The Horses of Follyfoot

by Monica Dickens

  That did it. ‘Come on, Arch,’ he said. ‘If I lose you, I’ll lose the best friend a boy ever had.’

  He unclipped the halter rope and led him towards the house.

  Grandma’s room was at the front. At the back of the kitchen, there was a little kind of pantry cupboard where Geoffrey’s mother kept flower vases and some of the china that was too expensive to eat off. The only way to get to it was through the kitchen.

  Archie didn’t want to come in, so Geoffrey put some sugar in the palm of his hand and walked ahead of him, holding out his hand. Archie followed, reaching out his head to lick the sweet hand.

  Geoffrey managed to get him through the kitchen without too much damage. His long tail knocked down the salt and pepper shakers that were shaped like owls. Good thing it wasn’t the ones that were shaped like swans, with breakable necks.

  He took the pony round the table and into the pantry. Archie just fitted in there. He stood quite contentedly. It was stifling hot, though, so Geoffrey squeezed past him to open the bottom of the window, squeezed back to tie his tail in a knot so that he wouldn’t whisk it around the shelves, and went upstairs to bed to read by the light of a torch. His mother had taken the bulb out of his lamp, so that he couldn’t read.

  At two o’clock in the morning, Mr and Mrs Masters were quarrelling on their way home from the party.

  ‘I’m sick of you always imagining things,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t imagine that woman insulting me. Oh! Be careful, Roderick. There’s a rabbit in the road.’

  ‘It’s a stone, you idiot. Get your eyes examined.’

  As they went past the row of cottages at Upham’s Corner, she said, ‘I smell smoke. We should stop and ring up the fire station.’

  Further on, she saw a cat up a tree and wanted Mr Masters to stop the car and climb up after it. Nearer home, seeing a man walking back from a date with his girl, she said, ‘I don’t recognise him. He could be a prowler. Let’s ring the police.’

  Roderick got pretty sick of her fancies. He did not pay much attention. As they went past the house to the gate of the drive, she gave a little scream.

  ‘What now?’

  She clutched his arm and he almost scraped the gate post.

  ‘There’s a horse’s head sticking out of the window.’

  ‘It’s not your eyes that want examining. It’s your head,’ he grumbled. ‘Get up to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.’

  In the morning, when she came down in her black silk kimono with the red poppies, she didn’t feel better, she felt worse.

  ‘Archibald is in the pantry with all my good china.’ She woke up Geoffrey.

  ‘Because of the mosquitoes, you see.’

  She didn’t want an explanation. ‘How will we get him out of there without breaking something?’

  Geoffrey got up and went down. He took hold of Archie’s thick knotted tail and pulled backwards. The pony came out like a cork from a bottle. He only broke one Wedgwood jug and a Rockingham saucer. Geoffrey’s mother went to wake up his father.

  ***

  Geoffrey’s father cancelled a tennis match and a cocktail party, and spent the day beginning the work on the stable for Archibald.

  Chapter 24

  THERE WAS ANOTHER boy who had a pony in that neighbourhood, and he had no stable for it, either. He only had it on loan for the summer, and a neighbour allowed him to graze it in his field, along with some cows.

  On the local radio news, it didn’t say anything about cows. It said horses and ponies. It said ‘Grave danger’ and ‘Mosquito-borne virus’. It said (or hinted) that anyone who cared at all about their horse or pony would keep it under cover where there was less danger of getting bitten.

  This boy whose name was Rubin did not actually care much about the pony. He had not been able to tell anyone that, however, since most of the children in his neighbourhood were either pony-mad or pony-hungry. They either rode all the time, or wished they could. It was a pity that the family who had lent him this pony had not lent it to one of the pony-hungry people. But Rubin had been in a lot of trouble this year, both at school and at home, and they thought that a nice wholesome summer with a fat grey pony would show him a ‘Good way of life’.

  Rubin’s idea of the good life was to hang around with his mates down by the canal. His mates were not the kind who had ponies, or wanted them. In their busy lives of knocking things off from shops and the market stalls and trading the items for cash, smashing things that annoyed them, like windshields, and sitting on the canal wall, smoking and planning the next project, there was no time for such childish things.

