by Stibbe, Nina
‘Why are you going through Hilfield?’
‘Mr Swift isn’t available today, we’re seeing a Mr Starling,’ she said.
‘Nightingale,’ I corrected.
Soon we were there at 24 The Parade. I held the door open and our mother carried Debbie in.
‘We need to see Mr Starling – it’s an emergency, I think she’s been hit by a car,’ said our mother to the veterinary receptionist.
‘Mr Nightingale,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ said the girl. ‘Come this way.’ Our mother followed the girl and placed Debbie in a shallow container on a table and stroked her nose.
‘It’s actually Mr Swift in surgery today. I’ll get him right away.’
Our mother swore under her breath.
The nurse heard and looked sympathetic. ‘Don’t worry, he’s a wonderful veterinarian.’
Mr Swift was very caring and nice and made no sign of acknowledging the unbelievable thing that had passed between himself and our mother. And our mother held up well too. He wanted some time with Debbie and asked us to wait in the waiting area. We waited. We were too sad to pick up a magazine, but I read an article over a woman’s shoulder in which a milkman is crushed to death by his own float and yet an eight-stone woman is imbued with power and lifts a truck off her young son. It seemed terribly unfair (on the milkman). After about fifteen minutes Mr Swift appeared at the door of the surgery.
‘Mrs Vogel, would you …?’ and he gestured her to enter the treatment room.
We followed her.
Mr Swift wondered whether it might be best for us to wait in the waiting area but our mother said Debbie was our dog and if we were big enough to have a dog, we were big enough to hear whatever he had to say.
‘Debbie’s injuries are serious and complex and, as you suggest, most likely the result of a road accident. She’s suffered trauma to her chest and left hind leg.’
‘Can you save her?’ our mother asked.
‘I can try. The leg looks straightforward and the ribs should mend with rest, but there’s something else. Has she been in water?’ Mr Swift asked.
‘Yes, she was found in a shallow ditch,’ our mother said.
‘Hmm, thought so. Her breathing suggests the early stages of pneumonia,’ he said, ‘and that complicates matters a bit.’
‘Can you save her?’ our mother said.
‘I can try, if you want me to,’ he said. ‘The other option is to put her to sleep.’
‘What’s best for Debbie?’ our mother said.
‘It’s hard to know, but I would like to try and save your dog,’ said the vet.
‘Very well,’ said our mother.
And then we spoke about various treatments, operations and so forth and we went home leaving Debbie there at 24 The Parade in a critical condition.
That evening my sister and I glued ourselves to the telly. And Little Jack wrote a mature letter, which made us very proud. He even asked how to spell ‘definitely’.
Dear person who ran over our dog,
You are a cruel person. First you ran our dog over, then you chucked her into a ditch to die. Or maybe you thought she was already dead. I would like to run you over. I would not chuck you in a ditch because you are too fat to lift. So I would just keep running you over until I knew that you were definitely dead. Everyone in this house hates you. And I bet we’re not the only ones. I feel sorry for your kids and dog.
From,
Jack Vogel
The next morning we rang the veterinary surgery at eight on the dot and heard the news that Debbie had pulled through and had even wagged her tail at the nurse. We heard just how much against the odds it had been and we all cried and our mother said, ‘Let’s all promise to be better.’ Which none of us really understood then. But I do now.
Debbie made a slow recovery and was always a bit wonky after that, and one eye bulged a bit and she didn’t live as long as she might have had she not been chucked in that ditch, but she survived and that was the main thing. Debbie surviving against the odds that time was a real boost to morale, as things like that can be, unless they’re a downer, and we felt quite blessed.
And just to round it off, Farmer Turner came round and produced the letter that Little Jack had posted through his door on the morning after the accident.
‘I didn’t hit your bitch. If I wanted ’er dead, she’d be dead. I don’t want ’er dead. I’d prefer you keep ’er safe on yer own property and the reason she’s not dead is because I ant seen ’er in the ewe field. But I will shoot ’er if I see ’er there and that’s all I can say.’
