by Sam Angus
Again and again it rang, frantic and feverish. Sudden, spurting hope electrified the faces of the crowd. It started forward. Ahead of them all, Ryland was running up the hill shouting, ‘The old shaft – Number One shaft!’
Men ran after him, the foreman dropping his paper, running too, shouting for a cage, for machinery, for temporary headgear. Dodo was running, racing with the crowd, joining the flood that poured from the main shaft to the next brow, trying to find Ryland.
On the lip of the old shaft, men were calling down, their faces wild with hope, torches flashing into the darkness below.
‘Send me down!’ Dodo cried. ‘I must go down.’
Someone was pulling her back and saying, ‘There’s no way to get down.’
She broke free. ‘Send me down!’ she screamed.
The foreman called for quiet, for silence, for everyone to keep calm. They waited, breath held, listening, but their silence was met only by the silence of the grave.
‘Send down a bottle – any bottle . . . brandy . . .’
Machinery was being hauled up the banks. A hundred, desperate hands were rigging up a makeshift headgear. A brandy bottle was passed from hand to hand.
Ryland tied the bottle to a rope and lowered it.
On and on, he fed the rope, five hundred foot or so, into the greedy, unfathomable dark. Then he waited.
‘Pull it, man, pull it!’ people begged him after a while.
Ryland waited a little, then began to pull. Five slow minutes passed. Men’s, women’s, children’s faces were lit with hope. Still Ryland was hauling up the rope. As the end of it neared the surface, one by one they stepped back, shaking their heads.
Ryland fell to his knees, bowed his head and pulled, hand over hand, just for the sake of it, knowing there was nothing there.
‘There’s nothing – nothing . . .’ he croaked.
‘Keep going, man, keep pulling!’ the crowd shouted.
Ryland pulled, mechanically, like a dead man, the last twenty feet of rope to the surface.
Dodo saw, illuminated by a hundred torches, a plume of silver tail hair, knotted in the end of the rope, like a sheaf of moonlit wheat. She leaped forward, grasping the rope, clasping it, holding it to the light, raising it to her mouth, to her cheeks.
‘Wolfie!’ she screamed. ‘Wolfie!’
Ryland was at Dodo’s side. She looked up at him, held up the silver plume and whispered brokenly, ‘The horse . . . It’s down there . . . Wolfie’s there . . .’
The headgear was in place, the rigging in place, a hundred desperate men pleading to be sent down.
Later it began to rain. The cage had been lowered over two hours ago and still there was silence from below.
For a long time, the wheels turned. The sky greyed.
A motor car drew up below. The crowd turned to watch as someone stepped out and began to climb towards the old shaft. The crowd turned as one and stepped aside, silence falling as he drew close, a path opening to allow Lord Seaton through to the shaft head, the murmuring and muttering in his wake like a rising sea, the swelling hostility of it palpable. The crowd tightened and closed behind him and he was caught in its web. Grief gave way to a surge of wholesale anger.
Dodo, uncaring, turned back to the shaft head.
‘Dodo?’ said a voice at her side but she heard nothing, the silver plume still clutched to her chest, her body quaking, as she whispered, ‘Wolfie, Wolfie . . .’
‘Dodo?’
The same voice again. Slowly, as if in a dream, hallucinating with fear and exhaustion, Dodo closed her eyes.
‘Dorothy . . .’
Slower still, she turned from the lip of the shaft. It was as if she were a child, as if hearing in her sleep a parent’s voice, thick with love, feeling the tender touch of a hand on her forehead.
She looked up and in the half-light she saw the father she’d not seen for five long years.
Pa. Pa. She was in his arms and he was holding her, her trembling subsiding in his warmth and strength.
After a few minutes, he pulled away to look at the daughter he’d not seen in so long, his eyes travelling over her face, his hands stroking her hair.
‘Wolfie?’ he whispered.
After a while he asked in a whisper, ‘Wolfie?’ Dodo closed her eyes and gestured to the shaft.
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Oh God.’
Wordless, choking, eyes still closed, she raised the silver plume. Pa looked at the quivering strands, silver as moonlight in the glare of the headgear lamp.
‘Hero,’ she said.
‘Hero? . . . Here? How? . . . Oh God – So Wolfie went down . . .’
He pulled Dodo to his chest once more, rocking her and holding her.
Later, the wheels of the winding gear began to creak and they turned, as one, to the shaft.
A white glow spread across the sky. The crowd fell silent. The cage was winched to the surface, inch by hopeful inch, Seaton forgotten, the world forgotten, all eclipsed by the springing hope that was in the heart of every person there.
The roof of the cage crested the lip of the shaft. There was a gasping, a crying out, a screaming, men, women and children all surging forward.
In the white light of a new dawn stood Wolfie, a young man with thick chestnut hair, naked to the waist, his face and hands and chest black and grimy, one arm curled around the nose of a tall fine horse.
In a makeshift blindfold, the arms of Wolfie’s jacket tied below his chin, his mane shorn, forelock shorn, stood Hero, arch and tall and quivering.
Behind them stood three wounded men, supported by rescuers. Three others lay on stretchers.
‘Seven!’ men were shouting. ‘Seven of ’em an’ a ’orse!’
Hand grasped hand, eye met eye. Smiles and tears wreathed faces.
