My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  Like many Dalmatians, he was hard of hearing and difficult to train. It was impossible to know whether his disobedience resulted from deafness or sheer natural bloody-mindedness, but in either case it was the cause of his premature death, knocked down in the road by a car.

  Back in the drawing-room at Chapel House, shining and slicked, we would be kissed and briefly admired before Mummy and Aunt Nancy found some excuse to leave on affairs of their own, telling us to be good and to play quietly with the Big Toys, which were kept in the Chinese cupboards. These were pretty basic. Various board games and large-format books, a babyish wooden roundabout, and a box of large wooden blocks and planks of various sizes, from which a child of architectural bent could build the houses of rather brutalist design shown on the lid.

  We preferred to stack them higher and higher in tottering towers, for the fun of hearing them crash when a vital support was removed – at least the boys did. I was drawn like a magnet to the beautiful pea-green gipsy caravan, with shafts and a swingle-tree, and a removable roof. It had dear little furniture inside and was pulled by a thick-set wooden horse we called Bonny, and I was horribly chagrined when one day it disappeared, given to a neighbour’s child who was dying of leukaemia.

  Gerry had a good treble voice, and would sometimes sing while Granny accompanied him at the grand piano, her stubby be-ringed fingers totally assured on the complicated black-looking chords of Victorian favourites like The Lordly Ones and The Last Rose of Summer.

  Then the wall-mounted grand-daughter clock would chime the half-hour and it would be time to read. This was much the best bit of our drawing-room time. Granny would sit on the sofa with her back supported by a drum-shaped Chinese bolster and her legs covered by a fringed shawl, because the little Bratt Colman fireplace gave only minimal heat, and we would sit or lie on the hearth rug while she worked steadily through The Wind in the Willows, both the Jungle Books and the Just So Stories, Charlotte M Yonge’s Dove in the Eagle’s Nest and The Little Duke and many more I don’t remember, reading clearly with each word beautifully pronounced, never skipping, never hurrying, and continuing until she reached a suitable break-off point even when half-heard sighs and scuffling behind the door indicated that the nannies had come to fetch us to bed.

  As petrol became scarcer, my mother’s thoughts turned to pony-power. She bought a two-wheeled, round bodied ‘tub’ cart in a ruinous condition, had it done up and smartly painted black and yellow, and picked up from somewhere a set of harness to fit an animal between 12 and 13 hands high. There was no shortage of beautiful, spirited, Welsh ponies with attractively dished faces and legs like deer available for between £10 and £20 in Hereford market; the trouble was that most of them were straight off the hill and wild as hawks.

  After a flighty black mare appropriately named Blackbird had kicked over the traces and smashed the front panel of the tub, and her successor, Nutmeg, had bolted on the main road when her driver took a handkerchief from her pocket, Mummy gave up the dream of bowling around the Wye Valley road behind a swift-stepping well-mannered driving-pony, and settled instead for a shiny, chunky little black five-year-old named Micky. He had very neat short ears, which barely poked above his bushy mane, a chiselled face and large kind eyes. Best of all, it was claimed by the vendor that any child could ride him.

  Well, maybe – provided he or she was superglued to the saddle, but merely sitting on is not the same as being in control, and Micky was very hard to stop. At an early age he had taken part in local ‘flapping races,’ where the contestants are handicapped by distance rather than weight, which had fired his competitive spirit to such a degree that a jointed snaffle was no more use in his mouth than a wisp of hay.

  In rapid succession Mummy tried out all the bits in my uncle Trevor’s tackroom – pelham, Kimblewick, gag and so on – but the only one to make any impression on Micky’s iron mouth was a straight-barred Liverpool with long cheeks and a tightish curb. In this Gerry could control him most of the time, but in common with most boys he disliked feeling he couldn’t stop when he wanted, and it was several years before he and Micky really saw eye to eye.

  He was also reluctant to be caught in the field, though for some reason he would – if sufficiently bribed – always come to me. The trick was to avoid looking him in the eye as you approached. Humans, with forward vision, are predators who stare at their chosen prey. A horse, whose best defence is flight, has widely-spaced side-set eyes so that he can watch all round for attackers and long experience has taught him that anyone who stares fixedly at him is up to no good.

