Flying Changes

by Caroline Akrill

  “Perhaps we could step up production,” Francesca suggested brightly, “treble the feeds, give them senna pods…”

  I gave her a hard look. Grinning, she dropped her eyes to her plate.

  “The way I see it,” Simon filled our glasses with Gevrey Chambertin, “is that we have to work on a smaller quantity. Now and then we sell off our cow manure, but by the trailer load, just dumping it outside the houses on the pavement, but not everyone wants that much. I mean, think of all those people out there with small gardens, they want manure, but not that quantity, not for half a dozen rose bushes and a couple of marrows, all they want is a barrowload.”

  “Now look here, Simon Hooper,” Francesca said indignantly, “If you think we’re prepared to peddle manure round the suburbs with a wheelbarrow ‘ ‘Good Morning Madam would you like one lump, or two?’ – you are very much mistaken.”

  “Not like that exactly,” he said, “but what I did think was that you could pack the, er … marketable commodity,” he said, as the waiter cleared the vegetable dishes, “into bags …”

  “Paper bags?” Francesca enquired in an innocent voice, “Or punnets perhaps? Then we could sell it like strawberries on the side of the dual-carriageway with placards set at intervals to entice passing motorists. You know the sort of thing - Best Quality Manure! 200 yards ahead! Pull in now!”

  “Francesca,” I said warningly, “please …”

  “It might sound ludicrous,” Simon said reasonably, “but if you bagged it just like you did before, and advertised it as hygienically packed, well-rotted stable manure, at something like a pound a bag, delivered to the door, I think you might make a fortune.”

  “A pound a bag?” Francesca looked up from her steak. “Would people really pay that?”

  “Of course they would. A tiny bag of fertilizer from a garden centre costs a bomb.”

  “And we’ve got the product,” I said, “tons of it, and the barn is full of empty feed bags.” It seemed a wonderful idea.

  “But what we don’t have,” Francesca pointed out, “is the transport. How on earth are we going to deliver it door to door? By bus perhaps? Or on horseback?”

  “Neither,” Simon said. “You can use my Land Rover.”

  In the restaurant of The Angler, at the table beside the hand-coloured print of a red mullet, beneath the dangling floats, Francesca looked at Simon Hooper, and a speculative look appeared in her grey-green eyes.

  Under the table, on the pretext of smoothing the pink dress with the deep collar and pleated skirt, I crossed my fingers briefly.

  FOURTEEN

  Our classified advertisement in the local newspaper was a resounding success. We had far more orders than we could conveniently cope with. All of our surplus available time was spent filling the empty paper sacks that our pony nuts were delivered in with our marketable commodity until soon we had an impressive stack of plump little bags, their tops neatly tied with baler twine. Simon, who had promised to help us to deliver the first load, looked askance when he saw it.

  “I didn’t realise they would be paper bags,” he said. “I was thinking of plastic or polythene, the sort of bags we have on the farm for fertilizer.”

  “We’re not actually selling bags,” Francesca pointed out, “we’re selling manure, I don’t honestly see that it matters.”

  “It won’t matter to the customer,” Simon said, “but it might matter to you if you pick up a bag and the bottom falls out. Manure has a high water content, and the bags are only paper, after all.”

  Francesca scowled at him. She had not enjoyed filling the bags and had rather expected to be congratulated on her industry, not criticised for using paper instead of polythene. We loaded the marketable commodity onto the trailer, and stacked as many as we could into the back of the Land Rover. Somehow I managed to manoeuvre Francesca in between us on the front seat so that she was sitting next to Simon. By means of plunging both pairs of her jodhpurs into a bowl of soapy water on the pretext of soaking out some of the dirt, I had managed to get her to wear jeans, and had even persuaded her to wear a soft wool jersey in eau-de-nil, which suited her perfectly. But already there was an unpleasant orange stain on one of the elbows.

