Mules are usually cheerful, intelligent animals, appreciate proper handling, and resent violence.
The War Office, Animal Management (London, 1923)
THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY BUILDING stood proudly by the side of the road, whitewashed and with a sign saying ‘ham and eggs’. What the sign didn’t say was that, while to all intents and purposes this looked like any other pub, it didn’t serve alcohol. The Cross Keys was a temperance inn and its name had been carefully chosen: the keys are those which Saint Peter holds to the gates of heaven.
Jasper had not been enthusiastic about coming, but became more interested when he read out the unusual list of drinks displayed in the dining room.
‘Dandelion and burdock, sarsaparilla, although they warn you should “be alert to the fact that sarsaparilla contains chemicals that aid the production of testosterone in the body”. There’s also a ginger slammer. And a concoction made from nettles, which apparently has “the aroma of a Sauvignon Blanc”. Hmm. They’ve definitely tried to give the botanicals a bit of a lift.’
The young waitress took our order. Jasper went for the sarsaparilla, to my amusement. We asked if she ever got disappointed customers who hadn’t checked in advance about the availability of alcohol.
‘Yes, we do. And they just go away.’
It felt not so much like a bar as a tea-room, with low beams, old ticking clocks and wooden dressers, together with the odd eccentric touch, like a policeman’s helmet hanging from a wall. Built in 1619, updated and extended in 1732, the Cross Keys had been turned into a temperance inn in the late nineteenth century when the movement was at its height.
The owner appeared, a cheerful, rumpled man in a green sweater, a Quaker himself. His name was Alan Clowes. He told us the property had originally been owned by one of the first Quakers, a man called Gervase Benson, who had been a colonel in the Civil War and a man of considerable influence. Like most temperance inns, by the end of the twentieth century it had fallen into disuse, and Alan and his wife had done a great deal of work to restore it, supported by the National Trust.
‘We have a lady buried under the floorboards in the dining room,’ he told us. ‘She was buried there when it was the garden. Now, let me take your order for food.’
But I wasn’t letting Alan get away with that; and it was too early in the morning for food. I got him to tell the story. The woman had been Gervase Benson’s wife Dorothy, like him first a Westmorland Seeker and then, when the movement began, a Quaker. As such, she had been prosecuted for her beliefs.
‘Dorothy was a very staunch and steadfast person. She would walk for miles if she had to. She once walked all the way to Carlisle gaol to see George Fox when he was in prison – but they wouldn’t let her in, so she had to walk all the way back again.
‘When she lived here, she was always disrupting church services and after many warnings was finally imprisoned – hauled off to York when she was seven months pregnant. She was told she would be released if she gave an undertaking not to disrupt church services in the future. But she wouldn’t. So she died in prison four years later. And her husband asked that her body be brought back and buried here, rather than in an Anglican churchyard.
‘It’s not a well-known story. The Quakers never talked much about themselves. Still don’t. But there was a lot of hardship in those early days.’
I asked Alan why conditions had been so propitious in what was once the county of Westmorland for the Quaker movement to begin. Was it because of the self-reliant nature of those who lived here?
‘Well, I tell you what: we need more independence all over again. And we need to get our county back. It’s ridiculous that they abolished Westmorland and put it inside Cumbria, which is a different place altogether.
‘By the way,’ added Alan, ‘you do know this wasn’t turned into a temperance inn for religious reasons?’
I didn’t. Given the house’s long association with the Quaker movement, I had assumed precisely that.
‘It’s because the landlord died and his widow couldn’t afford to keep up the licence. For most of the nineteenth century they served alcohol here.’
I sipped my dandelion and burdock. To be honest, I thought it was the sort of drink that Jethro would appreciate more than me. The principle of a teetotal pub was an interesting one; I just wasn’t sure if I could welcome it in practice.
Jasper made a complimentary remark about his sarsaparilla.
