Dora at Follyfoot

by Monica Dickens

‘Fox is the name. Bernard Fox. Good friend of the Colonel’s. He asked me to keep an eye on things, so I thought I’d just look in as I was passing by.’

  ‘How – how nice of you,’ mumbled Dora. Steve said nothing. Boys never do, in a pinch. So Dora produced a few cracked words. ‘Would you like to see round?’

  Bernard Fox had already seen quite a lot in the few moments he had been in the yard. Straw bales in the corner instead of stacked away. A fork left in a loaded wheelbarrow. Muddy heads looking over doors, with burrs in their forelocks. Pussycat licking the door of the feed shed, the nearest she could get to oats.

  ‘Better shut the yard gate while she’s loose,’ Mr Fox said.

  ‘She never wanders away,’ Dora told him.

  ‘You can’t assume anything with horses. They’re unpredictable.’

  ‘She knows when she’s well off. She’s gone far enough in her old life. A man was riding her from Scotland to London with a petition for the Queen. After a week, Puss lay down by the side of the road and wouldn’t go any farther, so the man had to go on by train, and when he got to London the Queen was in Australia.’

  Dora thought Bernard Fox would be interested, but he only said, ‘I’d still like to see you shut the gate.’

  He did not exactly order (he’d better not). He just stood there in the superb boots, with his foxy head cocked, confident of being obeyed.

  Dora stamped off, muttering and growling. The gate had dropped, because the hinge was loose. With her back to Bernard Fox, she tried to latch it without him noticing that she had to lift it.

  ‘Need some longer screws in that hinge, don’t you?’ he called out breezily.

  He had several other breezy suggestions.

  ‘Better get that muck pile shifted.’ He looked round the side of the barn. ‘Danger of spontaneous combustion. It’s hot enough for mushrooms already, I see.’

  ‘We’re growing them to eat,’ Steve invented. ‘Organic gardening.’

  They could not keep him out of the tack room. Cobwebs. Mildewed leather. A bridle with a grass-stained bit hanging on the cleaning hook, as if that were enough to clean it.

  ‘Colonel forgotten his Army training?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Dora was not going to have him criticising the Colonel. ‘We’ve had no time to clean tack. Haven’t got time to ride anyway.’

  ‘And nothing much to sit on.’ Bernard Fox’s cold ginger eyes took in the few dusty old saddles, which were all they had.

  ‘Bit risky.’ He looked into the loose box where Stroller was keeping company with Prince, who had been turned out of his stable for Flypaper, whose mange might be catching.

  ‘They get on all right.’

  ‘Start a kicking match sooner or later. Why don’t you turn ’em out?’

  ‘It’s going to rain.’ Steve looked up at the low sky, which might let down water on Bernard’s burnish at any moment. ‘Stroller is rheumatic and Prince is coughing.’

  ‘So will Stroller be, if you leave them together. Isn’t there an isolation box?’

  ‘Yes, the foaling stable. But Lancelot’s in that.’

  ‘Who’s Lancelot?’

  ‘The oldest horse in the world,’ Dora said proudly.

  Bernard Fox looked glumly over the door. Lancelot, despite having a rack full of hay, was eating his bedding. He was the only horse who could manage to have both a pot belly and sticking out ribs. His wispy tail was scratched thin at the top. He had rubbed away half his mane under his favourite oak tree branch. His long teeth stuck out beyond his slack lips and his neck curved the wrong way, like a camel.

  Bernard Fox looked at him for a long time, orange eyebrows raised, mouth pursed under the trim moustache. Lancelot looked back at him, his sparse lashes dropping over clouded eyes.

  ‘Ought to have been put down long ago.’

  ‘The Colonel doesn’t believe in taking life.’ Dora thought he couldn’t know the Colonel very well, or he would be aware of that. ‘Unless a horse is suffering.’

  ‘I’m suffering just looking at him.’

  ‘Lancelot is very content—’ Dora began, but Bernard Fox had walked off to look over the gate of the jump field, where Folly and a few other horses were grazing. The gate was tied with a halter rope. One of the jumps was wrecked from Dora’s efforts with the mule.

  ‘Nice colt.’ Even Bernard Fox could not find fault with Folly. ‘Who’s working with him?’

