The thoroughbred mare belonged to the daughter of the manor house—I knew the horse was a thoroughbred because I’d saved up to buy the Observer’s Book of Horses and Ponies. I’d immediately written my name and address inside, adding Great Britain, World, Universe, just to make sure it came back to me if I lost it. I still have that book—it’s on my desk, and there’s still a check mark where I’d identified the horse’s breed following the walk back from Five Acres.
I’d only needed one long look across the paddock toward the horse and I was in love again. Every day after school, I’d finish my chores and run down to the paddock, usually with a carrot taken from the larder. The mare would nicker and amble over as soon as she saw me, leaning her head over the gate to take the treat. Then I’d pull sweet grass from the verge for her to nibble and I’d just sit on the gate, stroking her neck, dreaming. I dreamed a lot about having a horse. Some days I’d run to Five Acres and pretend I was riding a horse. I’d slap my hip and clutch invisible reins, then leap over jumps only I could see, giving myself faults for a pole knocked down and of course congratulating myself on a clear round. I’d seen jumps of red and white set up in the field opposite the paddock, so I knew the thoroughbred was a jumper.
I was sitting on the fence stroking the horse’s head one day, when a girl—she must have been in her late teens or perhaps early twenties—entered the paddock at the far end and began walking toward me. She was wearing a white blouse and a pair of beige “elephant ear” jodhpurs, the sort people wore then—well, the people who were lucky enough to ride horses. Her tall black leather boots were polished to a shine, and she tap-tapped a riding crop against them. I didn’t know whether to run or stay. I slipped down from the gate, but did not leave.
“Hello,” she said. “Who are you?”
I told her my name and pointed to where I lived. And I showed off a bit—I didn’t want her to think I was a complete neophyte when it came to horses.
“What’s your thoroughbred’s name?”
She seemed surprised I knew the breed. “Her name’s Honey,” she replied, adding, “Do you ride?”
I shook my head. “No, but I want to, and I’m going to have a horse one day.” The words seemed to tumble out of my mouth before I could stop them. “And I’d love a horse just like Honey. She’s wonderful.”
We chatted a bit more about horses, about Honey, and then she said, “So you want to ride. Well, we’ll have to see what we can do for you.”
I ran home that day filled with hope, bursting with fizzy excitement. That girl was going to let me ride Honey, and she was going to teach me to ride. Wasn’t that what “We’ll have to see what we can do for you” meant? Someone with a horse had seen my wanting and would help make my dream come true.
I blurted everything out to Mum, who was home by the time I rushed into the kitchen.
“Just don’t get your hopes up, love. You know what people can be like, especially those sort of people.”
Those sort of people. I’d heard that phrase before, so I knew exactly who those sort of people were—they were rich people, people who weren’t like us, and they looked down their noses at ordinary people, apparently. We had a well-developed sense of those sort of people when they looked down their noses at us—as my parents would have us believe, those rich people didn’t like it when you got above your station.
“But she wasn’t like that—she was nice,” I whined. I know I probably whined.
“All the same, don’t get your hopes up.”
But I did. Of course I did.
Every day for weeks on end, when I came home from school I’d put on a pair of Celia’s castoff beige cotton trousers. I’d keep on my white school blouse, though I rolled up the sleeves to below the elbow, just like the girl who owned Honey. I’d put on my black Wellington boots—they would have to do until I’d saved up for a leather pair—and then I’d run down to Honey’s paddock clutching a couple of carrots, and I’d wait. I would wait and wait. Sometimes I would see the girl in the field, jumping over the red and white poles, soaring through the air on Honey. Then she’d dismount and lead her horse into the barn. She’d never even look up to acknowledge me.
One day I ran down to the paddock, and Honey was gone. She wasn’t there the next day or the next.
“Come here, love,” said Mum, as I walked back into the kitchen, as downhearted as a horse-mad girl without a horse could be. “There you are, down in the dumps again.” She rubbed her hands on a tea towel and pulled me to her for a long time. “Now then,” she said, releasing me from her grasp. “Take off that school blouse and put on an old shirt. And take off your boots. I’ve got a job for you.” A job was always thought to be balm for any distress to the soul in our house. A job calmed anger, sadness, too much energy, not enough energy and any malaise you could think of.
That night I did my best not to shed tears for Honey and for the fact that I wasn’t one of those sort of people who could afford a horse. But I wasn’t giving up so easily.
I entered a competition to win a Palomino pony, convinced that mine would be the best entry, the most compelling sentence in fifteen words or less describing why I wanted the Palomino pony. “When I bring home my Palomino pony, he will be the best pal o’ mine!” I wrote.
I didn’t win.
Another competition run by KP Peanuts promised the winner thousands of pounds, but involved a bit more creative work. On the entry form there was a template image—the outline of two peanuts. You had to make it into a cartoon and come up with a comic line. I drew a face on each peanut and gave them both a soldier’s helmet. I gave the peanut soldier on the left a monocle. A speech bubble coming from the peanut on the right said, “We’re being shelled, kernel!” I thought it was hilarious and was convinced I’d win enough money to buy my horse.
