Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  A few days later, after a wet night, we woke to find the kitchen in chaos. Eggs lay smashed, the bread bin was empty, oatmeal was everywhere, mixed with tea-leaves from the caddy; and the floor was covered with small, muddy, unshod hoof prints. ‘It must be Shandy,’ we shrieked, rushing outside to find him. He was standing by his tethering stake looking calm and serene, but nothing could hide the fact that he was no longer attached to it. We knew then for certain that Shandy, as we had always suspected, was of unusual intelligence. (Of course, he would not have been able to invade the kitchen if Cappy had not returned late from a Home Guard meeting and left the back door ajar; and he would not have known about the kitchen at all if we had not taken him into it on numerous occasions when we enjoyed what was then called ‘elevenses’ by us, and by others ‘lunch’, a light snack taken at eleven o’clock with tea, coffee or milk if young.)

  About this time, ignoring the Blitz, Cappy started to stay in London during the week, sleeping at his club and sometimes visiting The Players’ Theatre. We were now expected to fill up forms from the Ministry of Agriculture stating, among many other things, how many lettuces we had growing in the garden. These forms were a great trial to Mamma as someone had to count the lettuces.

  One dreadful night around midnight, the telephone rang. Always the quickest to wake, I leapt from my bed and rushed to pick up the receiver in Cappy’s office. It was a totally unexpected call from a hospital in Lichfield to say that Denis was dying of a burst appendix. Silently Cappy and Mamma prepared to leave. Josephine, the old soul, handed them a thermos of coffee for the journey. It was a dark night and raining as they left, driving away into the blackout on a long, hazardous journey. The next day Nana, who must have been contacted by Mamma via Aunt Dot, arrived to look after us – though I’m sure we could have managed without her. Each night Mamma rang from Lichfield to tell us the depressing news that there was no change in Denis’s condition. So as the doctor had said there was no hope, they sat waiting for Denis to die. To make things worse when Denis begged for ice and later for tomato soup, the nurses refused him, saying crossly that they had to keep the fridge shut ready for the air raid casualties. Mamma was to say later that it had been difficult to believe that Denis would die, when such wonderful witticisms were falling from his lips, but what they were I do not know. She was right, however, for he did survive.

  Soon after Mamma and Cappy returned home, they were summoned back again by another call from the hospital, taken again by me in the small hours; but this time when they reached the hospital after driving through a blaze of falling bombs, Denis was out of danger once again.

  As our pupils grew in number and older in years, many became our friends. I recall sitting under an apple tree with a group not much older than ourselves, with a book on fortune telling, given to Cappy as a farewell present by his London secretary. I think it must have been Josephine who was reading our hands; at times the results were embarrassing and frighteningly accurate, for the lines were strangely truthful, so that those who were selfish were decreed selfish and those who were greedy were described thus. It was then we discovered that Diana and I had heart and head lines woven in a continuous chain across the centre of our palms; this, according to the book, meant that our hearts and heads always worked together, making us strong, if sometimes uncaring, characters. My hands have remained the same while Diana’s heart and head lines are now separate. Has she changed so much, while I have remained the same? I wish I knew. I have read somewhere that this peculiarity is often seen on the palms of children suffering from Down’s Syndrome, though I cannot vouch for the truth of this.

  By 1942 the buses from Reading to Peppard were filling up with children on their way to ride with us; they came on bikes too, often arriving before eight in the holidays and at the weekends to help us bring the ponies home from their scattered fields. Soon during the summer some stayed until six or seven in the evenings, and with many parents away all day doing war work the Grove Riding School became a second home.

  It was about this time that we acquired two ancient upright bikes. We called them Victoria and Albert and rode them to the furthest field which was at Cane End. They had no lights and wonky brakes and often their chains came off, but it was still possible on a good day to lead two ponies tied to one another if you pedalled steadily and met nothing frightening on the way.

