A Horse Called Hero

by Sam Angus

  ‘Ned Jervis sent you horses . . .’

  Dick Jervis regarded Wolfie narrowly, his head tilted back against the stone. His eyes moved to Ryland, then back to Wolfie. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Ned sent ’em for the pit . . .’ He paused.

  Wolfie shook him, his head hit the wall and his face contorted. Wolfie waited.

  ‘Me brother thought they went for meat, but Ned was soft an’ thought more kindly to send ’em to the pits . . . They fetched the same money here as there, one way or t’other, so me brother knew no better.’

  His eyes still on the monster that was Jervis, Wolfie stepped back, stepped back in horror, stepped back in surging, racing hope.

  ‘Double yer profit, don’t you, Dick Jervis?’ Ryland said casually, coolly. ‘Buy ’em off those wagons on yer own account an’ sell ’em to the dealers at a profit. An’ on the morrer, buy ’em same ponies back on behalf o’ the master.’

  When Ryland turned to Wolfie, the boy had gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Wolfie forced his way through the crowd, heart pounding, desperate, elbowing his way from one point to another, searching frantically for Hero, for Dodo, for the ponies. Where was he, where was she, where were they . . . ?

  Ponies and horses were being led into a ring, bridled only, not saddled – bays, greys, roans, piebalds, skewbalds, furry mountain ponies . . . no tall and dappled grey. He ran round the ring, searching, pushing and shoving – more horses – more ponies, all sizes, all shapes – young boys mounting them . . .

  At the bookies’ stands, bets were being placed. To his right there was a small enclosure in which hill ponies were being shown by men in their gaudy best, and judged. Wolfie stopped. A small boy was fighting to control a feral and snorting thing – thick-maned, thick-tailed, mealy-mouthed – they were Hettie’s – Hettie’s ponies . . . Where was Hero? Was he not here too? Wolfie spun round, running, pushing and stumbling. That was Hettie’s brand, the ‘L’ of Lilycombe, the ‘L’ of Lamb, the double ‘L’ in the deep dark fur of the coat. He looked again – on one of them, two of them . . .

  Wolfie called out blindly into the mass of men for Dodo. He called to Hero. Men turned and stared. Women stepped aside, still he was crying out like a madman, whirling and running, racing, searching for Hero.

  In one place the crowd was surging up the sides of the horseshoe track, in another a brass band was booming – elsewhere, in a smaller ring, more hill ponies, redder, shorter ones, were being shown and judged. Somewhere else prizes were being announced, races called out, stakes shouted out.

  Dodo, turning from a stand selling lemonade, saw her brother, ragged and breathless. She called to him, calling, but he didn’t hear. She ran to him and caught him by the hands and held him till he was calm enough to speak.

  ‘They’re here – they’re here – Hettie’s . . . Dodo, they’re here – but not Hero – He’s . . . he’s not here . . . Where is he, Dodo, where is he?’

  Later, back at Wynyard, Ryland was waiting for Wolfie.

  ‘Jo – will he – I want him to take me down with him – I have to go down, Ryland – I have to . . .’

  ‘Aye,’ said Ryland, smiling gently at him. ‘If ’e’s down there, you ’ave ter.’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  ‘Nod or grunt, no other sound, till we’re through to the face and on our own. Nothing but your name.’

  Being with Jo was like being with Ryland, each of them the stamp of the other.

  Wolfie reached the front of the queue. Through the window of the lamp cabin, he was passed a metal disc from a hook on the wall. John Anstey. The name of Jo’s cousin, sick with the flu, was written down on a ledger. Wolfie was passed a heavy cylinder lamp across the metal counter. Copying the man in front, he hooked it on to his belt and joined a second queue, the awkward lamp banging against his knees, tools in one hand and a lunch tin, a ‘bait’ tin as Jo told him to call it, hooked to his belt. The line shuffled forward to the metal cage. They stepped in, a bell rang twice, and a steward called out, ‘Coming down.’

  From far below came an answer, distant, hollow and chilling.

  The cage was moving, barely perceptibly, down a duct, no more than six feet in diameter, the sides of it lined with wood. Wolfie looked up. The sun had not yet risen, but the darkness as they dropped was darker than the dark of the surface. The wood cladding gave way to sheet stone. The cage dropped faster now and Wolfie was dizzy with it. Down and down it dropped, the shaft black and bottomless it seemed.

