Chapter 25

IN SEPTEMBER, WHEN the fruit pickers came to the valley, they brought two ponies up to the Farm for their annual holiday. The Colonel would always take in working horses and ponies for a few weeks of rest. The owners paid what they could, or nothing if they couldn’t.

Sometimes, about this time of year, a costermonger’s pony or a traveller’s horse would be brought in ‘for a rest’, and the owners would then disappear, so that the horse would be sure of good food and shelter for the winter. They would come back all smiles in the spring, with gifts of firewood and vegetables, and probably be back the next autumn to try the same thing again.

The Shetlands and the donkey were back from the children’s camp, and Steve would soon go to fetch the nurseryman’s Welsh pony who came every year. His plaster was off now, and the leg mended. He brought a piece of the cast back after they took it off at the hospital, and they buried it at the spot where the motorbike had ditched him, and Callie drove in a stake, as if it was through the Toad’s heart.

An old man wandered vaguely into the yard one day clutching the newspaper story about Dora and Lily and Jane and the fairground pony.

‘I seen about this place in the papers,’ he said. ‘Touched my heart. I wish I could give you people something for the wonderful work you do, but I’m not a rich man.’

‘Who is?’ The Colonel had Ranger’s foot in his lap, trimming the hoof.

‘Got my pension, that’s about all it is, and my chickens and goats, just about keeps me going.’

He had watery blue eyes and wispy grey hair over a pink scalp. ‘I got an old mare. Hard-working old girl. I’d give anything to give her a bit of a reward for all the years she’s given me.’ He sighed and shook his head at his turned-up boots, then raised his eyes to see how the Colonel was taking it.

‘I’m sure you would.’ The Colonel put down Ranger’s hind foot and moved round to the other side.

‘I seen in the paper that they can come here for a rest.’ The old man followed him round, shaky but determined. ‘So I came up to ask whether my old girl—’

‘I’m awfully sorry.’ The Colonel kept his head down, because he hated having to refuse anyone. ‘I’m full up at the moment.’

‘She can stay out in all weathers. She’d be no trouble to you. I just thought, if I could get her on to some good grass for a month or so, it would mean the world to her.’ He paused, and watched the Colonel working skillfully on Ranger’s hoof. ‘She’s earned her rest, mister.’

‘Oh, all right.’ The Colonel put down the hoof and stood up, slipping the curved knife into the pocket of his leather apron. ‘But only for a month. We’ve got too many for the winter already. Just a month, all right?’

‘God bless you, sir.’ The old man’s eyes swam with emotion. ‘And all who work with you.’

But in spite of his shaky hands and his moist, emotional eyes, he turned out to be a pretty shrewd old man. In a neighbour’s truck, he brought the mare, and also her treasured companion, a nanny goat in milk, so that the Colonel should have some return for his kindness.

‘Who’s going to milk it?’

‘Not me.’

‘Count me out.’

‘I’m too busy.’

‘I don’t know how.’

It turned out that the only person who would milk the goat was Toby, and he managed it very well, sitting on a stool with the three legs cut down to make it the right height, and the goat working on her cud like chewing gum. She was crabby with everyone else but him. He milked her twice a day before and after school.

‘Who wants to drink goat’s milk?’

‘Not me.’

‘I hate it.’

‘Anna can make cheese with it.’

‘I don’t know how.’

So Toby took the milk home to his mother, and she gave it to her sickly new baby, who began to thrive.

The goat was out in the fields all day with the mare, making rushes if the other horses came close. The dusty black mare was getting on in years, with battered legs and a long bony head with flecks of white round the eyes like spectacles. Her name was Specs. She had been in the old man’s yard for years. She was reasonably fit, but she tore into the meadow grass like a fanatic. After two weeks, someone discovered that she was in foal.

‘The old game,’ the Colonel said. ‘Sneak them in here to have it. But he’s not going to get away with it.’

When the old man did not turn up at the end of the month, the Colonel went to the town where he lived and drove round for two hours looking for the address the old man had given him. There was no such address. No one had ever heard of the old man, or his mare, or his goats and chickens, or even his neighbour with the truck.

‘He’ll be back in the spring,’ the Colonel said when he came home, ‘for his mare and foal. The old devil.’

But Callie and Toby were thrilled, and so were Steve and Dora. They had not had a foal at the Farm since the Colonel had rescued the mare at Westerham Fair.

Callie took extra care of Specs. The vet said it was a first foal, and she was a bit old for it, so Callie brought her in every night and gave her extra food and vitamins, and came out in her nightdress long after she had gone to bed to shut the top door of the stable if the night turned cold.

They kept her in the separate foaling stable behind the barn, since she seemed to be getting pretty near her time.

‘Will you wake me?’ She made the Colonel promise to call her if the foal was being born. She had a private fantasy that the old man would never come back, and they would be able to keep the foal. She would call it Folly. Follyfoot, after the Farm. She would handle it and play with it right from the start, so that it would always like people.

‘Don’t worry,’ she murmured into the mare’s long furry ear. ‘Callie’s here.’

The old lady rested on her scarred and weary legs, with her grizzled head low and her bottom lip hanging, ratty eyelashes down over her spectacled eyes. She was not beautiful, but she was content. Her sides bulged like a cow. The Colonel thought it would be any time now, and Callie would hardly risk going to sleep.

On the bus to and from school, Callie and Toby talked endlessly about the foal, planning its future like doting parents. New babies in Toby’s family had always been more of a burden than an excitement, but this one was different. He and Callie could hardly exist through the school day until they could rush back to the farm.

Callie started to ring her mother up half-way through the morning to ask, ‘Any news?’ Once, at break, she was in the call box at the end of the staff corridor, and she turned and saw a squashed white triangle of nose flattened outside the glass, where the Louse was staring at her. When he took his face away, it left a wet smear.

Callie held the receiver and kept on pretending to talk long after her mother had rung off. But the buzzer went for class, and she had to hang up and come out of the box. Lewis fell into step beside her, quickening his pace as she quickened hers.

‘Talk to your boy friend?’ he asked.

‘It was my mother.’

A teacher was passing. Lewis put his hands in his pockets, to look like two friends strolling. ‘Everything all right at home?’

‘Yes.’ Callie did not dare to say, Mind your own business. ‘We’re expecting a foal,’ she said nervously, because they were turning into an empty corridor and it was safer to keep him talking. ‘At least, Specs is. That’s what we call her, because she’s got white hair round her eyes, like spectacles.’ She laughed uneasily.

Lewis did not say anything. When they reached a corner, he suddenly peeled off like a fighter plane and was gone. He did not seem so vicious this term. Perhaps he was growing out of it at last. Perhaps it was going to be a lucky year.