Spring Comes to World's End

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Well, but some doctors did prove you were obeying signals instead of actually counting.’ Bucephalus jumped a hedge and stayed on the other side. Jumping was about the only thing Clever Hans couldn’t do.

  ‘Those doctors were quacks. Here, Little L!’ Hans raised his head and neighed towards the low hills which rolled towards the blue distance, dotted with grazing horses. ‘Come and meet one of us!’

  A small, short-backed horse with a tiny head and perky ears came galloping, splashed through a stream, and trotted up to inspect Roy with professional interest.

  He was the Little Learned Military Horse, star of the first circus in England, two hundred years ago. Roy had heard of him, of course, as people have heard of Adam and Eve.

  He and Hans and Little Learned wandered off, swapping show business anecdotes.

  Watching Roy’s loose-jointed amble, John said to Carrie, ‘The old chap is a bit down on the right fore. He would have gone lame on the job.’

  ‘Aren’t you glad we got him away?’ Carrie asked.

  ‘Yes. But—’ John reached for a bunch of leaves in the hedge, to have something to do while he said this. ‘You do still think that I’m—’

  ‘The best. Always. For ever.’

  While John browsed on the hedge, Carrie lay on his neck like a drowned corpse, arms and legs hanging, her face buried in his aromatic mane.

  Thirteen

  Mr Mismo came back from the Isle of Wight the next day. Carrie and Lester found him and Michael crouched in the pigsties, just the top of the green hat showing over the wall.

  ‘Pygmalia!’ They vaulted over the wall, and crouched down with him to look through the bars of the farrowing pen. Twelve white piglets like maggots were squeaking round the brooder lamp Mr Mismo had rigged up, to attract them away from their clumsy mother.

  ‘Andrew, Bartholomew, James, John, Philip, Thomas …’ Lester started to name them after the twelve apostles.

  ‘Hold on,’ Mr Mismo said. ‘There’d better be some sows in that lot, if I’m to increase my stock.’

  ‘Phillippa, Thomasina, Joanna …’

  ‘I call them the Twelve Dancing Princesses.’ Mr Mismo was very romantic about pigs. ‘Good thing they didn’t dance into the world last night, with no one here.’

  ‘We did check,’ Carrie said. ‘Quite late. On our way home from - home from …’ She stopped. Lester poked her and she lost her balance. She picked herself up from the mud of the sty and said, ‘On our way home from - I mean, we came to tell you - well, it’s like this.’

  ‘Cough it up, old chum,’ Mr Mismo said. ‘Better out than in.’

  ‘There’s a horse in your calf pasture,’ Lester said airily.

  ‘There isn’t, you know.’ Mr Mismo stood up, his knees cracking like pistol shots. ‘Till some of my old girls start calving, it’s empty.’

  ‘It was.’ Carrie tried to stretch a charming smile, but it felt more like a stiff grimace.

  ‘All right, all right’ Mr Mismo had known her long enough to get the message. ‘Come on then, let’s go and look at it, and you can think up a good story on the way, Rover.’

  Because all Carrie’s animals had people’s names, Mr Mismo had decided to give her the name of a dog.

  ‘What a whopper,’ he said when he saw Roy. ‘He’s as big as that Clydesdale I won the championship with at the County Show.’

  Mr Mismo’s past seemed to be full of championship horses of every variety, to suit the occasion. ‘Used to pull the old wagon, that horse did. Just like you or me. Took him right out of the shafts and put him in the show ring, and he beat the best of ‘em. “For quality, I can’t fault him,” the judge said—’

  ‘You’ve got it!’ Lester interrupted the flow, which could go on for half an hour, when Mr Mismo’s pale blue eyes took on that faraway look. ‘Roy is a farm horse.’

  When they smuggled Peter away from a rotten home, they had disguised him with black hair dye. They took Roy back to Mr Mismo’s farm, and plastered him with gummy mud from the pig wallows.

  There was a lot of him to plaster. He looked like a hippopotamus.

  Michael ran in from the road where he had been on watch with the lanky hound Gilbert.

  ‘I just saw Arthur.’ Arthur was the sneaky boy who worked for the Post Office, the village busybody who knew everything about everybody, and none of it good. ‘He said a man in a red car is asking about a lost grey horse.’

