Spanish Steps Read online

  Of course, there were so many other ways the camino could ravage the mortal physique. The red cover of the Confraternity’s Pilgrim Guide to the Camino Frances was ominously laminated against inevitably brutal elements; within I read of temperatures that carelessly roamed the centigrade scale – from 2 degrees to 42, sometimes within a day, in my chosen departure month of April. One man stood to describe a storm so violent he’d had to link arms with four others while they dodged wind-borne farm machinery: ‘That was the day after two pilgrims ahead of us had been killed in a blizzard crossing the Pyrenees.’ There were still wolves in some of the lonelier forests, and bears had been reintroduced by someone with his heart in the right place and a desire to see mine in the serrated, slavering wrong one. And only the month before, fourteen pilgrims had been throttled in their sleep by hobgoblins.

  The discussion turned to packing and minimum human payloads, and as it did the voices around were sharpened with the boastful harshness of competition, perhaps even obsession. ‘I take my lead from the original pilgrims,’ said a sturdy woman with a face like a toby jug. ‘A hat, a coat and a stick.’ Here were people seriously debating whether to cut their toothbrushes in half; whether to take just one pair of socks; whether not to wear any underpants. ‘Did that last year,’ blurted a man in army shorts with fearfully misplaced smugness. ‘Went commando. You know: nothing on under these.’ Either Cleanliness didn’t fancy the trip, or Godliness just sneaked off without telling him. As a vague but familiar sense of inadequacy settled upon me, an epiphany presented itself, a sudden understanding of an important truth about myself as a pilgrim: buggered if I’m carrying a rucksack.

  Ignoring the fact that I would have to join these people, I didn’t see why I was obliged to beat them. Cut your pants in half and floss with a bootlace and you’d still be shouldering 8 kilos – the bare feasible minimum, yet nonetheless equivalent to piggy backing a set of fat new twins for 500 miles. And in any case there was something desperately dispiriting about rucksacks: put one on and the visual perception of your humourless inanity is boosted by as much as 24 per cent. People with rucksacks on don’t have fun, or if they do it’s the sort that involves a Thermos flask and brass rubbing.

  There were about eighty walkers in our group, and, in a separate huddle on the other side of the hall, perhaps fifteen cyclists. Panniers, trailers, baskets . . . the weight seemed to be lifting from my shoulders. I was half out of my seat en route to their ranks when a whispered comment from the barrel-chested sobersides three chairs down caught my ear. ‘I’m thinking about taking a mule.’

  ‘Not a mule,’ someone I couldn’t see replied. ‘Terrible animals in inexperienced hands. Wilful. Everything they say about them is true. I live near the Army’s Mule Pack Transport Troop in Melton Mowbray, and even they’ve switched to ponies.’

  I sat back down and listened.

  ‘Not a horse neither. I did it last year and on day two we saw a woman in tears with this big mare. Couldn’t cope with it.’

  ‘Fussy eaters.’

  ‘Hypochondriacs.’

  ‘If I could find one, I’d take a donkey,’ said the anti-mulist. ‘They eat anything and they’re incredibly resilient.’

  A distant but determined smile annexed half my face, and it was still there when I walked out into the spring wind half an hour later.

  In 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson went to the South of France, bought a canvas sleeping bag and set about finding himself a holiday runabout. ‘What I required was something cheap and small and hardy,’ he wrote in the subsequent journal, ‘and all these prerequisites pointed to a donkey.’ In my mind, of course, they pointed to a Fiat Panda, but a résumé of Stevenson’s adventures with Modestine provided heady inspiration. For 65 francs and a glass of brandy, he had bagged himself a slow but steady beast of burden, and one – as I could not stop reminding myself – with a uniquely authentic pilgrim heritage.

  In recent years there has been some theological debate, mostly fought out on bumper stickers in America’s more rural states, as to how the Son of God might sort out his transportation during any second coming. A derivative of the ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ mantra of youth-oriented evangelism, ‘What Would Jesus Drive?’ has inspired entertaining reinterpretation of the Scriptures. Chiefly to the benefit of Honda: it’s well known that Jesus endured three Civic trials, and clearly dissatisfied with these test drives bagged himself something a little bigger – we learn in the Book of Acts that ‘the disciples were in one Accord’.

