Early next morning Jacky cycled out to the riding school. She always spent her Sundays helping Miss Henderson with the rides—in fact, nearly all Jacky’s spare time was spent at the riding school. She just could not imagine what life would be like if Miss Henderson had really meant what she had said last night and was really going to close down.
Jacky hadn’t mentioned it to her parents. She’d told them about Dimsie being up in the wire but nothing else. Talking about the riding school being closed would make it real and as Jacky pedalled into the yard she just could not believe that in a month’s time it would all be changed.
Jacky left her bike in the hay shed and ran up to the tack room.
“Oh good, Jacky,” Miss Henderson greeted her. “I’m going for the ponies. Here you are,” and she gave Jacky two rope halters. “We may as well bring them all in. I’ll need them all for the morning’s ride.”
It was a bright sunny morning and as Jacky walked beside Miss Henderson she almost began to wonder if last night had only been a bad dream. Miss Henderson seemed her usual self, the same ponies were waiting at the gate to be caught. Everything was the same; yet everything had changed.
When they took all the School animals in Flicka was left whinnying after them. There was no Dimsie this morning to keep her company. Last night hadn’t been a dream.
“Give them some hay, Jacky,” Miss Henderson said when she and Jacky had sorted the horses out into their various stalls and boxes, “I’ll go and put the kettle on and we can have a cup of tea before we start getting them ready.”
When Jacky went into the kitchen Miss Henderson was pouring out their tea.
Jacky perched on the edge of the table warming her hands round her mug of tea.
“Did you mean it?” she asked hesitantly. “Mean what you said last night about selling all the ponies and everything?”
“I did,” said Miss Henderson. “I’ve been thinking about it all winter. It was a gamble from the beginning. Trying to make money out of always is. And I reckon I haven’t made it.”
“But it’s spring now,” Jacky said. “They’ll not need hay much longer. Grass doesn’t cost anything.”
“They need shoes all the time; tack wears out; there’s vet’s bills to be paid. It all takes money. No Jacky, I’ve made up my mind.”
For a minute there was silence in the kitchen as Jacky realized that it really was true. Miss Henderson had meant it.
Jacky took a gulp of hot tea. “But you won’t sell Flicka,” she said. Her voice despite her efforts to control it was shaking. “You couldn’t sell Flicka.”
“I must,” said Miss Henderson.
“Well, could I buy her?” Jacky asked desperately. “I get two pounds pocket money a week and I’d send it all to you, every week and with birthday money and things … It wouldn’t take too long for me to pay for her.”
Miss Henderson shook her head slowly, half-smiling.
“I’m sorry, but it would be too long. You can have her for three hundred pounds. She’s worth more but I’d like you to have her. Give her to you if I could but I just can’t afford to. Can’t possibly ask less than three hundred.”
“I’ll ask Daddy tonight,” Jacky said. But she knew wasn’t much hope of her father giving her money for a pony. “And if he won’t buy her I’ll make the money somehow. I swear I will.”
“You’ve a month to make it in and then they all go to Buckley. Now enough of this, drink down that tea and let’s go and get them saddled up.”
While Miss Henderson was out with the ride Jacky brought Flicka in and brushed her down. Then she fed her the crusts of bread that she had brought from home.
“Don’t worry Flicka,” she told the pony. “I’ll make three hundred pounds. You shan’t go to Buckley.”
Jacky cycled home early from the riding school. When she got in she washed and changed into a dress, then, taking her school bag, she went downstairs and sat down at the kitchen table.
When her father came through she was working hard at her homework.
After tea Jacky went on with her homework.
“I’ve finished all my lessons,” she announced at suppertime “All my arithmetic. The lot.”
“If you did it on a Friday when you get in from school you wouldn’t need to do it last thing on a Sunday,” stated her father.
“What’s the use,” thought Jacky hopelessly. “I may as well just ask him and he’ll say no, and that’ll be that.”
“Miss Henderson’s selling the riding school and all the ponies,” Jacky announced.
“That’s sudden,” said Mr Munro. “Bit of a blow. You’ll need to find somewhere else to ride.”
“All the ponies?” asked her mother. “What about Flicka?”
Mrs Munro had listened for hours to stories about Flicka and knew that her daughter’s life revolved round the black pony. “You were going to start jumping her this year, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Jacky, swallowing hard to keep back her tears. “But Miss Henderson says she’ll let me have her for three hundred pounds. Please Daddy, please will you lend me three hundred pounds and I’ll pay you back with my pocket money. Please?”
“No,” said Mr Munro firmly. “I not buying you a pony until you’ve passed your end of term exams. Then we’ll think about it but not before.”
“But it’ll be too late by then. It’s ages until I sit my exams and Flicka’s to be sold in a month.”
“Now we’ve been into all this before, Jacky.”
“If you bought Flicka now I promise I wouldn’t ride her until after the exams.”
“Now that’s just sheer silliness. And you know it is.”
