The Pullein-Thompson Treasury of Horse and Pony Stories

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  “Yes. He’s happy. He whinnies whenever he sees me.” Struggling to hold Thunderbird, who was treading on my toes, I shouted.

  Thomas started to sing, “I had a donkey and it wouldn’t go. That’s it,” he said triumphantly. “Problem solved. The donkey’s taught him to stick his toes in.”

  “I’ll try.” Carol snatched the reins from me. “Walk now, walk.”

  But Thunderbird threw up his head, rolled his eyes and continued to back up the lane, away from Morgan’s Garage. I took the reins again, patted his neck. “That’s it,” I said. “I’m going home the long way.” I looked at Carol and Thomas, “And thanks for all your help and advice.”

  “Don’t give in,” cried Carol. “Never give in. You must be boss. Wait. We’ll nip back and get a lunge rein.” She jumped into the car and drove off with her mother.

  Thomas looked at his watch, then picked up his bike. “I meant to go down to Morgan’s Garage to dig out Pete Connor, but I’d better be getting back,” he said; and he pedalled away.

  I decided not to wait for Carol, partly because I hated her interfering, which was silly because she only wanted to help, and partly because I wanted to save Mum and Ricky a useless wait. I led Thunderbird a few metres in the direction he wanted to go and then remounted. And, realising I had given in, he quietened down at once. We trotted slowly until I saw a phone box and, grateful for Mum’s insistence that we never go anywhere without money in our pockets, I rang home. I told Mum I couldn’t meet her by the garage.

  “Why ever not?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Thunderbird’s gone crazy and won’t go down Farm Lane.”

  Mum, who’s not a patient person, cried, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, you’re only just in time. We were walking out of the door when the phone went.”

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I shouted. “I’ll take Ricky out on Thunder when I get back. Must go – he’s pulling at the reins.”

  I remounted and we trotted off down the longer road to home. A few cars passed, then minutes later Thunderbird leaped two metres or more as an explosion rent the air, followed by flames on the other road and then a plume of smoke. And the sound of barking dogs.

  “Steady, it’s all right.”

  Remembering you must always hide fear within yourself when riding, I tried to sound calm. The grey plume became a pall of black smoke. And, straining my eyes, I located the place – Morgan’s Garage! The thought turned me cold. Supposing Mum and Ricky had gone there after all? Thunderbird quietened. A siren screamed – ambulance, fire engine or police? Then suddenly, in a flash, I understood. I looked at my watch. It said five past six. I leaned down and patted him. “You knew. You saved us all.”

  A man on a tractor came slowly by. I asked what had happened. “A bomb, I reckon,” he said.

  Then my mind back-tracked and I remembered years ago a wise old blacksmith telling me some horses were psychic. “They see ghosts and things we can’t see, and happenings before they happen,” he said. “They ain’t lower beings, you know, their senses are better than ours. That’s wot ’tis.”

  And I remembered a religious teacher telling me we “see through a glass darkly”, and a maths teacher saying people see things in three dimensions, whereas there are apparently at least five. That thought was more than I could grasp. But the Connors, who ran Morgan’s Garage, were real. Then I was home and Mum was standing at the gate.

  “Thank God you’re safe.”

  “And you, too,” I said, dismounting. “Was it a bomb?”

  “I don’t know, but if you hadn’t telephoned us in time…” Mum paused as she looked at Ricky before telling me she’d seen a police car drive past on its way to the garage and, shortly afterwards, an ambulance. “It sounded too small to be a bomb. Anyway, who in the world would want to bomb the Connors? This is the English countryside!”

  “We might all have been injured and perhaps Carol and Thomas Mason, too,” I said. “They were heading that way when Thunderbird dug his toes in.” I threw my arms round his hot black neck. “You saved us all, and we thought you were being naughty.”

  At this moment a woman appeared. “A car and lorry collided, an engine exploded, burst into flames,” she said. “Terrible mess, both burnt out. A bystander blown off his feet. Could have been me if I’d been ten minutes later.”

  “Anyone seriously hurt?” Mum asked.