So we weren’t so sure after all that it was Farmer Turner who ran Debbie over. In fact we thought it must’ve been a real accident and that maybe Debbie toppled into the ditch herself and that made us feel better too. And Debbie didn’t roam quite so much after that, anyway. She preferred to stay on our property. Maybe she understood what the farmer said. And we added him to the list again but only briefly, saying we didn’t want anyone who wore a vest and had a gun.
We wrote to Mr Swift, the vet, thanking him for saving Debbie’s life. Our mother was keen that we should and she was quite particular about the wording (‘You were most sensitive’). I felt it unnecessary – he was just doing his job after all. None of us thought to write and thank Doris the whiskery old lady in the slippers who had saved Debbie’s life just as much as the vet had, but that’s the way the world is (vets being thanked and old ladies being forgotten) and who knows if she’d have liked that kind of thing.
I don’t know what became of the Christy’s Soft Sensation bath sheet. My sister said she thought the nurse would have taken it home as a perk of the job, it being so luxurious and almost brand-new.
Writing about the Debbie situation reminds me how good our mother was when bad things happened. It always came as a surprise, her being so rubbish at the ordinary everyday things. She was especially good when really bad things happened or people died, not so much the practical stuff but the other often-neglected stuff such as actually going to see the bereaved. Crucially, she knew not to run away or to pretend it hadn’t happened. She knew that you should immerse yourself in it.
When her granny choked to death on a Lucky Black Cat pendant made from Whitby jet that had fallen into some rice pudding, she flung herself at her mother and showered love upon her. And even though she disliked both her mother and the granny, she was there at Kilmington pouring Scotch on the rocks, lighting two cigarettes at a time and saying what a good eye Granny had had for scarves. When the husband of a family friend suddenly just died for no reason one night and didn’t come down to breakfast, she zoomed over there in the car and said things about the deceased that no one else would even think of saying. He was so kind. He was such a considerate driver. He had such a sensitivity for Beethoven, and other things that seemed far-fetched, but the friend didn’t mind because the person had died and needed bolstering.
Sadly, though, when her own father ceased upon the midnight with no pain, her goodness in a tragedy failed her. She was like a useless little pebble on a riverbed. She hadn’t been expecting the death and had some bad feelings about it. She got it into her head that her mother and the family doctor had been a bit hasty in the helping. It was a shame because she’d always been the person who knew how to behave and how to make the bereaved feel better, but suddenly there she was saying the very worst things and reminding her family what a menace she was. My sister and I tried to steer her into normality – e.g., ‘Come on, Mum, don’t say stuff like that’ – but she shook herself free metaphorically and raged down the telephone, ‘If he was so fucking ill, why didn’t you telephone me to come and say my farewells?’ and her mother had said, ‘I thought you’d be too drunk.’
20
My pony Maxwell turned out to be nothing but trouble, as I knew he would. I don’t want to write too much about him as I’m planning a whole book (all about him) and he should only have a bit part in this one.
In the beginning he b
ehaved in such odd ways that I was genuinely afraid of what it all meant. He was an attention-seeker, an escape artist, a thief, and so utterly selfish it wasn’t true. He wasn’t like any ordinary pony and it was typical of me to end up with him.
If I rode Maxwell when it didn’t suit him, he would do his best to knock me off by walking or trotting very close to a tree or a wall. And when I learned how to lift my leg to avoid being hoicked off, he would fake a stumble and put his head down so that I might topple off the front, and when I got used to clinging on to the pommel and holding myself on until he’d corrected himself, he’d roll over. But that was only if he didn’t fancy a hack out. To be fair, he sometimes did fancy a hack out – however, on these days he’d always return home exactly when he wanted to and when the moment arrived he’d simply turn round and trot me home.
He was much better behaved with my sister on him because she was a proper horsewoman and didn’t mind using the crop on him. I wasn’t a crop-using type and Maxwell knew this. It got so that I couldn’t go out riding with my sister because she would get so cross with Maxwell that she’d snap a twig from an elder tree and give him a whack. And so if he saw her ready for a hack, he’d refuse to accompany her, knowing he’d get a whack.
