The White Horse of Zennor

by Michael Morpurgo

  The autumn fog came rolling in now each evening to blot out the sun, and the heather and the bracken faded on the moor above Tremedda. The sea turned winter grey beyond the ploughed fields, and the wind whipped across the fields from the open sea bringing with it the first storms of winter. The cows were driven into their winter quarters in the yard behind the parlour. They would not see the grass again until spring.

  Quite soon after the first frost it became apparent to Thomas that the milk yield was falling. Of course it fell anyway in the winter months but it was falling unusually fast. He put this down at first to the driving rain and the cold, and to the poor quality of the hay he had cut that summer. But no matter how much sugar-beet and barley he fed to his cows to compensate, he could not stop the slide. Cows were drying off before their time, and even those in the full flush of milk seemed to carry half empty udders. Each evening the milk level in the bulk tank was falling perceptibly lower, and at last Thomas acknowledged to himself that he had a problem. He called out the vet time after time to examine the cows, but the vet shook his head and whistled through his teeth declaring himself perplexed. All he could do was to prescribe a dose of minerals and vitamins. It seemed for a time that this might work, but very soon the level in the tank fell yet again.

  Sick with anxiety, for the milk was his main winter income from the farm, Thomas lay awake each night and worried. One wet November night Thomas was lying in bed in the early hours listening to the rain against the window pane when it came to him that there could be a fox prowling in the yard, frightening the cows, or perhaps even it was rats that were upsetting them. He threw on his old raincoat and went out into the wet black of the night. He took his gun with him just in case. As he opened the yard gate he heard quite clearly the sound of sucking, and that was strange for the suckling cows were housed a long way away in the new sheds by the covered yard. Even so he imagined at first that the wind must be carrying the sound across the fields from the covered yard – that was the only reasonable explanation. It was only when he shone his torch along the long line of cubicles that he discovered the cause of the sucking sound, for every cow in the herd was sucking hard on her own udder. He ran along the shed shouting at them to stop, but they paid him no attention.

  ‘It’s no use, Thomas Barbery,’ said a soft voice behind him, a voice he recognised only too well. ‘Once they’ve tasted it it’s the devil to stop them you know. Takes them back to their calfhood I suppose.’

  Of course Thomas knew before he turned around to whom the voice belonged, but he shone his torch in the direction of the voice just to be sure. The little old man stood watching him, leaning on his elbow against the yard wall.

  ‘A pity, Thomas Barbery, what a terrible pity, but these things happen in farming you know.’

  And he turned around and vanished into the night before Thomas had recovered sufficiently to raise his gun, or even to think about doing so.

  Gales came in January as they always did, howling in from the Atlantic, and seeking in their fury to tear every building from its foundations. The great hay barn behind the covered yard that had stood the test for a hundred years and more, shook and rattled until the new corrugated iron roof flew off one night bit by bit and clattered down into the yard. The storm lasted for forty-eight hours so there was no possibility of saving the hay. Thomas and his wife tried in vain to haul a great tarpaulin over the exposed stack, but the force of the wind whipped it from their hands and they soon had to give up the unequal struggle. By the time the rain subsided and the wind blew itself out, every bale of hay and straw in the stack was saturated.

  Thomas stood in the wreck of his barn and would have wept like a child, but a great anger raged in his heart and held back his tears.

  ‘A pity, Thomas Barbery,’ came a sympathetic voice from high up in the haystack above him. ‘A terrible pity, but these things happen in farming you know.’

  In his fury Thomas bent and picked up a stone and sent if flying up towards the little old man, but he had vanished.

  ‘Go to the devil,’ he shouted. ‘I know what you’re up to and I’ll never give in. I won’t believe in fairy stories.’

  Some of the hay and straw was retrievable, but even that never lost the smell of damp and the mildew set in to spoil all but a few hundred bales. So there was a new roof to be paid for and ten thousand bales of hay and straw to buy in, enough to feed and bed the stock through to the end of the winter. And still the cows were sucking themselves as they lay in the cubicles.