  Quite early on, we made certain rules concerning the ponies working for us, and they were never changed; no pony was expected to work for more than three hours in one day without resting the following one. Every pony was to have at least two weeks holiday a year without shoes. And the stables were closed one day a week so that every pony had a day off.

  Our classes in the holidays were at ten, eleven and two-thirty. When it was very hot the afternoon class was transferred to the evening. Sometimes we held a scholarship class for promising riders who could not afford lessons, and this was in the evening too. When the ground was hard, jumping and cantering were abandoned except in the woods where centuries of fallen leaves carpeted the ground. The first class in the morning was for the best riders, the second was for the not so good and the one in the afternoon was for beginners and generally took place in the paddock. Many of the ponies had to journey to their fields morning and evening, but they were all extremely fit. Illness among them was rare, lameness almost unknown and we never had a case of laminitis.

  It was not long before we were also giving individual lessons, often to adults, for which we charged extra. I think Josephine was the most talented instructor, but I am told that I was the kindest. Personally I felt then and I feel now that encouragement is the essence of good teaching. It is the same with horses: encouragement and praise, in my opinion, produce far better results than punishment. Diana combined both virtues and had her own devoted band of followers.

  Most of the ponies seemed very happy with us; they liked the routine and the companionship of other ponies. Eventually Tarragona, having grown old, went to a new home. After a few days she jumped the hedge which fenced her field and appeared in the stable yard in time for the first ride, having covered three or more miles at breakneck speed – a sad reflection on growing old, and also confirmation of how happy she had been with us.

  And now of course we were writing when we had time. Growing up with a mother who was an author, it seemed a natural thing to do, and with so many ponies and riders passing through our hands, we were not short of material – it was there in front of us all the time.

  Pupils of the Grove Riding School

  Diana

  When on the first day of war that air-raid siren wailed its message unforgettably across the blue skies of England, our parents had gone to the New Inn at Kidmore End, where they met their friends for a glass or two of beer every Sunday. We were still children, but for me the ominous siren stood for change, the end of an era. And the sunshine only increased the obscenity of impending bloodshed; for how could humans be so vile, so tiresome, when the world was at this moment so beautiful? The cigarette Mamma handed me in the bath (which I’m told I asked for), I smoked with bravado rather than pleasure, feeling it marked for me the end of childhood.

  But the war itself? What do I remember of those first two and a half years which has not already been said by Christine – or is about to be told by Josephine, who likes to put everything into historical context? The claustrophobic smell of gas masks; identity cards which we usually forgot to carry; Dunkirk; searchlights sweeping the night sky, occasional ack-ack gunfire, and the roar of planes, coming and going, German and British. And no more joints of meat or mocha cakes. Darning socks, until they became more darns than anything else; sewing chamois leathers, which needed no coupons, on the inside legs of our jodhpurs. A stomach which always rumbled well before meal times, because we were still growing and working as hard as Land Girls, but without their extra rations.

  Second-hand clothes. And a growing sense of achievement as the riding school grew, and difficult ponies, whose psychology we t
ried to understand, became rideable and obliging – for what is more rewarding than persuading a child or animal to change ways that have made their lives impossible, miserable or useless? There was one pony, Brown Sherry, who hated riders so much she tried to remove them by jumping sideways into thorn hedges, fences or gates. In comparison, backing young horses was easy, so long as no one had been there before us and made a mess of things. For if they trust you they are quite happy for you to sit astride them, especially if they have watched their companions being ridden. If they buck, it means you have moved too quickly. Fortunately we agreed totally about how ponies should be schooled and pupils instructed.

