Black Beauty's Family
Page 22
‘You are too old,’ she said. ‘You don’t know anything. Times have changed.’
‘But human nature hasn’t. There will always be good and bad masters’, I said.
‘Masters, Mistresses! We call them our owners, nowadays,’ she retorted. ‘I shall teach my next one a thing or two, I can tell you.’
People came to look over the house, complaining that there was no telephone and only one bathroom, and no central heating, just as they had complained over Matthew’s cottage all those years ago.
Then one day a tall gaunt man in uniform came walking up the path. One of his sleeves was empty and his hair was grey. He looked at the notice before he knocked on the back door. Jean came out, her hands dirty from cleaning the grate. ‘I see this place is for sale,’ he said. ‘Oh Jean!’
She stared at him and said, ‘Alan! It can’t be.’ But she kept staring at him.
Amelia and I watched without speaking.
‘I built a railway. I was in prison a long time. But I’m Alan, all right minus one arm of course,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘How pleased the children will be. They’re at school,’ gasped Jean.
‘Oh Alan I thought I would never see you again.’
‘The thought of this place and you, kept me alive. Let’s take down the notice, we’re not leaving,’ he said, stooping to kiss her. She started to cry. ‘I’m so happy,’ she said.
They fetched a hammer and took down the notice. ‘I was going to sell everything. The cows have gone already.’ Jean told him.
‘Not any more,’ said Alan, his one arm round her.
They talked for a long time. He had been sent to Australia because he was like a scarecrow. ‘They fattened me up there,’ he said. ‘You should have had a letter. Something went wrong.’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she said. ‘I was going to have Black Velvet put down and sell Amelia, but they can stay now, can’t they? Black Velvet saved Sonia’s life you know. No other horse could have stood up on the roads that night. They were covered with ice. I think he knew how ill she was . . . I never stopped hoping you would come back. Not until the war was over. I couldn’t celebrate then,’ she said.
‘We’ll have our own celebration this evening,’ he promised.
Sonia and Paul came home later and a great bonfire was lit in the paddock. Amelia and I watched as they danced round it singing old war songs. I felt very tired but happy too for I knew now that this was my home for ever. Amelia pranced up and down snorting at the flames, but I wasn’t afraid because I knew I would never be hurt again.
Later they said good night to us.
‘You really are going to be pensioned off this time,’ Sonia told me one arm round my neck. ‘You are going to live here to the end of your days and, when your time comes, you will be buried under the apple trees with a gravestone with Black Velvet on it, for all to see.’
I remembered how Mouse and Twilight had died, and poor Starlight killed because of ringbone. They had all been quite young. I was old now. Soon I would be ready to go to wherever horses go. Perhaps I would meet my mother there and all the other horses I had known – my own generation. They would be sound and young again and we would talk about the old days, not about owners and the pony club, but about masters and mistresses and carriages and phaetons, about the days when tails were still docked and we pulled the carts and ploughs of England.
BLACK BEAUTY’S FAMILY
AN RHCB DIGITAL EBOOK 9781446498965
Published in Great Britain by RHCB Digital
An imprint of Random House Children’s Books
A Random House Group Company
This ebook edition published 2011
Text copyright © Josephine Pullein-Thompson, Diana Pullein-Thompson and Christine Pullein-Thompson 1975
First published as Black Beauty’s Clan in 1975 by Brockhampton Press
The rights of Josephine, Diana & Christine Pullein-Thompson to be identified as the authors of these works has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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