Cocolo: the donkey who arrived unexpectedly at our door in Jerusalem

I was four when a donkey called Cocolo accidentally became part of our family while we were living in Jerusalem for a year while my dad was doing some work there. The arrival was inadvertent: my mum had told the doorman at the American Colony hotel that she’d always wanted a donkey, and a few days later a man turned up at our flat with a donkey.

We fell in love with him and named him Cocolo, after a donkey in a children’s book by Bettina Ehrlich, and he moved into the garden we shared with our upstairs neighbours. Mum decided Cocolo was the ideal mode of transport for the school run, even though there was a busy road where he would stall in the middle of rush hour.

While our classmates were dropped off in the family Volvo, we were led up the circular drive on Cocolo. He was good-natured but would hee-haw loudly at night, which made us increasingly unpopular with the neighbours. After a few months Cocolo was sent to a farm in the West Bank; he remained ours and we visited at weekends, going for rides around Nebi Samuel and feeling safe from the snakes and scorpions below.

The relationship later broke down when he was startled by a pneumatic drill, reared up and threw my sister Sophy and me to the ground. My mum then took him to the livestock market outside Damascus Gate and sold him to a milkman who wanted a donkey for the less accessible parts of his round; my mum promised the milkman was kind.

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