‘Ah,’ said Alan, ‘I can tell from your accent that you hail from across the water. Did you know it was an Irish family, the Fitzpatricks, who did more than anybody else to set up the temperance inns here? They came over to Lancashire in the 1880s. Like a lot of Irish, they had signed the pledge, and they brought their recipes for herbal drinks with them. By the time they’d finished, they had over twenty temperance bars. It used to be a really big movement, in the North particularly.
‘We had a man from CAMRA come here once,’ Alan continued. ‘Had a fit. Said he wanted to sue us under the Trade Descriptions Act – that we weren’t an inn at all. Only came because a Sunday magazine included us in a list of the best pubs in the country. He obviously hadn’t read the small print. Some people are just so sad.’
I asked if Alan came from a long family of Quakers.
‘No, not at all. In fact, none of my family were Quakers. I was very fond of my dad, he was a bus driver. And when he died I went into the local church, an Anglican one, and I thought, “I’m getting nothing out of this place, it’s cold and it’s miserable.” But then I went and sat in Brigflatts, the meeting house at Sedbergh. And at once I felt at home. The lad who was the warden at the time was an American, whose day-job was over at Durham Prison. He was working with prisoners who were serving life, and he was trying to give them a reason to keep on living. And I thought that must be a hell of a job. I liked him.
‘For many of the first meetings I went to, nobody ever spoke at all. Then a lady started speaking. She’d been on a Women’s Institute outing to an old country house where they’d recently found a doorway that had been blocked up and led to a room. And that was it. That was the story. Nothing more. And I could see everybody thinking. And somebody else got up and said, yes, we all had these rooms that were blocked away inside of us.’
I enjoyed Alan’s calm and deliberate way of telling a story. One of the most attractive qualities of Quakers must be that, unlike most religious movements, they do not proselytise; they let others see by quiet example. If you are moved to do so, they will always make you welcome at a meeting house, but they won’t be knocking on your door with a Bible in their hand.
We made our goodbyes. Jasper decided to head back to the farm and check that Jethro was all right; he probably needed a walk to work off all the excess testosterone in his sarsaparilla.
Meanwhile, I headed on to nearby Sedbergh, inspired by Alan’s stories and wanting to find out more about the birthplace of the Quaker movement.
Coming down from the Howgills into the valley where Sedbergh lies, I was struck by the beautiful setting. More lush and green than the high fells I had been travelling across, the last waves of the Lake District rolled down to meet the western Yorkshire Dales and gave the best of both worlds: roads that wound and curled to reveal a storybook landscape, where every lane seemed to peel off a small hill and the fields were a patchwork in shades of green.
As a place to ignite a movement – a place to inspire hope in a new beginning for England – it would be hard to beat. And of course, for the Quakers, this part of Westmorland had one great advantage: it was remote from the religious authorities, not just in London, but also York.
At the bookshop in Sedbergh, all was not well. I looked in to ask for a book on the early Quaker movement. Oddly, they didn’t have any, given the local relevance. But an argument was going on and they may have been distracted. It was a large shop arranged over two floors and there were books scattered all over the entranceway.
‘We’ve got to rehouse these orphans!’ exclaimed an older man, who I guessed was the owner. ‘The situation’s out of control. They’re all over the place. And somebody’s mixed them in with the table books … I can hardly believe it! I just can’t find anything.’ He sounded at the end of his rag. The two women helping him made soothing suggestions in unnaturally slow voices. ‘It’s all right. I’m sure we can rehouse all the orphans,’ said one. ‘Yes, we just need to do it systematically,’ said the other.
They didn’t have the book I wanted on the start of the Quakers – and I noticed throughout my visit that it was a curiously unheralded movement, perhaps because Quakers are so inherently modest. Instead, I found row upon row of old county histories: the literary equivalent of sporting prints, designed to line a wall rather than ever be read.
