Spanish steps, p.4
Spanish Steps, page 4
It was gratifying, therefore, to turn to this more junior namesake and find him fighting fit, fully eared and displaying his Fifth Advantage in the form I believe is known as a ‘lazy lob’. As we watched, this already majestic appendage developed further still, inspiring him to engage Mimosa in an activity described by Judy, with the junior delegates in mind, as ‘playing wheelbarrows’.
That wasn’t strictly speaking good news, but it was as good as it got. Even a small donkey, I was told, could drag a 20-stone man around a field. Wrap the leading rope absent-mindedly round a digit and if the animal bolted you might – and in two reported cases actually would – find yourself thumb-hunting in the hedgerows.
I couldn’t begin to master the crucial knot used to attach the donkey to anything: the simple loop Judy held in her fingers was, by some innocuous flick of the wrist, magicked into a multi-whorled, Gordian worm-cast. George bit a hole in my new coat. Asked to indicate Sam’s ‘withers’, I inaugurated another round of jolly guffaws by displaying the anatomical competence of a blindfolded child in a party hat.
All this, of course, was before I’d actually touched one. I’d noticed while watching the video that the more donkeys I saw the bigger they seemed, and as Judy eased me towards Sam’s shoulders I felt hopelessly overawed. It wasn’t just the size, or even the strength. I’d become accustomed to assuming executive control for all my personal transportation needs: you pressed one foot on a pedal and you got somewhere fast, or both feet on two pedals and got there more slowly. But here the boot was on the other hoof. I was not in charge. Finally, displaying the tactile relish of a man compelled to operate a humming light switch with wet hands, I jabbed a finger into Sam’s offside haunch. It yielded and he flinched slightly. I had poked my first donkey.
As new dawns go, few have proved falser. I put the head collar on the wrong way round, was butted indecorously throughout the parade section, and spent so long worrying about how to inspect the back hoofs without having them forcefully applied to my throat that Sam actually fell asleep on his feet. (I’m particularly ashamed to admit it would be over a month before I accepted this as the default stance for a dormant ass.) ‘Use your shoulder,’ urged Judy. ‘Lean into him and he’ll let you take his foot up.’ Everyone else, even the small boys, had long since dealt with their animals and now inevitably gathered round to watch. I applied my weight to Sam’s heated bulk, and gradually, in a procedure that had less in common with veterinary best practice than an attritional arm-wrestling contest, pivoted his knee backwards and brought a foot hoof-side up into my lap. Then I dropped it in disgust and jumped upright. Where once had rung chortles now startled silence reigned. ‘What?’ I said indignantly, challenging the frozen faces around. ‘Come on, it was all full of bits of crap and stuff.’
I did in the end manage a quick couple of scrapes, but neither of us enjoyed the experience. ‘To them it’s just like having their nails cut,’ said Judy bracingly as Sam lashed out once again.
‘Pulled out, more like,’ I muttered.
Sam needed to be appeased, and Judy showed me how to do it. ‘In fact, why don’t you all give this a try,’ she said, happily plunging her hand into a nearby donkey’s cavernous ear and rasping the oiled contours of its internal landscape with an extended knuckle. The hearty delight that warmed the crisp air suggested that for everyone else this was a fully mutual pleasure, but as I eased up to my watch-strap in Sam’s nearside waxen head tube and watched him dribble and quiver in response I felt dirty, as if coerced into an obscure act of wrongness. Here I was, in the dark corner of a West Country stableyard, fisting my donk.
I barely slept in my cosy little b.& b. up the road, beset with misgivings of the most fundamental sort: the day had impressed upon me that what I didn’t know about donkeys you could write in an enormous empty book entitled The Donkey. I’d hoped day two might fill in at least some of the gaps, but in fact it just added in more blank pages. This was Basic Donkey Health Care, and back in the lecture room we were soon in the realm of perioplic horn. A labelled line drawing, the sort of thing you might have found in a Haynes manual, betrayed ‘withers’ as merely a drop in the huge and murky ocean of asinine physiology. Everywhere I looked there were pasterns, croups, crests, polls, coronets. Each hind leg alone incorporated a hock, a gaskin and a stifle. There was even an eel, and not where I expected it.
