Mr. Shaw is on holiday with his wife and child, from his job as an insurance broker, when they come across Caroline in a field. They know she's called Caroline, because it's painted on her stable. Mr. Shaw's son gives this account of the meeting...
They faced each other across the sagging gate. He saw a rusty grey, barrel-chested donkey, with pretty ears nine inches long (one cocked, the other drooping to the left), head on one side, flicking her tail to keep the flies away. I noticed her shaggy coat and the pale whiskers on her upper lip, and wondered how old she might be. I wasn't sure how you told a donkey's age; something to do with their teeth, I thought, but she kept her mouth firmly shut as she champed on a mouthful of grass in a manner that suggested intense concentration mingled with dumb insolence, like a bored teenager with a plug of bubblegum.
And she, fixing my father my her great, dark, limpid eyes - "eyes a man could drown in", as he later described them - took in the hair thinning at the temples, his nose reddened with sunburn, his stomach bulging slightly over the waistband of his shorts (like all his colleagues, my father always wore shorts on holiday, regardless of the weather; shorts were not allowed in the office).
I suppose this was the moment the whole strange affair began; the moment, so well documented in classical poetry and TV soaps and sugary ballads, when two strangers come face to face; the heart thumps, an overpowering force shakes them, like the wind in the birch trees above the stable - in short, they begin to fall for each other.
with thanks to----
http://www.stuck-in-a-book.blogspot.com.au/
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