  When the ewes began to lamb in February and there were twins and even triplets born daily out in the high fields by the cliffs, Thomas’ spirits rose with a fresh hope. The spring came back in his step and he was, his wife noticed, his old self once again. The perpetual glower and heavy silence she had known in the last few months disappeared. Day after day he would come back into the house for breakfast, his face red from the biting wind, and report triumphantly that more doubles and triples had been born over night and that all the lambs were strong and healthy. This success enabled Thomas to shake off the problems of the milking herd and the hay barn. It was the heaviest crop of lambs ever bred on the farm – a reward he thought for his new policy of breeding only from the most commercial breeds of lowland sheep. The success however was to prove shortlived.

  Lambing was almost over and they were into a mild spell at the end of the month when the deadly white-scour struck the flock. One by one the lambs weakened and went off their legs, and now when he came back for his breakfast each morning he carried at least one dead lamb in each hand. In desperation he brought the whole flock inside to keep a closer eye on them and injected every lamb, but this seemed merely to accelerate the spread of the disease. Within a week he lost over fifty lambs before he took his vet’s advice and moved the sheep out onto the hills again. Then just as suddenly as it had begun the disease vanished.

  He was burying the last of the dead lambs in the soft hillside under Tregarthen cottages when he felt a presence behind him, and there, sitting up on an ivy covered rock, was the little old man. Sadness was etched on his face and the smile that was always there was a smile of sympathy.

  ‘A pity, Thomas Barbery,’ he said shaking his head. ‘A terrible pity, but these things happen in farming you know.’

  He hopped down from the rock and walked towards him.

  ‘Thomas Barbery,’ he said, ‘we want to help you. You’ve only to ask us. Please let us help you.’

  But Thomas could not bring himself to reply. He felt dejected and demoralised, but his pride refused to allow him to speak. He ignored his visitor and bent once again to dig the shallow graves, reflecting grimly on his growing catalogue of misfortune.

  Thomas had a particular pride in his calves, but shut up as they were all winter in the sheds and the covered yard, they began to develop ringworm. The great crusty growths crowded their faces and ran down their necks. It spread from one to the other until every beast in the covered yard was infected. Once again the vet was called in to treat them, but with no success, and much against his own better judgement Thomas called in an old farmer friend of his father’s from Morvah to charm the ring-worm away. But neither magic nor medicine had any effect. In the market his farmer friends, who loved always to find fault, pointed out that his sheds probably needed a good cleaning out, and one or two mentioned that cattle were always healthier if they wintered out.

  The tidal wave of misery was gathering momentum by the week. A farrowing sow lay on her litter and squashed half of them, a bullock broke into the granary one night and gorged itself to death on cattle nuts, and in the muggy March mists Thomas lost three calves with viral pneumonia. Then the hens began quite unaccountably to cannibalise their own eggs. And still the cows were not milking as they should and the hay and straw had to be paid for as well as the barn roof, and all his calves were covered in ringworm. Then there were the dead lambs – he could not forget the lambs.

  Thomas always hayed up his suckling cows in the covered
yard last thing at night after the milking. He had finished and was spreading straw behind them for their bedding when he heard a cough. He thought it was a cow at first, but when he looked up he saw it was no cow.

  ‘A pity Thomas, a terrible pity.’

  The little old man was sitting cross-legged up on the hayrack and smiling gently as he always did. It was not the smile of triumph – even Thomas could see that.

  The tone of his voice was gentle, not gloating.

  ‘These things happen in farming you know. It’s not your fault – none of it is your fault. None of it is our fault either – we don’t make these things happen. We are not happy that you are unhappy – believe me Thomas. Let us help you, Thomas, let us talk like friends. We have to be friends sooner or later. The story your father told you was true, Thomas. Why should he tell you a lie? Was he a foolish man? Was he a stupid farmer? Was he a bad father? Let’s strike a bargain and we’ll all go to work and help put things to rights again. We’ll work together, just like I did with your father and with his father before him. What do you say Thomas?’