‘The farrier’s got a case of laminitis to show you,’ said Judy brightly, ‘and I’m hoping to find some seedy toe.’ The daily health check required smelling a donkey’s breath, snipping waxy bits off the inside of his ears, making a ‘mental note’ of the temperature of each foot and, in the case of a gelding, ‘checking round the sheath and cleaning if necessary’. I was introduced to sweet-itch, which if left untreated swiftly transformed any donkey into a four-legged Homer Simpson: bald and yellow. The only remedy – one that aroused the first suspicions that this whole business had been designed as an elaborate joke at my expense – was an all-in-one donkey romper suit fashioned from stout blankets. The other complaints all sounded rather medieval: rain scald, mud fever, quidding and – ow! – sandcrack. ‘Bastard strangles’ was down as a lymphatic infection, but looked like half a tabloid headline on my pilgrim shame, the other half being ‘lovely donkey’. ‘If sinusitis becomes really severe,’ intoned Judy sombrely, ‘then the only effective treatment is facial trepanning.’
Even as I read through the less invasive remedial techniques that evening it was clear I’d never be able to prepare or apply a single one. I’d hardly find Stockholm Tar in the ‘At the Farrier’s’ section of my Berlitz phrase book. And unless anyone told me different, a ‘glucose drench’ would mean a bottle of Lucozade up the croup.
My concept of the donkey as a low-maintenance beast of burden had already been brutally qualified the moment A Passion for Donkeys landed on the doormat. This might have been a book aimed at pre-teenage girls, but though it started with an introduction by Virginia McKenna, it ended with the words, ‘See abscesses, castration, lameness, oedema, tetanus.’ Now I learnt that donkeys even got sunburn, for cock’s sake, which made rather a mockery of their African heritage. And by Christ their guts were fragile. How could the buttercup be a donkey killer? And acorns? ‘Yew is also toxic,’ I read on the leaflet Judy handed out, ‘infected animals usually being found dead.’ Most lethal of all was ragwort, an innocuous weed which at various stages of its illustrated life cycle resembled almost everything that grows anywhere.
There was a whole module on worms: ring, tape, lung. I realised I’d gone past caring when I found myself muttering ‘pinworm round his anus’ to the tune of ‘Lipstick on my Collar’. By the end I was just blankly transcribing overheard words almost at random: scab, zinc, wart, mould, crust, flies, scrotum. On the plus side, I learnt that as I wouldn’t be travelling in February or November, there was no need to worry about encysted redworm. Also, only some of the diseases were transmittable to humans. ‘Oh, yes,’ chirped Judy, aiming a silver-lining smile at me, ‘and donkeys can’t vomit.’
With her reservoir of grim pestilence finally drained, Judy led us down to the stables. Here, a stooped but jolly farrier was working away at an infected hoof with a vicious blade, energetically carving off bony shards until the weathered concrete was littered with oversized nail clippings. ‘I take it you’re not planning to adopt a donkey,’ he laughed, seeing me flinch. ‘God no,’ I said. ‘Just taking one across Spain.’ And with a shocked jerk and a rustic imprecation, he cut his finger.
Time was running out, and Judy could feel my fear. She ferried me down into the courtyard for a private hands-on tutorial in applying a hoof poultice, and without an audience it was all a bit less Generation Game. She ran through the health-care essentials I was likely to need, and what sort of ailments I’d face given what I was doing and where I was doing it. ‘At least you won’t have a lot of rain and mud,’ she concluded. ‘They cause most of the trouble.’ In my happy ignorance I managed a smile of relief.
There was a test at the end, two tests in fact. I read the first question – ‘Which of the following would tell you that your donkey was healthy?’ – and as soon as I saw that this involved a choice between ‘limping’ and ‘bright eyes’ I knew I’d pass. But though the certificate I came away with – my droving licence – declared proficiency in every aspect of Basic Donkey Care, even stable management, no one in the room was under any illusions. They’d watched me running away from George and being snouted about the courtyard by Sam. They knew that I was scared of donkeys, and they knew the donkeys knew it too. Even in French, as I discovered three weeks later.