  When close to one another, with no need to neigh or whinny, horses communicate by very small movements of the lips, and I found if I looked at Micky’s muzzle rather than his eyes, and sort of drifted obliquely towards him rather than marching up purposefully – while concentrating on the kind of simple thoughts that occupy horses’ brains: Food. Good. Safe, and so on, to counter his own negative reflections which probably focused on Danger, Pain and Exertion – he would approach cautiously and, with his weight still braced backwards ready for instant flight, stretch out his nose towards my handful of oats.

  I would spin these out as far as I could, while he gradually became more confident, and slowly pivot until we were both facing the same way and I could slip the leadrope over his neck. Once haltered, he was quiet and obliging, and though I knew perfectly well that it was the oats he loved, not me, it gave me a great buzz to be the only child who could be sure of catching him.

  No-one feeds ponies oats nowadays. It is recognised as a sure way to send them scatty, like pumping children full of fizzy drinks. But before the invention of pony-cubes and balanced equine nutrition, we used to stuff them with as many as we could scrounge from the cart horses’ and hunters’ rations. Oats would cascade from my pockets when I undressed, much to the annoyance of the housemaids, and we never made the connection between this unsuitably high-octane diet and the ponies’ erratic behaviour.

  Nor were we ever formally taught to ride. Mummy’s method was to put a child on a pony and lead it about, first on foot, then from a horse. When it seemed to be getting tired of being constrained, she would dispense with the leading-rein and – hey presto! – the child could ride. We never wore any kind of head protection – nobody did in those days unless they were showing or hunting. A penny would be placed between each knee and the saddle, and if you still had it there at the end of the ride, you were allowed to keep it. As a result, we rode like monkeys up sticks, gripping hard with our knees and hardly using our seat or lower legs at all. Bad habits acquired as a child have resisted all my efforts to eradicate them, and even today I feel most at ease on horses that closely resemble Micky.

  He would, no doubt, have been a very different character without the oats, but as it was, in his rather hepped-up condition, he was great fun for a lightish grown-up like Mummy to ride on the hill – lively, tireless, sure-footed, and extremely sharp. Even on the steepest slope he always had a leg or two to spare.

  He was the classic type of old-fashioned Welsh pony, in the mould of early champions like Starlight of Grove, much cobbier than today’s show ponies, but since judges tended to be gentlemen of riper years, Micky was a favourite at local shows, and though he considered jumping a mug’s game and preferred to keep his nice round feet firmly on the ground, he was brilliant at gymkhanas, particularly bending races, snaking round the end pole so slippily that his rider risked being shot over his shoulder.

  About the time we acquired Micky, I had had the luck to inherit our cousins’ pony Mincepie at the end of a glittering career in the Cotswolds. One after the other, she had carried Libby, Robbie, Jenny and John Lawrence to glory in Pony Club and hunting field, and when they all finally outgrew her she was far too much part of the family to sell. She was small, dark, long-tailed and fiery, and wore a pad saddle secured (more or less) by a crupper, though she was expert at blowing out her belly when you did up the girth, so unless checked later it had a horrid habit of sliding round
and depositing you on the ground. She was well over twenty when she transferred to our branch of the family, but still a great goer who, despite stiffening joints, would cat-jump small obstacles with tremendous brio, though whether she and her rider landed together was largely a matter of luck.

  The foothills of Mynydd Eppynt rose steeply behind Chapel House. A rough winding track skirted the fields belonging to Abernant Farm, and where it forked you had the choice of continuing uphill over a couple of shaley shoulders to the farm called Alltmawr, or turning left across a stream and up through a still steeper wooded slope to its neighbour, Pentwyn.

