My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  It was a hot muggy afternoon in July, just at the beginning of the summer holidays, and among the trees the horseflies were a constant torment. Daddy, who had hoped to spend a peaceful afternoon fishing on the Wye, instead took the situation in hand. He sent Gerry (who could drive but was too young for a licence) off in the old Land Rover to fetch spades, ropes, and everyone from the farm; instructed me and a friend who had come to lunch and was wearing rather unsuitable clothes to drive the pigs through the gate into the next field, and told Mummy to ring the garage in search of a vehicle with a winch.

  They did better than that: they produced a caterpillar tractor, which crawled across the soft ground where our Fergie and Fordson would have got stuck. Our neighbours turned out in force and dug like heroes, and at last succeeded in getting ropes and a surcingle round Fforest Fawr. Slowly the caterpillar hauled her out on to a gate laid on its side, and thence to the ramp of the horse-trailer.

  She was a pitiful object, black with mud, her sides heaving and one hindleg at an awkward angle, but an hour after we got her into a stable she was trying to stand up, and by the time the vet came she was on her feet and staggering about, no longer at death’s door, though she was never properly sound thereafter. The pull of the tractor against the suction of mud must have snapped or dislocated something in her back or hip, and though she subsequently had a nice filly foal which we called Fforest Fiddlesticks, she was always lame behind and had to be sold as a brood mare.

  Boggy patches were a constant hazard, despite the mole-draining programme. We lost two more ponies – a plain little black mare called Shân, and Dustyfoot’s daughter Smoky II – in different fields the following year. Often you didn’t spot the treacherous softness until too late. I remember once during a check out hunting I was sitting on my pony on what looked a perfectly sound bit of hillside just a few yards away from Mr Morris the Subsidy, a garrulous stout party in bicycle clips and trilby hat on a fiery little blood horse, idly listening to his flow of talk, when I noticed that his mount’s legs seemed to be getting shorter.

  ‘Hold up, horse!’ he said impatiently as it fidgeted.

  ‘Watch out, boyo, you’re in the bog!’ said his companion sharply, and next moment Mr Morris had flung himself off and was wading up to his knees while his horse floundered forward in great leaps to regain solid ground.

  That summer, Gerry and I had an anxious few hours on Mynydd Eppynt, and once again Mummy’s recklessness was the prime cause. Each year, the North Breconshire Show at Builth Wells (which eventually morphed into the Royal Welsh Show) was followed a week later by a smaller horse show and gymkhana at Erwood, only a few miles from Chapel House, and Mummy decided it would save time and trouble if, after the first event, we rode over the hill to Chapel House, parked the ponies there for the week, and rode them on to Erwood the following Saturday. Daddy, who rather detested horse shows, would spend the afternoon fishing the Chapel House water, then bring us all us back to the Fforest in his car.

  As the light began to fade, we left the showground and rode up the network of lanes overlooking the Wye. I was riding Taffy, as usual, and as usual we had crashed our way round the Under 13.2 hands show-jumping course, collecting faults in double figures. Mummy was on her latest purchase, a leggy, 14.2 hands liver-chestnut half-bred who had competed in flapping races. She had named him Stag because he jumped like one – head up so that his nose was parallel to the ground, he would take a flying leap without bothering to check his pace or judge his distance – Gerry rode a sensible chunky grey cob with a hogged mane called Caradoc.

  At the hill gate, instead of following the drovers’ track which swooped in a wide arc round the edge of a shallow bowl in the hill, Mummy decided to take a shortcut across the middle. ‘Much quicker,’ she said briskly.

  ‘I wouldn’t go over that green patch,’ Gerry warned.

  ‘Nonsense. It’s perfectly all right.’ Mummy vigorously legged Stag into the dip, but hardly were the words out of her mouth than he snorted, jibbed with his nose stretched down to the ground, and tried to retreat – but too late, he was well and truly in the bog.

  He plunged forward in a panic and, by a great piece of luck, located firm rock beneath a tussock, and heaved himself on to it. Mummy jumped off, and there they both stood, on a small island of rock and coarse grass about three foot across, with the disturbed bog quivering all round them and no way back that we could see.

