A Pony for Jean Read online

  ‘He sounds just the pony for Jean then,’ said Mummy. ‘But I’m afraid that just now …’

  That is a polite way of saying that you have no money. But Cousin Agnes said hastily, ‘My dear, if Jean would like him she can have him as a gift. Honestly he isn’t worth anything. Your orchard would do him proud and you only need bring him in in the depths of winter. Nigel could easily spare you a load of straw occasionally and some hay. He would be all right for Jean to start on, but I’m afraid he’s exactly as Martin describes him.’

  ‘It’s awfully good of you, Agnes,’ said Mummy. ‘What do you think, Jean?’

  I thought that even if The Toastrack was awful and all over horse bites, he would be better than nothing; anyhow he would have a velvet nose and the smell of horses. What had happened was that in spite of being so stupid and pretending I could ride, and falling off and fainting and lying like an old lady on the drawing-room sofa, I had begun that afternoon to love horses, and once you’ve started you can’t stop, and you would sooner look at the ugliest horse than at the loveliest pantomine, and you would sooner hear the sound of hoofs than the most beautiful music, and you would sooner smell the smell of stables than the scent your mother used to have when she was rich, that came from Paris and was called Enchanted Evening and cost a guinea for quite a tiny bottle.

  I was eating one of my sneaked cucumber sandwiches. I swallowed it nearly whole and said, ‘Oh, please let’s have him.’

  Cousin Agnes said, ‘Oh, well, that will be very nice then, but I warn you he’s no picture. Guy can bring him down to-morrow. Unless,’ she said, for she was one of the few people who understand how awful it is to wait for anything exciting, ‘you would like to take him home with you?’

  ‘Oh yes, please,’ I begged her.

  She laughed and said, ‘All right. If everybody’s finished, we’ll go and look at him.’

  There was a terrific scraping of chairs and we all got up and went out into the garden and down the drive to the stables. Cousin Agnes said, ‘He’s out all night, but we bring him in in the middle of the day because the flies worry his sore places.’ And as we got nearer to the stables, she added, ‘Now prepare yourselves for a scarecrow.’

  I went into the stable first. It was cool and dark after the sunny garden and it smelled lovely. I thought it was empty at first and then I saw that in one of the loose boxes there was a bay pony eating busily. He was frightfully thin. His hip bones stood out and he had two grooves running down his hindquarters, which I was told afterwards are called ‘poverty marks.’ He was a bay pony but his coat was all rusty and dusty and he looked a dull ugly brown, and his tail, which was black, was straggly and bald in places. I stood at the door looking at him and he turned his head round and looked at me. Now that I know his dear face so well and have groomed every hair on his body, it is difficult to remember him as he was then, but I shall never forget the long soft look he gave me.

  The others came in, and Guy opened the door of the loose box. Most of us went into the loose box and the thick straw rustled. Guy said, ‘I’ll give you a leg up,’ and I scrambled on The Toastrack’s back. His backbone stuck out in a sharp ridge and was very uncomfortable to sit on.

  Cousin Agnes told Mummy that he was over thirteen hands, and somewhere between seven and nine years old. She said, ‘Really I feel ashamed of giving you such a dud. Jean must start on him and then we must see what we can do about a better pony.’

  I suddenly felt that I didn’t want a better pony. I was a dud too. I felt for The Toastrack.

  Guy was awfully decent. He said, ‘We’ve got an extra brush that you can have and a curry comb. Do you know how to groom a pony?’

  I said, ‘No,’ humbly.

  Guy went to get the brush and the curry comb, and Mummy and Cousin Agnes faded away to look at the garden. I don’t know how they could, when they might have been looking at the dear Toastrack.

  When Guy came back he was simply loaded. He had a saddle and a bridle and a halter as well as the brush and the curry comb. He put the saddle and bridle down and gave me the brush. He told me to lean all my weight on it when I was brushing, and he said that you got awfully hot and should dismiss any groom that you saw grooming a horse with his coat on.

  ‘I SHALL NEVER FORGET THE LONG SOFT LOOK HE GAVE ME’

  Presently Mummy and Cousin Agnes came back and Mummy said that we must be going. Guy put on the saddle and Camilla put on the bridle and Mummy took the halter and the brush and comb.

