It’s Not a Donkey, It’s a Monster… and Other Tales of Mild Childhood Psychopathy
The Artist's Defence
In the shared bedroom of our Blaenymaes house in the mid-1960s, my brother David provided some of the most bizarre and unforgettable moments of my childhood. One story always springs to mind when I think about my brother David and Blaen y Maes: the infamous donkey drawing incident.
At some point, my father had painted the walls in our bedroom. As I mentioned in the Bedtime Stories post, us three boys — me, Peter, and David — shared the same room. Peter and David were in one bed, I was in the other.
One day we were suddenly summoned by an angry voice. My father was standing in the bedroom, red-faced and visibly furious. It wasn't hard to see why — one of the freshly painted walls was now covered in scribbles and drawings.
"Which one of you did this?!" he barked.
Silence.
"Come on, who drew this donkey on the wall?"
David, clearly offended, stepped forward and replied in a tone dripping with indignation and disbelief — as if my father had just insulted Michelangelo.
"It's not a donkey — it's a monster!"
At that point, the room collapsed into laughter. David stood there utterly baffled, unable to understand why his defence of the artwork wasn't being taken seriously. Even my father had to turn away and leave the room, barely able to keep a straight face.
To my knowledge, David was never punished for his "artistry," and I don't think my father ever bothered repainting that wall again. Really, what would have been the point?
Commandant David's War Crimes
One sunny afternoon, I found David sitting at the top of our garden steps, clutching what looked like a jam jar full of earth. It had a lid with holes poked into it. I asked what he was up to.
"Nothing," he replied, wearing his best innocent face.
I backed off a bit and perched on the garden wall to watch. Then I heard him mutter, in a dodgy German POW camp guard accent: "Zee punishment for trying to escape... is death!"
I looked up just in time to see him squash an ant on the jar lid with his thumb.
What he'd done was scoop up part of an ants' nest and trap it in the jar. As the ants crawled up and tried to escape through the air holes, he'd deliver his sentence and execute them one by one. I watched for a bit as he repeated the whole grim ritual with surprising dedication.
Eventually I got bored and wandered off, quietly reassured that I wasn't the only budding psychopath in the family. When I came back half an hour later, he was still at it.