Only one second-hand volume caught my fancy – by that old rogue Robert Gibbings, whose path I had crossed in my previous book when crossing a stretch of the Thames, which he had once floated down in a glass-bottomed punt. His popular wartime account of that journey, Sweet Thames Run Softly, had inspired a sequel, Floating down the Seine, which I had not come across before. I flicked open the pages at random, not least to be able to talk about it with Jasper later, as he was a great Gibbings fan.
Gibbings had reached Paris. He was telling a tall story about how Montparnasse models were so used to posing nude for artists that they would drop all their clothes on entering any studio, with predictably embarrassing consequences. But I suspect if I had opened just about any page there would have been a story involving a naked girl and an artist; Gibbings was of that bohemian Augustus John generation for whom the two inevitably went together.
However, this was a distraction from my purer quest to discover more about the origins of Quakerism. For like Buddhism, it was one of those religious movements which everyone broadly approved of but few understood – indeed, knew little about other than the headlines: Pacifists – Quiet – Independent Thinking. All qualities that were difficult to disagree with, if harder to practise.
Sedbergh was a small and appealing market town at the foot of the Howgills. It did not have one of the big cobbled market squares of its Yorkshire equivalents; more self-effacing, the quiet high street was filled with old-fashioned greengrocers and charity shops.
A little past Sedbergh, I came to the quiet hamlet of Brigflatts where one of the first Quaker meeting houses was built. It was here that a charismatic preacher called George Fox arrived in June of 1652 from the south, from Leicestershire, and found such a receptive audience for his radical message that the whole movement was born. The owner of Brigflatts at the time was a man called Richard Robinson, who Fox had heard might be sympathetic to his way of thinking.
And from Major Bousfield’s I came to Richard Robinson’s; and as I was passing along the way, I asked a man, ‘which was Richard Robinson’s?’, and he asked me from whence I came, and I told him, ‘from the Lord’.
And so when I came in to Richard Robinson’s, I declared the everlasting truth to him; and then a dark jealousy rose up in him after I was gone to bed, that I might be somebody that was come to rob his house; and he locked all his doors fast.
The Journal of George Fox
George Fox’s Journal, written many years later when he was in prison, gives a vivid and idiosyncratic account of those heady days, which he considered the most important of his life. When I had been at the temperance inn, Alan Clowes suggested that this encounter with a man when Fox was trying to find Robinson’s house has an edge of humour to it. The reason the man asked him ‘from whence he came’ was probably due to Fox’s thick Leicestershire accent; in those days, when regional dialects were more pronounced, it must have sounded comical to Westmorland ears. Fox’s tart retort, ‘from the Lord’, may have been because he was tired of people commenting on it.
And the next day I went to a separate meeting at Justice Benson’s, where the people was generally convinced; and this was the place that I had seen a people coming forth in white raiment; and a mighty meeting there was and is to this day near Sedbergh which I gathered in the name of Jesus.
The people ‘coming forth in white raiment’ were the Westmorland Seekers, and the reason that George Fox’s message found such a quick reception. The Seekers had been established in this part of Westmorland for some years and already proposed a radical, puritan form of Christianity. One of their doctrines was that priests should live austerely and not extract tithes from the flock. But Fox went further. He questioned the need for a formal priest, and indeed church, at all. If God was everywhere, then one might as well preach in the open air. ‘A church,’ said Fox, ‘is only a building.’ Moreover, the members of a community, both men and women, should all be empowered to debate with each other on matters of faith.
It was a revolutionary message and not surprisingly the Established Church reacted to it with extraordinary hostility. The later persecution of Quakers, at times vicious, often followed from the Church’s concern that it would lose its financial support as much as for theological reasons.
So, what did (and do) Quakers actually believe? This is harder to pin down. In some ways, they have always liked to define themselves by rejecting the ideas of others. In the seventeenth century, this meant they were opposed to the hard-line predestination views of some puritans who believed they were an elect; for the Quakers, salvation was possible for everyone, and men and women were equal in the eyes of the Lord. Moreover, people were urged to turn to the light of Christ within themselves. Even the Bible was less important than this inner spirit. As one commentator has put it, for the Quaker believer, ‘Heaven was within’.