Three
Comfortably more convenient than pilgrimage rivals Rome and Jerusalem, Santiago was always the British holy traveller’s preferred destination. Shakespeare included references to ‘cockle hats and staffs’ in Hamlet and Sir Walter Ralegh even composed a rhyming eulogy to the pilgrimage. ‘Give me my scallop-shell of quiet, My staff of faith to walk upon . . . My gown of glory, hope’s true gage, And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage,’ he wrote, and though he actually never did, skeletons clad in decayed pilgrim cloaks and clutching scallop shells to their ribs have been uncovered in church crypts throughout the land.
The eleventh-century British vanguard came on pray-and-slay crusades to take on the Moors; later, we helped pioneer pilgro-tourism and so, say I, inaugurated a long tradition of holidaying in Spain (and as souvenirs go, it’s tough to top remission of accumulated sins). We stayed loyal to Santiago even as the ever shifting allegiances of medieval Europe threw up new hazards: British pilgrim ships were regularly held to ransom in Spanish ports, and in 1375 six pilgrims from Yorkshire were executed as traitors on their return from Santiago, unaware that they had passed through Castille during a period of alliance with the hated French.
No one is certain how many Brits travelled overland, but good records exist of those who took the pilgrim ferries direct to Spain – William Wey, the most notable British pilgrim chronicler, sailed from Plymouth to La Coruña (‘La Groyne’ in his unfortunate translation) in an impressive four days. Even in the fifteenth century, with the pilgrimage’s popularity well past its peak, over 3,000 pilgrims were voyaging from Britain every year.
But even when Anglo-French relations sank to their murderous worst, there were always those for whom the express sea route was a little lightweight, a little inauthentic. To walk, it was said, was to pray with one’s feet. And for those, as I discovered between the forbidding covers of Jacobean Pilgrims from England to St James from the Early Twelfth to the Late Fifteenth Century, a regularly favoured stopover was at any of the friendly monasteries of southern France, where many – oh, happy, happy words – ‘were given or lent an ass for the journey’.
I’d found Hanno after a desperate request to Jan and Nick Flanagan, at whose cycling-based lodging house Pyrenean Pursuits I had been a guest some years before. I needed a donkey, I needed him in or near Spain, and with the summer pilgrim rush I’d been urged to avoid now encroaching, I needed him fast. Hanno, I should perhaps point out, was not a donkey. He was very much a man, indeed a vital, bearded Hagrid of a man who hurled my belongings into the dusted rear of his much-travelled Landcruiser with a single swing of a long arm. The Continental donkey enthusiast was evidently a breed apart from his pigtailed Sidmouth counterpart.
Apprehensive as to how I might recognise my donk vendor when he arrived to meet me at a bedrizzled Carcassonne airport, Hanno had described himself as having ‘much disorder in the hair’. As long as this hadn’t seeped into the head below I didn’t mind. For two weeks I’d been in constant, if indirect, contact with Mañuel Bazquez, a man tracked down by a Spanish-resident friend of mine, John Perring. The service Mañuel provided seemed ideal for my needs: he hired donkeys to Spanish pilgrims, providing all the medical kit and saddlebags and so on, and after a month drove all the way to Santiago to pick them up in a horse trailer. A one-way rental, and for only 600 euros all in.
There were a couple of drawbacks. One was that I’d never manage 774 kilometres in a month. Another was that Mañuel didn’t have any donkeys.
I’m not sure why it took Mañuel so long – a dozen emails and as many phone calls – to divulge this important fact to John, but his failure to do so didn’t augur well for future dealings with the tradesmen of Spain. On day one Mañuel had fourteen donkeys, but by day eight a party of pilgrims had led half of those away. Then on day twelve, without explanation, a solitary jackass browsed Mañuel’s yard. ‘We’ve got to make him an offer on that one pronto,’ I told John.
‘Absolutely right.’
Twelve hours later John phoned me back. ‘He’s just sold it to a shepherd.’
A day of silence was followed by an email of blurted self-castigation, in which Mañuel confessed that his rental business was no longer an active one; that indeed it was now – put the chisel down, Mr Moore – two years since last a bray had been heard in his grounds. ‘People who rented his donkeys couldn’t cope,’ elaborated John that evening as I held the receiver to my limp and sallow features, ‘especially when it rained a lot. They just abandoned them by the road.’
I can’t say this was a happy time. Mañuel’s customers had been Spanish, and so by definition more culturally at ease with donkeys: so at ease that when they weren’t weaving toy examples together out of raffia to flog to unsophisticated foreigners, they were lugging real ones up the church tower and heaving them off as a fiesta ice-breaker.