  A further setback occurred just as we were driving into the suburbs. I had a street map on my lap in order to navigate the marketable commodity to its recipients and asked Francesca for the list of addresses.

  “I don’t have the list of addresses,” she said. “I assumed you had it.”

  “No, you had it before we loaded the back,” I reminded her, “you were looking at it in the tack room. It will probably be in the pocket of your jeans.”

  It was not.

  Simon looked across at us. “I hope you haven’t done anything stupid, like leaving it behind,” he said.

  We had.

  We drove back to Pond Cottage in silence. Simon’s face was grim. Francesca looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. By this time the marketable commodity was beginning to smell. The windscreen was crawling with little flies. I had the feeling that this might turn out to be one of those days one would prefer to forget.

  The first address turned out to be on a housing estate too new to be on my map. This made my job as a navigator rather difficult. The estate was a labyrinth of identical streets of identical houses, liberally endowed with unexpected cul-de-sacs. We drive in rather a lot of circles. Shakespeare Drive and Chaucer Close began to look quite familiar, but Byron Avenue was not all that easy to find. When we did find it, the pensioner who opened the door required us to carry the bags down an endlessly long garden path to his compost heap. When we had each panted up and down with two bags each, he then asked us to empty out the bags so that he could inspect the contents. We stood aside and waited, whilst he poked the marketable commodity with a cane.

  “If he thinks we’re going to pack them up again if he doesn’t want it,” Francesca muttered venomously, “he’s got another think coming.”

  She was hot and rather bad-tempered by this time, and her hair was stuck with little pieces of straw. Luckily, the pensioner professed himself satisfied.

  The next customer was not at home, which necessitated a drive further into the town to the next on the list. We seemed to have used rather a lot of petrol, and with difficulty, persuaded Simon to pull in at a filling station. Petrol was more expensive than we had anticipated and this placed us in the embarrassing position of not having enough money to pay the bill. We were forced to negotiate the loan of two pounds from Simon. He was not at all grateful for the petrol, and in accelerating somewhat violently out of the forecourt, managed to lose one of the sacks from the back.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if this was such a bright idea, after all,” Francesca grumbled as, with traffic piling up all around us, we heaved the bag back onto the tailboard. But worse was to come.

  The next delivery was to a house in the middle of a long terrace, and try as we might, we could not discover the whereabouts of the back entrance. Eventually Simon drew up in front of the house and I knocked on the door. An elderly, homely lady answered and was delighted to hear that we had come to deliver her manure.

  “But you can bring it straight through the house and into the back yard, my dear,” she said, “It’ll save you ever such a long walk with those heavy bags.”

  In view of the pensioner and his endless garden path, we were rather relieved to agree.

  In the tiny front room, a bald-headed man with thick glasses was totally engrossed in a western film on the television with the sound at full volume.

  “Don’t mind my husband Arthur,” his wife explained as she led us past the settee and its occupant, through the kitchen and out into the back yard, “he’s nearly stone deaf.”

  We had almost completed our delivery when Francesca, who was following behind me with the penultimate bag, suddenly let out a shriek as the bottom gave way, depositing a goodly portion of the marketable commodity on the carpet behind the settee. ‘My husband Arthur’ was suffici
ently disturbed to raise his head and sniff the air. Francesca sank to her knees and frantically began to stuff the manure back into the upturned bag. Horrified, I set down my sack and went to assist.

  Pistol shots reverberated around the room, hooves thundered. The cries of the wounded were deafening. Then Simon came through the front door carrying the last bag and tripped over us. The bag he was carrying split open and showered us with its contents everywhere. ‘My husband Arthur’, roused at last by a wedge of our marketable commodity, rose from the settee in confusion. All was pandemonium.

  By the time we had collected up the manure and transported it into the yard, vacuumed the room, and sponged down ‘My husband Arthur’, we were all of us totally distraught. It was only when we were outside that we realised we had not been paid.

