Pony Stories (3 Book Bind-Up) (Red Fox Summer Reading Collections)

by K. M. Peyton

  ‘It’s not fair,’ she said. ‘No.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Cat’s Eyes. She looked mockingly at Peter, and said, ‘I’ll pair with you, if you like.’ Ruth recalled that her grey, a fat gelding with sleepy eyes, had refused three times at the first fence and been eliminated. Peter, obviously not easily ruffled, said, ‘Thanks for the offer, which I take great pleasure in refusing.’ He wheeled the chestnut round and trotted away towards the row of horse-boxes.

  ‘There!’ said Cat’s Eyes. ‘What a nerve! Typical McNair. He’s going home now. Talk about sporting spirit!’

  ‘Oh, well. He can’t help it, I suppose.’

  ‘I feel rather sorry for him, in a way,’ said Cat’s Eyes, maddeningly complacent. Ruth disliked her. ‘Anyone could win with the McNair stable to choose from.’

  But Ruth, remembering how the boy had ridden the champing chestnut through the gate, holding his electric power with such tact, and skill, did not agree. She did not think Cat’s Eyes could have ridden Toadhill Flax through the gate, over the stream and up the bank without hitting the rail, and not lost any marks.

  But the intrigue passed, the pairs jumped, the rosettes were awarded. The judges were collected from the far parts of the course by Land-Rover; and the horse-boxes, and strings of riders without horse-boxes, started to filter out through the gate. The cold wind was still blowing, and the grass showed the way the ponies had gone, but the field was empty. There was rain on the wind now, almost sleet. Ruth realized that she was frozen. She turned her head up into the wind, and her black hair blew back from her face. The wine-warmth of joy had dissolved, and she was left with the old familiar ache that would have her crying later, when she was in bed.

  ‘Oh, I must –’ she said out loud, into the wind.

  She turned round, her eyes picking out the jumps. She was alone in the field now.

  ‘I don’t want to win,’ she said. ‘Only to get round, on my own pony.’

  She shivered, hunched against the wind. ‘I will,’ she said to herself. ‘I will. It isn’t asking anything much.’

  But she knew, to her, it was.

  2

  MR. HOLLIS AGREES

  ‘ALL THOSE CHILDREN on ponies,’ Ruth thought, walking home, ‘have parents in suède jackets who know about ponies.’ She had read books about them. They lived in casual old farmhouses full of big dogs and saddles slung over the living-room chairs. They grew up knowing about ponies. Their parents bought them their ponies, and knew what to look for, and how not to be swindled. ‘But how shall I,’ Ruth thought, ‘buy a pony? Not knowing?’ She was determined now to have a pony. She would not postpone asking any longer. But she knew she could never be one of those casual girls who took it all for granted.

  Her mother was right about the buses. There weren’t any. Ruth, her head full of ponies, did not mind walking, at first. She was in a complete dream, and did not notice anything. She was thinking about their back garden, which would have to be their paddock, and wondering, as she had wondered many times already, whether it would be big enough. Their ‘Sunny Spacious Home’ was on a corner of the estate, and had a bigger garden than all the rest, a big awkward triangle. Nobody in their house liked gardening, so it was still all wild and full of half-bricks and lumps of breeze block. Fortunately, being in the far corner of the estate, it backed on to a field, instead of somebody else’s back garden, and there were big trees in the hedge which gave a bit of shelter. For there would be no stable for Ruth’s pony. No luxuries, Ruth thought. Just the bare pony, if she were lucky.

  ‘I will ask Dad tonight,’ she said to herself. Anything would be better than just thinking about it, and being afraid to ask. She wished desperately that her father was a farmer, who would say, ‘Of course, lass, you can keep it in Ten Acre. I’ll pick you up a useful animal in the market on Friday,’ instead of a traveller for Tibbett’s Toilet Ware, who would go grave at the thought of spending money and say, ‘Ponies don’t live on air, you know.’

  Ruth walked along thinking about buying a pony. She had forty pounds in National Savings Certificates. Her brother Ted had had sixty pounds, and had taken it all out to buy his motor bike three months ago. It started to rain again, and Ruth plodded on, head down. She pulled the hood of her anorak up and put the crash-helmet on top. There was nobody to see, as she was on a deserted stretch of country lane which ran, undulating, between vast fields whose hedges had been cut out. ‘The sort of farmer I don’t like,’ Ruth thought. It was efficient but ugly. In the burnt-out ditches the rain-water reflected the black grass. The rain started to hurt, with sleet in it, driving horizontally across the bleak lane, and Ruth put her head down against it. Her wet jeans plastered themselves to her legs and the sleet tinned on her helmet. There was nowhere to shelter, not even a tree, so she just had to keep on walking.