  ‘Callie is beginning with the lunge and long rein. She’s the Colonel’s stepdaughter.’

  ‘You’ll be sending him to a trainer though?’

  ‘I don’t see why. Callie does very well for her age.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘I see.’

  He asked, ‘How did the horse box get so filthy?’ Going over a ploughed field to rescue a fallen calf, and, ‘When are you going to get that stand of hay cut?’ When we have time, and as he was crossing the yard to leave, ‘What is that?’

  It was Slugger, coming out of the back door in his long cooking apron and his woollen cap, waving and shouting, ‘I did it! A loaf of bread – it rose! Come and get it before it falls down!’

  ‘Would you like some home-made bread and butter?’ Dora asked politely. Bernard Fox was so narrow and trim he did not look as if he got enough of things like that.

  ‘Thanks, but I must get on. I’ve got an appointment. Big thoroughbred breeder from America.’ Who cares? ‘I’ve stayed longer than I should.’ Too true. ‘But I promised the Colonel I’d help, and I’m a man of my word.’ Too bad. ‘And help is what you youngsters need.’

  Dora and Steve hated to be called youngsters. They were doing a grown-up job with grown-up responsibilities. They were paid. They were independent. They had both left home, more or less for good.

  ‘We’re all right.’

  Instinctively they stood side by side, arms touching. They had fought and argued and annoyed each other many times since they were left on their own, but they were very close now, scenting the Fox as enemy.

  ‘You need another stable hand.’

  ‘We’ve got Slugger. And Callie.’

  ‘Slugger is the one with the bread, I take it. And Callie is the twelve-year-old? I’ll make some enquiries tomorrow and see if I can get hold of someone efficient. I’m sure the Colonel will agree.’

  ‘Not to someone who treats horses like horses,’ Dora said. Hard to explain what she meant – the caring, the understanding, the sharing of life between animal and man. Impossible to explain to Bernard Fox.

  ‘Better than treating them like inmates of a cosy old folks’ home,’ he said. ‘Good day to you, Miss Dorothy. Steven.’ His hand went politely to his cap. Steve and Dora clicked heels and saluted, and Bernard turned on his burnished boots without a smile.

  Dora’s heels did not click very well. A puppy had eaten one of her shoes, and she was barefoot. As he passed her, Bernard Fox said out of the side of his mouth, ‘You’re asking for tetanus.’

  Chapter 4

  BERNARD FOX, A man of his word as he said, cabled for the Colonel’s permission, and found a new stable hand within a few days.

  It was a girl who used to work for him.

  ‘Always these mucky girls,’ Slugger and Steve grumbled to each other. ‘Nothing but girls. Remember those two – Lily and Jane – used to squeal all the time and get their toes trodden on? Why can’t we get a man round here? Nothing but sloppy, useless girls.’

  Dora went on brushing mud off the white parts of the Appaloosa horse Spot (he never got mud on his brown patches where it wouldn’t show), and pretended not to hear.

  ‘If this new one wears tight purple trousers and dangly earrings and calls me Daddy-O, I’m packing it in,’ Slugger said.

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ said Steve, ‘if she paints her eyes like dart boards and wants to darn my socks.’

  ‘He said “efficient”.’ Dora hung an arm over Spot’s door to bang the mud out of the curry comb. ‘He didn’t say insane
.’

  Phyllis Weatherby, the efficient stable girl, was coming in two days’ time. They pretended not to care, but they did work extra hard to spruce the place up so that she would know that this was how things were done at Follyfoot.

  She was not on the afternoon bus with Callie.

  ‘Relax, everybody.’ Callie ran into the yard and spun her ugly school hat into a tree. ‘Perhaps she won’t come at all.’

  Slugger went into the house to take off his boots and put his feet up. Steve and Dora settled down to play cards in the barn. Callie changed her hated school uniform for her beloved bleached jeans and took Folly for a walk to the village, showing him the world.

  She was back quite soon in a car she had flagged down for a lift.

  ‘He got away!’ She panted into the barn. ‘A car backfired and I couldn’t hold him. He went off down the High Street with the rope trailing, knocked over a couple of bikes, went across the main road – cars swerving and screeching, it was awful – through a hedge and off across the fields, I’ve no idea where he’s gone!’ She sat down on a bale of hay, scattering the playing cards, and burst into tears.