  “We can’t go back,” I said, “we just can’t, we shall have to just write it off.” There was a piece of paper under the windscreen wipers of the Land Rover. Simon pulled it out. “What is it?” I asked distractedly, “what does it say?”

  “It’s a parking ticket,” he said, “I’ve been fined six pounds for parking on a yellow line.”

  “Six pounds?” Francesca cried in an outraged voice, “Six pounds?” She was quite at the end of her patience. The day had been a disaster from the very beginning, we were two pounds out of pocket, the eau-de-nil jersey was ruined, and the parking ticket was the last straw.

  “Of all the senseless, idiotic things to do,” she raged, “you might have known you would get a fine …”

  Simon Hooper turned on her. So far he had managed to keep his temper in the most trying of circumstances and I would not have blamed him for venting it now. In fact, I thought for a moment he was going to strike her, but instead he took hold of her shoulders, pushed her against the side of the Land Rover, and fastened his mouth over hers.

  I tip-toed silently to the passenger door and climbed inside. Despite everything, I could not help smiling to myself. It might not have been a good day for the marketable commodity, but it had been an excellent day for romance.

  There was still, however, the problem of St. Luke. And try as I might, I could not hold out much hope for our fund-raising. But there was one person who might be able to help. That person was Oliver.

  I did not want to ask him. I put it off for as long as I could but when, a few days later, Francesca went out with Simon in the evening, leaving me alone in the cottage, I sat and looked at the telephone. I knew it was stupid to feel nervous, to allow myself to be intimidated by my own brother, but at that moment I was intimidated. I was nervous. I did not want to ask him. I did not want to give him the opportunity to refuse me. As I had refused him. Four years ago …

  FIFTEEN

  Sandy Headman was very useful to the stud, and became a far better showman than I would ever have given him credit for. True, he did not have Oliver’s looks, or his elegance, or his easy skill in the saddle – the kind of innate ability to make the onlooker believe the rider is doing very little apart from enjoying the ride, but he was a tireless worker who thought nothing of the heavy work around the yard, and never minded the endlessly demanding hours spent schooling the horses, or the indignity of having the rough edges smoothed off his riding in order to do them justice in the ring.

  I think Charity Ensdale wondered what I had brought her at first. His appearance was so off-putting, his language was appalling, and of course, she had not seen him ride, but from the start she regarded him as something of a challenge, and gradually a working relationship developed. It amused her to try to fashion a gentleman out of such unpromising material, and she appreciated his efforts – being an extremely hard worker herself (success in the show ring is never achieved by sloth), she always respected that quality when she came across it in others.

  There is no doubt that Sandy Headman also had great therapeutic value. Oliver had been an expensive emotional luxury, and his successor could not have been more different. Although at first he tried to give the impression that he was completely indifferent about it all, he was actually very proud of his new position, yet he knew his place, and was careful to keep it. He never attempted to become over-familiar, even as he grew more confident and relaxed, and there was a welcome relief from tension in the yard. Gradually, Charity regained all her former assurance, she lost the nervous irritability which had characterised the last months with Oliver, and the fits of depression which had followed his departure lessened until they finally vanished altogether. She became once again the person she had been when we had first known her, a presence to be respected and admired, and a commanding hand upon the reins. It was all rather satisfactory.

  Only one thing was less than satisfactory as far as I was concerned, and that was the gradual change in the nature and character of the yard. Any new number one rider inevitably brings with him his own special qualities, and there was a vast difference between the qualities Oliver had, and the qualities that Sandy Headman brought to the yard. Oliver had been a skilled and aesthetically perfect horseman, the sort of rider who improves the look of a horse simply by being in the saddle. Sandy Headman was not sublime, he looked far more workmanlike, but he was a strong rider, and fearless, exceptionally able on a difficult horse, and people in the showing world were not slow to notice that we now had one of the best nagsmen around.

  As a consequence of this, the type of horses sent to us to produce and exhibit began to change. They were still good quality animals, still the right sort for their respective classes, but they tended to be animals with behavioural problems.

