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

by K. M. Peyton

  ‘Put your arms round my neck.’

  One hand holding Fly’s halter, with the other she scooped up the eager Elizabeth and slid her gently on to Fly’s back. He tossed his head and twitched his shoulder muscles as if an insect was worrying him, but otherwise made no move. Elizabeth patted him.

  ‘He’s good.’

  Ruth grinned.

  ‘He’s wonderful!’ she cried. Had ever ‘backing’ a pony been so easy? she wondered.

  ‘Go,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘No, not tonight,’ Ruth said. She put her arm up and lifted the child down again. ‘Tomorrow you can sit on him again. Nobody has ever sat on him before. You are the first person, in all the world, to sit on this pony.’

  It was a great privilege, in her eyes, and Elizabeth took it as such, and opened her eyes very wide.

  ‘And again tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The next day Fly walked round the field with Elizabeth on his back, but it was over a month before Ruth was able to get the bridle on him. It was a week before she could pass the reins up over his head without his running back and looking horror-struck, and another week before she managed to get the bit between his teeth.

  ‘The books say roll the bit in brown sugar. Or jam,’ Ruth said to Elizabeth. ‘Go and ask Mummy for some brown sugar.’

  Elizabeth disappeared at the gallop and came back with a bowl of sugar and a pot of strawberry jam. Ruth took a dollop of jam out with a finger, wiped it over the bit, and rolled it in the sugar for good measure. Then she held it on the palm of her hand and approached Fly, who was watching with great interest, tied to the fence by a halter. Ruth put the reins over his head, held the headstall in her right hand, in the approved manner, and put the bit under his nose hopefully. Fly clenched his teeth hard. Ruth, feeling very sticky, pushed the bit against his teeth, gently, but most of the jam and sugar now seemed to be on her rather than on the bit. Somehow, Fly managed to take several crafty licks, and still the bit was not between his teeth. The bridle was sticky all over. Elizabeth was sitting on the grass, eating the jam by scooping it out on a finger, as demonstrated by Ruth.

  Ruth flung the bridle down crossly.

  ‘Oh, he’s so stubborn!’ she said. She looked at Fly, tied to the fence, and he looked back at her. He arched his neck, licked his lips curiously, and pawed the ground with a neat round hoof. He would stand tied up if she stayed near him, but if she went away he would pull back and whinny and churn about. Ruth would tie him up and potter about where he could see her, or disappear round the side of the garage just for a minute or two. Gradually she persuaded herself that he was improving. Once he pulled the fence out by its roots – Ted’s fence – and once the halter broke, but, these crises apart, progress in this direction was fairly satisfactory. But not with the bridle.

  ‘You need a dozen hands,’ Ruth said. She picked up the jammy thing and considered it. Then, experimentally, she unbuckled the bit from one side of the headstall. Then the other. She went over to Fly, and put the bridle on over his ears. She pulled his forelock out over the browband, and did up the throatlash. Then she fetched the bit and buckled it on, on one side.

  ‘Fetch the saucer of sugar,’ she commanded the willing Elizabeth. ‘Hold it up. Higher. That’s right.’

  With both hands to work with, Ruth eased the bit into the saucer of sugar and slipped it between Fly’s teeth before he knew what she was about. She buckled it on to the other side, and stood back, triumphant. Fly mouthed the strange thing on his tongue, bending to it, tossing his head, curious but not frightened. Ruth was elated, warm with achievement. She stood smiling, utterly happy.

  ‘How’s the nag?’

  Ted’s friend, Ron, having called into the kitchen for some rags, paused on his way back to the garage, wiping his oily hands.

  ‘New bridle, then?’ he remarked.

  ‘Yes. I bought it a fortnight ago, and this is the first time I’ve managed to get it on.’

  ‘Sets you back, horse gear,’ Ron said. ‘Worse than parts for the bike.’

  ‘Oh yes!’ Ruth had given up the idea of ever riding on a saddle, since she had discovered that even second-hand saddles were generally more than the whole sum her father had given her. She looked at Ron with interest, wondering how he came to know about the price of what he called horse gear. Nobody in her family knew about it, and she had not dared to tell her father how much he would have to give her if she was to have her saddle. Encouraged by Ron’s interest, she told him about her experience in the saddler’s.