  ‘I’ll get the truck. Dora, you take Hero and follow the colt. You can’t miss those little tracks.’

  Dora put a bridle on Hero, tried to vault on to him bareback, failed three times, and climbed on from the milestone mounting block. Steve was backing the truck out of the shed when Slugger ran shouting out of the house in his socks and his old indestructible Army vest and trousers.

  ‘Folly’s loose!’

  Dora turned back. ‘He’s across the main road. That’s where we’re going.’

  ‘He may be headed home. Mrs Ripley at the Three Horseshoes saw him run through her yard, “going like smoke”, she said on the phone.’

  Callie got into the truck. ‘Hurry, Steve.’

  ‘Better wait, if he’s headed home.’ Slugger put his hands on the door.

  ‘How do we know?’ Callie was anguished.

  ‘Tearing round the roads won’t help.’

  ‘We’ve got to do something – let go!’ She tried to pry his fingers from the edge of the door. She thumped them. She even bent down and bit the horny knuckles.

  Slugger paid no more heed than if she were a fly. He had turned his head away to listen.

  ‘Let go,’ Callie pleaded. ‘Oh hurry, Steve!’

  But Steve had heard what Slugger had heard, and jumped out.

  Specs, Folly’s mother who had long ago seemed to forget the colt was hers, had heard it too. Her shaggy head was over the door, ears pricked, eyes staring out of the white circles round them. Her head swung up and she called, deep and throaty, as she had not called since Folly was a skittery foal straying too far from her in the field.

  Other heads were coming out in a chorus of neighs, whinnies, grunts, and a donkey’s ear-shattering bray. And then from beyond the hayfield at the bottom of the hill came the faint answer, high and shrill, unmistakably Folly.

  Dora and Hero were off down the grass track, scrambling over the low bar in the gateway and down the side of the hay field to open the bottom gate for him. They came back together, Folly bounding and teasing, knocking up against Hero’s stiff, steady trot, galloping off in a circle, snatching at the tall hay, running ahead with his tail up and his head down to buck and squeal.

  At the bar, he stopped and sniffed. As Hero began to step carefully over, Folly took a flying leap and landed in front of him. Hero stumbled. Dora fell off. Hero recovered and trotted back to the yard without her.

  At this moment, a car stopped in the road and a tall girl, in the sort of raincoat you see in photographs of sporting events, walked in.

  Hero was wandering loose with one foot through his reins. Callie, with tear stains on her face, was chasing Folly round the yard, trying to grab the flying rope. Slugger was hobbling after her in his socks and khaki vest, swearing at the cobbles. Dora trailed in with mud on her behind.

  ‘With all the practice you’ve had, you ought to be able to fall off on to your feet.’ Steve laughed at her, and Dora wiped a muddy hand in his hair.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the girl in the raincoat, ‘is this Follyfoot Farm?’

  ‘Foyft Fahm,’ she said. She droned in her nose without opening her mouth, as if she couldn’t spare the words.

  She was no girl either, when you saw her close. Dry and leathery, she would never see thirty again, nor even thirty-five.

  ‘Right,’ she said, when she had introduced herself as Phlis Wethby. ‘Right, let’s get hold of that little clod.’

  ‘I can’t—’ Callie was still breathlessly playing Tag, Folly’s favourite game. Phyllis Weatherby strode over, and as Callie grabbed and he flicked away, she was there to catch him on the other side.

  ‘Get’m off guard, right?’

  Most of her sentences began and ended in ‘right’.

  ‘Right,’ she’d say, ‘we’ll get the mucking out finished and this lot turned out and these other nags groomed before we break for lunch, right? Steven, you take the end stables and Dorothy can start down that side. Right, Slugger, there’s all those cobwebs should have been got down from the beams years ago.’

  ‘We keep ’em to catch flies.’

  ‘Nonsense. Asking for coughs. Use the old birch broom, right?’

  Dora followed Steve into the shed where the barrows and forks were kept.

  ‘Right,’ she droned between closed lips, ‘you know what I think? She’s come here to be boss, right?’

  ‘Wrong.’ Steve set his jaw.