As far as this story is concerned, we got into trouble for taking Maxwell upstairs. Our mother hadn’t been at home when it happened. We didn’t tell her exactly what occurred but she found out. When she knew the main details, she became like any normal nasty mother and made us clean out the hen house as a punishment (a job that Mr Gummo would usually do) and it put me right off the hens and almost off eggs. It seemed unfair because we didn’t take Maxwell upstairs as such, he just came when we called – we never really thought he would. He came up because he was such an unusual pony. An unusual pony that our mother had insisted on buying – that I had never wanted in the first place.
I tried to explain this to our mother, but she hated long sentences and judged you on the first few words.
‘We didn’t take Maxwell upstairs, as such,’ I began, and before I could add the rest she’d accused me of trying to tell her black was white.
That day had started out OK. Our mother had gone to a hospital appointment in a taxi – Denis the retired mechanic’s Ford Zodiac. She hadn’t wanted to drive herself because she didn’t want to have to drive home again afterwards because she was having a pregnancy terminated. Mr Oliphant was the father (and in my opinion should have done the driving) and had apparently been mortified to hear about the pregnancy as he already had four children with his wife, that awful clingy woman we’d seen at the summer fair who kept linking arms with him even though the marriage was on the rocks.
Our mother said that had made it doubly disappointing (that we could behave so stupidly while she was out of the house having a horrible procedure and was utterly miserable and sad).
This is what happened.
She’d gone off in the retired mechanic’s Ford Zodiac and we’d gone to play on her four-poster – a thing we loved but seldom got the chance to do, her being in it so much. From the bed we could see through the open balcony doors that Maxwell had escaped from the paddock and was in the garden, nosing around, as he often did. We called him in the style of his ex-owner at the riding school (‘Come oi, come oi’) and to our astonishment and delight we soon heard him clopping up the interesting staircase. And he appeared at the doorway of our mother’s bedroom and walked smartly across the polished boards. I liked him then, for a moment, his big brown eyes full of wonder at the new place, his chestnut lashes tinged black at the tips. He was a handsome pony, I can’t deny it. Much handsomer than Sacha, who was grey and a bit wishy-washy.
Unfortunately, once fully in the room, he stepped on a rug, skidded slightly and became fretful. In this state, he stepped on the draped bed-curtain, which began popping off its brass rings, and a section flopped down over his head. In all the head-tossing that followed, our mother’s walnut dressing-stool broke in half and clattered to the ground.
Maxwell then clip-clopped into the landing and that’s when he looked out of the window. He let out a loud whinny and bashed at the mullioned panes with his muzzle. The window rattled and banged and miraculously didn’t break. Mr Lomax the Liberal candidate happened to be in the street posting his manifesto at the time and he looked up with a most unhappy expression.
My sister and I ran down the stairs and called Maxwell to follow. But he just stood at the top of the sweeping staircase, trembling and pawing the ground like a nervous little bull.
‘Come, Maxie, come,’ called my sister. But he wouldn’t. He just whinnied and pawed.
‘Come on, you bastard,’ I called, feeling desperate and responsible and resentful and thinking how I always knew something like this would happen (him being an unusual and charismatic pony).
My sister said, ‘Swearing at him won’t help.’ She went away and came back with a bucket of nuts, which she rattled. ‘Come, Maxie, come,’ she coaxed.
Suddenly Mr Lomax was there in our hall with us with his light tan boots on.
‘Keep back,’ he said, ‘in case it jumps.’
‘He won’t jump, he’s a calm pony,’ said my sister.
‘He’s a Welsh Mountain,’ I added, ‘he can turn on a tap with his hoof.’
Then it became clear that Mr Lomax was something of an expert on pony psychology.
‘Ponies can go most uncharacteristic when they’re in a strange environment,’ Mr Lomax said. ‘I doubt he’d have the wherewithal to turn on a tap in his current state, he’s gone semi-insane because you’ve let him look out of an upstairs window.’