When I found the Brigflatts meeting house down the end of a small country lane – with no one querying my strange southern accent – I found a class in progress: a group of Quakers were being taught how to scythe grass on the lawn just in front of the meeting house.
‘Why use a strimmer,’ asked the young man giving the lesson, ‘when you can do this instead? When you can be at peace with yourself?’
Given that using a full-length scythe clearly needed a great deal of instruction – the class were advancing cautiously over the grass to make sure they didn’t cut their toes – I could see why people might keep the strimmer. But the scythes all moving across the lawn in unison had a quiet grace that was instantly appealing. It was a lovely thing to watch.
‘What you have to do,’ the young man told the class, ‘is use your whole body weight and balance to swing the scythe from side to side, like t’ai chi. The mistake is to do it the way the Austrians do, the haymaking way, and just use the strength in your upper arms and shoulders.’
He demonstrated. The class murmured in sympathetic appreciation. They were a gentle, middle-aged group in fleeces. Many of the men and women had long hair, the men’s often in a ponytail, the women’s loose and frizzy. None of them looked as if they worked out at the gym to build up Austrian-style upper arm and shoulder strength for haymaking.
‘Hold the snath tightly.’ The snath was the handle. ‘And make sure the snath doesn’t swing and bang against your knees. That’s not a good look. And it hurts.
‘Right,’ he carried on briskly, ‘we’ll do two or three passes across the lawn and then we’ll talk about sharpening, which is going to take a while. There’s a lot to learn. Remember that when you’re scything grass, you need to sharpen your blade almost every five minutes. For the moment, you can leave your whetting stones with your bags.’
The class set off, swinging gently from their hips as the blades swung across a lawn that was already cut, so this was strictly a rehearsal. When I went inside the cool, dark meeting room, with its long benches and wood-panelled walls, where I was the only person, I could hear the voices of the class outside from the sunlit lawn.
I am not a practising Christian, but I enjoy sitting in a quiet church. ‘Stone and oak shelter / silence while we ask nothing / but silence’, as Basil Bunting put it in one of his poems about Brigflatts. There was something about the democratic layout of the meeting house, which has no pulpit as there is no priest leading the service – all the Friends present contribute thoughts when they are ‘moved to do so’ – that I found appealing. It was a reminder of the need to be attentive in life; to listen more and talk less.
Modern Quakers are not necessarily theist at all – many say they find the whole notion of a God looking down on the world problematic – and I suspect more people would be drawn to them if they were not so self-deprecating and hidden. In a world which likes to shout from the rooftops, the Quakers are whispering in a corner.
There was a small, rather good library at Brigflatts, with all the books I had been unable to find in the Sedbergh bookshop: many out of print, like Braithwaite’s long account of the early Quaker movement in two volumes, an Edwardian doorstopper. What came across from all the accounts of those heady days in 1652 was the excitement of their debates. The name ‘Quaker’ was a nickname given to Fox and his followers by a judge for their habit of shaking with ecstasy when they talked about religious ideas in the dock. In Fox’s memoirs, he often refers to disputations he has with people along the way – theological discussions that could last for hours.
I had noticed in my encounters with Quakers that everyone talks in a soft, low and reasonable voice, which is very attractive for a while, although longer exposure would make me want to go and put on some rock ’n’ roll. I suspect that Fox was not a great orator in the rhetorical sense; he did not whip up the crowd. His insistent and patient arguing of the case was what won his audience over.
George Fox had arrived in Sedbergh at a busy time. There was an annual fair taking place at which traditionally servants were hired by the gentry – which meant a lot of young people were looking for work. Fox started holding forth in the steeple-house yard and attracted a large crowd. Local clergymen berated him; one told him he was mad. But Fox stood his ground and found a receptive audience, especially among those already influenced by the Westmorland Seekers.