  Bits of coal and drops of water fell with surprising force on his face. The grey of the sky shrank to the size of his palm, the noise from above dying, the dark darkening. No one spoke. Wolfie clenched his teeth as the metal cage grated on the stone of the walls as it swung and bounced against them.

  A dim light glowed below.

  ‘Steady the basket,’ someone called.

  There was a clanking of chain, then a sudden, violent thud as the cage hit the ground, flinging Wolfie against Jo.

  ‘Six hundred feet down,’ whispered Jo.

  Not a ray of light from the sky reached the bottom. Wolfie heard the metal bar of the cage being lifted. He made out the dark shape of a man, a figure holding a single light. The ‘overman’, Jo said. Another man with a light and a map in his hands, a surveyor perhaps, approached the overman.

  Both bent over the map and began to discuss the gradient of the new tunnel, discussed the field above it.

  Somewhere beyond the shaft bottom, in the tunnels, there were terrible crashes, clangings that reverberated and echoed, metal scraping metal, metal scraping stone.

  ‘Wait till you get yer eyes in and can see summat,’ said Jo.

  After a while they moved away, with the rest of the men, to collect a pick blade and tools from a pile.

  They walked a quarter of a mile down a sloping roadway, known as a ‘drift’, then turned into a passage, a declining tunnel cut into sheet rock, the roof arched and faced with bricks, the sides faced with bricks.

  ‘Number Nine Branch Road,’ said Jo.

  There were crossings at regular intervals. On either side of the tunnel stood workings, hollow spaces five yards or so wide, twenty deep, a supporting column in the centre for the roof.

  ‘Coal has a grain to it . . . like wood.’ Jo spoke less gruffly now they were away from the others, now Wolfie was safely down. He hadn’t wanted to take Wolfie. He was holding his torch to the roof, whispering, almost with pride, almost with love. ‘Look, see the ferns? Preserved, like they were printed . . . three hundred million years old . . . each leaf perfect.’ He ran his fingers over the tiny leaves, the fronds patterned and overlaid like lace.

  They branched into a tunnel that was so low and narrow that it felt like the inside of a black vein. It had high and low parts to it, wet and dry parts, their own torches shining like meteors in the thick blackness. The rumbling and clanking of trams in other districts shuddered through the walls.

  ‘They say as this road’s ’aunted. Someone died ’ere . . . a roof fall. Men say as if you see a lamp burnin’, an arm holdin’ it, an’ no body at all, there’s trouble . . . danger comin’.’

  Wolfie kept close to Jo. The alien, uncanny blackness of the air pressed on him like a weight.

  ‘The whole of the town was above us in t’ first passage . . . an’ ’ere it’s William Pit above our ’eads, and above William Pit’s th’arbour. Just water and all them boats.’

  Wolfie preferred not to think about a whole pit and a whole harbour with its fleet of bobbing masts being above his head. ‘Is it far now?’ he asked.

  ‘Nay, pit’s six miles east ter west, three miles t’other way . . . them’s five hundred acres of George Pit under the sea.’

  Again Wolfie heard the curious pride in Jo’s voice.

  At 6.55 a.m. they arrived at the face they were to work.

  ‘Eighty fathoms we are, eighty fathoms below the waves.’ Jo smiled and took off his jacket, waistcoat and shirt. Wolfie shrank from the smell of th
e place, the dark of it, the heat and swelter of it. Jo saw and laughed. ‘Aye, headings are always the stalest bit of a pit. There’s only the one way in and the one way out – the way we came.’ He took up his pick. ‘Come on, help at the back here, this is the end of the workings, this is where we start today.’

  ‘Where’re the horses, Jo?’

  Jo poked his lamp into the corners of the face.

  ‘I’m testing fer gas,’ he said. ‘It can be touched off by a wee spark, e’en a pick’ll strike a spark from a stone . . . Come on, jacket off. Get to. I’ll take you to stables at snap time.’

  Later, when they paused to rest and wipe their faces and drink, Wolfie asked, ‘How many horses are there?’

  ‘Forty-five on ’em, give or take.’

  ‘Are they far?’

  ‘Aye, stables’re always at the bottom. They’re down one hundred fathoms.’ Jo set to at the face with his pick.

  ‘Can’t we go now?’

  ‘At snap time the shift’ll change – men coming in, men going out – when there’s most men in the pit, we’ll not be noticed.’