  “I don’t know. There’s a fire engine there and an ambulance. I couldn’t look. I felt so queasy. The lorry was carrying propane gas. Terrible! I just had to tell someone.”

  “Good grief! Must we have big lorries like that down our lanes?” exclaimed Mum. “Soon there won’t be anywhere safe for the children to ride.”

  “Thunderbird will look after us,” I said, feeling slightly sick.

  “Well, it’s the little old cottages which need the gas, isn’t it?” the woman said. “Local people.”

  “Want a ride?” I asked Ricky.

  “Not now. What’s propane gas?”

  “Sorry, I don’t know. Same as Calor, I suppose,” I said, “which is used for cooking and heating.”

  Leading Thunderbird back to his field, where Jericho waited for him, I didn’t want to think about the awfulness of the accident because it would make me miserable and there was nothing I could do to help the victims. I only wanted to think about Thunderbird and his sixth sense, which had almost certainly saved some of us from horrible injuries.

  “We owe you so much,” I said as he wandered across the field to have a roll.

  The Gentle Giants

  Diana Pullein-Thompson

  Great dark horses they were, brown as mahogany, with huge feathered legs and splashes of white on their faces, as though a bucket of milk had been thrown at them. A gelding and a mare, called Moses and Rebecca, nine years old and enjoying their last summer. All day they stood under the trees head to tail, keeping the flies out of each other’s eyes, never dreaming that their lives might soon end because they were no longer needed.

  Autumn came with mists and drifting rain and leaves falling everywhere, and each day the two great shire horses expected to be taken into the yard to be groomed and harnessed to cart, harrow or plough, but no one came for them. Instead they watched farmer George Clipper mount his tractor, whose fuel smelt abominable to the horses, and drive it to do the work they had once done. They would raise their heads and stare at him for a moment with their large dark eyes, which were soft and warm under their black forelocks, and then go back to their grazing or a quiet life under the forest trees.

  George called them his “Gentle Giants” and longed to keep them, but he worked now for a company whose senior director lived up the road in a big old house and bothered more about balance sheets and making money than about animals.

  “Horses have no place in farming these days,” this fat boss in a dark city suit said, standing well away from the mud. “They’ve got to go, George; big ones like them eat a lot of fodder – it’s cash down the drain. Can’t have that, can we? If they can’t be sold for work, they’d best go for meat.”

  Sadness made George’s throat so dry he couldn’t reply.

  The winter came, mild at first and then in early December bleak and cold as the Arctic; it was England’s coldest winter for decades. For days and days a biting east wind blew across the frozen landscape. And then, suddenly, snow fell quickly in huge flakes and in a moment paths and trees and fields disappeared under a blanket of white. The cattle came into the stockyard; the horses into the stable. The humans drew their curtains early and the cats stayed in the barns.

  On the way home from the station the boss’s car stuck in a snowdrift and was soon buried. His wife, a pale, petulant woman with ash-blonde hair and pleading blue eyes, was distraught when he did not arrive for dinner. She telephoned the police.

  “This is Mrs Lamont-Brown speaking,” she announced in her grandest tones. “Please would you send a search party out for my husband, who is lost in the snow somewhere between Wickley sta
tion and our house, Mackstone Abbey.”

  “Very sorry, madam,” said the policeman on duty.“All our patrol cars were recalled an hour ago.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “It’s true, madam, every road is impassable.”

  “A helicopter?” she suggested weakly.

  “Too many calls on their time. They’re putting the sick first.”

  “He’ll die!” shrieked Mrs Lamont-Brown, “and he’s a very important man.”

  “He should have heeded the radio warnings, then,” the policeman said, calm as stagnant water. “This is the worst snowfall in living memory. Why didn’t he spend the night at Wickley?”

  “I phoned the station and they said he had left in his car.”

  “He’s most likely lost between you and the motorway, then. I must go, madam. I have urgent calls coming through.”

  “But this is urgent!” shrieked Mrs Lamont-Brown. “My husband…”

  After the policeman hung up, Mrs Lamont-Brown called an old servant, who cleaned the shoes and looked after the conservatory to supplement his pension.