  Reluctantly discarding this tempting solution to the mysterious origins of that central initial in Jesus H. Christ, the more pertinent question should surely be: What Did Jesus Ride? And here we have an answer beyond speculation – from foetus to saviour, the Son of God was carried about on the back of a donkey. As I’ve said before, albeit only in regard to long hair and immortality, if it’s good enough for him . . .

  ‘A donkey?’ blurted my family as one. For a moment it didn’t seem they’d ever be able to list all the reasons that made this so entertainingly ludicrous. Almost at random, my seven-year-old daughter Lilja alighted on just one. ‘He’ll . . . stamp on your toes.’ And then she laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

  There was to be a lot of this in the weeks ahead, and I soon honed the gently beatific smile that was my response: forgive them, Lord, for they know not why they hoot. Yes, I’d never ridden a donkey on a beach or petted one at a city farm; never even pinned a cardboard tail to one’s throat after the jelly and ice cream. There were obvious counterbalances to that momentous unburdening of the rucksack, yet any logistical disadvantages could, with a little imagination, be repackaged as spiritual bolsters. For a lifelong Londoner with mild farmyard phobia, assuming care of a proper, large animal instantly upgraded my camino from big walk to revelatory voyage of self-examination.

  So a donkey would be my hairy-coated hair shirt, making the journey a truer test of the will, a trial. The contemporary pilgrim, I’d read, departed with a burden of doubt or distress – in charge of a jackass, I’d saddled myself with a ready-made bundle of both. Maybe even a little bottle of Christian spirit, in an All Creatures Great and Small kind of way. And because I’d already proved myself unable to resist pondering the opportunities for labour-saving pilgrimage dishonesty – bicycles, hitch-hiking, public transport – here was a guarantor of moral correctitude. How could I cheat with a donkey? A question I hoped not to be asking Birna on my first night home.

  ‘You don’t want to over-prepare,’ someone had said at the Confraternity meeting. ‘Without surprises it’s not a journey of discovery.’ Waylaid by donkeys, in thought if not in deed, this was a homily I embraced so tightly that after a month you could read it backwards on my chest. I downloaded a Spanish language course off the Net, but as is often the way with such material found it hacked by some corrupted absurdist. I tried, really I did, to concentrate on ‘I am not from Venezuela’ and ‘Here is the ferry terminal’, but it was never going to be easy when ‘Eat shit and die’ and ‘Get the fuck out of here’ were on offer. Then I bought a torch, and some safety pins, and – may the Lord have mercy on my soles – a pair of open-toed sandals. I knew there’d be something I wouldn’t be able to find when the time came to pack. Why did it have to be the safety pins?

  We were into April, I was nowhere near finding myself a donkey, and the Internet, for once, had failed to unearth a willing ass. But it did add grist to the mill, with a surprisingly large number of contemporary paeans to the donkey as long-distance porter. All were in French, however, and because I don’t even know what fetlock or withers mean in English, I was obliged to make use of an online translation service. Being complimentary, this was also magnificently wayward, referring to God as ‘Our Mister’ and to sundry European towns as ‘Population of Fields’, ‘Queen Bridge’ and ‘Pony’. Thus I read of the Breton man who had taken his donkey across France ‘not as physical exploit, or tourism, but order gait witty’. There was the retired optician whose donkey had been led through Lyons’ dark streets by ‘girls of small virtue’ and – oooh – the Belgian couple who had walked with a pair of donkeys and two young daughters all the way from their home to Santiago. I was also, in more general terms, appraised of the ‘Five Advantages of the Luggage Donkey’.

  First of these was, of course, that ‘one not carry more’. Here, having explained why 56 kilos is not large issue for donkeys, the author rails against the misplaced nostalgic sentimentality that, to atone for cruelties past, now aims ‘to treat our modern donkeys as living-room toutous’. Advantages two and three emphasised that a donkey does not cost nothing and provides an amicable and confident link with the native populations. The donkey’s mischievous nature as a joker who will imagine sometimes the worst stupidities to go interesting was explored in ‘Comedy – The Fourth Advantage’. And finally, with my mouse arrow hovering shakily over the ‘clear screen’ button, I read of the donkey as a small companion, very discreet, very complicit, who will know to share you a beautiful love history.