  This time I mounted on the right side and facing the tail.

  The Toastrack walked very slowly down the drive and stood stock still at the gate while we were saying goodbye and thank you. When I tried to get him out into the road he wouldn’t move, so Mummy led him. She said it was a funeral procession but I didn’t mind. I could hardly believe that I was riding home on my own pony.

  I said, ‘I’m jolly well not going to call him The Toastrack. How would Camilla like to be called Snubnose or Martin Freckle-Face?’

  Mummy said that it was certainly enough to give him an inferiority complex. In case you don’t know, that means thinking you are stupider or uglier than other people, and it must be very uncomfortable. So as we went slowly along we tried to think of a beautiful name for him.

  I thought of Sir Lancelot and Buccaneer and Bonny Dundee, but Mummy said that The Toastrack might get just as bad an inferiority complex from feeling that he couldn’t live up to his name. She suggested countryfied names: Lad’s Love and Sweet William and Harvester. Then we got silly and giggled and suggested names like Haystack and Midden and Mangle-Wurtzel and Corrugated Iron. You know how silly you can get if you start giggling. I rolled about in the saddle and nearly fell off and Mummy’s legs went weak and she leaned against The Toastrack and he stood still.

  We decided not to be silly and we went firmly on. I still giggled at intervals. Then, as we were going through the village, we met some horrible boys. They pointed at The Toastrack and said that we were taking him to the knacker’s and he would be made into sausages.

  I was awfully angry with them. I didn’t take any notice, but looked at The Toastrack’s ears. He didn’t take any notice either, but just walked slowly on. He reminded me of someone going to the scaffold and ignoring the rabble, and when he had passed the boys I said to Mummy, ‘I know. Let’s call him Cavalier.’

  Mummy thought that that would do, so we decided. I have heard since that it is unlucky to change a horse’s name, but I don’t believe it, because I have never had any bad luck with my darling Cavalier. And his name must have been altered twice at least, because the cruel master, that he had before the cousins bought him out of kindness, didn’t call him The Toastrack, but probably something dull like Jack or Tom.

  When we got back to our cottage the sun was setting, and under the apple trees in the orchard it was shady and cool. We turned Cavalier out there and at once he started eating. We stood looking at him for ages and then I had to go in to supper and bed. But I could see him out of the bathroom window as I dried myself, eating happily under the round harvest moon.

  III

  I WOKE up at six – at least, Bluey, my clock, said that it was six, but since I dropped him over the bannisters he is apt to be half an hour or even a whole hour slow. Usually I am bad at getting up, but that morning I leaped out of bed and it didn’t take me a minute to put on my Aertex shirt and my shorts and my sandshoes. I crept downstairs and let myself out of the back door into the garden. It was a fine morning, and everything was covered with dew.

  I ran to the orchard gate and there was Cavalier still eating. I called him and he threw up his head and looked at me. I ran back indoors and got five lumps of sugar and the bridle, which I had hung up in the hall.

  Then I went back to the orchard and through the dewy grass to my pony. I gave him three lumps of sugar and stroked his poor thin neck. Then I began to put the bridle on.

  Putting a bridle on is as easy as winking the third or fourth time you do it, but it is p
erfectly awful the first time, especially if you have no one with you to show you how. I took the snaffle in both hands and Cavalier opened his mouth most obligingly, but every time I got the bit in, the bridle slipped down. When I let go of the bit to take hold of the bridle, the bit fell out of Cavalier’s mouth and I had to unmuddle the bridle and start again. I got hot and bothered and Cavalier began to jerk his head about. If you get hot and bothered your horse always does too.

  ‘I RAN TO THE ORCHARD GATE’

  When I had tried six times and was really despairing, I heard a laugh on the other side of the hedge that separates the road from the orchard. For one awful moment I thought it was the cousins who had got up early and come down to see how I was getting on. But when I looked I saw it wasn’t the cousins but the old man who looks after the hedges and ditches on the road. I had already made friends with him and he had told me that he had been a carter for forty years.