‘Seven!’ The word was passed from hand to hand, to the back of the crowd. The sky brightened. The foreman called for men to go down, to explore the tunnels from this side, for more lights, more machinery, more men.
Soft, smiling rain fell. Wolfie untied the blindfold. The bar of the cage was lifted, and he led Hero out into a green and shining world.
Hero lifted his head. He snorted. Wolfie loosened his rope. Hero breathed, breathed again, nostrils wide, then he lifted his tail, he felt the clean wind on his cheeks and he cantered, kicking and snorting and bucking to the turf above the shaft. He lowered his muzzle to sniff at the grassy bank, at the wondrous green of it and he snorted and blew and pawed at it and struck at it to be sure, then doubled his knees, fell to the ground, and rolled and kicked and rolled and kicked and pawed the heavens with his four hoofs.
Hettie, waiting a little distance away with a bucket of fresh clean water, now watched as he slurped and sloshed, dipping his head almost to his cheekbones, and she rubbed at a patch of his neck till she saw, through her tears, the dappling of his coat.
Hettie, Dodo and Pa were at Wolfie’s side: they were holding him, hugging him, weeping, smiling, and shaking with tears and joy until Wolfie pulled away, pointing to Hero, saying, ‘Pa, Pa! Will you look at him?’
Hero lifted his head and trotted airily to the side of the young man he loved. He pushed his head between Wolfie and Pa and nuzzled Wolfie. Wolfie’s eyes were fierce and full, Pa’s smiling and round with pride. Hero’s head sank to the boy’s naked shoulder and rested there.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE EXMOOR PONY
The Exmoor pony is the oldest and most primitive of the native breeds. Early Celts used them to pull chariots, smugglers for moving contraband, and farmers for ploughing, harrowing, shepherding and pulling carts. The First and Second World Wars had a devastating effect on them. By 1945 the breed was almost extinct, with only fifty registered mares and four stallions surviving nationwide. Incredibly, some were used for target practice by soldiers, many stolen for meat and sold in the cities of the North, and others taken to work the mines – often being smuggled out, transported by train, then sold at auction.
THE V
ICTORIA CROSS
The Victoria Cross is the nation’s highest award for gallantry. Until the end of the First World War, holders of the Victoria Cross could be stripped of the honour for crimes such as desertion. In 1920 George V ruled that, once earned, a VC could never be taken away.
There are some (though not many) instances of holders of the VC being court-martialled.
The last great cavalry charge in British military history was at Cambrai, towards Moreuil Wood. For this, two officers were awarded VCs.
PIT PONIES
There are many instances of ponies being rescued from mines after disasters. In one case, three ponies lived for an incredible twenty-one days on rotten wood and water licked from the walls of the pit. These three ponies survived the West Stanley Pit disaster in 1909, in which 168 miners lost their lives.
On the 25 November 1911, an explosion occurred in a North Staffordshire mine. On Monday, 18 December a rescue party found three ponies alive six hundred yards from the shaft. Fifteen dead ponies were found.
Horses and ponies are refered to indiscriminately by miners as ponies. The taller animals tended to work nearer the shaft head or in drift mines.
THE MASSACRE AT WORMHOUT
The Norfolks and the Warwicks, ordered to defend Wormhout to keep the way clear for troops making their way back to Dunkirk, held up the enemy for an amazing twenty-four hours, allowing approximately 338,000 Allies to get to the beaches, and await evacuation back to Britain.
On Monday, 27 May 1940, German planes dropped propaganda leaflets over Wormhout encouraging the British to surrender. The leaflets read: ‘Do you believe the stupid rumours that the Germans kill their prisoners? A decent enemy will be decently treated.’ The SS then committed an orgy of barbarism at Wormhout and the surrounding posts of Ledringhem and Esquelbecq. General Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich commanded the SS Leibstandarte Division to massacre all prisoners. Wild with fury at the losses he’d incurred, trigger happy with drink, he unleashed a killing frenzy. The ground of the barn at Wormhout was a vision of hell, piled with half-naked bodies, their skulls smashed in, flesh mutilated, limbs twisted. British prisoners of war had been stripped naked to the waist, all identity tags removed, then shot at point blank range. Dietrich bears the primary responsibility. Theoretically under the command of Himmler, in practice his special relationship with Hitler allowed him to disregard the chain of command. In return for his performance at Wormhout the Führer rewarded Dietrich with the order of the Iron Cross.
Most of the survivors said nothing to their families until the media gathered proof of the ordeal and their presence there. Those that did speak found that no one believed them until Otto Senf made his deathbed confession and the bodies were exhumed.
There is a monument on the road from Wormhout to Esquelbecq to the memory of the men of the Cheshires, Warwicks and Royal Artillery who formed the rearguard action which played its part in the evacuation of a whole army.
On their courage depended the final outcome of the war.
Sam Angus was born in Italy, grew up in France and Spain, and was educated rather haphazardly in most of these countries, at many different schools. She studied English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, where she kept a dog until he was discovered being smuggled out of college in a laundry basket. She taught A level English before spending a decade in the fashion industry and now writes full time.
She lives between Exmoor and London with improvident numbers of children, dogs and horses.
Also by Sam Angus
Soldier Dog
First published 2013 by Macmillan Children’s Books
This electronic edition published 2013 by Macmillan Children’s Books
a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-1-4472-4137-9
Copyright © Sam Angus 2013
The right of Sam Angus to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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