Matthew thought about the Pinkney boy, his contemporary and schoolfellow. He said spitefully: “They ought to have called him just Bulb, instead of Merlin—not that Merlin isn’t a pretty awful name ... ”
“I believe it’s the main reason why she’s got us a show pony—because she’s jealous of hearing about all the rosettes Celandine gets and because there was a photograph of her in Horse and Hound.”
“Maybe you’re right. I don’t envy you, Susannah, when you get into the ring …”
Susannah went back to what was at the moment a greater weight on her mind. “It’s not so bad for you—Clown can eat anything. Uncle Mark once said he had an incinerator instead of a stomach— but don’t you remember how Cosy nearly died of eating rushes? And I believe ragwort poisoning is a terribly painful, lingering death.”
The stable clock above them struck seven, reminding them they would soon have to go in and change for the meal of salad and fruit designed to keep their elder sister as lean as a racehorse.
“I tell you what,” Matthew said, “we’ll ask Tim O’Brien to go and see—to root up any ragwort he can find. They will have finished with their horses by now.”
“Oh, yes. He could go on a bicycle—or Shamus could take him in the van. They’d help, I know, if it was a question of ponies ... ”
Mrs Aston-Pringle disapproved of the O’Brien brothers from the bottom of her heart, and it was not really admitted that the two families even knew each other. The Irish, she allowed, made quite good grooms if you Kept An Eye on them, and they were trustworthy with pigs because, in the Bog where they came from, it was well known that pigs abounded in every cabin. But as friends of her grandchildren they were not acceptable. They wore disgraceful old clothes and did not seem ashamed of them, and if old enough to do so smoked filthy pipes and drank whiskey, and one and all had extremely catching accents. And why wasn’t Tim O’Brien, at the age of fifteen, at school, like Matthew and the Pinkney boy? Mrs Aston-Pringle would ask that question, whenever the O’Briens were mentioned, and then supply the answer herself. The O’Briens were nothing more or less than horse-copers.
So a telephone call to the O’Briens had to be put through from the call box in the road just outside the gate. It was too risky to lift the crinoline doll from the white telephone in the hall, to hiss any sort of message or request down the hygienic glass mouthpiece that was supposed to be wiped before and after every call.
The car, being expensive, was noiseless, and in the summer the front door stood open, and in the summer, too, their grandmother wore, instead of the neat black shoes or elastic-sided boots that might have been expected, gay Espadrilles that made no sound approaching over the parquet floor.
Matthew and Susannah decided regretfully, but necessity knows no law, that Priscilla would have to be content with twopence to add to her fund, and while Susannah, who was the one most concerned about the ponies, dialled the number, Matthew kept watch outside the call box, ready to bang on the door if danger could be seen or heard in the distance. It was just after seven, so the O’Briens might be expected to be still in the house, lingering over the ruins of the high tea of which Mrs Aston-Pringle so much disapproved and which provided her with an added argument for never allowing the children to ask them inside her house.
The O’Briens, both of them, hated and feared the telephone, because they would have preferred to live in any other century but the twentieth, and only had it at all in order to get a vet if they needed one in a hurry, and they could never remember to loose off a flood of bad language and grumbles before rather than after they lifted the receiver to answer a call. It was Tim who answered now, and Susannah could hear him assuring his brother in the background that as it was after seven it couldn’t be the forage merchant ringing up again about his bill.
When she had his attention she poured out her sudden, dreadful fear about the ragwort, telling him, to add emphasis, about the time Cosy nearly died of eating rushes, and he promised he would nip down with what he called a slasher and deal with it. She asked him, while he was there, to look the ponies over for cuts, warbles, and burrs in their manes. He suggested she might come too, possibly thinking she had set him too much of a task to perform single-handed, and she told him about getting tidy for supper. He snorted at that, because he himself was never required to get tidy for anything, and only washed his hands if he had been gutting a rabbit or dressing a horse or dog for a contagious skin disease. He said sarcastically that they might as well be living in London, which seemed to him the worst fate that could befall anyone. She then begged him to look at Cosy’s feet, and he told her the keep was too poor in that field to give any pony laminitis.
Susannah hadn’t thought about Cosy getting laminitis.
She had merely been worried lest the ponies’ feet needed cutting back. That was another terror added to the sum of her anxieties.
Then she remembered what had been over-laid in her mind by her preoccupation with her own pony: the presence in the stable of the unloving, pampered show pony, Swedish Rhapsody, and the uncomfortable responsibility about to be laid on her shoulders, the importance of beating Celandine Pinkney’s grey.
There was silence at the other end instead of the sympathetic condolences she had expected from a kindred spirit like Tim O’Brien.
“Don’t you think it’s miserable for us?” she asked. “I mean, we don’t know anything about showing. We just like to ride ponies for fun in the summer, and hunting in the winter. It can’t be fun if it matters so much whether you win or not.”
Matthew banged on the glass door and mouthed at her, and she realised he must have heard, away on the main road, the unmistakable, musical horn of their grandmother’s car.
“Tim ... ” she said urgently, “are you listening?”
“I heard,” he said slowly. “The thing is, we’ve just bought a show pony ourselves …”
Buy Dark Horse
Jane Badger Books
Jane Badger Books is dedicated to bringing back classic pony fiction, some of which has been out of print for over 50 years. Authors available so far include:
Caroline Akrill
Joanna Cannan
Victoria Eveleigh
Patricia Leitch
Patience McElwee
Marjorie Mary Oliver & Eva Ducat
Hazel M Peel
Diana Pullein-Thompson
Josephine Pullein-Thompson
www.janebadgerbooks.co.uk
Published by Jane Badger Books 2020
First published by Collins, London, 1955
© The estate of Josephine Pullein-Thompson
Cover image © Sheila Rose
The moral right of Josephine Pullein-Thompson to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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