‘Is that bad?’ we asked.
‘Bloody right it is. Never let a horse look out of an upstairs window, that’s my advice to anyone who likes bringing them indoors,’ said Mr Lomax. ‘If you have to bring them in, then you must draw the curtains beforehand.’
Mr Lomax said we were in a highly problematic situation, and in an ideal world four men would escort Maxwell down backwards with a twitch on his lip and, failing that, he should be sedated. My sister said she was anti-twitches and Mr Lomax said they were perfectly humane if applied to the lip, though never the ear. The two of them argued about twitches for a while, and then Mr Lomax asked my sister to fetch something with which to blinker Maxwell (if she didn’t object to a blinker). She fetched a bikini top, thinking it was the right shape. Mr Lomax ushered us to a safer area within our hall and we all looked up at Maxwell, who stood sweating above us. Mr Lomax crept up the stairs and reached round to tie the bra over Maxwell’s eyes. But before he’d finished the bow, Maxwell leapt the first flight of steps, crashed through the banister to the parquet below and lay there with his belly heaving. Neither my sister nor I dared approach him. We just stared, not breathing, like we had with an injured wood pigeon the day before.
I imagined, briefly, dragging Maxwell’s body out of the hall by the hoof, through the front door and into the street, realizing it would be the only way, and was just imagining Mrs C. Beard rushing across to admonish us about littering, when he was up on his feet again. He looked around, shook himself and walked slowly through the kitchen, out of the back door, and began cropping the lawn with his six-year-old teeth.
‘Jesus,’ said my sister.
She thanked Mr Lomax for his help and he gave her a couple of Liberal Party posters to put in the upstairs windows.
Our mother ended up staying in the clinic for a night and our grandmother arrived to stay with us. When she saw the wrecked banister she asked how it had happened, and we told her Maxwell had done it. She was confused about who Maxwell was but didn’t admit it or ask for details. She just shrugged and tutted and tried not to look at it. We sorted out our mother’s bedroom except for the broken stool, which we hid in a cupboard.
Then when our mother returned we said that Maxwell had barged into the banister by accident. Our poor mother was too tired and sad to even think about it but rang Mr Lomax from her bed and of course he knew all about it
and the truth came out. As so often, my sister and I hadn’t thought it through.
‘Mr Lomax tells me you brought the fucking pony up here!’ said our mother, suddenly more awake.
‘Not as such,’ I began to say. And that’s when she got cross and we ended up cleaning out the hen house. I was dreading Mr Lomax turning up and giving a full account of the event, but luckily he rang back and insulted our mother by asking for a cheque upfront and waiting for it to clear in the bank before he began the work. Either that, or cash. And our mother told him not to bother and that she’d arrange for someone else to come.
Neither my sister nor I have ever forgotten the rule about horses and upstairs windows and I’ve never had one inside since. Nor that an overnight stay might be required with a pregnancy termination.
21
The Longladys were going to America for a whole fortnight for the holiday of a lifetime. And to see a seriously ill relative of Mrs Longlady’s who lived in Boston. Melody was beside herself as she had always longed to see Boston in the fall. I wasn’t sure what it meant to see Boston in the fall, except it meant seeing Boston.
Mr Longlady wasn’t going on the holiday and wouldn’t be seeing Boston because, according to Melody, he’d seen an American film about a psychopathic American truck driver that had given him recurring nightmares, plus it was one less airfare and someone to hold the fort and feed the bees.
It was coming up to the time of the USA trip when our mother began to tell us how things were looking financially (quite bad). It was a strange and curious thing that as recently as 1970 Vogel’s, the business, had been given the Queen’s Award for Industry and was used as a business case-study and had sponsored a new department at the university. But by 1972 parts of it were in serious trouble and, sadly for our mother, the bit of the business that she had shares in, Vogel Machine Parts (VMP), was in the deepest trouble. So much so, the dividends were not forthcoming. Added to which her savings had been very much used up on bills she didn’t even know she had. Such as enormous bills from Miss Woods’s shop.