  But Thomas said nothing. He simply strode out of the building and banged the steel doors closed behind him. He was consumed with such a deep sense of hurt and humiliation that he could not even bring himself to look at the little old man as he passed him.

  As his farming fortunes deteriorated, his unhappiness spilled over at home. He was sharp now with his wife where before he had been gentle and kind, and he had no time for his toddling son who would coo plaintively at his brooding father to try to get him to play as he used to. Any wandering sheep or cattle were a cause for unreasoning dispute with his farming friends and neighbours who scarcely recognised him these days as the Thomas Barbery they had known since schooldays. Sympathy or kindness on their part seemed to arouse only a sullen resentment so that as time passed there were very few offers of help. No one could reach him, not even his wife, who lived her life now in perpetual dread of his black moods. The prospect of ruin had settled on him and cast a shadow not only over him but over everyone who knew him and loved him.

  There is no mains water serving the farms that run along the cliff tops at Zennor. Tremedda farm, like the others, is fed by a spring that bubbles up into a leat below the Eagle’s Nest. There had always been more than enough water for the farm and for the house. No-one could ever remember the water at Tremedda running dry. Even in drought years when there is no water left in the reservoirs and the wells run dry all over Penwith, the leat below the Eagle’s Nest flows strong and plentifully, and the troughs in the fields are always full. So when one morning in early spring the water to the drinking-troughs in the cowyard suddenly stopped and the taps in the house ran dry, Thomas could only imagine that there was a blockage in the pipe. But try as he did to unblock it, not a dribble of water trickled out of the pipe. With increasing anxiety he climbed up the rocks through the gorse to the leat on the hillside and found it empty.

  Thomas sat down on a great flat slab of granite, numb with despair, and looked out over his farm. Without water there could be no farm – he knew that well enough. He could hear the thunder of the sea against the cliffs and the urgent mooing of his thirsty cattle. The first cuckoo called out from the woods by the old chapel ruin and he noticed that the daffodils that filled the garden of the ruined cottage nearby were in full flower. That, he remembered, was his favourite playing place as a child. The farm lay spread out below him. He could see his wife picking daffodils in the garden, and his son pedalling frantically round the sandpit on his tricycle. Thomas had not cried since he was a child, but tears came now to his eyes as he watched them. And then the cuckoo called again, a clear recurring call from the ruined cottage this time, a clearer call, more insistent.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said aloud, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand and getting to his feet. ‘I have been a cuckoo, a right cuckoo, and there’s only one way I know to put things right.’

  After milking that evening Thomas washed out his father’s old white bowl which he had kept in the corner of the dairy, and dipped it into the swirling milk in the tank. He walked out over the field towards the great rock in the meadow and set the bowl down in the centre of it before turning away and going back into the dairy to fetch the sack of potatoes he had brought down from the house. As he opened the door he was half expecting the little old man to be there, and indeed he was, sitting on the silver tank, his little legs crossed as Thomas had first seen him all those months before. They looked at each other for a moment before Thomas spoke.

  ‘I need your help,’ he said. ‘I’ve put your milk out on the rock, and I’ll let you have these potatoes to be going on with. There’ll be a row for you and yours next year, I promise, and every year after that.’

  The little old man’s smile widened and he chuckled with delight, holding out his hand to Thomas, who took it gratefully and helped him to the ground.

  ‘Thank you Thomas Barbery,’ said the little old man. ‘I knew we would be friends one day. From now on we will see to it that your farm and your family prospers. Come on now,’ and he reached up and took Thomas’s hand, ‘I’ve something to show you.’

  He led Thomas by the hand out into the meadow and stood for a moment looking around him.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ he said. ‘Is there any place more beautiful on all the earth?’

