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don’t.’ He walked away smiling, leaving me to reconcile the two warring halves of my brain.
    â€˜Doing nothing’ meant not taking away the freedom of other creatures. Simon’s eyes dwelt on the dogs as he said this, and they wagged their tails at him hopefully. He clearly considered them to be living in a state of spiritual slavery, but he did not say so, perhaps because nothing could be done about it.
    He questioned the rules Alex and I had formulated years ago concerning dogs: no dogs to be allowed in any part of the house other than the kitchen, and dogs always to be shut in thekitchen when anyone left by car. The reason for the first rule was, I thought, obvious. The reason for the second was that my small terrier, Hoppy, was car-fixated and likely to follow any departing vehicle down the drive and on to the main road. Simon, Dao, Pete and Coral listened smiling to our explanations and appeared not to believe a word. I could hardly blame them. Where is the slave-master who cannot justify his actions in terms of the well-being of his slaves? Nevertheless I could not repress a grin when later, after the door from the kitchen into the main part of the house had been repeatedly left open, Dao found something unexpected in her bed. It was the leg of a long-dead sheep. I realised that it was a gift, but I was alone in this perception. The kitchen door was henceforth kept shut.
    The goats posed more of a problem. There were three of them, and they provided us with milk. If they were not to eat every vegetable in the garden and every fruit-tree in the orchard, and then go off and do the same thing to the neighbours, they had to be tethered. The alternative was to fence them in, which would be expensive, difficult, and by the group’s standards just as undesirable. The question was debated in the first few days of the group’s existence and no solution was found. From time to time we would return to it, as to an itching scab. It was no answer to sell or give the animals away, for their new owners would impose on them the same imprisonment as we did: there were no wild goats in England. What was more, their new owners would undoubtedly apply the principles of commercial goat-keeping and slaughter any billy-kids they might produce. It was an impasse. We had to compromise, and show our regret by tethering them on pasture as varied and interesting as possible.
    Having admitted a temporary defeat over the goats, we passed on to the ponies. The ponies were Alex’s province, as the goats were mine, and I was glad to leave them to her since with the dominant one, Bishop, I existed in a state of perpetual war. If he could step on my foot or knock over my milk bucket or nip the top out of a tree I had just planted he would do so, andsometimes he managed to do all three at once. I loved Osmond, the nervous, fine-featured grey, who would come to me even across the stream if I called; but I could do nothing with Osmond if Bishop had set his mind against it. But Bishop listened to Alex. They understood each other, and she rode him bareback with an indolent grace that brought my heart into my throat.
    Well, there was to be no more riding, that was clear. One did not put a piece of steel into the mouth of another being and climb on its back. Alex, who never rode for pleasure but only when there was no other way of getting Bishop home (he liked to visit Mr Webb’s stallion over the hill), raised no objection, but I could see that, like me, she was wondering how the freedom of the ponies could be reconciled with the comfort of the humans. The ponies at the moment were kept in a field they could not get out of, and for good reason. Bishop had a disconcerting habit of pushing open the kitchen door in the mornings: if you let him, he would come in to breakfast. He also liked to eat the roses in the garden, break the cold-frames on the patio and take the wing-mirrors off cars. I said all this, and wondered, not for