  On very hot days we taught and rode only before ten in the mornings and after half past seven in the evenings. Between these times the ponies rested under trees in the yard; we covered our arms, legs and faces with olive oil, while it was still available and, wearing large straw hats, lay blissfully on the lawn under trees reading books. But whatever the weather, six times a week, we journeyed to rented fields up to two miles away to collect and return ponies; sometimes sitting very upright on Victoria or Albert, or jogging before jogging became fashionable, reciting poetry or singing on our way. The picture-postcard wells at Cane End and Gallowstree Common, now gone, provided us with water, which we carried to troughs or discarded baths. We bought an old yoke, which must have been made for men because it dug into our shoulders. At Kingwood Common, where we rented an orchard, we chucked buckets down a more primitive well and tugged them up three-quarters full. In winter we carried haynets to ponies on their day off, working, like all those who cared for animals, seven days a week.

  Much of the time I revelled in feeling strong. Like Italian peasants, we used for hay every yard of spare unfenced grass we could lay our hands on, cutting it with a grass hook and bringing it back in a cart pulled by Susan. Dried nettles were useful, too, as they have a high proportion of protein. We mucked out stables, unloaded lorries of hay when we were lucky enough to get it, or cut it from our own stack. Often we rode up to six or seven hours a day, and cleaned tack late into the evenings in the kitchen to the sound of music on the gramophone.

  Evacuees, left alone by their working ‘aunties’, brought sandwiches and spent their days during school holidays and at weekends in our yard. We gave them riding lessons when we had suitable ponies to spare. Sisters Cathy and Winnie, tense, pretty little girls, from, I think, Shepherd’s Bush, would turn up at eight in the morning along with more privileged children to help us fetch up the ponies, riding bareback. It was a new life for me setting out with halters and a gang of children on sunlit mornings with the birds singing and the dew still wet on the grass, especially as I was at last Diana, not just one of the twins, and I found I liked being with children; in fact I liked having people of all ages around me all day, because I was, it turned out, very gregarious.

  More and more pupils came, lured by word of mouth or the typed postcards we put in the saddlers’ shops and elsewhere. A few lodged in the village in the holidays to ride with us every day. The Grove became then a meeting place and sometimes a refuge for children not happy at home. Mick, who didn’t care for ponies, spent his spare time in our kitchen, running errands for Mamma, grinding coffee and fetching coke or anthracite up from the cellar. Mick’s parents had not allowed him to take up a place at Henley Grammar School, because they were afraid he would get stuck up. So when his friend Val went, he was out on a limb. Afterwards, standing with his back against the Aga, he became almost as much a fixture as Simon on the chimney piece above.

  We studied Equitation by Henry Wynmalen, and marked out a school with white-washed stones in the top meadow, where we had our jumps. Our riding lessons usually ended with races of one kind or another, to keep daredevils interested. Other times we took groups of riders hacking through the woods, over fields and commons and across Peppard Common, whose vivid green slopes and bunkers – it had once been a golf course – were tempered by the more muted shades of bushes and trees, until the yellow gorse set them ablaze. Burnt Platt, Witheridge Hill, Woodcote and Checkendon, Stoke Row, Dog Lane, Shepherd’s Green, Highmoor and Nettlebed, Cray’s Pond, Little Bottom Wood and Satwell, the Devil’s Elbow and Hook End: these names, and many more, run through my head like never-to-be-forgotten songs, marking a moment of my life which was surely, despite the war, as happy as anyone’s life can be.

  With little hay around, we were always looking for more pasture. The sight of an empty field within two miles of us would send us running to the owner’s doorstep. So when I saw an empty, overgrown paddock opposite the Greyhound on the Gallowstree Common Road I did not hesitate. And when a stricken, inaudible voice answered my knock at the open back door, I wandered inside and came upon a dying woman, whom I remember – surely wrongly – as Miss Mildew; a shrunken wreck alone on a dirty, dishevelled bed, all skin and bone, her neck tendons like rope, her hopeless eyes sunken berries in a grey face, her lips pale as paper. I had to go so close to hear the hoarse words dragged painfully from her defeated body that I could hardly bear to ask more than a single question. But she managed to say ‘Yes’. We fixed a price and I walked home on leaden legs.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ I asked Joan.