  Not that there was much to see when we got there. If they happened to be outside in the farmyard, plucking chickens, chopping wood or tending stock in their faded cotton dresses and sacking aprons, heavy stockings and cracked leather boots, Mrs Williams Alltmawr and Mrs Price Pentwyn would respond politely to our greeting and duck back indoors as soon as they decently could, while the farmer himself stared at us with rheumy pale-blue eyes as if we were beings from another world. There was a high incidence of goitre in the area, caused by lack of iodine, and with most able-bodied young men and women away at the war, those that remained were often simple-minded (or, as it was tactfully called, ‘delicate’) hapless victims of centuries of in-breeding.

  Landscape and farming practices had scarcely changed since the days of George Borrow. In an era of agricultural depression and scarce manpower, Welsh hill-farming meant subsistence living of a kind that is almost unimaginable today – perhaps the nearest equivalent would be Romania at the time of Ceaucescu, but without the sunshine. Despite beautiful views on every side, the climate of mid-Wales could only be described as depressing, as all-year-round Atlantic weather systems brought heavy rain and dumped much of it in the Wye Valley.

  ‘We do reckon,’ an old carpenter once said gently to Mummy, ‘that we do have nine months winter and three months middling weather.’

  How right he was. Year after year, a wet summer ruined the hay, and constant rain rotted wooden posts and rusted wire until the fences would hardly keep a cow in, let alone those incorrigible escapers Welsh mountain sheep. Tractors were few and far between in those days before the little grey Fergie 20 revolutionised farm work, and most of the power on a typical hill farm was still provided by a single carthorse with, perhaps, a Welsh cob to work in double harness when needed, or take the family to market.

  To Alltmawr or Pentwyn and back was about as far as children cared to walk – in fact I always loathed forcing my legs uphill and could never decide which was worst: the long gradual slope to Alltmawr or the short steep struggle to Pentwyn – but nannies and governesses were united in their view that no afternoon was complete without a walk. I suppose they reckoned it would cut down on mischief in the evening.

  Ponies, however, extended our range considerably and gave us a whole new governess-free territory to explore. In a matter of twenty minutes or so, Gerry and I could ride up to the hill gate – previously the ultimate boundary – and discover beyond it an unbroken expanse of undulating open country stretching as far as eye could see, its ancient turf quilted by wind and snow into firm, springy cushions, and its great tracts of bracken or heather intersected by alluring green tracks. These were former drove roads, part of the great network of mountain trails whose soft surface was kind to the hoofs of cattle making the long trek to market, years ago; and little by little we learned where they led until we could ride with fair confidence over the hill to Builth – say – or Erwood in the other direction, or even to watch the sheepdog trials at Cwmowen, which really did seem the back of beyond, and avoid the main road along the river.

  A few years later this became important to me when Mincepie went to the great Hunting-Field in the Sky and Mummy bought me a charming gentle blue-roan Exmoor with a fluttery ginger muzzle called Sally, a perfect child’s pony in every respect except for her ineradicable fear of lorries. Taking Sally to the blacksmith in Builth was an anxious business, because even if you rode over the hill, the last mile to the forge took you through the back streets right into the centre of town, where you were almost bound to meet one of her bugbears.

  As soon as she saw it, her head would go up, her muscles would tense, and her eyes would start to roll while I signalled urgent appeals to the driver to switch off his engine. If the monster fell silent, Sally would – with much legging and urging – eventually agree to pass it, but if it didn’t, she would either rush into the nearest garden, alleyway or shop, or whip round and bolt back the way she had come. Even with Micky between her and the lorry, she could not overcome her terror, and I was always thankful to get her inside the high corrugated-iron walls surrounding the forge where the lorries could not trouble her.

  Oh, the hours we used to spend waiting for our ponies to be shod! Whole mornings would go by as we perched uncomfortably among the broken implements and heaps of worn-out shoes, trying not to mind that Charlie Evans the blacksmith seemed to be attending to everyone else’s needs before ours, though to be fair it was probably more important for him to finish mending some vital bit of farm machinery than making shoes for children’s ponies.

  Men in trilby hats and flat caps would drift in and out of the forge, chatting and laughing, and Charlie, his high-arched eyebrows and turned-up nose giving him a look of perpetual surprise, would blow up his fire and put down his hammer, and join in the gossip, while we fidgeted silently, not daring to go shopping in Builth in case we got pushed even farther down the queue of customers.