As we rumbled and roared through damp villages, I waited for Hanno to explain in his proficient English why I had nothing to fear. Instead I learnt that people would think I was a gitano, or gypsy, and would consequently drive the donkey off their land, to be met by real gitanos, or gypsies, who would steal it. I learnt how I’d need to treat the animal for ticks every three weeks, and then in dramatic terms how to effect this by jabbing a stout hypodermic through its breast – an enactment that required him to remove both hands from the steering-wheel whilst overtaking a tractor.
‘You are strong?’
Hanno glanced at my T-shirt and what it contained, saving us both the discomfort of a verbal reply. ‘But you will be. You must be. In the first days the donkay must understand that you are the boss. You will be . . . physical to him.’
Walking a donkey on asphalt, as following the camino would regularly require me to, dangerously eroded its hoofs; better to take a compass and just head off cross-country, snipping barbed fences with wire-cutters. I should also be wary of crypto-fascists, two-faced priests and snakes. ‘Be very careful, huh?’ he warned at the end of almost every sentence, rather superfluously for what had now been upgraded from a culturo–spiritual voyage of discovery to a fatally ill-equipped commando raid by the Dad’s Army cavalry.
Tarmac turned to mud and we bumped up, across and then down a mist-wreathed hillside. The sudden violence of our progress seemed to dislodge a rogue nugget of inner defiance: what did he know, anyway? Panoramane, Hanno’s one-man ass-for-hire operation, rented donkeys for cosy three- and four-day hikes around the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Long-distance travel was not his business, and nor was anything Spanish. By his own admission he’d never even sold a donkey before.
Despite this stage of the journey causing his considerable head to impact repeatedly against the cab roof, the proximity of home seemed to mellow Hanno. ‘But what you are doing, it’s a . . . a very strong experience.’ He kissed the bunched fingertips of his right hand. ‘You will find again the, ah, ancient rhythms of life, a nomade with another nomade at your side.’ We rumbled down a muddy hairpin and up to a wooden house in the latter stages of construction; he killed the engine. ‘Possessions will have no meaning,’ continued Hanno, his glassy gaze on the bedrizzled valley below, perhaps willing me to imagine no religion.
‘Voilà.’ An asinine honk blared out, and there, trotting down through the tussocked greenery, were a dozen damp donks. Big donks: wildly shaggy, almost bison-like in their brunette sturdiness. Feeling like a motorist whose car has broken down in a safari park, I managed a mechanical wave.
‘Which one is mine?’ I asked, unable to keep a quaver out of my voice.
Hanno scanned the long, dark faces. ‘He’s not here at this moment. Sometimes you find him, ah . . .’ Bleeding? Foaming? Sinking? Hanging? ‘. . . Hiding.’
‘So, um, how do you know?’ I enquired as Hanno climbed into the back to pass me the bags out under the gormless scrutiny of his herd, mercifully coralled behind an electric fence.
‘Hmm?’
‘About, you know, the experience. And its strength.’
Boldly oblivious to the constraints of his surroundings, Hanno depicted incredulity with the very Frenchest of all body gestures. ‘But I have done it!’
All we’d established in the first of our two brief calls was that he had a spare donkey, and would sell it to me for 800 euros. The second had covered logistical arrangements.
‘But you knew, no? Five year ago I walk from Belgium to Santiago with my family and two donkays.’
It was him! And he wasn’t even French! This was quite something. ‘Why will I sell you donkay if not for this reason? I don’t sell donkays, but this adventure you make, it’s special, and so I like to help.’
Following Hanno up into his home I felt as if I was being inducted into a benign secret society. Within lay yet more evidence that the people who did this pilgrimage were clearly not as I was. No television, but a computer monitor with a donkey-themed screen saver. A wood-burning stove and a supper-cooking wife, the welcoming, winsome Marie-Christine, chopping home-grown vegetables at a long, slender table. The more youthful of their two daughters breezed about in a headscarf. Her elder sister, evidently at a more challenging stage of young adulthood, had by mutual request been installed in the guest room. This was an old caravan 100 yards uphill, yet still her parents found themselves within the radius of adolescent loathing: asked to find alternative accommodation with friends for the two days of my visit, she had apparently almost smiled.