  ‘What grey horse?’ Carrie picked up some hay from the yard and stuck it in Roy’s darkly bedraggled tail.

  ‘So Arthur told him to go and ask the Fieldings. That’s us,’ Michael told Roy, standing on tiptoe to slap a lump of mud on to the horse’s broad chest.

  Carrie ran to warn Mr Mismo. He came to the back door, eating a bath bun. He ate all the time, chain-eating, like chain-smoking.

  ‘Discretion is the better part of you know what, Rover. Come down, Rita!’ He bellowed up the stairs for his wife. ‘I want you to drive me into Town.’

  Mr Mismo had lost his driving licence for running into the war memorial, which was a merciful relief for public safety.

  ‘I took you yesterday!’ his wife bellowed back.

  ‘This is today!’

  When they had gone, Lester and Carrie put the dusty harness on to Roy and hitched him to the old blue cart. He had probably never been in harness, but he was a horse you could do anything with. If he came through this, Carrie was going to teach him to count, like Clever Hans, fake or no fake. She urged him forward. He felt the weight of the cart and hung back, but as soon as he understood, he threw his massive shoulders into the collar, and pulled the cart up the slope to Mr Mismo’s turnip field.

  He stood by the long, straw-covered mound of turnips, resting a muddy leg, the cracked blinkers on the bridle standing out at right angles from his dirty, patient head.

  ‘He’s here!’ Michael and Gilbert raced up from the road, and went to ground under a tarpaulin. Lester and Carrie hid behind a straw stack. Rodge, muddied from foot to head, including his beard, and much more like a farm worker than a music teacher, rolled up his sleeves and started to throw turnips in the direction of the cart. Some went in. Some missed.

  It was Ma Rosinella’s son.

  ‘I’m looking for the Fieldings.’

  ‘They’re not here.’

  Thump, thump. Two turnips in the cart. ‘Oi, look out!’ That one must have hit Rosinella.

  When he asked, ‘But do the Fieldings live here?’ Rodge, good old Rodge, boldly answered, ‘Yes,’ to keep him away from World’s End. Carrie and Lester let out their anxious breath on a sigh of proud relief that he could tell a good lie without stammering.

  ‘I’m looking for a horse,’ Rosinella said. Here it came. ‘About the size of that poor old skin of yours.’ Phew! There it went.‘ You never heard of a curry comb?’ he asked rudely. ‘That nag looks like the wrath of God.’

  ‘Never having expa-expa-experienced God’s wrath,’ Rodge stammered placidly, ‘I wouldn’t know.’ Thump, thump, and a thud, squelch, as a turnip hit Roy’s imperturbable quarters and bounced off.

  ‘With all this unemployment about,’ Rosinella said, ‘I’d have thought the Fieldings would give the job to someone who could see what they were at.’

  ‘It’s Hire the Handicapped Month,’ Rodge said sweetly.

  ‘I beg yours,’ Rosinella said, and went away.

  Fourteen

  When Lester, who had a network of informers like the C.I.D., heard from one of his spies that the circus was pulling up stakes to move on, they took Roy back to World’s End.

  He settled in happily with John and Peter and Oliver. Leonora and Sebastian made friends with him over the orchard fence. Oliver, who had no idea how small he was, attached himself like a pilot fish to the big horse, who stood about six hands higher than him. He grazed alongside, turned when Roy turned, an absurd parody of Liberty horses.

  Wendy liked the big grey horse too.

  ‘Where’s Roy? Come on, let’s find R
oy in the stable.’ Her tail waved like a banner as she led Rodge fast to the loose box Carrie had rigged up with bars across the cart shed, where Roy dreamed his dreams of the sawdust ring, with Dianne and Currier, the oldest hens, roosting venerably on his ample back.

  When Rodge could not find Roy in the stable, or Carrie either, he said, ‘Where’s Carrie? In the field. Come on, good girl, let’s find Carrie and Roy in the field.’

  Wendy learned to lead him between the trees behind the house, avoiding the hammock, which had once caught him in the chest and felled him. They followed the fence to the flat corner of the field, where Carrie practised bareback riding on Roy.

  Lester was better at it than she was, even without practising. His feet, which were smaller than Carrie’s, clung like the kinkajou’s toes. His light, springy body could balance and turn, and sway easily to the movement of the horse.