  When at last he did get around to dealing with our ponies, he made the shoes from scratch, like a proper craftsman. No ready-made cold-shoeing for him. He would cut, heat, hammer, and bend the fullered bars of iron on his anvil, the rapid hammerstrokes bouncing and ringing, then carefully shape them to the pared hoof, not the other way round, while I would silently prayed that the pony (chilled and bored from the long wait), would not disgrace me by snatching her hoof away and knocking over the tripod. Charlie was teetotal and a pillar of the Methodist Church, and would never have sworn in front of children, but if a pony was obstreperous he would stand back with his hands on his hips, and blow out his lips in disgust, and say he wouldn’t be able to finish if she didn’t behave better.

  It was a fearful threat, but luckily never carried out. At long last the job would be done, the four neat hoofs finished with a slick of tarry-smelling oil, and I would fish from my jodhs pocket the ‘five bob a leg’ he charged for a full set, and go out to face the lorries again.

  Riding on the hill was not without its hazards, but they were natural ones. It was very easy to lose your way amid those continuous false horizons and tussocky ponds which all looked very much alike. There were bogs, and rabbit-holes into which a galloping pony might put a hoof, and sometimes a bossy little Welsh stallion would leave his bunch of mares and foals and trot over, with wild mane flying and plumed tail held high, to fancy Sally and squeal angrily at Micky.

  We would hurry on our way, knowing he would not pursue us very far; and we soon learnt that if a mist came down to blot out the landmarks, the ponies were as good as compasses and could be relied on to find their way home.

  Children on their own are usually pretty cautious, and in fact on both the occasions when we got into serious difficulty on the hill Mummy was with us – indeed, most of the trouble was directly attributable to her.

  I remember it was an unusually fine warm April afternoon when we rode up to the lake called Pant-y-llyn, with my mother on a hunter called Lucky Lark, borrowed from our great-uncle Trevor, who lived at Abernant. In the middle of the lake were a number of marshy islands, white with noisily-nesting gulls, and Mummy was inspired to strip to her underclothes and half-wade, half-swim out to the nearest, in quest of their delicious pink-yolked eggs.

  Holding her horse and our ponies on the bank, Gerry and I watched in growing alarm as she began to swim from one island to the next, her head a mere blob among the dancing ripples. From time to time we’d see a pale flas
h as her arm reached into a nest, abstracted an egg, then tested it in the water. If it was fresh, it would sink. If it floated, it was certainly addled or contained a chick near hatching. Selecting suitable eggs took a long time, and we became increasingly anxious as she went ever farther from the shore.

  We were both rather short-sighted, and what with the dazzle of sun on the water it was difficult to keep her in view; but eventually we had to recognise that the head was no longer visible. Mummy had vanished. We looked at each other in dismay, wondering what to do. We couldn’t let go of the horses and there was nothing to tie them to. Nor could either of us swim that far.

  The sun went in, a chilly wind blew, the ponies fidgeted and tugged at the reins, and we stood there in frozen indecision.

  Then Gerry said, ‘There she is!’

  I saw it, too. A confused splashing on the edge of one of the islands, a faint halloo, and to our huge relief we saw Mummy haul herself out of the water and collapse among the rushes. She lay there, pummelling her legs, trying to get up and falling down again.

  After what seemed an age she stood up and waved to us. We caught the one word, ‘…Back,’ and saw her lower herself into the water. With hearts in our mouths, we watched her swim slowly and splashily towards us, and Gerry thrust all the reins into my hands and waded deep into the water to help pull her out. His clothes were soaked when they both staggered up the bank, and Mummy’s arms and legs were mottled green and red in patches, like condemned meat fed to lions at the zoo, and she shivered convulsively. We tried to dry her off with heather, but it was too scratchy, and gorse was plainly not an option, but after a bit she managed to pull on her clothes and began to look more herself.

  ‘I got cramp. Too silly! But look…’ And she showed us the clutch of little greeny-khaki eggs she had brought back, knotted into a big spotted handkerchief.