Follyfoot

by Monica Dickens

  Dora went on the big roundabout three or four times. It was strange. She could ride a real horse at the Farm almost any day, and yet she could not resist the fascination of sitting astride the cool wooden painted horse, up and down and round and round, all four legs impossibly prancing, nostrils flared, teeth bared, the twisted barley sugar brass pole to lay your cheek against, the crowd and the trodden grass and the upturned faces spinning faster and faster into a blur, the blare and tootle and thump and clash of the pipe organ, swelling and fading and swelling again as you came round past the bosomy figurehead ladies, the painted signs: ‘Longest Ride at the Fair’, ‘Oh Boy!’, ‘Yes! It’s the Galloping Horses!’

  When Dora got off, Jane, shooting at random without her glasses, had won a large yellow rabbit at the rifle booth. ‘Something for our money at last.’

  ‘What can you do with it?’

  ‘What can you do with it?’

  What did you have to do with an enormous yellow nylon fur rabbit except keep it on your bed until you got sick of it and stuck it on top of the cupboard to collect dust?

  There was another, much smaller roundabout at the end of the fairground, among the ‘Kiddies’ Rides’. Feeble cars on tracks, with steering wheels which the kiddies turned zealously and thought they were driving. Little boats that floated endlessly around a doughnut-shaped tank of dirty water, while a strong dreamy boy stood in the hole of the doughnut and turned a crank to keep them moving.

  The merry-go-round was not turned by a dreamy boy. Instead of painted horses, there were four live ponies, each with a breastplate attached to a bar which turned on the hub so they pottered slowly round and round.

  It was not exactly cruel, and yet it was not exactly what a pony ought to be doing.

  Dora and Lily and Jane watched for a while. A big man with a simple face and a wobbly paunch lifted the children into the saddles. They rode round a small circle, the bigger ones jiggling and bouncing, or sitting tight, lost in a dream that they were galloping, the tiny ones petrified, staring at their proud mothers all the way round, begging silently to be lifted down.

  The ponies were Shetlands with trailing tails, quite well kept. Although Dora and Lily and Jane watched critically, with the narrowed eyes of experts, they could find no cruelty to complain of, except possibly to small children.

  But Dora said on principle, as they turned away, ‘The ponies hate it.’

  ‘Oh no.’ The paunchy man turned round, with a wriggling child in his arms. ‘They like it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Someone in the crowd giggled.

  ‘When I put the harness on, each one walks to his place and stands to be hitched up. Don’t you, love?’ The pony hardly came up to where his waist would be if he had one. He could have bent over it, if he could have bent, and touched the ground on the other side.

  He put the child gently into the saddle, whistled, and the ponies moved forward, little hoofs the size of coffee mugs pockmarking the soft ground. When he whistled again they stopped, and the children were lifted down.

  ‘Not much of a ride for two pounds,’ Jane said, since there was nothing else to complain about.

  The man turned his mild face round to her and said, ‘Quite enough for my little ponies.’

  The fair was closing when they left. They were waiting at the bus stop, when Jane suddenly cried out, ‘My rabbit!’ She had left it at the fair, near the pony-go-round where she had put it down to pat one of the Shetlands.

  ‘Come back with me.’ She dragged at Dora’s arm.

  ‘We’ll miss the bus.’

  ‘Anna will come for us. She said she would if we phoned.’ The bright fairground illuminations were out. There were only a few working lamps where people were cleaning up or shuttering the booths, and windows and doorways of trailers spilled patches of light on to the trampled ground.

  The yellow rabbit was not where Jane had left it.

  ‘I could have told you.’

  ‘They probably put it back in the rifle booth for tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m going to look. I’d know it anywhere.’

  ‘It’s all shut up.’ Lily began to walk back.

  ‘My rabbit.’

  Going to the gate, they passed a small open-sided tent where the four Shetlands were tied in stalls with canvas partitions.