  Rubin had not told them about the grey pony. He had not told his parents that he was still seeing his mates. Since he rode the pony out almost every day, they thought he was getting wholesome. They did not know that he rode towards town, tied the pony up in the tumbledown shed behind Carter’s coal yard, and then sneaked between the buildings and down the alley to the place where his mates gathered to pass round the cigarettes nicked from a table in the caff last night and discuss new ways of destroying the plumbing in the gents at the cinema.

  But when he heard the radio warning, he did confide in his best friend Arthur, who had been in so many tight places that he knew how to keep his mouth shut.

  ‘If that pony kicks the bucket, you see,’ he told Arthur, ‘I’ll have no cover story. They think I go riding all day. If there’s no pony, they’ll never let me go off on my own, and I’ll miss the big thing at the warehouse.’

  ‘You got no shed, not nothing, at your place?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘Only the garage, and that’s got my father’s car in it.’

  Rubin and his father did not get along very well, so he spoke of him as ‘my father’ to make up for feeling, sometimes, that he didn’t have a father.

  ‘It’s mostly nights they said was the danger time, right?’

  ‘And that’s just the time the car is always in the garage.’

  ‘And just the time your dear old dad will be tucked up in bed oblivious, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  Late that night, Arthur sneaked down to Rubin’s house. He waited by the garage until Rubin came out and said, ‘My father’s in bed and asleep.’

  They opened the garage door cautiously. Rubin could not drive so Arthur, who said he could, was the one who backed the car out.

  He put it into first gear and smashed the headlamps against the workbench. Because he knew how to drive, he was able to get it into reverse. He backed out fast, just missing Rubin who was holding the door, couldn’t reach the footbrake, couldn’t find the handbrake, and crashed through a fence with a night-shattering noise of breaking glass and splintering wood. He stopped with his back wheels against the next-door garage, opened the door and ran.

  When Rubin’s father came out, it was obvious what Rubin had done. He tried to explain about the pony, but his father had heard enough of Rubin’s stories to know a fairy-tale excuse when he heard one. Rubin was confined to the house and garden for the rest of the holidays. He missed the raid on the warehouse, and so missed being picked up with Arthur and the rest by the police car which was waiting for them outside the broken window.

  The grey pony went back to its owners. They were very disappointed with Rubin for not having found a ‘Good way of life’.

  There were also three girls who had a pony, which could not be brought in at night because there was no place to keep it.

  Yes, there was. It was a very small pony, not much bigger than a Shetland. On the day that the Royal Veterinary College sent out its warning to horse owners, there was parked outside the house where the girls lived a closed grey van, of the kind used by plumbers and painters to carry their equipment. It had been there for days. On its sides was painted, J. E. DUGGAN. HOME REPAIRS ALL SORTS. DECORATIONS. GUTTERS. UPHOLSTERING. U NAME IT. The van was empty. The girls knew that, because the back door was unlocked and they had looked.

  So when the warning came, it was obvio
us where they could store the pony out of danger. It was a lot of trouble to get it into the van, but with one of them getting her shoulder under the front end, and the other two lifting a back leg each, they finally got their beloved pet into the van, closed the door and went to bed relieved that Ponto was safe from harm for tonight at least.

  Early the next morning, J. E. Duggan, who had run out of petrol and taken a bus into town, came back with a can. He put a gallon in the tank, filled up at a service station and drove on back to Scotland with the pony.

  Those were only a few of the things that happened that night of the Great Encephalitis Epidemic Scare.

  Chapter 25

  ANOTHER THING THAT happened that night was that Callie found Dora crying in the tack room, wiping her eyes with a grubby rag that had last been used to polish a snaffle.

  ‘Oh, come on.’ Callie quite often cried herself, but it unnerved her to see a grown-up doing it. ‘Robin’s all right, and if Rebel dies – well, he might never have been rideable anyway. Steve says he would have killed somebody in the end, and you’d have been lucky if it was one of the Crowleys and not you.’