“Yes,” agreed Jacky bitterly. “I know. I know you won’t help me. I know you won’t save Flicka. I know you don’t care,” and she turned and ran upstairs to her bedroom.
“Ponies!” exclaimed Mr Munro.
“She’s so fond of Flicka,” said Mrs Munro. “Couldn’t you let her have it?”
“No. She doesn’t work at school as it is. What do you think she would do with a pony to dream about? No, definitely not.”
Next morning, on her way to school, Jacky stopped at three newsagents and asked if they needed anyone to deliver papers, but they all had regular boys.
After school she went round to Miss Doughty’s and asked if she would like her to take Bonzo for a walk.
“Of course dear. I’ll get his lead. Any time you want, come and collect him. I know you love animals so I always feel quite safe about Bonzo when he’s with you.”
Jacky clipped on the asthmatic boxer’s lead. Then, looking straight into Miss Doughty’s faded eyes, she announced, “I’m charging forty pence for dog walking. It’s for a cause—to save a pony.”
Before Miss Doughty could object, Jacky was dragging the reluctant Bonzo down the garden path.
An hour later when Jacky brought Bonzo back, Miss Doughty gave Jacky fifty pence but said that she didn’t think Bonzo would be needing any more exercise that week.
“I think he needs nothing but exercise,” Jacky muttered, pocketing her fifty pence.
Jacky knocked on one or two more doors asking if they wanted their dogs exercised but nobody seemed at all interested. One woman asked Jacky if she was a bob-a-jobber, and when Jacky had to admit that she wasn’t, the woman said she was a disgrace and did her mother know she was going round people’s doors begging.
When Jacky got home she found a jam jar and put her fifty pence into it and her two pounds pocket money. Even to Jacky’s optimistic gaze it looked pretty hopeless. “But it’s a beginning,” she told herself, and she tied a piece of fancy paper round the outside of the jam jar so that she wouldn’t see how little money there was inside.
Jacky didn’t count her money for another fortnight.
“There might be fifty pounds,” she thought hopefully, looking into her jam jar before she tipped the contents out on to her bed to be counted.
On the two Friday evenings a friend of her mother’s had employed her as a babysitter and paid her two pounds for each evening. The first evening had been no trouble at all. The baby slept all the time his parents were out and Jacky watched their television all evening. The second Friday had been disastrous. The baby had started crying just after his parents drove away and, despite all Jacky’s efforts to silence him, he didn’t stop crying until they came back at ten o’clock. By that time the baby’s face had stopped being scarlet and was more or less purple. Jacky had had to remind them that they hadn’t paid her. “I should have got danger money,” Jacky had thought, “having to expose my eardrums to that din.”
She had taken washing to the laundrette, scrubbed the kitchen floor, written two compositions for girls in her class at school, washed cars, pushed prams and done more shopping than she liked to think about.
“I must have made fifty pounds,” Jacky thought as she sorted the coins into piles.
But there was only twenty pounds ninety-six pence. Jacky counted it three times to make sure and then, in disgust, tipped it all back into the jam jar.
And there were only another two weeks left, two weeks until Buckley Sale.
“I don’t see how I’m going to make more money in the next fortnight,” Jacky moaned to her mother. “I’ve done everything I can think of this fortnight and people get mad if I go back asking for jobs too often.”
“It looks as if you’ll have to accept the fact that Flicka is going to be sold,” Mrs Munro said.
“Couldn’t you persuade Daddy to buy her?”
“Perhaps if your school report is very good he might reconsider it.”
“It won’t be,” said Jacky. “Worse than ever I think and it’s late now to do anything about it. The Easter exams were last week.”
“Oh Jacky, you never told, us. You didn’t do any swotting for them.”
“I was trying to make some money,” Jacky said, turning away and going back to her bedroom.
Jacky broke up for the Easter holidays two days before Buckley Sale. Her school report was not very good.
“I was top in English,” Jacky told her father, drawing his attention to the only bright patch in her report.
But after she had listened to his comments on all the “Jacky must work harder,” and “Does not pay attention,” sort of remarks, there didn’t seem any point in even mentioning Flicka.
After another fortnight of odd jobs Jacky still hadn’t managed to reach fifty pounds.
“Thirty-six pounds seventy-eight pence,” Jacky thought in disgust, staring at her jam jar of money. “I might as well have spent all my time with Flicka. Don’t know why I thought I could make three hundred pounds. I wouldn’t even know how to steal it. There’s nothing I can do to stop them selling Flicka, nothing.” And Jacky stared rebelliously out of her bedroom window.
“It’s all wrong,” she thought. “It’s arranged all wrong. I’d be far the best person to look after Flicka but I can’t have her because I don’t have three hundred miserable pounds, but any rotten old runty person who has the money can buy her. Well that can’t be right.”
For so long Jacky had been waiting for the day when she could ride Flicka and now it wasn’t ever going to happen.
“It’s just not right,” Jacky said aloud.