  ‘Cor, stone me! I know that bloke. Calls you sir. I bet he called you madam, till he found you hadn’t any cash?’

  ‘Yes, he did!’

  ‘Sew their saddles with gold thread, at that place,’ Ron said. ‘Mind you, new ones are never cheap. Lot of work in a saddle.’

  ‘Yes, but what shall I do? I daren’t tell my father how much they cost!’

  Ron considered, pursing his lips. He had a thin, amiable, rather spotty face, a lot of untidy hair and, like Ted, smelt of motor bikes. He wore filthy jeans and a black leather jacket with various badges stuck to it and had the same sort of bike as Ted, a twin-cylinder 650 c.c. B.S.A. After they had spent a week polishing their camshafts, they used to ride out and have races along the nearest suitable stretch of road. At week-ends, when they weren’t tinkering, they would ride out with their gang. When Mrs. Hollis complained about Ted’s obsession, her husband would point out that all his friends were pleasant, well-mannered boys, he was never bored, did not break the law (excepting, on occasion, the 70 m.p.h. speed limit) and wasn’t it better than girls? Mrs. Hollis would agree, dubiously.

  For all these reasons, Ruth was surprised that Ron knew about saddles – apart from bike saddles.

  ‘Reckon I could find you a saddle,’ Ron said.

  Ruth stared at him, frightened to say anything.

  ‘There used to be one in an old shed, up Mr. Lacey’s place. Pony saddle it was. I remember seeing it, when I used to cut his grass. The lawn-mower was in the shed, and the saddle was stuck up in the rafters. I used to live in Wychwood, you know. Down Mud Lane. Two along from Mr. Lacey. That’s why I used to cut his grass.’ He looked speculatively at Fly. ‘Nice pony.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ruth let her breath out.

  ‘When I’ve finished tonight we’ll go along, if you like, and see if it’s still there.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Mmm. When I’m through.’

  ‘Oh!’ Not only was the bridle actually in Fly’s mouth, but on the very same day it seemed as if she was going to acquire a saddle. To Ruth, after several days of getting nowhere at all, it was as if the day was charmed, bewitched. It was a sort of week described in the horoscopes as: ‘Try to be patient. The beginning of the week will be full of minor irritations. But Thursday promises to be an outstanding day, bringing good news and the fulfilment of a long-desired ambition.’

  ‘About an hour,’ Ron said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Ruth danced back to Fly, still mouthing his bit in exactly the way the books said was to be desired. She hugged him round the neck, smelling the heavenly scent of his thick mane in her nostrils.

  ‘Oh, you are lovely! I adore you! You are good!’

  ‘Do you want any more jam?’ Elizabeth asked.

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Can I lick the sugar?’

  ‘Yes. Tomorrow, perhaps, you can ride on a proper saddle!’

  ‘Can we use more sugar and jam?’

  ‘Yes, if it helps him take the bit.’

  ‘I like doing it like that.’

  Ruth, having very carefully taken the bridle off, giving Fly time to drop the bit, and not pulling it against his teeth, untied him and took off the halter. He walked away across the bare grass, blowing out through his nostrils. Ruth watched him, glowing with a deep satisfaction.

  Her deep satisfaction was shattered when her mother saw the state Elizabeth was in, which Ruth had not noticed, but, after a slight unpleasa
ntness, she was able to escape and join the boys in the front drive. Soon she was up on Ron’s pillion and they were scrabbling and roaring through the pot-holes of Mud Lane. The lane, overhung with elms, led down to the creek, and a few tatty weatherboarded cottages sat back from it behind overgrown hedges. Mr. Lacey lived in the last one, just before the lane degenerated into a field track, and the marsh grass took over from the last decaying orchard.

  ‘I reckon no one’s cut the old boy’s grass since I did it last,’ Ron commented, when he stopped the bike on the rutted garden path. Ruth’s eyes were already straying to the conglomeration of old barns and sheds behind the cottage. ‘What a nice place,’ she was thinking. ‘Like Mr. Marks’s. A “me” place.’ She could not take to their smart new house, however hard she tried, when she compared it with the romantic wilderness of Mr. Lacey’s abode.

  Mr. Lacey came out and recognized Ron, and, after some few minutes of reminiscence and inquiry, he issued a very satisfactory invitation to ‘Root out what you please, lad. It’s all rubbish.’ Ron led the way to one of the sheds, skirting banks of stinging-nettles.

