Man at the Helm (19 page)

We told him we’d find a batch of ponies via the ads and make appointments to see the most appropriate ones and see if he might be available to accompany us on any of the viewings.

That very afternoon we rang upwards of twenty pony vendors and made appointments to view two on the following Saturday. And then we invited Mr Oliphant along and he said he’d be delighted to come. When he turned up on the day, though, our mother said she wasn’t in the mood to meet horsey Phil Oliphant, the dog judge, and said we should ask him to come back later. This was awkward, so we told him she’d got a lady’s problem and could he come back in half an hour when she’d cleaned herself up. And when he called back, she was in the mood and had changed into a silk shirt. And when they said hello, it was as if they were already in love. Phil Oliphant’s eyes flicked between our mother’s nice smoky eyes and her nipples – until she folded her arms to shield them.

And so began a long and detailed hunt for a pony for me.

I reminded my sister a number of times that I did not want a pony and that I was going along with it only for our mother’s happiness, and that once she’d got serious with Phil Oliphant, or engaged to him, we must stop looking and let me not have a pony.

My sister said, ‘Of course, that’s the plan. She’s run out of money anyway, stop worrying.’

And hearing that, I stupidly stopped worrying.

Phil Oliphant definitely took to our mother and she to him and we went to see practically every pony who lived in the area.
We scoured Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Cambridgeshire as well as our own county. We saw two more Blazes, Conker, Ruby, Robin, Ruben and Zippy. We saw two very nice mares, both called Dana. We saw Eliza, Rosa and Petula, but our mother preferred geldings.

We saw a few yearlings which weren’t broken in yet. We liked Rollo, a dapple-grey, but not Martha. My sister wanted me to get William, a light bay Exmoor, but Mr Oliphant preferred Snowball, except he showed signs of crib-biting.

It was funny to see our mother, who wasn’t at all horsey and had very little experience buying ponies, being so picky and interested and pretending to look at their hooves and touching their fetlocks. Things were going well and towards the end of it I didn’t even bother going along, saying I trusted my sister’s judgement, and then even she stopped going and so it was just Phil Oliphant and our mother trotting these ponies along verges, looking at their teeth and asking country folk what was their rock bottom.

And they seemed quite happy for a while and often came home all fuzzy. In the end something must’ve happened between Phil Oliphant and our mother (my sister said he had dental crowns and didn’t use tooth picks but I think he was just too nice). Whatever it was, he was suddenly off the case and our mother, without really consulting me, made a verbal agreement on the phone regarding a six-year-old bay gelding from a riding school a few miles away. I tried to object but she explained that only the quick acquisition of a pony would shake off Phil Oliphant, which was something she was suddenly keen to do. She didn’t even listen to my side of the predicament.

We drove up to the riding stables and immediately saw a scruffy brown pony nosing around some rubbish bins in what was clearly a non-pony area. We went into the tack room to meet the owner
and said we were here to view the thirteen-hand-high pony. The owner said, ‘Oh, Maxwell, right, he’s around here somewhere.’ And he whistled from the tack room door, then shouted, ‘Come oi, come oi,’ and banged a stirrup iron against the wall. The brown dustbin pony appeared and came rushing up to the owner – looking more like a dog than a pony – and the owner said, ‘Meet Maxwell.’

‘Why isn’t he with the other ponies?’ I asked.

‘Maxwell does his own thing,’ said the owner, or words to that effect.

Maxwell came sniffing round us and got his teeth round a tube of fruit Polos I had in my pocket. He pulled at them. The owner gave him a smack on the muzzle. ‘You can’t keep stuff in your pockets with Maxwell around.’ He laughed and showed us the flappy mess that had once been a pocket at the front of his overcoat.

The owner said Maxwell was a real character, full of charisma, hilarious and always up to his tricks. I wasn’t particularly pleased to hear that. Charisma and character are not all that desirable in a pony. You want them to be normal, trustworthy and good at zigzagging through poles.

I gave our mother and my sister pleading looks and said I really wasn’t sure Maxwell was right for me – him being so charismatic etc. and me not really ready for my own pony. But, for their own separate but desperate reasons, both our mother and my sister wanted to acquire this oddball of a pony and before I knew it our mother had handed over fifty-five guineas – a guinea being slightly more than one pound in horse and livestock money – and Maxwell arrived by Rice trailer the next day with a saddle, bridle and head-collar. He was by far the cheapest pony we’d looked at.

So in addition to my other worries I now had a charismatic Welsh Mountain pony to look after day in day out, seven days
a week, summer, winter, spring and autumn. He was twelve hands and three inches high at the withers. That was how come he was so cheap (that and his charisma), because ponies are sorted by the hand and half and Maxwell, at 12h 3in, was one inch too tall to enter the 12h 2in classes at gymkhanas and shows. This put him in classes with the likes of Sacha ridden by the likes of my sister and other dedicated horsemen and horsewomen. Not kids like me.