  Chapter Forty

  Dodo was down early to the breakfast room. At her place lay an envelope, postmarked London, Waterloo. Waterloo? London? Pa’s hand on the envelope? Dodo tore at it and read, tripping and rushing in her haste over the words.

  Wednesday

  Dearest Dodo,

  I’m released and on my way to London. I’ll be with you both on Friday. I’ve to go to London first as I’m summonsed to the Prisoner-of-War Cage in Kensington Palace Gardens. I’ve only to identify the men of the SS that were there at Wormhout, then I’ll come straight from Kensington to Seaton to find you both and bring you home.

  I count the minutes.

  In all haste & with all love,

  Pa.

  Friday. Friday. Three days from now. Dodo was at the window, gazing out over the park, light headed with joy, in a dream world of her own, when Lord Seaton and his manager entered, deep in conversation. Seaton nodded briefly to Dodo, introducing the visitor as Higson, his Consulting Engineer, then gestured for Higson to sit.

  ‘How’s the new seam?’ Is it good and thick?’

  Higson remained standing, ‘Yes, sir. A good thick seam, a two metre seam, sir. High quality household coal. But –’

  The butler lifted the lid of a silver tureen.

  Seaton helped himself. ‘Kedgeree?’ he offered Higson, gesturing impatiently for the man to sit.

  ‘The ventilation’s poor sir, and they found a fissure, a pocket of firedamp yesterday.’

  Seaton gestured again for Higson to sit. Higson sat but declined the kedgeree.

  Seaton unfolded his napkin.

  ‘I don’t like it sir, I want to pull the men out – deeper the seam goes, more likelihood of the firedamp–’

  Coffee was served. Dodo took her place at the far end of the table.

  ‘Do we keep going sir or can I tell the manager to pull the men off the job?’

  Seaton unfolded his napkin.

  ‘No,’ Seaton said. He sighed and speared a flake of haddock with his fork. ‘No, keep going just till the end of today. It’ll make my life easier, at least for this afternoon, at the shareholders’ meeting.’

  A glass of fresh orange juice was put in front of him.

  ‘There’s trouble ahead,’ he said, taking his fork to the kedgeree, as Dodo and Higson looked on in wonder and longing at the orange juice. ‘Trouble again in the House last week . . . I’d like to give those politicians some shareholders of their own, I’d like to.’

  Pa. Coming here. After so long. After five long years, they’d see the father they barely knew any more.

  The girls burst into the room.

  ‘Morning, Papa,’ they chorused like little birds, then ran to Dodo. ‘Shall we sketch in the park today, Miss Revel?’ they chirped.

  Dodo smiled, bright and sunshiny because of Pa.

  ‘It’s warm, can we be outside – please, Miss Revel, please can we draw outside – in the park?’

  The telephone rang in the hall. The door was opened for Seaton to step outside and take the call.

  Dodo rose to help the girls at the sideboard. From the hall came Seaton’s voice, ‘Keep the men on the job.’

  Chapter Forty-One

  ‘Almost there.’ Jo said, as they ran down a side heading that lead from the haulage road to the pit bottom. Halfway along, where the heading levelled out, Jo gestured to a steel trap door. ‘Disused workings there . . . They gave up on those.’

  Wolfie glanced, for a bare second, at the trap door, then ran on impatiently.

  ‘Too many roof falls, all faulty strata so they closed it up . . .’ Jo was saying, lingering by it. Wolfie stopped and turned, and saw Jo running his light along the edges of the door. Jo looked up at Wolfie. ‘My grampa died down there . . .’

  At the end of the side heading was a cavern, lit with electric light, the walls whitewashed, the floor sawdust.

  ‘See?’ said Jo, as Wolfie gawped at the strangeness and the wonder and the horror of such a thing, a stable full of horses, with straw, with oats and electric light, all here, here beneath the surface of a sea.

  ‘Better fed than the men,’ Jo was saying. ‘The master can get a man for free, don’t need to buy ’im, but ’e ’as to buy an ’orse. An’ that’s a hefty thing today, the price of an ’orse.’

  Wolfie, not listening, broke away, shooting forward, running from stall to stall, horse to horse.

  ‘Hero! Hero!’ he was calling.

  He didn’t see Jo hold out a palm, turning his face towards the heading by which they’d come, didn’t hear him say, ‘It’s odd . . . ventilation’s changed . . . air direction’s changed.’