  But Phyllis Weatherby was hard to resist because, like Bernard Fox, she expected to be obeyed, which hypnotised you into obeying. Or she would tell you to do something you were just going to do anyway, so it put you under orders. She was hard to ridicule, because she had no sense of humour and couldn’t tell the difference between a joke and an insult. When Slugger was driven to mutter, ‘Oh, knock it off, you silly old cow,’ she slapped poor Trotsky on his bony triangular rump and said, ‘Right, he does look more like a cow than a horse.’

  When Dora said, ‘Right, Phyllis, it’s your turn to load the muck cart, right?’ Phyllis answered, ‘Right, you can take my turn while I soak that pony’s leg, right, Dorothy?’

  ‘The name is Dora, if you haven’t washed your ears lately.’

  ‘Short for Dorothy. Right?’

  But she did her share of the work, you had to give her that. Rejecting the comfortable, shabby farmhouse because there were spiders in the bath and mice in the larder, she had taken a room at the Cross Keys Hotel in the village. But she was back at the Farm before anyone was up, throwing pebbles at the bedroom windows and clashing buckets fit to wake the dead, which Slugger sometimes wished he was when he woke and found that the nightmare of Phyllis Weatherby was true.

  She brought her lunch from the hotel, because she couldn’t get her tight-fisted lips round Slugger’s doorstep sandwiches. She ate quickly, and jostled the others out of their usual hour of lazing in the sun, gossiping, dozing, reading, swilling mugs of the strong sugary tea which Phyllis prophesied would rot all their teeth.

  This annoyed Slugger so much that one day he took out his teeth in his red bandana handkerchief and opened his mouth and said, ‘Look, Phyll, it did.’

  ‘You were right, right?’ Dora grinned.

  ‘All right, back to the mines.’ Phyllis Weatherby dusted crumbs off her strong capable hands and stood up. ‘Fooling about won’t get the work done.’

  She chivvied the old horses as much as the people who looked after them. Hero must be schooled, though he was long past it. The Weaver must wear a cribbing collar to break him of his habit of crib biting with his long yellow teeth on his manger or door – it didn’t. Even Lancelot’s senile dreams were disturbed. He did not care to go out in damp weather. You could open his door and he would just stand there, swinging his head like a hammer and watching the rain.

  ‘Right, get a move on.’ Phyllis pushed him towards the door with her shoulder. Though
she was thin, she was sinewy and tough. ‘Get out and get some exercise.’

  ‘He’s too stiff,’ Dora said.

  ‘If he’s not sound, he shouldn’t be kept alive.’

  ‘That’s what Bernard Fox said. Why does everyone want to put down poor old Lance?’

  ‘If Mr Fox said it, it’s right. He is a master horseman.’

  ‘If you were the oldest horse in the world,’ Dora hid her head against Lancelot’s neck as he sagged at the edge of the orchard, too bored to eat grass, ‘you wouldn’t want a master horseman. You’d want a friend.’

  ‘Well, he can’t have it both ways,’ Phyllis said offensively. ‘He must either shape up or be put down.’

  ‘That’s not the point of Follyfoot,’ Dora said into Lancelot’s straggly mane.

  ‘Right. I can see that.’ Phyllis Weatherby began to shake up bedding, hissing to herself as if she were a horse.

  How were they going to get rid of her?

  Chapter 5

  QUITE A LOT of their time was spent discussing how this could be done without trouble. Phyllis Weatherby was in touch with Bernard Fox. He would hear from her about trouble, and report it to the Colonel.

  How were they going to get rid of her?

  One Sunday when Steve had gone to see his mother, and Callie and Dora wanted to try and make a dress, Phyllis insisted on taking them to a horse show to see what riding was.

  ‘We know what riding is,’ Callie objected. ‘We just don’t happen to have anything much to ride.’

  ‘If some of these old horses had been kept working,’ said Phyllis, to whom a horse was a vehicle, ‘they wouldn’t have stiffened up, right?’

  The show was quite large and smart, with a lot of teenage girls on expensive horses with jockey caps tipped over their noses and a blasé air of having seen it all before. Which they had, because they had been going to shows ever since their ambitious mothers stuck them on a pedigree Shetland in the Leading Rein class before they could walk.

  They all rode beautifully and their horses were perfectly trained. Phyllis Weatherby thought this should be inspiring, but Dora and Callie found it rather depressing.