  ‘It was this one, as I remember it.’

  The shed was gloomy and full of dust drifting through shafts of the late evening sunlight. Ruth crossed both her fingers and prayed silently, gazing into the dust: ‘Please, God, let it be there.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Ron.

  He was climbing up on an old packing-case, reaching up. ‘Look, here we are.’ There was a shower of cobwebs and woodrot. Ruth sneezed. Ron swung down and held out his prize, smiling. ‘Look, it’s no showpiece, but it ought to fit.’

  Once, many many years ago, Ruth thought, it had been a good saddle. She took it gingerly, afraid it might crumble in her hands. The leather was dry and cracked, the lining split and spewing stuffing. There were leathers and irons, but the leathers were cracked by the buckles beyond repair, and the irons were rusty.

  ‘No girth,’ said Ron, ‘and the leathers are no good. But it’ll come up all right, I’d say. Neatsfoot oil is what it wants. And the lining renewed, and new stuffing. It won’t cost you a fortune, though. What do you think?’

  ‘Oh, if it fits . . .’ Ruth, examining, began to see that there was hope. She wiped the seat clear of dust with her elbow, and thought she could see the glimmer of a real saddle’s rich shine. In her mind she saw it. She longed to start work on it. ‘It’s wonderful. If it fits – and it looks as if it should – I am sure it could be made all right.’ She was full of gratitude again. She hugged the saddle. She saw herself sitting in it, well down, confident, smiling (as in a diagram captioned ‘A good general-purpose seat’) waiting to go down to the first jump at Brierley Hill. This was her biggest problem solved. She rode home behind Ron, the saddle on one arm, dreaming.

  5

  THE GIRL AT ‘THE PLACE’

  MR. HOLLIS WENT DOWN to see Mr. Lacey about the saddle, and came back looking absent-minded.

  ‘Nice place he’s got down there. I mean, it’s ramshackle, but – well . . .’ He hesitated, considered. ‘You could do things with a place like that.’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Ruth agreed avidly. ‘All those old sheds you could turn into stables, and all that orchard and field and –’

  ‘Oh, you –!’ Her father laughed. But Ruth knew that he was thinking that he would rather have a place like Mr. Lacey’s than ‘South View’ on the Sunnyside Estate. ‘There’s nothing to do in a new house,’ he said, as he settled down to watch the television. Ruth, watching Fly-by-Night searching for grass in the bare plot they called a field, longed for what she called a Lacey-house, with lots of Lacey-grass.

  ‘He’ll starve here,’ she said to Ron, watching Fly-by-Night. It was summer, and the grass was growing fast, but in the field Fly-by-Night ate it as fast as it grew, and trod it down flat: the field was too small. His summer coat was through, but he was ribby.

  ‘You ought to ask the estate man if you can use the field behind,’ Ron said. ‘They’re going to build on it some time, but not yet awhile. It’s doing nothing. Ask him.’

  Ruth’s eyes opened wide with amazement. She had never thought such a thing possible, and had worried miserably over her lack of grass. She had been taking Fly out in the evenings along the lanes, to eat the verges. She had sat in the cow-parsley, holding the end of the halter, watching him, and worrying. His ribs showing made him look very much a forty-pound pony. On the end of his halter he ate ravenously, pulling at the lush grass, his thick tail switching. Sometimes, when she sat in the grass, she thought she had never worried so much in her life as since she had bought Fly.

  ‘Do you ride him now?’ Ron asked.

  ‘Well . . . sort of.’

  Ruth looked at the ground, uncomfortably. She had admitted it to no one, but riding Fly-by-Night so far had been a miserable experience. She had cleaned up the saddle and bought a new girth and new leathers, and had accustomed Fly to the feel of it, and to being girthed up. She had got him to accept the bridle, at last, without resorting to jam, and had taught him to stand still while she mounted him. She had then expected to ride off, walking, trotting and cantering to order. But this was where Fly-by-Night’s ideas and her own parted company.

  ‘The trouble is, I can’t ride,’ she said to Ron.

  ‘Well, you’ll soon learn, won’t you?’ Ron said.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You mean he bucks you off or something?’

  ‘No . . . not really . . .’