  ‘No,’ said Thomas. ‘Come to think of it, I shouldn’t think there is.’

  ‘Watch this, Thomas Barbery,’ the little man said, and he clapped his hands loudly three times. From under every rock on the farm it seemed, from the daffodil cottage and from the ruined chapel beyond came an army of little men and little women, running and jumping and capering until they gathered in a circle around the rock where they joined hands and danced together. ‘You see,’ said the little man. ‘There’s a lot of us, and now we’re back at work we’ll soon have your farm working just as it used to. We’ll have a word with your cows right away and they’ll stop their nonsense – you can be sure of that. You’ll never see us again Thomas, not if you love the land and are true to us, but you’ll always know we’re there. And after you’re gone we will look after your son, and his son after him when they take on the farm at Tremedda.’

  In the months and the years that followed the farm thrived as it had never done before, and Thomas was a happy man again. Every evening since that terrible day when the leat below the Eagle’s Nest unaccountably dried up, he put out the bowl of milk for the little people and he always grew a line of potatoes and left them in the land for his little friends.

  When some time later his son asked him why he left out a bowl of milk every night on the great rock in the meadow below the milking parlour, he replied,

  ‘It’s for the cat. It’s milk for the cat.’

  ‘But we haven’t got a cat, Father,’ said the little boy.

  ‘I know,’ said Thomas, ‘but for the moment let’s pretend we have. When you’re a bit older I’ll tell you a story, a true story; and then you’ll know why. But I’m not going to tell you just yet because you’d believe me, and if you believe it now you won’t believe it later when it really matters.’

  ‘I don’t understand, Father,’ said the little boy.

  ‘You will, my lad,’ said Thomas, and smiled to himself. ‘You will.’

  MAD MISS MARNEY

  THERE IS A LOST HOUSE HIGH UP ON THE moor above Zennor churchtown where no one comes and no one goes. No road leads up to it, and even the peat-black track passes by the front gate as if it might be afraid to go any closer. It looks as if no one lives there for no curtain ever shivers and no smoke breathes out of the chimney. But someone does live there.

  Mad Miss Marney has lived on her own up there for as many long years as anyone can remember. In all that time the only people she has ever spoken to are the shopkeepers in Penzance where she goes just a few times a year for provisions. On these rare appearances she is always a source of great interest and speculation for she goes dressed in a coat
made from corn-sacks and tied around the waist with binder-cord. She talks to herself incessantly and cackles whenever she laughs. All this may well be why she is known as ‘Mad Miss Marney’. Most people try to avoid her for she is disturbingly strange to look at, but for those who do take the time to speak to her she always has a toothy smile and an infectious laugh that often breaks into a high-pitched cackle.

  To the children she is of course a witch. Any bent old lady who lives on her own, carries a knobbly walking stick and cackles when she laughs has to be a witch. But Mad Miss Marney is a witch mostly because the children have all been told to stay away from her by parents who themselves believe that there must be more to Mad Miss Marney than meets the eye.

  One of these children was Kate Trelochie who unlike most children had no fear of the dark or of witches or of anything much, but like most children she was insatiably inquisitive. She lived at Wicca Farm under the shadow of the Eagle’s Nest. She was an only child whose parents were so yoked to their farm and so consumed by the work of it that they had little time or energy to spare for their child. So she grew up a wild, independent soul wandering the fields and the cliffs with her friends, but always reserving the high moor by the Eagle’s Nest for herself alone. The moor suited her for she was a creature of impulsive moods, at one moment unable to contain her exhilaration and at the next so full of despondency and gloom that she could scarcely speak to anyone. Ever since she could remember she had been drawn to the sighing mists and the whispering wilderness of the moor; everything from the collapsed three-legged Quoit, that last sad reminder of some ancient chieftain’s earthly sway, to the great granite cheesewring rocks that overlooked Zennor itself – everything was her own private sanctuary, her kingdom.