  ‘Cancer of the throat,’ she said.

  ‘Does anyone look after her?’

  ‘A neighbour goes in.’

  It was my biggest shock since Mr Shea. The poor woman was, I suppose, a hopeless case and in those days before the National Health Service, there was perhaps no hospital place or hospice for her. Or did she want to die alone in her own bed? That question and the vision of her lonely misery haunt me still. And yet I never mentioned my shock at seeing Miss Mildew to my sisters. Deeply felt emotions were private and unspoken worries to be shut away in the subconscious and maybe brought out in gloomy moments for further thought.

  We never saw bomb victims, but I remember staring in awed silence at the red glow behind the spinney, dramatic against the pines I loved, which was London burning. Then, naturally high-spirited, we buried the worry in work. Foxhunting around us was soon to stop; gymkhanas and horse shows continued as a pleasure for all those who had not left to fight. Bowley, now a soldier in the Pioneer Corps, came to see us, his uneven, brownish teeth replaced by a shining set of false ones. Miss Thomason arranged for a lorry-load of flyers (the husks of oats) to be delivered to us, because, dampened and sprinkled with salt, they helped fill our ponies’ bellies.

  Joan, now Mrs Chandler, left in 1940 a month or so before Jim, the eldest of her five children, was born. Not very long afterwards she nursed her mother until her death from cancer in 1942. Later, when family life allowed, she came back to work for us part-time. I look back on Joan now as a kind friend and often a mentor, too, for she seemed to know almost everyone in the village and was never afraid to tell us where we had gone wrong. She once advised me on how I should manage Cappy. She was not herself very put off by his temper, although she remembers revenging a slight by furiously tipping curry powder into a dish until the resulting meal was unbearably hot. The message got home and in later years, after I had left The Grove, Cappy would ask, when over-spiced meals were served, ‘What have I done now to offend Joan?’

  After Joan departed, help in the house became spasmodic. Mamma washed up, with our help, and cooked, but jibbed at heavy housework, so sometimes one of us scrubbed the lovely red flagstone floor in the dining room, where later we were all to write sitting round the same table. For although rather dark, this room was cool in summer and warm in winter; its open fire was fed with logs, which we were sent to saw in the scullery if we complained of being cold, sensibly killing two birds with one stone.

  The winter of 1940 was bitter. There were weeks when the ground was too hard and icy for riding. In bed with ’flu, we passed round the thermometer, and then whoever had the lowest temperature got up and fed and watered the animals. I remember a day when Mamma and I trudged carrying haynets through the snow to Kingwood Common. On the way home our t
emperatures rose and we giggled rather hysterically over nothing. The next day we were worse and Mamma became delirious and saw fish on the wall, so Christine and Josephine braved the weather. Cappy was working in London and there was at this time no help in the house. The blue cupboard in the kitchen was almost empty of provisions, apart from packets of a chocolate pudding mix which we cooked over and over again, until no one wanted ever to eat a chocolate pudding again.

  Every winter of the war we caught ’flu. Once when Joan turned up we welcomed her as a saviour; but she had come for glucose for Jim, who was ill, and was in no mood to help us. Another time Robert, a village boy, whom we taught to ride for nothing, rescued us and fed all the animals.

  Worse than ’flu, because they were more insidious and unsightly, were our boils. My first ones appeared in late 1939 and resurfaced whenever I worked hard, until penicillin became widely available in the early nineteen-fifties. As they ripened, boils woke you at night and when the pain seemed almost unbearable you crept downstairs, boiled a needle or sterilised a knife and tried to lance them. When they finally burst you welcomed the revolting flow of greenish pus almost as a friend. The final moment arrived when the boil’s root came out, leaving a small dark pit which I erroneously called the black hole of Calcutta. Dr Field gave us medicinal yellow powder, probably sulphonamide-based, which we mixed with water and painted on the boils without effect.