  ‘Steve says.’ Dora sighed and twisted the rag in her hands. ‘Steve is always saying. He knows it all. Like,’ – she made a sound between a laugh and a sob – ‘like Chuckie Fiske.’

  ‘Who’s she? Oh, I remember. The one who said you were the only idiot in the world who could get Robin on the wrong lead.’ Callie had heard the saga of America many times. ‘Chuckie Fiske, she knows it all.’

  ‘She knows nothing,’ Dora said bitterly. ‘It’s all her fault.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Steve told me that if the disease is confirmed, all our horses here will probably have to be put down.’

  ‘All our horses here?’ Callie stared at Dora. She felt that the blood had dropped from her face into a pool of lead in her stomach. All the horses – Cobby? Hero? Specs and Polly? Lancelot who had survived so stubbornly?

  Dora was sitting on the broken chair, staring blankly at a five-year old calendar on the wall from E. Tibbets, Grain and Hay. Callie ran out.

  She went to bed early, without supper. She didn’t want to see anyone. She lay upstairs and listened to voices, the phone ringing, feet running. It seemed for ever before the house finally settled down for the night.

  Long after everyone was asleep, Callie was still keeping herself awake by pinching bits of skin, scratching her toenails against her ankles, reciting dates of kings and queens, and finding towns and rivers and colours and trees and types of horse for all the letters of the alphabet.

  Through her open window, she could hear the stabled horses stamping and snorting. In the winter, they mostly lay down quietly. Now they could not get used to the loss of their summer freedom. When Callie leaned out of the window and said, ‘Cobby,’ he heard her at once and answered.

  She dressed again and went downstairs. The friendly house was still and unfamiliar, full of strange creaks and knocks and angled moonlit patches. The Colonel’s dog stirred and thumped her tail. The cats sleeping on piles of laundry and newspapers took no notice as Callie let herself quietly out of the back door and went to the stables.

  One by one, she led the horses out to the big field and turned them loose. Cobbler’s Dream was last, and the grey donkey. Riding Cobby and leading Donald, she went down the grass track into the field and shut the gate behind her.

  Dottie, watching from the orchard, brayed a strangled question.

  ‘Shut up,’ Callie told her. ‘You’ll have to stay and risk it.’ Polly was too little to let loose with the others.

  She rode among the horses, still leading the grey donkey, down the hill, across the bridge over the stream, and out to the far end of the long pasture, where the grass became harsher and the bushes thicker as the land approached the open moorland beyond the farm boundaries.

  The old horses were in the habit of following Don, and they followed him now, straggling in singles and groups, pausing at the open gate, and then following Callie on through, cautiously scenting the wide spaces that were not fenced or hedged.

  Callie got off, removed the donkey’s halter, and threw some pebbles at him to make him run ahead. The horses followed. When they were all through the gate, she shut it behind them. With her face set as a stone and her heart numb with loss, she slipped off Cobby’s halter, who without looking back at her, trotted after the other horses over the dipping moorland.

  Chapter 26

  RON STRYKER FELT deprived. Cheated of glory.

  It was he who had made the historic telephone call, awakening the nation to the threat of an epidemic. Now everyone but him was getting the publicity. Everyone but poor old Dr Dillon.

  He couldn’t go to the farm to give newsmen the chance of a picture of the ‘Man who Broke the News’, because the Colonel would get after him with an iron rake for doing the Dr Dillon act, so he decided to go to London and let one of the big dailies have an exclusive.

  His motorbike was not licensed for this quarter. That was all right for buzzing round the local roads where the police were dozy, but a trip to London was too risky. Ron got out on the main road and started using his thumb.

  Expert at the art as he was, never failed to get a lift. Looks and personality, that’s what does it.

  Looks and personality kept him walking for about half an hour, while cars whizzed uncaring by him. Then a car going fast slowed ahead of him and pulled to the side of the road. Ron panted to catch up with it.

  The driver was lighting a cigarette.

  ‘Thanks for stopping for me.’ Ron opened the door.

  ‘I didn’t,’ the driver said. ‘I stopped to get a packet of cigarettes out of my coat.’

