place for pets who have lost their human companions, so he took them over. They were very effective guard animals, almost too effective, for they didn’t bark on approach as dogs would do, but would creep quietly up behind an intruder and then cough directly into their ear, or sometimes bray at the tops of their voices. Several would-be thieves suffered injuries dashing headlong into the darkness in fright. In those days thieves hadn’t learnt the art of suing for injuries received during commission of a crime, but as the modern age of litigation dawned the owner began to fear for claims against his business and put the donkeys out to pasture in the grassy common land around the outside of the blackthorn hedge that kept the cars from straying off on their own. Now at least 50 years old, they were slower and quieter than they had been in their heyday when they roamed the avenues between the mangled metal heaps.

The owner arrived as I finished taking a few photos of the donkeys, and we chatted for a while as he inspected the electric fence, which had been caught by a passing vehicle and dragged down. The donkeys had realised it was no longer live and blithely walked straight through it again and trotted off down the road.



“They’ve decided they’d rather go and eat my lawn,” he said, as we watched them waddle down the road.

“OI! Left, left!, he shouted, as they reached the turning to his drive. They stopped for a moment, looked left, looked at each other, and then carried on down the lane.

“I’ll have to get the car and herd them back,” he muttered, and walked off.

I carried on along my way, passing the hedge that last year had been neatly laid into a pleasant plaited shape, and was almost at the turning when I heard a screech of car tires. I also thought I had heard a thump, but couldn’t be certain if it was before or after the short skidding noise. Fearing for the donkeys in the narrow lane I started to run back. I got as far as the top of the road to the scrapyard, from where I could see the empty lane, and also the busy main road. Cars were still going down the hill, so I had to assume that the main road had not had yet another accident. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing one or both of the donkeys dead in the road, and turned round to resume my walk, accepting the fact that in the evening I might be sitting down to write a requiem for a donkey. Later, as I heard sirens wailing, I began to hope that it had after all been a normal overtaking incident on the busy main road, and not someone being taken to hospital with whiplash injuries after meeting an unexpected animal in a quiet country lane.

With the stoppage, the brief run back, and the eventual visit to the muddy stretches of water that had flattered on the map, I was out for all of the afternoon. I walked back past the useless electric fence, the old horsebox body that served as their stables, and past the turning to the owner’s house, without seeing any sight of the donkeys, and mercifully saw no blood on the road or skid marks. When I set off a little later to go and get some computer parts I passed a crumpled car being winched onto a recovery vehicle, and saw the two sets of curving marks rushing towards each other, and the depression in the grassy swathe beside the tarmac where at least one car had ploughed through the waist-high tangle. It had been a people incident after all, and the fifty-year old donkeys would carry on grazing placidly on grass and front-garden flowers according to their fancy.