  It was difficult to explain just what happened when she rode Fly. Every time it was different, so she never knew what to expect. She had got into the habit of leading him down the road and along Mud Lane until she was on her own, in a quiet place, with just the hedges and the trees for company. Then she would mount him.

  In her little green book it said, ‘He must be encouraged to walk freely forward . . .’ According to the book, Ruth would squeeze with her legs and give him plenty of rein, and under her breath, she would pray, ‘Please, God, make him do it.’ Sometimes Fly would go backwards. The more she squeezed with her legs, the more eagerly would he back, until brought up short by a hedge, or by nearly falling into a ditch. But if he was in what Ruth thought of as his ‘freely forward mood’ he would leap off as soon as she eased her reins, and continue at as fast a pace as possible. When he did this Ruth had to concentrate on not falling off. She held on to his mane with both hands, and when she thought she had got her balance she would bravely let go to take a pull at the reins. When she did this, Fly would poke his nose in the air and gallop faster than ever. Gaining courage, and getting more desperate, Ruth would pull again, and then again, with all her strength, and the wild progress would generally finish by Fly swerving suddenly to one side or the other, pitching Ruth off over his shoulder. He would then immediately settle down to grazing, and Ruth would lie in the grass, trying not to cry. Not through fear or pain, but with despair.

  When, on the rare occasions Fly-by-Night chose to progress at a forward walk, he would proceed on a meandering course to which Ruth’s aids would make no difference at all. He would gaze all about him, as if in astonishment at the landscape, and frequently shy violently at nothing at all, so that Ruth often fell off. The only really satisfactory thing about Fly-by-Night, she often thought, was the fact that he did not run away when she fell off. He always started to graze, without even looking for a better bit of grass than that under his feet. Because he’s so hungry, Ruth thought.

  ‘It takes a lot of patience, training animals,’ Ron said. ‘Horses, dogs – people think it can be done overnight. And it can’t.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Training him would be a lot easier if you had another pony to go with him. One that knew. Then this old fellow would just follow along. There’s a girl at “The Place” got a pony. She’s about your age. Why don’t you go and see if she’d give you a hand?’

  ‘“The Place”?’

  ‘Big house opposite the village hall. Pymm, they’re called. Father’s in beer. Very rich.
’

  ‘Oh.’ Ron’s monosyllabic description was slightly off-putting. She knew ‘The Place’, but did not know a pony lived there. It was an old house surrounded by belts of thick trees, with wrought-iron gates and a fake gas-lamp.

  ‘You ought to arrange your paper round, so that you can go there. Then you’d meet them. If you’re afraid just to walk in, like.’

  Ruth looked at Ron admiringly. ‘You do have good ideas! I could try that.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got it up here.’ Ron tapped his head.

  ‘And the field, too. That’s a wonderful idea.’

  Ron grinned. ‘The trouble with you is you don’t see the funny side. You make it all matter too much.’

  ‘That’s what Daddy says.’

  ‘Looking at you, worrying, no one would say owning that pony was a great joy to you.’

  But Ruth, worry or no, could not imagine not owning Fly. She tried, and she thought of all the things she need not worry about, but the picture was one of such bleakness, such a void, an abyss of nothingness, that she could not even consider it.

  ‘It’s hard now, and I know I get in despair, but when I think back I can see that I am making a little bit of progress. So as time goes on it will get better and better. Don’t you think so?’ Ruth wanted reassurance.

  ‘Should do,’ Ron said in his amiable way.

  ‘It’s so slow, because I’m not very good. I know what I should do, but it’s not always very easy to do it.’

  ‘You’re a stickler, I’ll give you that.’

  ‘The books make it sound so easy.’

  ‘Well, same as books telling you how to take down a motor bike. It’s easy, if you just read about it.’

  Ruth longed to know the girl Pymm, whose father was in beer. The thought of a friend, a knowing, horsy girl-friend, who would understand her trials and despairs and rare glows of achievement, whom she could ride with and learn with, was a wonderful, warm anticipation. Ruth had made mere acquaintances in the village school, and none was so attractive as to keep her away from Fly-by-Night. Nobody at school rode. But next term, in September, she would be going to the Comprehensive at Hanningham, six miles away, and she thought, with luck, she might meet somebody horsy there.