I didn’t win.
I begged Dad to buy me a horse and pony magazine during the month it came with a free hoof pick. I believed that if I started gathering various items I’d need for my tack box, my horse would materialize. It was not a cheap magazine, but he bought it for me—that hoof pick was a sign of the coming horse as vivid as the olive branch the dove brought to Noah to mark the end of the flood. I needed a safe place for the hoof pick in the bedroom I shared with my brother, and it would have to be a very safe place indeed, because to my brother, the hoof pick would be a tool. John liked tools. He liked them for breaking things apart to find out how they worked. I hid it in the drawer underneath my school knickers. There is no way in the world that those ugly, baggy green uniform thick cotton briefs could be known as anything other than knickers. The hoof pick would be safe there.
As my tenth birthday approached, I began lobbying for a horse. “Don’t be ridiculous,” said my mother, opening her purse to let me see the emptiness inside. I asked again, this time as she swapped over the flat irons, placing one back on the stove’s hotplate to heat up while wielding the other, then continuing to press the sheets and pillowcases. We didn’t have an electric iron until I was eleven, when a Morphy Richards iron came as a free gift with our first refrigerator.
“Oh sure you can,” she replied.
I heard, “Oh sure you can,” as in, “I’ve changed my mind and you can have a horse.”
What she really meant was, “Don’t you understand? It’s still ridiculous. We can’t afford a horse and never will.”
I ran downstairs on my birthday, expecting to see a horse like Honey standing outside, his head poking through the kitchen window as he waited for me with a big red bow around his neck. But there was no horse and no gift, just my cards on the kitchen table.
Things looked up when I found out that Wendy’s sister had a Saturday job at Benenden riding stables, part of the private boarding school for girls in a local village. It was several miles away via the twists and turns of Swattenden Lane, but I thought I could easily walk to the stables, work all day, then walk home again,
so I began asking her if she could get me a job there, because after a day of mucking out stables, you’d earned either ten bob or a free riding lesson. Margaret reported back that a Saturday job was available, I only had to go round and see the person in charge. This was a job I knew I could do easily. I was strong and I was used to hard work—and I would get to ride! What could go wrong?
Dad stared at me across the dinner table, pointing at me with his fork. “I’m not having you shoveling shit for those sort of people.”
“And you’re not walking all that way on a Saturday morning all on your own,” added Mum. “Anything could happen.”
Mum was always hyper-vigilant, and often threatened us with “anything could happen” when she felt an element of control slipping from her grasp.
“But they’re not those sort of people—lots of girls work there,” I maintained.
I wasn’t going to win the argument—after all, this was the stables where Princess Anne rode her horse because she was a pupil at Benenden School. Not only were the prices high, but it was the only riding school for miles around.
“Please let me do it—please,” I tried again. “The lessons normally cost ten shillings, and I’d get one just for working a day.”
“No. And let that be the end of it,” said Dad.
It was the end of it for some time, until one day after our tea. John had gone out to play, but Dad and Mum asked me to remain at the table.
“Your Dad and I have decided that if you want riding lessons, we’ll pay for you to have riding lessons, and you can go on the bus to Benenden on a Saturday.”
I looked at my parents, in my heart knowing that they couldn’t afford ten shillings, because really ten shillings would become a pound—if I had ten shillings’ worth of something, then John would have to be given the same amount, plus the bus fare. It was a rule—what one had, the other had, too. When it came to allocating money to be spent on anything, Mum always made the point that “It all adds up.” And I didn’t want to even think about the cost of a “riding habit”: jodhpurs, jacket, boots and hat. They were strict at the riding school, so I’d need the correct clothing. The girls who boarded there even had their own special short red duffel coats for winter riding. Even if I managed to get a pair of hand-me-down jodhpurs somewhere, the rest would cost a fortune.
I shrugged. “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve changed my mind anyway. I don’t want riding lessons. I’ll get a job somewhere else.”
Dad looked at me. He knew I was lying, and that it wasn’t really all right, because he loved horses and he knew they were my passion. But he was only too glad to let it go—it would have been a stretch, and he was already working two jobs. I would lie awake at night, feeling heartsore to the point of weeping, I was so upset that my father had to work harder than anyone I knew, and I would not settle until I heard his footfall on the path alongside the house. Sometimes he would work so late he would miss the last bus, and walk home over ten miles in the snow on a winter’s night.
“I told you she’d grow out of it,” said Mum, getting up from the table.
I never grew out of it, though, and was always one to leap at the chance to ride, if it came along. I’d linger if there were horses in a field on the way home from school; I’d forget the time and have to run all the way to get the tea going.
I was finally earning enough money to learn to ride properly when I was twenty-four. Every Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon at the local riding stables near my home in Surrey, I would have a private lesson before going out on a long hack across the countryside. On the first Christmas after I started my lessons, as a gift Mum and Dad gave me the money to buy my breeches, tall boots, a helmet and the coveted Harry Hall hacking jacket. The boots wore out long ago, but I still have that jacket, and though the breeches are a bit threadbare, I kept them—my first riding breeches.