One of the Seeker preachers, perhaps sensing this was not the place and occasion to pick an argument with the church, invited Fox to speak at Firbank Fell, where the Seekers had a chapel that was discreetly far enough from Sedbergh.
I felt reflective as I walked up the long lane towards Firbank Fell, and what is now locally called ‘Fox’s pulpit’: a remote stone in a field where he preached to an audience of a thousand people in the safety of the open air, far from persecution. For Fox refused to speak in the small Firbank Chapel itself – which given the size of the congregation would anyway have been impractical – but drew his audience out to the open air, speaking for some three hours in what he always judged to be the greatest address he ever gave: ‘for the word of the Lord came to me, I must go and sit down upon the rock in the mountain even as Christ had done before.’
If the longevity of a hedge can be told by the variety of species you find within it, then the hedge along that lane to Fox’s pulpit was one of the oldest I have ever seen. This was still a very wild and exposed part of the Howgills, on the western flanks. Fox was giving his address in June, which is still late spring this far north, and the hedgerows would have been full of spring flowers, with lambs in the fields.
It took me longer than I expected to walk to Firbank Fell – long enough to be impressed at how many of the people of Sedbergh and the surrounding district had made the effort to come to hear him. So it was around three in the afternoon when I arrived, about the time of day that Fox had given his address.
I was surprised to see how little now marked the spot of what must surely be one of the great moments in English Christianity. There was nothing left of the chapel; just a small graveyard with a few windblown trees, one of them a yew, and a retaining wall. If the stone from which Fox spoke, his pulpit, had not had a small plaque, it would have been easy to miss. Moreover, it was one of those places, increasingly rare in England, where not a single human habitation was visible for miles. Just sheep.
Fox himself had been a shepherd in his Leicestershire days, and his writing is full of references to the simple and sober life of those living in the countryside; he was also alert to the biblical comparisons.
That speech to the faithful in this wild place was perhaps the highlight of his life. He was just twenty-seven. Ahead lay many years of persecution, both for himself and for his companions and disciples, the ‘valiant sixty’ who spread the word for the Society of Friends, as they called themselves.
George Fox is virtually forgotten by the wider public in Britain. Hardly a portrait of him exists, as a young man at least, although we know he had long hair ‘like rats’ tails’, so the seventeenth-century equivalent of Rasta locks.
At the height of the movement, almost half the population of Westmorland were Quakers; today there are estimated to be no more than 20,000 in the whole of the country. But the Quakers have always punched above their weight – to use a deeply inappropriate metaphor – and not just with their commendable commitment to pacifism, an inheritance from Fox, whose early youth had been spent during the turbulence of the Civil War.
Because of their nonconformism, they were unable to join many of the established professions – not only the clergy, but also the law, Parliament, universities and many more – and therefore applied their considerable energies to business, where their integrity and honesty quickly made them successful. Clarks Shoes, Bryant & May matches, and both Barclays and Lloyds are among the substantial companies founded by Friends.
Their quixotic quest to convert the working-class man from beer to hot chocolate resulted in a lucrative near-monopoly as Rowntree, Cadbury and the oldest Quaker family business of them all, Fry’s of Bristol, came to dominate the chocolate trade. I had once lived in a part of Bristol, Redlands, which didn’t have a single pub due to the dominance of the Quakers when it was built.
Like nearly any religious movement, the Quakers have at times had a darker side: their insistence at one point that members marry only within the community led to much unhappiness; and people forget that Richard Nixon was a Quaker, which didn’t stop him bombing Cambodia.
But the simplicity and directness of Quaker dealings, still echoed in Westmorland, and above all their unabashed habit of ‘speaking truth to power’, as George Fox did to Cromwell when he was brought before him under armed guard, is a wonderful legacy. The Protector was at the height of his powers and held Fox’s life in his hands, but Fox was as direct and honest as ever, exhorting Cromwell ‘to keep in the fear of God’. When Fox was leaving, after an intense and long discussion, Cromwell caught him by the hand and was heard to say, with tears in his eyes, ‘Come again to my house.’