  But having proved he could do it, he jumped down, patted Roy, and said, ‘That’s enough.’

  ‘Put me up.’ Carrie reached her hands up to Roy’s high withers, and bent her left knee for a leg up.

  ‘He’s sick of it.’ Lester put his hands in his pockets.

  ‘He’s not. He loves it.’

  ‘You want him to love it,’ Lester said. ‘Let him make up his own mind.’

  ‘He feels comfortable going in circles. It’s his vocation.’

  ‘It was. But we rescued him from it, remember?’

  Lester walked away, following a field mouse through the long grass, so Carrie led Roy to the fence and climbed on from there.

  Now that the old grey percheron was getting plenty of rest, he seemed to be quite sound. Carrie could only do about one and a half circles anyway, without falling off, or jumping off before she fell. Then she had to take Roy to the fence to get on again.

  Michael had made her a surcingle out of old inner tubes from the Peaslys’ garage, with a suitcase handle fixed in the middle. She had a rope attached to it to steady her when she stood up, but she spent more time on her hands and knees, hanging on to the handle or the flopping mane, while the broad back heaved gently under her, like the sea.

  ‘Look at me! Look at me!’

  One day, she did three circles standing up, and let go of the rope on the last one.

  ‘Look at me! Oh Rodge, I wish you could see me.’

  ‘I can hear it when you fall off.’ Rodge was sitting on the fallen tree, carving hearts on it with a penknife.

  ‘That’s most of the time.’ Em had taken the silver cat, Joan of Arc, up a tree to watch.

  ‘Give me a chance.’ Carrie pulled Roy up by the reins which lay loose on his neck. ‘When I get better at it, I’m going to give an exhibition. People will pay to see me. “The Great Carriella and her Wonder Horse Roy in Breathtaking Feats of Daredevil Daring.”’

  ‘I thought the wonder horse was supposed to be retired.’ Em grumbled.

  ‘He’ll make a come-back. Positively his last appearance on any stage.’ Since the World’s End money had been spent to rescue Roy, it was fair that he should earn some of it back.

  Carrie set him again on the trodden ring of turf. She told him, ‘Canter!’ and stood up, her bare feet trampling his rump. When she got her balance, she dropped the rope and spread her arms, as Lester had done. For about a minute, it was marvellous. Tongue between her teeth, arms out, fists clenched, she kept the balance, the rhythm, to the rocking canter. She was one with the horse moving under her feet, as she was one with John when she rode him well.

  Charlie had enough sense not to waste energy following a horse that was doing circles; but Henry the ram was close behind Roy’s feathered heels, his own private circus, thin front legs hitting the ground together, stiff and straight, in the stilted way a sheep canters.

  Carrie’s long hair flopped like Roy’s mane. She felt that she was floating, flying, high above the ground. Henry swerved sideways from a cat in the grass. Roy saw him out of the corner of his eye and side-stepped. Carrie fell off and bit her tongue.

  ‘Who’d pay to see that?’ Em asked Joan of Arc.

  Perhaps she was right. Em often was, although Carrie would not admit it. But the Vicar was planning a Spring Fayre on his lawn, to herald the opening buds, and he said that Carrie could give a bareback riding show and pass the hat, and split the profits with The Old Folks’ Outing Fund.

  There was an open piece of grass by the fence that divided the lawn from the churchyard, where the Great Carriella could perform daredevil feats for the breathtaken spectators.

  ‘Do it with me,’ she urged Lester. ‘We could be a double act, like Rosinella and his wife.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because.’

  ‘Please, Lester. Roy’s sound as a trivet.’

  ‘No.’

  Carrie even tried saying, ‘You’re better at it than me,’ but Lester hunched his shoulders and said, ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘You could be the Great Lesterola, with his—’

  ‘Shut up.’ He turned, swift and fierce. ‘It would be like the circus, don’t you see?’

  ‘Oh.’ Carrie stepped back with a hand to her mouth. ‘I forgot.’

  He had been a circus elephant, and they had laughed at him. He would never forget.

  She began to take Roy up by herself to practise at the end of the churchyard.

  After Rodge and Wendy had been there with Carrie several times, and they were not in the stable or the meadow, the diligent, sensible dog learned to take him through the gap in the stableyard wall, along the path through the fields behind Mr Mismo’s farm, over the piece of waste land to the edge of the village, across Church Lane, and through the gate of the churchyard, picking her way carefully among the graves.