Several years after that lesson, I earned a trophy and a rosette when I came first in a local showjumping competition, though I still didn’t have my own horse. When I called to tell Dad about the trophy, his voice cracked as he congratulated me and he began to weep. Mum took the phone, so excited you would have thought I’d just won an Olympic medal. I could not stop smiling for days.
When I was twenty-six and ready to buy my first house, I was in two minds about the decision. A horse I loved to ride was coming up for sale, and I had more than enough to buy her because I’d saved the down payment on the house, plus extra to give me a cushion during the first year of ownership. Dora was a slate-grey ex-racehorse with a lot of attitude, but I loved her. On Saturdays my friend Debbie would ride a horse named Cherie, another former racehorse, and I’d be on Dora, and off we would go for a couple of hours, across the countryside until we reached the gallops at Epsom Racecourse, where the Derby was held every year. The racecourse is private property with access restricted to resident horses in training, but those long gallops were way too tempting. We’d trot along a bridle path through the woods, bringing the horses to a halt at the spot where we could see across the racecourse. We’d watch and wait to make sure no one else was on the gallops—the racehorses usually came out really early, and it would have been dangerous to ride ex-racehorses anywhere near the gallops when the pack was being put through its paces—during races, even the mounted police have to move their horses as the pack comes around because they get too excited. As soon as we were satisfied that there were no racehorses and no rangers patrolling, we’d take off, galloping round at speed. As soon as we heard the ranger warning us through a loudhailer, we’d turn into the woods again, pop over a few logs on the way, and then back to the bridle path. It was wonderful. Every time I went out on Dora it was a thrill, and I felt so lucky.
“The trouble is, you want a hose, but you can’t decide if you want it with a U or an R in the middle,” observed Mum, as ever enjoying a play on words.
Good financial sense got the better of me and I chose the house—the hose with a U—though I continued to ride Dora for several years.
I was forty-five years of age and living in California when my husband bought me my first horse. That horse had to be sold following a serious riding accident, and afterward I thought I would never be able to ride again. Yet I was back in the saddle within six months and subsequently had three more horses—one I had to sell as I began spending months on end in England when my dad and later mum became ill, and two who sadly had to be laid to rest, one due to age, and one illness. Oliver was the jet-black Friesian who reminded me of my first equine love, the horse on the hill. Doesn’t every horse-mad young girl who read Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell, want her own black beauty? Oliver died less than three months after Mum passed away, and as grief’s dark shadow settled into me, I thought I would never have another horse, so deep was the ache in my heart. But now I have Calvin, a beloved big bay Dutch Warmblood who nickers and comes to the gate as soon as he hears my call, and rubs his soft nose against my cheek. I still feel so very fortunate, so privileged whenever I see him, and even more so as I slip on his saddle and bridle, ready to ride.
“We’ll see what we can do,” said the girl with elephant ear jodhpurs who owned Honey, the chestnut thoroughbred. I learned never to trust anyone who said they could do something for me—after that, I took promises with a pinch of salt; people could be so fickle. Yet I also learned that in claiming responsibility for making my dream come true, so much sweeter was the accomplishment. And in the grand scheme of things, the wait at the gate wasn’t so long, really.
19
The Rule of Three
I wonder if events in life come in clusters. Certainly my mother thought so. If she read about a plane crash, she would wait for the next one, and if it came quickly, she would say with great authority, “There’ll be another.” It’s amazing how many times she was right. I began to think of the “rule of three” whenever disaster struck—though sometimes one was enough.
My brother hate
d school. He hated it from the moment his uniform was on and he had to spend just one day inside in a classroom instead of on the farm with my mother. He had become used to following old Bill Wickham, one of the farm hands, around on his three-wheeler bicycle, the same one my father had refurbished for me when I was four. Bill would be up ahead on the tractor turning the land and my brother would follow, pretending to be in charge of his own tractor plowing right behind Bill. I’m amazed that when Bill was spraying crops with fertilizer, probably with some nasty chemicals in the mix, no one stopped my brother following in his wake.
Without doubt, being in my wake at Cranbrook Primary school was a fate worse than death for John. He screamed and cried every single day. Mum had to accompany him to school because he would not set foot on the bus without her, and when he did, he would hang onto me until one of the teachers came to extricate me from his grasp and I would run to my classroom, weeping—it was clear I was failing at my job because my brother was so unhappy. One day I broke down in the cloakroom just before going into Mr. Croft’s class for morning register. Wendy found Mr. Leech—the deputy headmaster, who was also one of our neighbors in Hartley and someone I revered, and told him I was upset, and when Mr. Leech came into the cloakroom to talk to me I collapsed into his arms, blurting out that I didn’t know what to do because John hated school and I couldn’t make it right for him. That evening, Mum and Dad told John he had to be good and get down to work, because he was making poor Jackie ill. It took a long time for John to settle down, though by the time he was seven years of age he had some friends. Yet the end of term could never come fast enough for my brother.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 18