  Lily ran in out of the darkness, and put her hand on a pony, without speaking to it. The pony jumped, pulled back, broke its thin rope and made off, ducking and swerving in fright as the three girls tried to catch it.

  It kicked over some crates, tripped over a guy rope, skittered round the ticket booth and out into the road, hard little hoofs pattering, with Dora and Lily after it. Jane had fallen over the crates and the rope too and was some way behind.

  It was a fairly busy road. The cars were not going fast but they were coming steadily in both directions. The pony ran along the side of the road, then swerved across the middle. For a moment, it was caught in headlights, outlined all round like a haloed donkey in a Christmas crèche, and then it disappeared in a scream of brakes.

  The car skidded, slid into a car coming the other way, and was rammed from behind, just as the first car was hit in the back. The crashing and screeching of brakes and the tinkling of glass seemed to go on for ever.

  When Dora and Lily ran up, there were five cars already involved in the crash, and one more just skidding up to bash headlights into tail lights. Screech. Crash. Pause. Tinkle. Car doors opened everywhere and the road was full of people.

  ‘It was the pony,’ the first driver kept shouting, waving his arms about.

  ‘What pony?’ No one could see a pony. Dora and Lily were on hands and knees looking for it under the car.

  They thought it must be dead, but Jane, limping along with her knees grazed and her ankle bruised, met the pony going home head on. She grabbed it by the broken rope and yelled to the others, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got the pony!’

  If she had not done that, the girls might have been able to slip away and let the people in the cars, none of whom was hurt, argue about hallucinations and bad lighting and blind spots in the road. As it was, the police got the whole story, and the newspaper also got the whole story, slightly wrong.

  ‘RESCUE EFFORT ENDS IN SIX CAR CRASH’

  After they explained to the police, Lily and Jane had talked to a newspaper reporter, thinking he was a detective, because he wore a belted trenchcoat with a cape on the shoulders, like old television films.

  ‘We were sorry for the ponies,’ they had said. They added, ‘But then we saw that the man was good to them,’ but the breakdown lorry arrived with a deafening siren as they said that, and the story that came out in the paper sounded as if they had deliberately let the pony loose.

  The Colonel went to the owner of the pony and also to the newspaper, to set the story straight, but he got several letters from the kind of people who may never write so much as a Christmas card, but are always moved to write a letter when one of Our Dumb Friends is involved.

  Some of the letters were cranky. Some were sentimental. One had a two-pound postal order in it ‘to buy the little fellow a bag of carrots.’ One was a poison pen letter, unsigned.

  ‘Why can’t you people mind your own business?’ it said. ‘Not that your business is anything to boast of, keeping those wretched animals alive that should have been put out of their misery long ago … Trying to stop a man from earning an honest crust of bread … Should be stopped yourselves … We know your sort and what we know we don’t like.’

  ‘What are they talking about – “crust of bread”?’ The Colonel looked up. ‘Who could have written a thing like that?’

  ‘The man at the roundabout?’ Jane suggested.

  ‘Not with that gentle face,’ Dora said. ‘And the writing is too good.’

  ‘The writing … Jane,’ the Colonel said, ‘go and get me that letter you had from the Pinecrest Hotel. The one that Sidney Hammond wrote.’

  The handwriting was the s
ame.

  Chapter 25

  IN SEPTEMBER, WHEN the fruit pickers came to the valley, they brought two ponies up to the Farm for their annual holiday. The Colonel would always take in working horses and ponies for a few weeks of rest. The owners paid what they could, or nothing if they couldn’t.

  Sometimes, about this time of year, a costermonger’s pony or a traveller’s horse would be brought in ‘for a rest’, and the owners would then disappear, so that the horse would be sure of good food and shelter for the winter. They would come back all smiles in the spring, with gifts of firewood and vegetables, and probably be back the next autumn to try the same thing again.

  The Shetlands and the donkey were back from the children’s camp, and Steve would soon go to fetch the nurseryman’s Welsh pony who came every year. His plaster was off now, and the leg mended. He brought a piece of the cast back after they took it off at the hospital, and they buried it at the spot where the motorbike had ditched him, and Callie drove in a stake, as if it was through the Toad’s heart.