  The sun set, black clouds of midges danced around us in the gloaming, the harvest moon rose, and stubbornly Stag refused to leave his refuge. You could hardly blame him. He wasn’t a hill pony. He had had a nasty fright and didn’t want to repeat the experience. It began to look as if we would be on the hill all night.

  Endlessly we debated who should go for help. Gerry didn’t want to leave me and Mummy stranded, but I couldn’t be sure of finding the way down to Chapel House on my own.

  While I held the horses, he patiently circled the boggy area, prodding with an old fence-post, trying to find solid ground, but although a human might – with care – tiptoe cautiously from tussock to tussock, a pony was too heavy. Just a couple of steps and Stag would be up to his girths again. The best hope was a flying leap, but we couldn’t persuade him to attempt it.

  Mummy buckled the full length of Stag’s reins to one half each of each of the other ponies’ and all our stirrup leathers, then tossed the end to me and Gerry and told us to pull while she harooshed Stag from behind. It was no use. He braced himself and threatened to kick, and we couldn’t get enough purchase on the long thin ‘rope’ to pull him forward.

  ‘Try taking the ponies out of sight!’ she called.

  So we led Taffy and Caradoc away round a shoulder of the hill, tripping and stumbling in the bracken, but as soon as we were out of sight Stag began neighing and of course Taffy answered, so he knew we hadn’t gone far.

  ‘He nearly went,’ reported Mummy when we returned. ‘I think if I hadn’t been here either, he might have risked it.’

  She knotted the long rein round her waist and, while Gerry and I held the other end, placed her feet very carefully on one tuft of grass after another until she was back on firm ground. Again we led Taffy and Caradoc away, while Stag’s neighing became ever more frantic, and had probably gone about half a mile before to our great relief he came cantering after us, sweating and thickly plastered with black mud but otherwise none the worse.

  It was nearly eleven o’clock before we reached Chapel House, to find Daddy pacing the drive, a shotgun under one arm and a bottle of whisky in his other hand. ‘I didn’t know which you’d need most,’ he explained.

  There is no more room for two bosses on one farm than for two cooks in the same kitchen. Though Ron Weale was a good, conscientious traditional stockman, he found it difficult to share Mummy’s sudden enthusiasms for newfangled systems of management, let alone pigs and turkeys, and he tended to delay carrying out any orders she gave him until Daddy came down from London and confirmed them.

  This annoyed Mummy, who felt herself sidelined. It used to make me uneasy to hear her bombarding Daddy with a litany of woe the moment he stepped off the 4.45 from Paddington. Whether she meant it or not, the implication was that while he lived in cushy London she had been abandoned to struggle alone on a bleak Welsh hill – which was far from the case. Though he would listen patiently and make soothing noises, the farm dramas must have seemed pretty small beer after the large-scale problems that had occupied him all week, but to her they were all-important and she was determined they should have his full attention.

  While Ron was in charge of the sheep and cattle, and not too keen to accept her advice on how to manage them, Mummy directed her energies to the more congenial enterprise of horse-dealing. She had always been attracted to the beautiful little Welsh mountain ponies, with their Araby dished faces and floating action, and now that for the first time in her life she had plenty of land to accommodate them, she could hardly go to a sale without bringing back one or two. The colt foals
were heartbreakingly cheap, just a few pounds each, since they were mostly destined for the plates of French diners. They would arrive miserable and traumatised, having lost their mothers and travelled for hours crammed into lorries and trailers, but after a week or so would form jolly, mischievous gangs who larked about on ‘The Ranch,’ as the fields across the road from the farm buildings were known, squealing and sparring, and making yearning eyes at any mare who happened to be in season. Since the fences were by no means all pony-proof, and the colts were often not gelded before they were sexually mature, this led to a good many unauthorized matings and the number of horses on the farm expanded exponentially.