  “Please fetch George at once,” she said. “The master is stranded somewhere between the motorway and here.”

  “He should never had set out. He should have more sense.” The old man lit his pipe.

  “Do as you’re told,” snapped Mrs Lamont-Brown.

  “Can’t get to the farm; snow’s too deep. I reckon the master’s buried in a snowdrift. In 1963…”

  “I don’t want to hear your horror stories,” cried Mrs Lamont-Brown, for desperation had made her lose the last of her manners. “I’ll phone the farm then.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said George in his slow, agreeable voice. “I’ve been busy keeping a path clear and seeing to the cows. But I can’t promise anything. It came down so quick.”

  He tried to start the tractor, but its fuel had turned to jelly and the engine wouldn’t start, however much he tried and however often he cleaned the filters with his cold hands.

  Mrs Lamont-Brown phoned the farm again.

  “What’s happening? While George messes about my husband will freeze to death or he may try to walk and that will be a disaster. Surely you can do something. ”

  “My George is doing his best,” replied Mrs Clipper with gentle firmness.

  “It’s not good enough,” snapped Mrs Lamont-Brown, her blue eyes brimming with tears.

  “The tractors are useless once the diesel oil is frozen,” said Mrs Clipper, who knew about such things.

  “You’re letting a man die!” shrieked Mrs Lamont-Brown.

  Then George left his tractor and went to the harness room, turned on the light and took a collar, breeching, traces and a bridle and walked the short distance he had cleared of snow to the stable, a flashlight in his hand. “There’s a job for you. Which of you shall I take?”

  And the two horses, who were loose, sniffed his head; he could feel their long whiskers and the white hair that sprouted from their lips running over his scalp, and their warm breath on his neck. He was very tired because he had been fighting the snow for the past two hours and when Mrs Lamont-Brown phoned he had been trying to keep it from the milking-parlour door.

  “Moses,” he said. “Let’s take you.”

  The gelding pushed his head through the collar and looked at the silent, white world which only two hours earlier had been full of different colours and, for him, loud with the distant roar of traffic on the motorway which carved its way through the landscape only a mile from the farm.

  “Mrs Lamont-Brown wants you to go to see her,” called Mrs Clipper from an upstairs window.

  “Tell her I’m off to find her husband,” shouted George, grabbing a shovel before climbing from an old mounting block on to Moses’ back.

  The sky had cleared and a moon rode high above the trees, lighting the land around them. The snow reached the horse’s belly, but he waded through it and, instinctively knowing what was wanted, made his way to the road. Here the snow balled on his feet, so sometimes he seemed to be walking on stilts, but, because he wasn’t shod, it soon fell off and then for a few moments he would walk normally again. The road dipped here and there and in every dip there was a snowdrift to be negotiated and at times Moses seemed to be swimming, his huge body pushing back the snow. When they came to the fifth drift, they saw a stick sticking out of the snow and stopped. Leaning down, George shovelled snow off what was, as he had expected, the roof of a car.

  “Mr Lamont-Brown, are you there?” he called, but his voice met only the uncanny silence of the snowbound night.

  Then he slipped off Moses and stood on the roof and called again, and a voice answered, saying, “That’s me,” softly like the last whisper of a dying breeze.

  “Hang on, sir,” said George. “We’ll soon have you out of this drift.”

  He shovelled and shovelled, clearing the snow from the roof of the car and then from the sides of the car and at last from the ground. Then he fixed Moses’s traces to the front of the car, climbed on his back from the bonnet and shouted, “Up there, for’ard,” slapping the horse’s flanks with his cold hands. Moses pulled and pulled, throwing his weight into the collar and dropping his head, and then the car moved. It slipped out of the drift, and George shouted, “Whoa!”

  He climbed off Moses, undid the traces, opened the car door and half lifted out his boss. He got him on the bonnet of the car and then on to the horse, so that he was lying across the withers. “Can’t pull it all the way home, sir,” he said.

