ANOTHER VOICE

Tara causes a London sensation (not Palmer-Tomkinson)

MATTHEW PARRIS

First the dramatis personae. Tara is an orphan lamb — well, not quite an orphan, for she does have a mother who more or less abandoned her at birth. Some ewes are apparently unable to produce milk for their young. My friend Mrs Rushton, the farmer's wife, asked us to look after the lit- tle creature.

I should not really say 'us' because Mara did all the work. Mara is my Italian friend who lives in my house in Derbyshire, cooks and keeps things in order. She loves ani- mals and agreed to care for and bottle-feed the lamb, which she named Tara, from Gone With the Wind.

Besides Tara and Mara, I need to intro- duce Yoghurt. Yoghurt is a blind, white pigeon whose first home was a cardboard box from a supermarket, with 'Yoghurt' printed on the side. Yoghurt too was virtu- ally orphaned: Mara adopted him when she realised that his parents, who live on the window-sill in our barn, were refusing to feed him. After a few weeks we realised why. He was completely blind and — the pigeon community being a Thatcherite world — the adult pigeons were taking a Darwinian view and purging duff genes from the avine pool. But Mara housed the young squab in the yoghurt box in our kitchen and fed him corn and water four times a day.

We threw Yoghurt in the air to find out whether he could fly. He could, but only backwards, and he was unable to see where he was going. He was returned to the yoghurt box.

Tara, meanwhile, was proving quite demanding. Mara kept her in a child's playpen, also in the kitchen, and bottle-fed her every four hours — or whenever his insistent bleats broke down her resolve. She made the feed up from powdered ewe's milk which she kept in a jug in the fridge. More than once I put this in my coffee by mistake. It tasted fine.

Besides feeding Tara and Yoghurt and caring for her two cats, Thomas and Ruth, Mara was also busy looking after our two llamas: Llesley (born on my father Leslie's birthday) and Imp. These are now teenagers and not hard to look after: they feed themselves in summer — there is plen- ty of grass — but have an attitude problem. They wish to be involved with human beings, but strictly on their own terms, fol- lowing us round and listening, but refusing to do as they are bidden. A boy llama is coming to stay in August, and next year Mara and I hope for the patter of tiny llama feet.

Mara has also been looking after me. I do not bleat in the night or leave droppings on the kitchen floor, nor do I have to have food placed in my beak. I am fine with a knife and fork. Indeed, when at home I can help look after Tara, Yoghurt, Thomas, Ruth, Llesley and Imp.

But a few weeks ago, on a Tuesday, I could not be there. This was awkward. Mara needed to go down to London to see her brother, who lives in Stratford, E15. What with Tara's four-hourly bottle and Yoghurt's four-times-a-day corn, the task was more than it seemed reasonable to ask even Mrs Rushton to take on. Rationally speaking, then, what Mara did made sense. Armed with two days' supply of ewe's milk, she set up the playpen in the back of her old VW Golf, and lifted Tara, bleating, aboard. Into the passenger seat beside her went the yoghurt box, containing Yoghurt, pecking wildly at the cardboard as is his wont when he senses the possibility of change to his routine.

The journey to London takes about three hours. Late at night you get a clear run down the Ml, so, around midnight, Mara, wearing her favourite cloak, headed for junction 28. In my album of mental pictures the image of an Italian lady in a big black cloak flying down the fast lane of the M1 in a rust-flecked maroon VW Golf in the small hours of the morning, a blind white pigeon pecking at the passenger seat beside her and a small, fat lamb bleating from a playpen in the back, holds a treasured place.

On arrival, to minimise the chances of lamb's droppings and puddles on the 'There's been a take-over Mr Rowland.' kitchen floor the next morning, Mara took Tara for a walk before bed. They are hard- bitten folk, the residents of Stratford, but Mara says the few small-hours stragglers whom she passed with her lamb on the pavement that night seemed dumbfounded. In the nearest park the next morning Tara was apparently a sensation. It would not be honest to say Yoghurt visibly enjoyed his visit to London, but he seemed unfazed. It is hard to know what passes through a blind pigeon's mind. Perhaps nothing.

The journey back passed without inci- dent. The trio stopped at the Blue Boar ser- vices at Watford Gap for the lamb to do its business, then continued safely home to Derbyshire, where they were greeted by Llesley and Imp, who hum gently when amused. The cats (brother and sister), Thomas and Ruth, were glad to see them home.

I wish I could report that all live happily ever after. Tara's fine and almost weaned. I took her for a walk to the top of the ridge at sunset the other day. As we set out home she heard a sound she had not heard before: sheep bleating from a distant field. She stopped. I carried on. I called her. She hesitated, distracted — what was that sound? — then threw in her lot with me. A poignant moment.

Now she lives in the field with Llesley and Imp and thinks she is a llama among llamas who sadly cannot bleat. They think she is a tiny llama who can't hum. None of them has ever seen a mirror.

But what of Yoghurt? Ah, sad news. As the weather improved we took to placing him outside on some rocks every morning. Even if he could not see the meadows at least he could feel the sun and wind on his feathers. He took this change to his routine impassively.

But last week, when Mara came to fetch him in for the night, our pigeon was gone. She searched everywhere. I told her that perhaps sight had miraculously been restored and he had flown, but she was not convinced. Two days later a small heap of white feathers was found behind the coal- shed. A fox? Mara has been very sad but, as I pointed out, Yoghurt had possibly the best life any blind pigeon has ever led in pigeon history. And he did go to London.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.