  After a few minutes she heard the noise of a heavy lorry approaching from behind. She shifted over into the verge, glancing over her shoulder. It was a big horse-box, with ‘McNair’ painted over the cab. It went past, soaking her still further with spray from its wheels, but about twenty yards farther on it stopped. She walked on. The door opened and a man put his head out into the rain and called back to her, ‘Want a lift?’

  ‘Oh, yes, please!’

  Ruth ran, and scrambled up into the seat beside the driver. The cab was hot and fumy, with steam on the windows, deliciously comfortable. She slammed the door.

  The man put the lorry in gear and eased it into motion once more, and said, ‘I don’t pick anyone up as a rule, but on a day like this . . .’ He grinned. ‘Bit wet, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Wychwood.’

  ‘I can put you down there, then. I pass it. Bit of luck for you, eh?’

  ‘Yes, I thought there would be a bus, but there wasn’t. I went to watch the Pony Club Trials.’

  ‘That’s where I’ve been. Left at three, but had to take young Peter up to Potton to ride some ponies his father’s thinking of buying.’

  ‘What’s his father, then? A dealer or something?’

  ‘Yes. You not heard of McNair? It’s quite a business he runs, him and the three boys. The two eldest do a lot of racing now, and jumping. Young Peter has to handle the ponies – the others have got too big. They work hard between them – the old boy’s a right slave-driver. Wouldn’t have got where he is if he wasn’t.’

  ‘Have you got Toadhill Flax in the back, then?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. You saw him jumping, eh?’

  ‘Yes. He’s a gorgeous pony.’

  ‘Flashy. Done well, hasn’t he? Six months ago that pony was as wild as they come, straight up from Wales. And yet today he went round that course and beat the lot of them. That’s McNair for you. Work! He never stops. Get a colt like that for twenty quid at the sales, and a year later it’s worth two hundred.’

  ‘How does he do that, then?’

  ‘Sheer hard work. Those boys – they’re in the stable at six every morning. Peter now – he’d work young Toad (he calls him Toad – says he jumps like a toad) before school, and again when he comes home. Every day. Steady. The old man shouting at him – got a temper like the devil himself, has the old man, but only with people. I’ve never heard him raise his voice to a horse. He’s a right character, I can tell you. Fair, too. You won’t get a bargain off him, but he’ll not cheat you. He’ll not cover faults up. And if he doesn’t think you’re fit to have a horse of his, he’ll tell you straight. Doesn’t mind what he says. But work! Cor, he doesn’t know what it is to sit in front of a telly. People like that – they deserve to make money, by my reckoning. Good luck to ’em, I say.’

  Ruth began to understand what the girls had meant with their sideways remarks about the McNair establishment. No wonder Peter could ride . . . even Cat’s Eyes saying she felt rather sorry for him made sense now. Ruth wondered (knowing how she felt herself when she first opened her eyes in the morning) whether Peter McNair reall
y wanted to get up at six every day, to be shouted at by his father.

  ‘I want to buy a pony,’ Ruth confided to the cheerful driver.

  ‘Come and see McNair, then. You won’t be sorry. He’s got some nice little animals, just suit you. We’re only three miles farther on from Wychwood. On the Hillingdon road. It’s on the right, set back a bit, but there’s a notice on the road marking the drive. You can’t miss it.’

  Ruth, in the steamy cabin of the horse-box, hypnotized by the windscreen wipers diverting the deluge of rain out of her vision, sank into a happy dream of herself buying a pony from Mr. McNair. Having him trotted out . . . running her hands down his legs, like the people in books . . . looking knowledgeably into his mouth. Every now and then from behind the partition she heard a snuffle or the clonk of a hoof from Toadhill Flax, and for a few minutes she had a sense of belonging to the horse world, swishing through the rain with the warm smell of horse permeating the cabin. ‘It’s lovely,’ she thought. ‘I am happy.’

  ‘Here you are,’ said the driver. ‘I’ll have to drop you here. I go straight on.’