  An old man wandered vaguely into the yard one day clutching the newspaper story about Dora and Lily and Jane and the fairground pony.

  ‘I seen about this place in the papers,’ he said. ‘Touched my heart. I wish I could give you people something for the wonderful work you do, but I’m not a rich man.’

  ‘Who is?’ The Colonel had Ranger’s foot in his lap, trimming the hoof.

  ‘Got my pension, that’s about all it is, and my chickens and goats, just about keeps me going.’

  He had watery blue eyes and wispy grey hair over a pink scalp. ‘I got an old mare. Hard-working old girl. I’d give anything to give her a bit of a reward for all the years she’s given me.’ He sighed and shook his head at his turned-up boots, then raised his eyes to see how the Colonel was taking it.

  ‘I’m sure you would.’ The Colonel put down Ranger’s hind foot and moved round to the other side.

  ‘I seen in the paper that they can come here for a rest.’ The old man followed him round, shaky but determined. ‘So I came up to ask whether my old girl—’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry.’ The Colonel kept his head down, because he hated having to refuse anyone. ‘I’m full up at the moment.’

  ‘She can stay out in all weathers. She’d be no trouble to you. I just thought, if I could get her on to some good grass for a month or so, it would mean the world to her.’ He paused, and watched the Colonel working skillfully on Ranger’s hoof. ‘She’s earned her rest, mister.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ The Colonel put down the hoof and stood up, slipping the curved knife into the pocket of his leather apron. ‘But only for a month. We’ve got too many for the winter already. Just a month, all right?’

  ‘God bless you, sir.’ The old man’s eyes swam with emotion. ‘And all who work with you.’

  But in spite of his shaky hands and his moist, emotional eyes, he turned out to be a pretty shrewd old man. In a neighbour’s truck, he brought the mare, and also her treasured companion, a nanny goat in milk, so that the Colonel should have some return for his kindness.

  ‘Who’s going to milk it?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Count me out.’

  ‘I’m too busy.’

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  It turned out that the only person who would milk the goat was Toby, and he managed it very well, sitting on a stool with the three legs cut down to make it the right height, and the goat working on her cud like chewing gum. She was crabby with everyone else but him. He milked her twice a day before and after school.

  ‘Who wants to drink goat’s milk?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘I hate it.’

  ‘Anna can make cheese with it.’

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  So Toby took the milk home to his mother, and she gave it to her sickly new baby, who began to thrive.

  The goat was out in the fields all day with the mare, making rushes if the other horses came close. The dusty black mare was getting on in years, with battered legs and a long bony head with flecks of white round the eyes like spectacles. Her name was Specs. She had been in the old man’s yard for years. She was reasonably fit, but she tore into the meadow grass like a fanatic. After two weeks, someone discovered that she was in foal.

  ‘The old game,’ the Colonel said. ‘Sneak them in here to have it. But he’s not going to get away with it.’

  When the old man did not turn up at the end of the month, the Colonel went to the town where he lived and drove round for two hours looking for the address the old man had given him. There was no such address. No one had ever heard of the old man, or his mare, or his goats and chickens, or even his neighbour with the truck.

  ‘He’ll be back in the spring,’ the Colonel said when he came home, ‘for his mare and foal. The old devil.’

  But Callie and Toby were thrilled, and so were Steve and Dora. They had not had a foal at the Farm since the Colonel had rescued the mare at Westerham Fair.

  Callie took extra care of Specs. The vet said it was a first foal, and she was a bit old for it, so Callie brought her in every night and gave her extra food and vitamins, and came out in her nightdress long after she had gone to bed to shut the top door of the stable if the night turned cold.

  They kept her in the separate foaling stable behind the barn, since she seemed to be getting pretty near her time.