  When he saw me looking at him he said, ‘Lor’ bless you, Miss, that baint the way to bridle an ’orse.’

  I said, ‘Oh, Mr Perks, I wish you’d show me,’ and he opened the orchard gate and walked in.

  He showed me how to put my hand under the snaffle and hold the head-band in the other hand. I had Cavalier bridled in two seconds.

  Mr Perks stood and looked at Cavalier and said that he was poor, he was, but he’d pick up, no doubt, and he said that he’d been a good ’un and that a drop of blood was worth two ton of bone. Then he said he must be off or them there grass edges would be growing right over the road, and he gave me a leg up and went away looking like part of the country and the early morning, and not like a person at all.

  ‘I GOT HOT AND BOTHERED’

  I can’t tell you everything that I did every day with my pony, because, as I said before, this book mustn’t be too long, and if I told you everything I should have to leave out some of the really exciting things that happened later. A few days after I had brought Cavalier home, I started going to Miss Pringle for lessons. Miss Pringle lived in the village. She was a retired schoolmistress. She was quite old and generally much better tempered than Mademoiselle. She lived in a red brick villa like a dolls’ house and kept a canary called Stanley after Mr Baldwin, and a cat called Mary after the Queen.

  CAVALIER lOOKING OUT

  Every morning before I went to Miss Pringle I used to go into the orchard and fetch Cavalier into the stable. It wasn’t a smart stable like the cousins’. It was built of flints and mortar and it leaned sideways, but everyone in the village, whom we consulted, said that it would last these forty years. Inside there were two stalls divided by a very old crumbly wooden partition, and in each stall the floor, which was brick, was worn away in four places by the hoofs of the carthorses, who had stood there for the last three hundred years. Daddy knocked down the partition between the stalls to make a loose box, and we hoped that we should find old coins between the boards, but of course we didn’t. However, we had a very nice big loose box, and we sawed the door across so that the top half could stay open, and when I came back from Miss Pringle the first thing I used to see was Cavalier looking out, and really he looked quite like a first-class hunter with his bones hidden by the lower half of the door.

  Uncle Nigel sent us some hay and straw, and he sent some oats and bran and a hay-bag too. Cavalier used to have the hay when he was in the stable during the day. Mr Higgins, the farmer, told me that flaked maize was fattening, so I bought some with the ten shillings Daddy had given me on my birthday, and we mixed it with the oats and the bran. Then we read in a book, which Mummy bought second-hand for sixpence, that boiled barley was ‘useful for getting a bit of flesh on a poor horse,’ so Cavalier had that too. Out of the same book we learned how to make a bran mash and Cavalier had one every Sunday for his tea. Of course if your pony is nice and fat there is no need to give him any of these things. He will do quite nicely on grass and hay.

  ‘AT FIRST I STAYED IN THE ORCHARD’

  It was only in the mornings that I used to go to Miss Pringle. Every afternoon I rode Cavalier. At first I stayed in the orchard and Mummy used to come out with the book, which had pictures of good riders and bad ones, and she used to tell me which I was looking like. I took three days to learn to rise in my stirrups and I thought that I should never learn, and then quite suddenly it came. The next day I went beyond the orchard. I didn’t go into the road because I wasn’t sure if the cousins had gone back to school yet, and I thought that I might meet them riding beautifully on their fat and frisky ponies. I went into the fields at the back of our house, where there is a footpath which leads nearly three miles to Mr Higgins’s farm. Half-way along this footpath there is a stile, which will come into my story again presently, so please remember it; but the field gates were always open, so, if you were riding, you could go in at one gate and out at the next and avoid the stile.

  I learned to canter along the footpath. At first it was difficult to get Cavalier to canter because he was so thin and tired, but every day he seemed inclined to go a little further and a little faster, and one morning at the end of the first fortnight we were encouraged by the voice of Mr Perks saying over the hedge, ‘Lor’ bless me, I do see a change in that ’orse, to be sure.’ Both Mummy and I had thought that Cavalier was fatter, but when you look so often and anxiously it is difficult to tell. Daddy only came down for the week-ends at that time because he was busy in London seeing if any of the family fortune could be saved, so we had hoped that he would be able to tell us, but he wouldn’t take any interest in Cavalier. Mummy told me in secret that it was because he hated not being able to buy me a better pony, which was silly, because I wouldn’t have swopped Cavalier for the most beautiful and expensive pony in the world.