After Cromwell’s death and the return of Charles II, the Quakers were lumped in with all the other millenarian movements that had contributed to his father’s execution, and many were imprisoned, including women and children. Fox wrote much of his memoirs in jail and died a broken man in 1691. When he was carried to his grave in London’s Bunhill Fields by his fellow Quakers, a bystander remarked that ‘for a considerable time there was nothing but deep sighs, groans and tears and roaring to admiration, and, after that all had vented and eased themselves, and grew quiet in their minds.’
I felt humble to have briefly followed in Fox’s footsteps and stood on his pulpit; ignorant that I had previously known so little about him; and profoundly lacking in the grace and courage which seems to have sustained him for so many years, and through so many troubles.
On the way back to Jason’s farm, I rang my parents. My father David answered the phone. He was surprised that I was travelling across the North with a mule, although we had discussed this many times. I told him where I was in the Howgills and that the next day, Jasper and I would be travelling further east to Kirkby Stephen with Jethro.
For the last ten years, my father, like so many of his contemporaries, had been slowly losing his memory; he was suffering from vascular dementia, more benign than Alzheimer’s, but with similar short-term memory loss. While he could remember the events of his childhood and of the Second World War with great clarity, he found more recent events and day-to-day recall increasingly difficult.
My father bore this change with fortitude, as he had some of the other difficult events in his life: the death of his mother when he was a boy, and the disruptions of the war. But it is a cruel disease, both for the sufferer and those close to them, like my mother, who had needed to become his full-time carer.
Such forms of dementia have, of course, become increasingly and distressingly common, although our family has always had a history of such memory loss in older age: both my grandfather and his father suffered from the same thing, while keeping physically fit well into their eighties.
The odds are good – or rather, bad – that I may well suffer in the future from it myself. My father’s illness had made me more conscious of the value of memory; and also of its vagaries, its deceptions.
Each time we talked, we needed to start from first principles – as now, when I had to explain why and how I was getting a mule from one side of the country to the other. This often made for fuller and more detailed conversations. With those who are close to us, such chats on the phone can be quick progress updates – where we are, what happened yesterday. With my father, it needed to be the full story and would force me each time I told it to consider exactly what I was doing and why.
Before he became ill, my father would sometimes tell the story of how he had been present in the hospital when his mother had died from tuberculosis. He had been twelve. His brothers and sisters were not with him, as the war had separated the family. Only his father was there.
Because he had been considered so young, no one had told him how gravely ill his mother Kathleen had become. Her death therefore came as an even greater horror of shock and surprise. But in the years of telling the story – and he would do so only during certain intimate moments – it had acquired a patina, a way in the telling, as may happen to us all with any memory, however painful. We make a narrative: in my father’s case, much of it exculpatory, first of his own father, who had been forced to divide the family; of the mores of the time, which thought it better for children to be kept in ignorance of their parents’ illnesses; and then of the war, which anyway caused so much grief to so many.
When he became ill, much of this fell away. While he could remember his mother’s death, he could no longer remember how he had continually told the story. He had to tell it afresh.
One day when we were having coffee and talking, the real, true memory of that moment suddenly came back to him: the moment when he had been in a dark hospital anteroom, left by himself, and someone had come to tell him that his mother had died. The existential pain of that moment.
Telling me that story afresh, he had suddenly burst into tears. A wall in his memory had given way.
And it had made me realise how easy it is to do that: to construct memories that are not so much false as a way of telling the story. Of sometimes making it bearable, or even simply comprehensible.
It is something we do collectively as a country. Dunkirk becomes in retrospect a gallant rescue of the British Expeditionary Force by a fleet of little boats, rather than the squalid endgame of what Churchill described at the time as ‘a colossal military disaster’. The Restoration of Charles II is remembered as a festive return to ‘royal business as usual’, with Nell Gwynne and bucolic licentiousness; not the start of a witch-hunt which saw Quakers and other religious minorities brutally persecuted, leading to the deaths of George Fox and many of his followers.