  ‘Will you wake me?’ She made the Colonel promise to call her if the foal was being born. She had a private fantasy that the old man would never come back, and they would be able to keep the foal. She would call it Folly. Follyfoot, after the Farm. She would handle it and play with it right from the start, so that it would always like people.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she murmured into the mare’s long furry ear. ‘Callie’s here.’

  The old lady rested on her scarred and weary legs, with her grizzled head low and her bottom lip hanging, ratty eyelashes down over her spectacled eyes. She was not beautiful, but she was content. Her sides bulged like a cow. The Colonel thought it would be any time now, and Callie would hardly risk going to sleep.

  On the bus to and from school, Callie and Toby talked endlessly about the foal, planning its future like doting parents. New babies in Toby’s family had always been more of a burden than an excitement, but this one was different. He and Callie could hardly exist through the school day until they could rush back to the farm.

  Callie started to ring her mother up half-way through the morning to ask, ‘Any news?’ Once, at break, she was in the call box at the end of the staff corridor, and she turned and saw a squashed white triangle of nose flattened outside the glass, where the Louse was staring at her. When he took his face away, it left a wet smear.

  Callie held the receiver and kept on pretending to talk long after her mother had rung off. But the buzzer went for class, and she had to hang up and come out of the box. Lewis fell into step beside her, quickening his pace as she quickened hers.

  ‘Talk to your boy friend?’ he asked.

  ‘It was my mother.’

  A teacher was passing. Lewis put his hands in his pockets, to look like two friends strolling. ‘Everything all right at home?’

  ‘Yes.’ Callie did not dare to say, Mind your own business. ‘We’re expecting a foal,’ she said nervously, because they were turning into an empty corridor and it was safer to keep him talking. ‘At least, Specs is. That’s what we call her, because she’s got white hair round her eyes, like spectacles.’ She laughed uneasily.

  Lewis did not say anything. When they reached a corner, he suddenly peeled off like a fighter plane and was gone. He did not seem so vicious this term. Perhaps he was growing out of it at last. Perhaps it was going to be a lucky year.

  Chapter 26

  TWO NIGHTS LATER, the telephone rang. Everyone in the house woke and sat up. It was two o’clock in the morning. The ringing in the hall sounded loudly through the still house, like disaster.

  It was Mr Becket
t.

  ‘This is it, Colonel.’ He was sputtering with rage. ‘The horse was all over one corner of my winter wheat, and then right through my seedling fir trees, galloping as if the devil himself was behind. I took a pot shot at it. Said I would, didn’t I? No, I didn’t hit it, but I tell you, Colonel, I almost wish I had.’

  It was Specs. The door of the foaling stable was wide open. Her hoofmarks led through the orchard and the open gateway, across the lane and on to Beckett’s land.

  The Colonel got into the car to go round to the other side of Beckett’s farm. Steve and Dora and Callie were starting out on foot through the orchard when Steve stopped.

  ‘Let’s ride,’ he said. ‘If they chased her, she may be miles away.’

  When they came out of the house, they had all heard the motorbike, screeching along the road into the downhill curve. They did not see the riders, but they were all sure who it was.

  They took Cobby and Hero, and Dora rode the mule. It was a dark night. No moon, and a damp mist hanging over the ground, and on the trees like veils. They could not follow the mare’s tracks.

  They rode round the edges of Beckett’s arable land, and along a cart track between his cow pastures. Ahead of them they saw the Colonel’s lights on the road and went to join him.

  ‘Better go home,’ he said. ‘We’ll try in the morning.’

  They went back into the fields, but they did not go home. They kept riding about in circles, farther afield, covering the land. If Specs heard or smelled the horses, she might come to them.

  When the first line of light began to creep along the edge of the far hills, they were all exhausted, and the mule was falling into every rut and over every stone, even those that were not there. Callie was cold and Hero was bored. Every time they made a turn away from home, he would fight to turn back. Steve and the Cobbler rode ahead, picking their way between the low bushes scattered over a fallow field. They were a long way from home. Callie was not even sure where they were.