  After about a month I felt quite at home when I was cantering and not in the least tempted to hold on to the saddle or to Cavalier’s mane, which, by the way, was getting much thicker. I wondered what a gallop would be like, but I thought it would be cruel to make Cavalier gallop until he was feeling much more lively. Then I thought of jumping, but Mummy said no; she had had enough of that when I fell off Hesperus. She said I must wait till Daddy could afford to pay for proper lessons. I argued and argued and then Mummy said that I should drive her into a lunatic asylum, so I had to give in. I don’t know why grown-ups are always so nervous. I am sure that when I have children of my own, I shan’t be.

  ‘I HAD THOUGHT CAVALIER WAS FATTER’

  I suppose it was very wrong but one day, when Mummy was out, I did try jumping. I made two pillars of bricks that were lying about in the orchard and I put a bean-pole across them. Cavalier was very obliging and he trotted briskly up to the jump, but he only went over it leg by leg as the cousins said he would do. I got off and found some more bricks and made the jump higher, and he trotted up to it again and just knocked the bean-pole away with his forelegs. I tried him again and again, but he did the same thing every time, and unfortunately I forgot to take the jump down when I went in to tea. Mummy found it and there was what Nurse used to call ‘unpleasantness,’ and I was told that Cavalier would be sent back to the cousins if I tried to jump him again.

  The unpleasantness blew over, as it always does in the end, though sometimes when it is happening you feel that nothing will ever be the same again, but about a week later there was some more unpleasantness, because, when Miss Pringle was out of the room and I was supposed to be doing fractions, I drew horses in my arithmetic book, and when Mummy came to fetch me, Miss Pringle complained. Considering it was the first thing I had done to annoy her, I thought that she was very mean, and when Mummy said how tiresome I was, I answered, ‘What’s the use of arithmetic, anyway?’

  Mummy said that I ought to learn everything I could, because when I was grown up I would have to earn my own living because of pepper, and I said that I was going to be a horse-breaker and break horses by kindness instead of by frightening them, and you didn’t have to know arithmetic to earn your living that way. Mummy said how could I be so silly as to talk
about breaking horses when I had only ridden for two months on an old screw.

  I was furious. Lately I had felt that the time when someone would say, ‘Oh, Jean can ride anything,’ was getting nearer, but now it seemed very far away.

  When we got home from that unpleasant walk, I went into the orchard and talked to Cavalier. He was out all day now because there are no flies in November, and we hadn’t yet begun to bring him in at night because of the cold. I am sure he knew that I was miserable, and that it wasn’t only because he expected sugar that he nuzzled me so. The afternoon passed miserably. It poured with rain and Mummy wouldn’t let me ride. I sat and read a silly book about some children who were always forgiving each other and kissing, and, while I was reading, Sally, who was still a puppy then, ate my hat, and Mummy was annoyed. She said how could a person sit in a room with a dog eating a hat and not notice it? and I said, ‘Quite easily,’ and she said she would tell Daddy that I was getting very rude. She told me afterwards that she was worried that day because pepper had gone worse than ever. Grown-ups are funny. I wish that, instead of making a fuss about hats and arithmetic, she had told me what was really the matter, at the time.

  We had tea in gloomy silence and then I shut up the hens. Our ideas about collecting eggs in little baskets had vanished, and there was plenty of room in my coat pocket for the solitary egg I found. Before I went back indoors, I went to say goodnight to Cavalier. I had hung his hay-bag on a tree because I thought the ground was rather wet for him to eat off, and there he was tearing the hay out and not eating it at all, but wastefully throwing it down. I would have given him a lecture on wastefulness only I had heard enough lectures myself that day. I put my arms round his neck and he agreed with me that hats didn’t matter and that one day I should be able to ride anything, and I told him I should always love him best no matter how many beautiful and valuable horses I broke in.