  Behind Jo, a lamplight was growing larger, picking its way through the gloom.

  ‘Get on out,’ the figure said to Jo, moving on quickly. ‘Not along out-by, but in-by.’

  ‘Hero! Hero!’ Wolfie was still calling, the name echoing down the stable, out into the long tunnel.

  The figure with the lamp hurried on, the lamp dwindling away into the gloom.

  ‘Hero! Hero!’ Wolfie called again.

  There was no answer.

  A horse whinnied. Wolfie stopped. It whinnied again. Wolfie ran towards that voice but it was a tall dark bay horse who’d whinnied.

  ‘Hero!’ he called and he ran down the length of the stable like a man possessed, flinging himself from stall to stall, taking only the merest glance at each box. At the far end of the stables, Wolfie turned and hurled himself at the other side, caught the post of the box opposite and ran on down.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he cried to himself as he reached the final box.

  ‘Hero! Hero!’ he cried softly into his hands.

  He stood in silence, leaning against the wooden post, tears flooding down his cheeks, all hope gone.

  There was a soft whinny. Wolfie covered his ears and buried his head in pain. Again a horse whinnied softly and there were soft hoof thuds on the sand floor. When Wolfie turned and looked up a tall dark horse was being led down between the stalls towards him, his head high, almost to the ceiling, ears pricked and turning, the coat of him dark and black with dust, the mane shorn, forelock shorn . . .

  In flesh and blood before him . . .

  ‘Hero! Hero! Hero . . .’ he whispered.

  The horse nickered softly. Slowly Wolfie moved towards him. Slowly he bent his face to the muzzle, smiling into the dusty velvet of it. He ran his hand up his head, along the shorn stubble of his mane.

  ‘I’d know you . . . I’d know you . . . if you were covered in coal from head to toe, I’d know you.’

  He moved his hands over the bulk, the vein and muscle and tendon of the horse . . . all there, under his fingertips, as they’d always been.

  Somewhere there were voices, shouts, screams echoing.

  ‘Get out. Get out in-by!’

  ‘Get on – get on – get out!’

  He rubbed at the broad
bone of the temple, brushing at it till the white of it was like a moon, the sweet dapple shining. Wolfie pulled and tore at the blinkers and hurled them down, then he smiled through his tears into the dark eyes.

  ‘I’d know you . . . anywhere . . .’

  They stood, nose to nose, lost to the world.

  ‘Tie ’em up – help tie ’em all up – get the horses tied!’

  Someone was running down the centre of the stalls, pushing Wolfie to one side, saying, ‘Get th’orse in a stall – quick – tie ’im up.’

  Wolfie stood, detached from the commotion, fingering the dull coat, the muzzle and the dust-rimed eyes, the pitiful stubble of his forelock, whispering to Hero, ‘I let you down, betrayed you . . . I didn’t save you from this –’

  ‘Get th’orse in the stall – tie ’im up I said!’

  ‘I promise you, Hero.’ Wolfie whispered, ‘I promise you green fields and tall grass. I promise you rivers and mist and stars . . .’

  Hero nuzzled him, then tossed his head impatiently. Tears slid from Wolfie’s eyes. ‘Don’t you know me? Hero, Hero—’

  Someone cussed at Wolfie, pushing him to one side, yanking at Hero’s collar, pulling him into a stall and tying him up.

  ‘Wolfie!’ Someone was calling from somewhere.

  Wolfie followed Hero into the stall and stood by him, whispering, ‘I promise you bushes to scratch against and wind and . . .’

  Hero tossed his head and pulled at his rope, eyes wild, swinging his head.

  Jo was there suddenly, pulling Wolfie, yanking him, shaking him. ‘It’s running the wrong way – air’s reversed – we’ve got to get out.’ He dragged Wolfie out. ‘Give ’im hay – tie ’im up.’

  Jo ran into the next-door box, checking the rope, hobbling the animal. On the other side of the line, more men were doing the same, hurriedly working from stall to stall. Wolfie stood, stock-still, dumb and uncomprehending.

  ‘TIE ’IM UP!’ Jo shouted. Wolfie did nothing.

  ‘You can’t have ’em racing through the tunnels in pitch black. Tie him up. Quick.’ He grabbed Wolfie by the hand. ‘We’ll get out down th’intake airway.’