Nothing beats going back to the source to reveal the inconvenient truths that scatter our history; and being forced to walk slowly across the country with a mule was a great way of making sure you always looked at the ground.
My father had asked why I had chosen a mule and whether this had been a good decision.
As Jasper and I loaded Jethro back into the Dodge van back at Jason’s place and made our goodbyes – with a promise that he could buy the van after the journey was completed, and a demonstration of the immobilisation lock – I thought more about this.
I was beginning to feel that Jethro had come to trust me. This might have been a delusion, but he was less prone to obstinate behaviour. He would box up into the horse lorry well; could be left loose close to us while we had a picnic; even seemed to look at me with more confidence in his beautiful eyes.
Which was not to say he still didn’t want to assert a sturdy independence at all times. But then I was used to that from the women in my life.
Mules were sterile. Nobody had told Jethro. He had kept all the inclinations of a stallion, despite having been gelded. Every time we put him into a field, Jasper and I had to erect a portable electric fence to prevent him bothering any mares. I knew from experiences at my sister’s place in Oxfordshire before we had left – where Jethro had behaved with such rock ’n’ roll abandon with the female ponies that he was almost thrown out of the hotel – how unpopular this could be.
The problem was that Jethro’s feelings were often reciprocated. At one of the places we had berthed, there had been some beautiful white mares. They kept coming to the little stand of trees between the paddocks and flaunting their long white manes at poor Jethro, who had been told firmly by both Jasper and me to be on his best behaviour. They even kept making those soft little ‘why are you ignoring us’ neighs.
It was the classic appeal of the bad boy. Here was Jethro with his troubled borstal past – the rescue mule from the RSPCA – and unconventional ‘interesting ugly’ looks, short in height maybe but with attitude and unusual colouring. He was Mick Jagger in an astrakhan coat, or a rapper from East London, arriving in the demure pastures of the Home Counties. Nice middle-class mares had never seen anything quite like Jethro before. There was bound to be trouble.
A mule proper is the offspring of a jack donkey and female horse; the other way round – the offspring of a female donkey and male horse – is, strictly speaking, called a hinny not a mule, and there are far fewer of them.
The height difference between the parents – and let’s not get too technical here – is important. A jack donkey can serve a mare up to three hands larger than himself. If the mare’s any taller, he’s going to need snookers, so to speak. Or the owner of the mare will have to use artificial insemination.
A mule is always said to have the body of a horse with the extremities of a donkey. So the things that stick out in its appearance, literally, are its long ears and short, thin mane. It has the straight legs of a donkey with tough straight-sided hooves that need far less looking after than the troublesome horse’s. Unique to the mule, though, are the eyes, which are quite different from those of either a donkey or a horse. Jethro’s were deeply soulful.
By contrast, a hinny gets the worst of both worlds. It has the body of a donkey with the extremities of a horse. This is not a good combination. Moreover, they tend to align themselves with donkeys. A test muleteers always use if they are concerned whether an animal is a mule or a hinny is to set them loose in a field with both donkeys and horses present. The mules will always associate with the horses, while the hinnies will associate with the donkeys. And hinnies are more donkey-like in temperament: they are less adventurous and independent than mules, although for some owners this may be a good thing. They are not even as vocal. Whereas Jethro was given to quite a lot of conversational ad libs as we strolled across the country – a mule’s bawl has been well described as sounding like ‘an asthmatic steamboat in distress’ – a hinny was virtually silent. Which I would find disconcerting. There’s nothing worse than a travelling companion who never says anything.
Apart from isolated pockets in Europe – like Cyprus and Ireland – there are few hinnies around and the breeding needs considerable ingenuity: it is usually done with wiry pony stallions on strong female donkeys of about the same size. However, only a small proportion of donkey mares will conceive when served by a horse.
