Chapter 24

TOWARDS THE END of their holiday at the Farm, Lily and Jane got restless, and wanted to go into town to dance.

‘Dora, you come. Do you good.’

‘I can’t dance.’

‘You can stand in the crowd and twitch,’ Jane said. ‘That’s all there’s room for.’

‘It’s not my style.’

‘Perhaps it ought to be,’ Anna said. ‘Sometimes I worry about whether this kind of life is right for a young girl.’

‘You sound like my mother,’ Dora said.

‘Thank you. Is that a compliment?’

‘No.’

The three girls went off on the bus, but they never got to the dance place, or even into town. On the way, they passed a fairground, and it looked so inviting, with coloured lights and blaring music, that they spent the evening there instead.

Dora went on the big roundabout three or four times. It was strange. She could ride a real horse at the Farm almost any day, and yet she could not resist the fascination of sitting astride the cool wooden painted horse, up and down and round and round, all four legs impossibly prancing, nostrils flared, teeth bared, the twisted barley sugar brass pole to lay your cheek against, the crowd and the trodden grass and the upturned faces spinning faster and faster into a blur, the blare and tootle and thump and clash of the pipe organ, swelling and fading and swelling again as you came round past the bosomy figurehead ladies, the painted signs: ‘Longest Ride at the Fair’, ‘Oh Boy!’, ‘Yes! It’s the Galloping Horses!’

When Dora got off, Jane, shooting at random without her glasses, had won a large yellow rabbit at the rifle booth. ‘Something for our money at last.’

‘What can you do with it?’

‘What can you do with it?’

What did you have to do with an enormous yellow nylon fur rabbit except keep it on your bed until you got sick of it and stuck it on top of the cupboard to collect dust?

There was another, much smaller roundabout at the end of the fairground, among the ‘Kiddies’ Rides’. Feeble cars on tracks, with steering wheels which the kiddies turned zealously and thought they were driving. Little boats that floated endlessly around a doughnut-shaped tank of dirty water, while a strong dreamy boy stood in the hole of the doughnut and turned a crank to keep them moving.

The merry-go-round was not turned by a dreamy boy. Instead of painted horses, there were four live ponies, each with a breastplate attached to a bar which turned on the hub so they pottered slowly round and round.

It was not exactly cruel, and yet it was not exactly what a pony ought to be doing.

Dora and Lily and Jane watched for a while. A big man with a simple face and a wobbly paunch lifted the children into the saddles. They rode round a small circle, the bigger ones jiggling and bouncing, or sitting tight, lost in a dream that they were galloping, the tiny ones petrified, staring at their proud mothers all the way round, begging silently to be lifted down.

The ponies were Shetlands with trailing tails, quite well kept. Although Dora and Lily and Jane watched critically, with the narrowed eyes of experts, they could find no cruelty to complain of, except possibly to small children.

But Dora said on principle, as they turned away, ‘The ponies hate it.’

‘Oh no.’ The paunchy man turned round, with a wriggling child in his arms. ‘They like it.’

‘How do you know?’

Someone in the crowd giggled.

‘When I put the harness on, each one walks to his place and stands to be hitched up. Don’t you, love?’ The pony hardly came up to where his waist would be if he had one. He could have bent over it, if he could have bent, and touched the ground on the other side.

He put the child gently into the saddle, whistled, and the ponies moved forward, little hoofs the size of coffee mugs pockmarking the soft ground. When he whistled again they stopped, and the children were lifted down.

‘Not much of a ride for two pounds,’ Jane said, since there was nothing else to complain about.

The man turned his mild face round to her and said, ‘Quite enough for my little ponies.’

The fair was closing when they left. They were waiting at the bus stop, when Jane suddenly cried out, ‘My rabbit!’ She had left it at the fair, near the pony-go-round where she had put it down to pat one of the Shetlands.

‘Come back with me.’ She dragged at Dora’s arm.

‘We’ll miss the bus.’

‘Anna will come for us. She said she would if we phoned.’ The bright fairground illuminations were out. There were only a few working lamps where people were cleaning up or shuttering the booths, and windows and doorways of trailers spilled patches of light on to the trampled ground.

The yellow rabbit was not where Jane had left it.

‘I could have told you.’

‘They probably put it back in the rifle booth for tomorrow.’

‘I’m going to look. I’d know it anywhere.’

‘It’s all shut up.’ Lily began to walk back.

‘My rabbit.’

Going to the gate, they passed a small open-sided tent where the four Shetlands were tied in stalls with canvas partitions.

Lily ran in out of the darkness, and put her hand on a pony, without speaking to it. The pony jumped, pulled back, broke its thin rope and made off, ducking and swerving in fright as the three girls tried to catch it.

It kicked over some crates, tripped over a guy rope, skittered round the ticket booth and out into the road, hard little hoofs pattering, with Dora and Lily after it. Jane had fallen over the crates and the rope too and was some way behind.

It was a fairly busy road. The cars were not going fast but they were coming steadily in both directions. The pony ran along the side of the road, then swerved across the middle. For a moment, it was caught in headlights, outlined all round like a haloed donkey in a Christmas crèche, and then it disappeared in a scream of brakes.

The car skidded, slid into a car coming the other way, and was rammed from behind, just as the first car was hit in the back. The crashing and screeching of brakes and the tinkling of glass seemed to go on for ever.

When Dora and Lily ran up, there were five cars already involved in the crash, and one more just skidding up to bash headlights into tail lights. Screech. Crash. Pause. Tinkle. Car doors opened everywhere and the road was full of people.

‘It was the pony,’ the first driver kept shouting, waving his arms about.

‘What pony?’ No one could see a pony. Dora and Lily were on hands and knees looking for it under the car.

They thought it must be dead, but Jane, limping along with her knees grazed and her ankle bruised, met the pony going home head on. She grabbed it by the broken rope and yelled to the others, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got the pony!’

If she had not done that, the girls might have been able to slip away and let the people in the cars, none of whom was hurt, argue about hallucinations and bad lighting and blind spots in the road. As it was, the police got the whole story, and the newspaper also got the whole story, slightly wrong.

‘RESCUE EFFORT ENDS IN SIX CAR CRASH’

After they explained to the police, Lily and Jane had talked to a newspaper reporter, thinking he was a detective, because he wore a belted trenchcoat with a cape on the shoulders, like old television films.

‘We were sorry for the ponies,’ they had said. They added, ‘But then we saw that the man was good to them,’ but the breakdown lorry arrived with a deafening siren as they said that, and the story that came out in the paper sounded as if they had deliberately let the pony loose.

The Colonel went to the owner of the pony and also to the newspaper, to set the story straight, but he got several letters from the kind of people who may never write so much as a Christmas card, but are always moved to write a letter when one of Our Dumb Friends is involved.

Some of the letters were cranky. Some were sentimental. One had a two-pound postal order in it ‘to buy the little fellow a bag of carrots.’ One was a poison pen letter, unsigned.

‘Why can’t you people mind your own business?’ it said. ‘Not that your business is anything to boast of, keeping those wretched animals alive that should have been put out of their misery long ago … Trying to stop a man from earning an honest crust of bread … Should be stopped yourselves … We know your sort and what we know we don’t like.’

‘What are they talking about – “crust of bread”?’ The Colonel looked up. ‘Who could have written a thing like that?’

‘The man at the roundabout?’ Jane suggested.

‘Not with that gentle face,’ Dora said. ‘And the writing is too good.’

‘The writing … Jane,’ the Colonel said, ‘go and get me that letter you had from the Pinecrest Hotel. The one that Sidney Hammond wrote.’

The handwriting was the same.