  At the far end, Rodge’s hands felt for the weeping angel who kept watch over the tomb of a child. He would sit down on the moss-grown stone, and do what he called watching Carrie practise.

  ‘Look at me!’ She liked to have his company. She could tell him what she had done right, and he couldn’t see what had gone wrong.

  He brought his accordion, and fitted a waltz to the beat of Roy’s cantering hoofs.

  ‘O Danube so blue, so blue, so blue.

  O Carrie on Roy, like glue, like glue…’

  A Musical Ride. Carrie was going to wear a sort of Robin Hood costume she had found in a trunk in the attic. Moth-eaten tights, and a faded green cloak, and a pointed hat with a feather.

  ‘How much do you think we’ll make?’ she asked the Vicar.

  ‘The Morris Dancers made four pounds last year,’ he said, ‘but they had bells on their legs.’

  Mr Mismo’s nephew had brought him a set of sleigh bells from America. Roy should wear jingling sleigh bells on his broad chest, if that was what the public wanted.

  Fifteen

  All week, people in the village had been saying that the Vicar was mad to have an outdoor fete at this time of year, but the morning of the Spring Fayre looked hopeful.

  There was warmth in the sun. The only clouds were small fat white ones, far away on the horizon. The sky was that special first clear blue of spring that makes your heart ache with joy at the promise of summer.

  Carrie got up very early to give Roy a bath. No good washing him the night before, because, like all grey horses, he picked the dirtiest places to lie down, indoors or out.

  The bath was a matter of many buckets of soapy water, and stepladders, and Liza’s shampoo for the mane and tail. Michael stood underneath the vast airship swell of Roy’s stomach, and swished the dish mop back and forth, as if he were painting a ceiling.

  Carrie was excited and nervous about the Musical Ride. Would she fall off? Would she be able to do the difficult jump and turn, teetering for a moment facing the floating tail, before she jumped round again to the security of the flopping mane on the crested neck?

  Would Rodge get there in time? He was giving piano lessons, and couldn’t catch the early bus. How much would people throw into the hat? How many peop
le would come to the Fayre anyway?

  Because her nerves were strung high, she was giving orders to everyone, including Lester, when he came over to help.

  ‘If you’re going to boss,’ he threw down the tablespoon he was using for a hoof pick, ‘I’m not going to help.’

  ‘Don’t then.’ Carrie was on Roy’s back, combing out his mane.

  ‘He’s half my horse.’

  ‘All right, you can wash the back half.’

  ‘Don’t do the show, Carrie.’ Lester stood in front of Roy’s chest, with his arms spread wide to reach round the horse’s shoulders.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re scared.’

  ‘Pooh, what of?’ She looked down at Lester’s bony brown face, black hair against Roy’s grey neck, and saw that he was serious. ‘Yes. Yes, I am,’ she said, suddenly serious too.

  ‘Don’t do it.’

  ‘I must.’

  Carrie was the only one who had not put anything into the red crock for weeks. No one had said, ‘You shouldn’t have used all that money you got for the radio to buy a horse.’ No one had said, ‘We need another horse like we need a hole in the head.’ If they had, she could have fought them. As it was, she had to do something to make it up.

  Lester knew this. ‘Rather you than me,’ he said quietly, and bent to pick up Roy’s enormous hoof again.

  Everyone was going to do something at the Fayre, and the Vicar, who understood about the terrible threat to World’s End, was going to let them all keep half of what they made.

  As well as accompanying the Musical Ride, Rodge was going to be a strolling musician, serenading ladies with his guitar, and playing ‘O Sole Mio’ on his accordion in the tea tent.

  Liza was selling homemade bread and cakes. She had been baking for days.

  Tom was going to run the coconut shy. Michael would pass the hat for Carrie and Roy. Em was going to sell stuffed eggs, her speciality this season, since the hens were laying like lunatics.

  Because Liza would not let Em near the stove when she was baking, Michael had hard-boiled the eggs in a cauldron, which was a bucket hanging from the cross bar of the laundry lines over a fire in a ring of stones. He was practising for living rough as a refugee, if Uncle Rudolf ever did turn them out.