  ‘You can give the donkey a happy ending, but the miserable beginning remains for ever.’ Scrolled beneath Eeyore in its promotional material, it’s this ethos that has made the Donkey Sanctuary one of Britain’s most successful charities. Largely funded by bequests from women old enough to remember doe-eyed long-ears being beaten in field as on beach, it now raises £13 million a year. Its founder, Elisabeth Svendsen, has done her job so well that 3,500 living-room toutous – three quarters of the entire UK donkey population – now browse the sanctuary’s 2,500 rolling Devonian acres. Three quarters! Yet still sixty full-time sanctuary inspectors roam the land, looking for donkeys in distress, or really just any donkeys at all. Now there’s a job. ‘Dr Svendsen? Inspector Forty-six here. Listen, I’m at the Savoy tonight
. . . Yes, same story as Claridges, really – loads of people, couple of dogs, no donkeys . . . Actually, no, that’s a very good point. I’ll check under the bed right away.’

  It had recently lodged in the back of my mind, and more regrettably at the front of my mouth, that I was about to do something bad to a donkey. When I’d phoned up the sanctuary to book a place on their Basic Donkey Care training course, why hadn’t I lied? I could have claimed to be researching a horsefly-on-the-wall TV docu-soap, or said that my vastly rich and terminally ill grandmother had asked for a report on current levels of deserving poignancy in the donkey community. The woman I spoke to didn’t approve at all of my intentions as I outlined them on the phone, and it was hard to blame her. Slave-driving a donkey up and down the Pyrenees and onwards for almost 500 miles, with a backload of stuff I couldn’t be arsed to carry myself: precisely the type of persecution they’d been set up to eradicate, and here was some bloke asking them to help make it happen. It was as if I’d gone to Help the Aged for advice on tattooing a confused uncle.

  Instead she’d given me the phone number of a husband and wife of their acquaintance who’d recently taken a mule through France. ‘Talk to them first, then see if you still think it’s a good idea.’ Her tone said I certainly would not.

  In fact, Rex Johnson and his wife tried their very best to encourage me when I spoke to them – a shame, as I’d have dearly loved to dismiss almost everything they said as defeatist propaganda. ‘A bit nervous, was Sparkle. Bolted a lot. Didn’t like forests much – any large trees, really. Or birds.’ This revelation caused me to emit a noise which Rex interpreted as implying modest curiosity rather than distraught panic. ‘Yes, funny thing. Swans in particular. I think it was the reflection of their wings on the water. I had to sit up with him all night a few times.’

  The terrible red tape at the borders, the importance of teaching the animal to drink from a bottle – it was some time before the Johnsons stopped supplementing the burgeoning stock of equine tribulations I’d already built up. I’d anticipated that saddling up in the morning might prove a mild chore, but by their estimate, leaving at 9 a.m. meant getting up in the dark. Every two hours thereafter you had to take everything off again to let him rest, prior to the early night that ensured what my Internet translator had so engagingly described as ‘evenings of grass and of water’. As a result the best they’d ever managed in a day was 16 kilometres, and even averaging that, seven days a week, would mean fifty days from St Jean to Santiago – at least ten too many if I wanted to stay ahead of the summer rush of Spanish student–pilgrims the Confraternity had warned me about.

  The train of thought that all this set in motion was a one-way express to Sod That, and before it scooped me aboard I quickly phoned back the lady at the sanctuary. ‘I’ve never felt more sure about anything,’ I boomed, sweeping aside her scepticism more melodramatically than intended. There was a silence, presumably while she contemplated the alternatives: accept me on the course, or let a clueless novice loose with a donkey in a land not known for its enlightened attitude to animal welfare. ‘You’re not to ride him,’ she said at length, in a scolding tone. ‘I promise,’ I replied: don’t tell Jesus, but an adult’s weight comfortably exceeds the maximum humane payload for a donkey. Another pause, ended by a sort of defeated sigh. ‘We’ll see you on April the 8th.’

  So there I was, in a room wallpapered with best-in-show rosettes and a floor space dominated by a four-legged skeleton. Without having yet beheld a living counterpart, I was reminded by the dimensions of this fleshless beast that by being larger than a cat, the donkey fell into that category of animals I was at least slightly scared of.