Mules are much easier to breed. Ever since the nomads of Nubia discovered in around 1750 BC that if you left a domesticated mare tethered outside your tent for a wild jack donkey to find, you would end up with desirable offspring, mankind has loved the mule. Ancient records show that the Hittites would pay three times as much for a mule as a horse because of their greater staying power. Mule models have been found in Egyptian pyramids. King David rode a mule to enter Jerusalem.
A vase found at Thebes shows a mule-drawn chariot; while Homer celebrated mules in the famous passage when Princess Nausicaa uses them to take her laundry to the seashore with her ladies in waiting, and is surprised by Odysseus. Alexander the Great was carried to his grave by a train of sixty-four mules yoked together in teams of four. Roman senators preferred to take their shopping home from the forum, so to speak, riding a mule not a horse; a mule was steadier and less likely to bolt for the horizon if surprised by a man wearing the wrong sort of toga.
In more recent times, Americans used mules to conquer the Wild West. They were more adaptable than horses to the arid conditions of desert frontier lands, as well as to the humid plantations of the South. Freed slaves were awarded not only a grant of land – forty acres – but a mule to go with them. George Washington was such an aficionado of the mule that he petitioned the Spanish king to send him tall jack donkeys to sire them. American mules still tend to come in larger sizes, like their portion control; their breeding donkeys are called American Mammoth Jacks. So highly are they valued, the United States even celebrates a National Mule Day each year.
When the mujahideen were struggling against the Russians in Afghanistan, the CIA sent 7,000 large mules from Texas. It may well have been on one of these same mules that Osama bin Laden make good his escape after the later Allied invasion; even if in Islamic hagiography he is portrayed as riding the passes on a white stallion.
However, when I said that mankind has always loved the mule, there is one significant and strange exception: the British. Elsewhere in the world, from the Middle East to China, the mule is still used as a universal pack and saddle animal. In Europe, mules have flourished from Ireland to the Balkans. Yet for reasons which seem mysterious, the mule has almost disappeared from this country.
Why? It was a question that puzzled me more and more as I made my journey. They were so obviously well suited to the British climate and even, dare I say it, temperament. We had plenty of donkeys, even if most of them were now in sanctuaries. And plenty of mares.
It took a certain amount of digging in the historical archives to come up with a possible solution. But finally, I came up with the answer – and it was one that surprised me.
It seems mules were still greatly valued in medieval England, especially among the clergy. There had always been a prejudice against the riding of horses by priests, as it was considered too worldly or military. But it was precisely because of this that they may have disappeared.
The Pope was often portrayed riding a mule. Cardinal Wolsey used one to transport his considerable bulk around the country before ‘he fell sick suddenly, and grew so ill / he could not sit his mule’, as Shakespeare described his death. And so, come the Reformation, the mule was indelibly stamped as being the mark of a Catholic priest.
Records show that they fell sharply out of favour towards the end of the sixteenth century, after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. If you rode a mule, you might as well have carried rosary beads or worn a T-shirt proclaiming your allegiance to Rome or Spain. Mules were thought of as incorrigibly Latin and Catholic – and to a certain extent still are. That was why it had been so incredibly difficult for me to find a mule for this journey: religious prejudice dating back almost 500 years, pure and simple. If you rode a horse, you supported Glasgow Rangers; if you used a mule, you supported Celtic.
Instead, the English had turned to ponies as pack animals – unless it came to their numerous wars in Europe, when they unapologetically led hundreds of thousands of mules to their slaughter in Spain or in France; foreign mules, not mules they had bred themselves.
I felt like launching a campaign to bring back the mule to Britain. The Act of Emancipation of 1829 seemed to have passed mules by. We had welcomed Catholics back into public life; why not their mules as well?
Jethro had been extraordinarily good company on the journey. Perhaps he was not quite as handsome as a horse. But then the way I had come to feel about it was that while horses can have faces of impossible elegance – like models in a magazine – mules have the sort of faces of people you might meet in a pub. Who have had a couple of drinks. And for a long crossing of the country like this one, I knew which I would prefer.