  “I made a hole with the stick so I could breathe,” whispered the half-frozen man as George jumped off the car and sat behind him.

  Moses, who could hear Rebecca neighing forlornly, retraced his steps, while George held his boss firmly. At last, standing at an upstairs window, Mrs Lamont-Brown saw in the moonlight Moses’ head, big and proud with shining eyes, his mane flecked with snow, which clung also to his feathered legs. She told the old servant to fetch the master, but it was George who carried him in.

  “Let him thaw out slowly,” he said. “No hot-water bottle, mind, but plenty of blankets, and warm sugared tea when he wants it.” He laid the man on the sofa and rubbed his hands and then his feet, after taking off his expensive shoes, while Mrs Lamont-Brown leaned over them both, fluttering her hands.

  “Oh, my poor Andy! So terribly white! A doctor!”

  “Doctor can’t get through,” said George, as the old servant fetched blankets.

  “Will he live?” Mrs Lamont-Brown’s voice was full of awe.

  “I thought I was finished,” whispered her husband. “Done for. I stuck that stick up for passers-by to see and to let the air in, but I didn’t think anyone would come. I thought I would die of cold.”

  “Oh, my poor darling!” cried Mrs Lamont-Brown, starting to wrap him in blankets.

  “I’d take off his damp coat first,” said George. “Yes, sir, the stick and the horse saved your life.”

  “He’s waiting outside. Look,” Mrs Lamont-Brown went to the window. “He’s better than a tractor.”

  “Ah well,” said George. “Them tractors are only machines, aren’t they? No brain, no heart.”

  “Why’s he waiting?”

  “The last folks here, the ones before you came, used to give him and Rebecca sugar-lumps, so he’s hoping. Horses don’t forget,” George said.

  “Tom,” said Mrs Lamont-Brown to the old servant, who had taken on her wrapping-up job, “go to the kitchen and find the best lump sugar.”

  The next morning was dry. When George had cleared the path from the farm to the house, Mr Lamont-Brown tottered round to the stable. He looked at the horses and stroked Moses’ nose.

  “The world doesn’t change much, does it?” he said.

  “I don’t get your meaning,” confessed George.

  “When things go wrong it’s back to horse power. Their fuel doesn’t freeze. Don’t sell them,” said Mr Lamont-Brown, looking weak, white and tired. “After what happened
yesterday I want them to stay here for life – and you too for that matter. Use them when you can and bring them over to the house for sugar every Sunday. And here, for you.” He handed George a bottle of expensive whisky. “Just a token. I can never thank you enough, you know that. Perhaps an increase in salary?”

  “I’ll be glad to drink your health, but money’s nothing to do with it,” George said. “It was Moses did it. Keeping the horses is thanks enough for me.”

  Lettie Lonsdale

  Diana Pullein-Thompson

  We live in Cherryford, an old village with an old bridge that crosses the shallow waters of the river Lynne; a village of low-roofed cottages and dreaming houses and quiet, sheltered gardens, unspoilt by townsmen or modern house-builders. A long, low village of trees and mossy walls and cobbled yards.

  Our house stands on the left bank of the Lynne, and all day and night we can hear the murmur of the water amongst the rushes. And in the summer when we take tea in the garden, two stately swans drift by our lawn and beg for food. We have christened them the Lady of Shalott and Sir Lancelot.

  Our house is a shabby pink – badly painted because Mum and I were the painters. The outside woodwork is an unusual colour; neither light nor dark it resembles Picasso’s blue. By the back door there are two pink loose boxes, standing in a small cobbled yard that is rough and uneven and difficult to sweep. A white five-barred gate leads from the yard to a little crooked orchard, fenced by green hedges which are kind to the eyes and harbour the birds in spring.

  I brought Martini to Cherryford in the dusk, when the Lynne’s waters were darker than the darkening skies, and the river meadows drifting into slumber.

  I had ridden her from Stringwell Market, bareback in a plain snaffle, and I already loved her long stride and lively carriage. She had shied and jogged in the town, but out in the open country she had become calm, as though quietened by the stillness of the evening, and had walked on a loose rein.