  The dream was over. ‘Thank you very much.’

  She walked home, head down against the rain.

  ‘Oh, Ruth! What a sight!’ said her mother. ‘I wondered whatever you could be doing, this weather! Did you find a bus?’

  ‘No, there wasn’t one. I walked a long way, then a horse-box stopped and gave me a lift.’

  ‘A lift, eh? What have I told you about taking lifts?’ her mother asked crossly.

  ‘Oh, Mother, in this weather, surely? Besides, I told you, it was a horse-box.’

  ‘With a horse driving, I suppose?’ Mrs. Hollis said tartly. ‘Because it was a horse-box, that makes it all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Sometimes, Ruth, I think you’re plain stupid,’ her mother said. ‘Go and get changed and put those wet clothes on the washing-machine.’

  ‘Do you think Daddy will say I can have a pony now? He said we could when we lived in the country. Do you think, if I ask him . . .?’

  ‘There’s no harm in asking. But don’t expect too much. This house is about all we can afford at the moment. The mortgage is over five pounds a week. Where do you think it all comes from?’

  Ruth shivered, and went upstairs to change. ‘I will have one,’ she said to herself. ‘I will earn some money myself. I’ll work in a shop on Saturdays. Or do a paper round. Or –’ She couldn’t think of anything else. ‘If not I shall die.’

  She took her wet clothes downstairs and dumped them in the kitchen. Her mother, smart in towny shoes and a frilly apron, was cutting up tomatoes. Ruth thought gloomily, ‘She’d never sit all day on a little stool in a wood scoring marks for a Hunter Trials. She doesn’t understand anything about what matters.’ She felt uncomfortable thinking such things, but the thoughts came nevertheless. Ruth wanted a tweed mother, with pony-nuts in her pockets.

  Ted came in, and later her father drove his car – or, rather, Tibbett’s car – into the drive and stamped his feet on the doormat, sniffing the kitchen smells. They all sat down to supper and Ruth ate without noticing, only thinking of what she had to ask her father. ‘Tonight I will know, one way or the other,’ she thought, and felt sick. She could not get the question out. Her father finished his meal and sat on with a cup of tea and the evening paper. Ted went out. Mrs. Hollis started washing-up, and Ruth had to clear away. She felt cold in her stomach, and the question would not get past her lips. There was a pencil on the table, and she sprawled in a chair opposite her father, drawing a horse on the formica.

  ‘Ruth, for heaven’s sake!’ Her mother swooped down with a cloth.

  ‘Can I have a pony?’ Ruth said desperately.

  ‘Pour me another cup of tea,’ her father said, pushing his teacup out from round the newspaper. Mrs. Hollis took the cup.

  ‘Ruth’s on about this pony business again,’ she said. ‘You’d better settle it one way or the other, John, else we’ll get no peace.’

  ‘Oh.’ John Hollis lowered the paper reluctantly. ‘What is it, then?’ He knew perfectly well.

  ‘Please can I have a pony? You said I could when we lived in the country.’ Ruth looked at him, quivering.

  He frowned. ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Please. I shan’t ever ask for anything else. Not clothes or anything. If I can just have a pony. I’ll look after it and everything. You won’t have to do anything.’

  ‘Only pay for it,’ said her father.

  ‘I’ll earn some money. I’ll do a paper round. Mary Barker does one, and they want another – there’s a card in the shop. I promise. And I could use my National Savings. Ted did for his bike, so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t. I’ve got forty pounds.’

  ‘Oh. Would that buy a pony?’

  ‘I don’t know. I should think so. I could find out.’

  ‘But then you have to feed it when you’ve got it. How much is that a week?’

  ‘Nothing in the summer and only hay in the winter. And hay’s cheap in the country, almost nothing,’ Ruth said recklessly.

  ‘Where would it go?’

  ‘Out the back. There’s enough. You wouldn’t have to do any gardening. He’d graze it all smooth and it would look lovely.’

  ‘It sounds a lot too simple the way you put it,’ her father said, half serious, half smiling.

  ‘Well . . .’ Ruth smiled too, uneasily.

  ‘How do you go about it, then? Buying a pony, I mean. You have to know something about it, don’t you? Do you know enough?’