  My fellow training-course delegates were three schoolgirls, their teacher and a family group that included a pair of pre-teenage boys. The schoolgirls were there, I suppose, because of the peculiar hold that equine beasts exert on young females, and the family because they were hoping to adopt a pair of Sidmouth donkeys as living-room toutous – sorry, as cheerful additions to their weekend farm in Hampshire. ‘It’s no longer clear what donkeys are for,’ I’d read in a newspaper critique of the sanctuary’s success. Well, I was putting that right, I thought, bolstered by the pronouncement on the Donkey Breed Society’s website that ‘a busy donkey is a happy donkey’. At the time this seemed a pilgrim’s charter, but looking from face to kind and earnest face as Judy, our tutor for the day, doled out the information packs, it tolled out in my mind as the slogan beneath which I’d have driven through the sanctuary gates had Dr Goebbels been in charge.

  A scent of manure wafted in through the lecture-room windows along with the springtime Devonian sun. Two girls in sanctuary sweatshirts popped their heads round the door to announce they were ‘taking the donkeys out into the woods for a bit of a jolly’, and I looked in vain for someone to share a ribald smirk with.

  We kicked off with a video. The donkey, I learnt, evolved in Africa and first came to Britain with the Romans: jackass beat Jesus to our shores, but – by happy historical coincidence – only just. Being biologically designed to roam arid landscapes in search of food, the modern British-based domestic donkey’s chief enemies were over-feeding, lack of exercise and moisture-related fungal conditions. Everyone else scribbled frantically; for once I smiled and folded my arms. (This was perhaps two weeks before the twin discoveries that Galicia’s meteorological reputation has earned it the nickname ‘the urinal of Spain’, and that I would be starting my pilgrimage at the end of the month known colloquially as ‘water thousand’.)

  ‘What you’re seeing here,’ said Judy, as on the screen two pony-tailed girls chaperoned an unenthusiastic long-ear across what was probably a paddock, ‘is a pretty outdated method of leading a donkey. We don’t teach that now.’ I couldn’t begin to see what rendered their approach so shamefully démodé, but the prospect of being tutored in state-of-the-art leading techniques was one that quietly excited. I saw myself being fêted by grateful locals as Don Burro del Futuro, the man who brought Castilian donkey handling into the twenty-first century.

  I’d smelt the donkeys, and I’d heard them – an extraordinary, painful noise, not so much a hee-haw as someone trying to push-start a seized-up traction-engine. After lunch I finally got to see some. We were led into a small, cobbled courtyard, and there before us stood half a dozen examples of the beast known to the rosy-cheeked and exclusively female Training Centre staff as ‘donks’. They’d seemed big enough on the screen. Now, here, around me, they were huge. Huge and stubborn and indomitable.

  Judy informed us that Coco, a feisty male dedicated to the detection and ruthless humiliation of ‘donkophobic’ visitors, had been locked away. This still, however, left my asinine virginity in the hands of one animal who routinely battered visitors about the chest and legs with the business end of a jaw-gripped traffic cone, and another who specialised in the removal of jewellery by dental means.

  ‘Oh, Mimosa’s a sweetie,’ I heard someone say. And: ‘George – he’s a terrible tinker.’ I’d been told that the dearth of published donkey-handling guides was down to the impossibility of generalising usefully on such individual animals, but this lot seemed almost identical to me: idling about the courtyard with expressions of bleary bemusement, like big-eared ponies with hangovers. These were show donkeys, yet they looked, and indeed felt, as if they’d been stitched together from old doormats. The girl next to me patted one and a great brown dust-cloud rose up into the sun.

  One of them shared my name, a fact regrettably divulged only after I had entertained the courtyard with a panicked response to the command ‘Shift your bum, Tim, you daft lummox!’ He wasn’t the only one, in fact: I’d found another in the index of Elisabeth Svendsen’s A Passion For Donkeys (not a book, I’ve discovered, you’ll want to keep spine out on a prominent shelf). ‘Some six years ago,’ began the relevant page, ‘Timothy was a happy, normal gelding in his early thirties.’ A personally memorable introduction to an unforgettable tale of friendship, of jealousy, but above all of almost continuous Timothy-directed mutilation. The final episode was recounted with lurid relish: ‘Armed with a carving knife, the gang attacked Timothy, slicing through one ear and then the other . . . He was still blundering desperately around the field, blood flowing down his eyes, when the unsuspecting owner arrived with his evening carrot.’