  ‘My mistake.’ Ron was going to shut the door, but the man said indifferently, ‘Get in anyway. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Going to London?’ Ron asked. The man nodded and Ron hugged himself. Never failed. Always the old luck.

  ‘I’m going to Fleet Street,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact.’

  Since the driver appeared unmoved, he added, ‘Exclusive story on the big horse-disease epidemic. They want pictures of the man who broke the news.’

  ‘That rather suspicious-sounding vet?’ the driver asked. ‘I’m a doctor myself, so naturally I was interested, but those first reports sounded a bit whacky.’

  ‘Bad reporting,’ Ron said. But he decided to settle for being Dr Dillon’s assistant, rather than whacky Dr Dillon.

  ‘You’re a vet’s assistant?’ The doctor’s glance took in Ron’s tangled red hair, his leather jacket with the oil marks, the tattoo on the back of his right hand which said ‘Rita’.

  ‘Yerss, and so naturally I’ve been involved in the whole affair.’ Ron had many accents available for use. This one was taken from the Colonel’s friend Sir Richard Wortley, who had a strawberry nose, and pointed at old horses with his stick saying, ‘Getting a bit groggy on his pins, what?’

  ‘What is your estimate, then,’ the doctor enquired politely, ‘of the biological factors favourable for the perpetuation of the virus through infected vertebrates?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Next question: what’s the point of trying to put me on?’

  ‘Well—’ Ron shifted uneasily. ‘Just having a bit of a lark.’

  ‘I don’t like people having larks in my car.’ The doctor stopped, leaned across and opened the door. Ron got out and gave a cheery wave, to show he didn’t mind bad manners.

  The next car that stopped was driven by a simple-looking boy, with a thatch of pale yellow hair and a crop of fiery pimples. Who should Ron be this time? The boy looked impressionable. He might do his pop singer bit.

  When the boy asked, ‘Going to London?’ Ron said, ‘Yes. Got a couple of concerts booked. I always travel this way because I like to meet my fans.’

  ‘Who are you then?’ The boy turned on him a vacant gape.

  ‘Silk Valliant.’ Ron studied his long dirty nails.

  �
�Silk Valliant!’ the boy mooed, disguising with over-enthusiasm the fact that he had never heard of him. ‘Wow, wait till I tell the gang I gave a lift to Silk Valliant. I do a bit with the drums myself,’ he added modestly, ‘but, of course, not in your class.’

  ‘Ah well.’ Silk Valliant settled back and prepared to enjoy the drive. ‘We’ve all got to start somewhere.’

  When the boy stopped to let him out at the point where he turned off the London road, Ron fished in his pocket and put two green tickets into the glove compartment.

  ‘Tickets for my concert,’ he said. ‘Bring your old lady. Come round and see me after.’

  ‘Gosh, thanks.’ The boy’s bumpy skin flamed. After he had driven on alone for a while, he took out the tickets. They said, Parish Church of Ashbury serving Little Moulsden. Summer Fayre. Grand Raffle. First Prize a 14lb Goose.

  Nobody stopped for Ron for a long time. He sat by the side of the road and rubbed his ankle, with an expression of pain that people were going too fast to notice, even if they cared. The only person who cared was a little old lady going slow enough to notice. She stopped and backed up to him fast, almost running over the leg he wasn’t rubbing.

  ‘Do you need to go to a hospital?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘No,’ said Ron. ‘I’ve had that bullet in there so long, they reckon they’ll leave it.’

  He got into the car, and almost immediately regretted it. The lady pulled across to the middle lane and drove at thirty miles an hour, with people passing her on both sides. From time to time, she wobbled off course. Drivers hooted, glared and shook their fists. Children jeered through back windows. Ron slumped in his seat, hoping not to be seen.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the old lady asked sunnily. ‘You look deathly pale.’

  ‘Please stop the car and let me out,’ Ron said faintly. ‘I think I’m going to be car sick.’

  ‘Oh, we can take care of that, my dear.’ She pulled out some paper bags from under the seat. ‘I’ve got a little grandson who always throws up, so I’m prepared. Goodness, that lorry came close to me.’ She had wavered almost into the path of a big lorry, who had swerved just in time, stark horror on the driver’s face.