  The idea was that we should break and school them, show them at local gymkhanas, and sell them as well-behaved children’s ponies. There were, however, a few snags to this plan. Although we could all ride after a fashion, none of us had a clue about schooling or systematically teaching ponies to jump. Our default position was what is rudely known as the Old English Lavatory Seat – firmly planted on the buttocks with legs well forward – comfortable and secure but far from elegant. By the 1950s the clap-on-a-saddle-and-hop-aboard approach was definitely out of date, but lunging, long-reining, flatwork, circles were alien concepts to Mummy, so all we ever did in the way of education was hack about the hills until the ponies could be relied on to behave reasonably, and then we put them up for sale.

  Here Mummy’s unshakable conviction that all her geese were swans proved a powerful weapon, and she generally managed to persuade the buyers that under the shaggy coat and unsophisticated manners the pony in question was a real treasure, with a perfect temperament, ideal for a child to handle and so on. During my school days ten or a dozen ponies passed through her hands in this way, and she acquired quite a reputation among our friends as someone who could usually produce a riding-pony to order.

  Stag was sold for £90 – a very good price – in order to buy an oil-fired Aga, which was a great boon though I would rather have kept Stag, especially since Taffy was temporarily out of commission. The love lives of our ponies were getting steadily more convoluted, and although at the age of fourteen I was already too big for Taffy, like her previous owner I would happily have gone on riding her till my feet touched the ground. I was looking forward to one last summer competing with her at local shows when I got the unwelcome news that she had foaled unexpectedly, thus securing herself six months of maternity leave.

  Her scraggy bay filly Rico, father unknown, suffered the fate of many unwanted children. By the time I came home for the holidays, she was two months old, unhandled, and wild as a hawk – and so she remained for the rest of her life. Nominally she was mine, but I had neither the time or inclination to train her, and when she had produced two equally wild foals of her own, Mummy drew the line at keeping her any longer. Rather than condemn her to the sale ring and an uncertain future, I persuaded a marksman to shoot her in the field, and she remains a blot on my conscience.

  Taffy’s second foal could hardly have been a greater contrast. Sired by Sally’s son Jock Scot (who had been born in the butcher’s field at Much Hadham), the bay colt we named Pendragon combined thoroughbred, Arab, and Exmoor genes, plus Taffy’s robust constitution and splendidly positive temperament. He was, by general consent, the best pony ever bred at Fforest Farm, and one of those rare animals who seems to realise what you want him to do without being told.

  George, aged five, used to lead him about the farmyard as a foal, threading in and out of vehicles and other animals. Before Pendragon’s second birthday, Miranda and George were scrambling on and off him with nothing but a halter-rope round his neck, and when the time came to put a saddle on him he accepted it with perfect grace, and calmly joined the party going off for a hack as if he had been doing it for years.

  At 14.2 hands, handsome and robust, he was appreciably bigger than his mother, and everyone’s favourite, carrying eight-year-old Miranda or Mummy herself with equal care and aplomb. For several years running he won the Best Trekking Pony at the Royal Welsh Show, and best of all, he jumped in Taffy’s calm, uncomplicated way, appearing to gallop straight over his fences rather than take off and land.

  In this respect he was completely different from Rhwstyn, a compact little ball of muscle whom Mummy bought after seeing him jump five foot over a plain bar at the Aberedw Sports. It was his party trick. He would trot steadily up to the pole apparently hanging in mid air without even a ground line to help him judge its height, and make a cat-like spring that took him clean over it. This he would do over and over again with no sign of resentment or boredom; the only trouble was that he wouldn’t jump anything else. A course of coloured show-jumps would undermine him completely, and if you asked him to canter rather than trot at a fence, he would waver unhappily from side to side and finally slide into a refusal.

  He, too, was a stallion when he arrived at Fforest Farm, and Sally – who was now in human terms Taffy’s mother-in-law – further complicated our ponies’ relationships by producing a foal by him whom we called Nesta, after an heroic Welsh queen. She had a mouth so sensitive that she couldn’t accept a metal bit, and therefore wore a bendy rubber snaffle which gave her rider very little control. I remember trying desperately to stop her overtaking hounds on a steep downhill slope and eventually running her into the fat hindquarters of the Joint-Master’s chestnut heavyweight, behaviour which did not escape a stinging reprimand.