  Ruth knelt on the chair, thin eager elbows on the table. ‘I met a man today, the man who picked me up in the horse-box, and he works for a Mr. McNair who lives on the Hillingdon road, and he’s a dealer. Very straightforward, the man said. He said I’d get a good pony from him. I could go and see him, couldn’t I? I mean, it’s like a shop. You just go and look round and get an idea. Could I go?’

  ‘You never get a bargain off a dealer.’

  ‘I could look at the adverts. Could I look, though? If I found one, could I have it? It’s no good looking if I can’t have one anyway. But if you say I can look . . .’ Ruth’s words tumbled out in a heap. ‘If you say I can use my National Savings money, then I could look, couldn’t I? Ted used his.’

  ‘Well, his motor bike was for getting to work on. Not just pleasure.’

  ‘Oh, it is pleasure!’ Ruth said. ‘You’ve only got to look at him –’

  Her father grinned. ‘He had a wonderful argument for buying it, though. Better than yours, my girl.’ But he was too kind to tease her further. ‘All right. You use it. In ten years’ time it won’t be worth much anyway, and as you’re so set on this idea I won’t say no. You can go shopping.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Looking. If you find anything hopeful, you must report home. And don’t look too keen.’

  ‘Oh!’ Ruth was speechless with excitement. Her face went red, and then white, her lips quivered. Her father looked at her, and said, ‘You are a funny girl.’

  Mrs. Hollis picked up the empty teacup. ‘While you’re in a decision-making frame of mind, dear, how do you feel about my putting my name down with the Council again? We’re well settled in now, and I’d like a child about the place again.’

  When they had lived in London, Mrs. Hollis had been on the local council’s list of foster-mothers, and a succession of small children, one at a time, or occasionally two, had followed each other in the Hollises’ spare bedroom. They were children whose mothers had had to go to hospital, or occasionally whose fathers were in prison, or whose parents had been evicted; normally they had not stayed for more than a few months. Just long enough, Ruth had often thought, to get so that they were one of the family. Then, when they went, it was a wrench and a misery; she did not like it.

  Her father said, ‘All right, dear. If you want to. But past the crying-in-the-middle-of-the-night stage, please. Sixish, say. Tell them your husband is very sensitive.’


  ‘Well, you take what you’re sent as a rule. But I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Right. Everybody happy?’ Mr. Hollis grinned at Ruth. She was sitting in a dream, staring into space. She did not even hear him. Mr. Hollis looked at his wife and shook his head.

  ‘She’ll come down to earth,’ Mrs. Hollis said. ‘When this pony is a reality. It might not be all bliss – all roses. She’ll learn.’

  But Ruth, if she had heard, would not have believed her.

  3

  THE FORTY-POUND PONY

  RUTH CYCLED SLOWLY up the driveway that led to McNair’s. She wished it was longer than it was, for she was dry-mouthed with nervousness. The great moment had arrived, but perversely she felt no joy: she was too frightened. It meant so much, and she knew so little. Reading her old-fashioned horse-books by the light of a torch most of the night before had done nothing to help. Her head reeled with the fatal diseases of the horse, imperceptible to the inexperienced eye; with the vices that meant doom: from bolting to wind-sucking. She had read about dealers who filed their horses’ teeth to pass them off as youngsters, and dealers who injected their horses with sedatives when prospective buyers were trying them out. ‘No foot, no horse,’ was an adage to remember, and, from the feet up, the possible blemishes were legion: curbs, splints, spavins, thorough-pins, windgalls and sidebones on the legs alone. Expressive words with ominous meanings floated through her brain: stargazer, daisy-cutter, herring-gutted, Roman-nosed, ewe-necked, cow-hocked . . . She pressed down on the pedals, standing up, as the gravel bogged her tyres. ‘I don’t know anything,’ she thought in a panic, ‘only words.’

  But now she was in a yard, meticulously tidy, surrounded with loose-boxes, like a photograph captioned ‘A desirable layout.’ The loose-boxes were new and smart, with concrete forecourts. At one side was a wooden chalet labelled ‘Office’; beyond, behind the stableyard, the roof of a large modern house stuck up. Ruth put her bike against the nearest wall, where it looked very untidy, and went to the door marked ‘Office’. Before she got there a man came round a corner from the direction of the house, and Ruth stopped short, feeling like a burglar. Mr. McNair, she thought. He was what Ted would have called very hacking-jacket. He said, ‘Can I help you?’