  Oliver noticed the change first. He had accepted Sandy Headman’s presence in the yard as a necessary convenience, and once reassured that he was no threat to my peace of mind, watched his development into a proficient showman with an ironic amusement, but; “You are getting too many rough animals,” he said. “Sooner or later you are going to get hurt.”

  I did not believe him. “Sandy deals with the villains,” I told him. “I only get to ride the mild cases. He won’t put me up onto anything dangerous.” This was true, because Sandy was always solicitous about my welfare. We had become friends. After some initial awkwardness which was only to be expected after the incident in the barn, there was now an easy camaraderie between us. We had achieved a relationship which would have been an impossibility under normal social conditions after such a traumatic start but which is common to the most mismatched and unlikely people when they are working together, when they are genuinely pulling for the same team.

  But the work was not easy. Faults of conformation in a show horse can be disguised to a certain extent, even defective movement can be improved with sufficient care and skill, and neither of these present any threat to the producer. Behavioural problems are quite different. Manners must be imprinted upon the equine subconscious; the horse can only learn by constant repetition and has no conventional moral sensibility. Therefore good behaviour is either a habit or it is not, and all habits are more deeply ingrained if they are acquired at an early age.

  The trouble was that many of the horses we were sent had not been properly disciplined in their early years and, increasingly, they were hard cases, sometimes even failures sent from other showing yards. They were certainly a challenge, but they were also hard work because when a basic obedience has not been established right from the beginning, preferably even before any formal training on the lunge or long rein, any corrective training in later years to eradicate bad habits is a lengthy, hazardous, often distressing business, with no guarantee of lasting improvement. To give him full credit, Sandy usually managed to get them round, at least for as long as they were exhibited from the yard, but there were times when I shared Oliver’s unease at the way things were going. The yard was busy, it was successful. We still had a waiting list of horses. We were paid with a bonus for every win regardless of who was in the saddle or running alongside, but I was not really happy. At any one time we would have in the yard a horse who was nappy, a bolter perhaps, a habitual rearer, an ot
herwise amenable animal who was a savage man-eater in the stable, and a horse with a buck capable of launching a man into space. I would have gravitated back to the ponies, but Charity Ensdale had managed to find and employ a really first-class experienced girl to run that side of things, and as such people are rare in the showing world, I knew better than to interfere with such an arrangement.

  Things finally resolved themselves at a show where I was exhibiting a five-year old mare of impeccable breeding in the Ladies’ Hunter Class. The mare had every possible attribute for a Ladies’ hunter, she had faultless conformation, a low, long stride, she was bold and yet well-mannered with a perfectly confidential mien, she had a glistening chestnut coat guaranteed to catch the eye, but she was completely and totally ring-shy. She would do anything rather than enter the ring, run backwards into the other exhibits, rear, dig in her heels in a furiously determined jib from which no jabbing spur could shift her, or move forward as if persuaded, only to swing round abruptly in an effort to dislodge her rider. On the rare occasion when she was coerced into the ring, she would nap towards the collecting ring at every opportunity, and the whole performance would be repeated when she was asked to come out of line to perform an individual display. She was an exhibitor’s nightmare and her owners, sensibly deciding that she had no future in the ring, wanted only that we should collect one or two championships at major shows before they retired her to stud. The red, white and blue rosettes were not a lot to ask and they were important because they would assure a healthy demand for her foals, but the truth of the matter was that the mare almost defeated us.

  During our home schooling sessions, she had performed impeccably, lulling us with her kindly demeanour into believing her slandered by people who did not really understand horses. It was only when I tried to ride her into the ring at the first show that we realised we had been duped. It was a fiasco and, anxious to protect our reputation and not wanting to draw undue attention to the mare and jeopardise her future prospects with the judges, we removed her swiftly back to the box and drove home knowing ourselves to be fools.