  Builth cinema provided us with a steady diet of cowboy films, and one holiday we were gripped by a craze for shooting a home-made Wild Western, using Mummy’s 8mm movie camera. The storyline (as I remember it) required me on Taffy – Baddy – to ambush Clarissa on her black mare Victory – Goody – chasing her across ‘The Ranch.’ When she starting shooting, I would vanish from Taffy’s back but continue to pursue while clinging to the saddle on the far side, finally overtaking the Goody and throwing her to the ground.

  It looked so simple on paper, but the rehearsals were surprisingly painful. Time and again when I tried to cling to the far side of Taffy’s saddle it would revolve and deposit me on the ground, and even when the girth was tight enough to take the strain, it was difficult to keep the pony cantering with her burden lopsided. Nor was it easy to unhorse Clarissa when she knew what I planned to do. Every time I seized her stirrup and jerked it upward, she would force it down again, and Gerry, operating the camera, became so weak with laughter that the resulting pictures were hopelessly jerky and blurred. No more than one short sequence of the film ever got developed, but our respect for professional stunt-riders increased enormously.

  The filming did, however, give Mummy an idea for fund-raising for the Church in Wales, then in very low financial water. She painted eye-catching signs saying: Danger! Highwaymen Operating and underneath, in much smaller letters, in aid of the Church in Wales, which we nailed up at either end of the Fforest’s stretch of main road, and Olivia and I, equipped with black tricornes and bandanna masks, spent a happy summer day galloping out of hiding on our ponies to hold up every passing vehicle and demand a contribution.

  Great fun for us: rather less amusing for the tradesmen plying between Builth and Kington, who got stopped every time they passed. Many of them were Methodists anyway, and their comments became pretty terse. Nevertheless, we collected a respectable sum and had a really lucky coup when we caught the Bishop of Oxford, on his way to fish the Wye with a couple of friends, all of whom laughed and turned out their pockets, putting £8 in our tin – the equivalent of about £40 today.

  While Ron Weale was responsible for the sheep and cattle on the farm, we children had no direct role in their management, and could make ourselves useful only on odd occasion when sheep had to be driven here or there or when, each summer, they were gathered off the hill for shearing and dipping. A huge cordon of pony- and motorbike-mounted riders with dogs would sweep the section of mountain where the Fforest had grazing rights, driving ewes and lambs from their hiding-places in the bracken and channelling them into the steep, ro
cky track that led down to the farm.

  It was thrilling to gallop over the hill in pursuit of little bunches of sheep, yelling to stop them breaking back through the line, and a dramatic sight as all the little rivulets of moving fleeces coalesced into a single wide river which flowed down the hillside and through the gate to Beili Bychan common.

  There sentries would be posted to turn the flock in the right direction, and more to turn them at the foot of the short, steep drive, at the top of which was the corral, strongly railed, with a wooden race leading directly to the dipping tank.

  The next job was to sort out any sheep that weren’t marked JB and chase them back to the hill – an operation marked, I am ashamed to say, with much casual brutality as we pounced on the struggling ewes and evicted them from the corral, then did the same for their frenziedly bleating lambs. In fact, the way we handled sheep in those days hardly bears thinking about. Pain and terror were inflicted on the poor creatures every time they came into contact with humans, and even then I always thought the livestock market in Builth where they were bought and sold was horrible beyond words.

  There seemed to be a particular breed of red-faced, overweight, middle-aged men armed with sticks who gathered round the stock-lorries and trailers as they unloaded for the sole purpose of hitting every animal that came within reach, creating completely unnecessary terror, confusion and noise simply, it appeared, for their own gratification. Shouting, cursing, harrying animals this way and that, driving them into the sale ring under a hail of blows, generally all in pouring rain and with a background din of the auctioneer’s barely comprehensible patter, made it a scene from hell.