I didn’t mind that much, pleased to never have to win anything. I minded much more about the everyday. The keeping this pony alive and not letting him die or harm anything or kill anyone. I suppose a bit like being a parent.

Although my sister was terribly disappointed that somehow we’d let horse-loving Phil Oliphant slip through our fingers, it was a huge consolation to her that I now had Maxwell and therefore as much on my plate as she had on hers (almost). In the first days of pony-ownership, I lost my cool with my sister and reminded her that I had never wanted a pony and that I’d only agreed to look for one so our mother could have sex with Phil Oliphant. And now Phil Oliphant was nowhere to be seen and I had this extra burden. A charismatic burden.

My sister wondered if we might add the riding school man to the list, him being horsey and handsome in a Heathcliffy kind of way, but I just yelled at her that she’d have to find a man on her own from now on as I’d be too busy. Also, that if the Heathcliffy riding school man came anywhere near me, I’d insist on his taking Maxwell back before I allowed him anywhere near our mother.

Debbie was ill with something and had to see the vet. The vet was called Mr Swift and I liked the name. My sister added him to the list, though in all the worry about Debbie we didn’t go through the pros and cons properly, but my sister insisted he was probably a good candidate, being Oxbridge-educated and on a vet’s salary. She really had started factoring the economics in by then, which added to the excitement somehow.

And though we were sorry for Debbie, we were amazed at how quickly after Mr Oliphant another possible expert helmsman had appeared. When you think of all the months with no one decent.

It turned out that Debbie had a suspected blockage. This was diagnosed because she kept being sick and trying to be sick and seemed lethargic. I didn’t know exactly what a suspected blockage was, only that it was uncertain but might be somewhere between bad and very bad indeed.

Mr Swift was kind to us and said although it might be bad, it also might not be (not realizing that the word ‘might’ meant might and might not) and he said that we mustn’t blame ourselves. I hadn’t blamed myself until he said that, and I felt I had to clear the matter up. I asked him why he thought we might blame ourselves. ‘
What I mean is, you mustn’t feel it’s your fault that Debbie might have eaten something that may have caused a blockage,’ he explained.

‘We don’t blame ourselves,’ I said, upset and wanting this cleared up in case of a fatality, and imagining going around with the weight of possibly, though probably not, being to blame.

‘What I mean is that Labradors are greedy beggars and they eat all sorts of nasty things, and that can cause this kind of thing. And you mustn’t think it’s your fault,’ he went on.

Mr Swift gave Debbie a dose of something and stroked her throat to make her swallow and told us to watch her very carefully. A couple of hours later there was a pile of used teabags on the lawn all in a sort of grassy foam. We’d forgotten to watch her, but agreed that this could have been Debbie’s suspected blockage.

Our mother telephoned Mr Swift the vet and he dropped by that evening and looked at the teabags, which we’d left on the lawn where they’d been passed. He poked them with a slim stick and agreed with our supposition. ‘These look as though they’ve been partially ingested,’ he said, meaning that Debbie had eaten them and shat them out again.

He congratulated Debbie – who’d gone pretty much back to normal – with a vigorous neck rub, and had a drink with our mother in her sitting room and didn’t leave until after we’d gone to bed and then they probably had sex – definitely, if I believed my sister, who said she’d heard evidence including Mr Swift groaning and saying, ‘This is unbelievable.’

My sister kept me awake wondering what Mr Swift could have considered unbelievable.

‘Do you think he means the sex is unbelievable,’ she asked, ‘or the
fact
of them having sex?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Is it
it
– or the idea of it?’ she wondered.

She was always wondering things like that now since starting at secondary school and doing a project on Knowledge. And since doing this course she seemed to be going backwards and always wondering and pondering on things that she’d have taken in her stride before.

‘What would it be for you?’ I asked.

‘Oh, for me, the idea of it. But that’s just me,’ she said, ‘I’m quite philosophical.’

Debbie had a series of trips to the vet’s surgery after that. She had her dewclaws clipped and her various checks and even had her teeth cleaned. Our mother seemed very happy and bought us two rabbits called Benjamin and Bertie and they had a few trips to the vet too.

One day our mother called Mr Swift to see one of the ponies but she forgot which one was supposed to have a problem, so we had to make something up on the spot. My sister – being the imaginative one – said she’d seen Sacha limping. Mr Swift asked her to trot him along the path and felt down his pasterns, then he came in for a cup of coffee and our mother slapped him round the face and he roared off in his Volvo.

We questioned our mother and she said things were extremely bad but gave no details. She wasn’t referring to Sacha’s leg – we knew that much.

From time to time that dreadful Farmer Turner, who’d shot the cow that was stuck in the plough, would yell at us from his mud-caked Land Rover and say Debbie had been near his ewe field. Debbie did have a tendency to roam the village but we couldn’t imagine she’d be a sheep-worrier. She was such a lovely dog. Farmer Turner would say, ‘That black bitcha yours as bin up near my top field an’ I’m warning you if I see her set foot in that field I’ll shooter no questions ast.’

This made Farmer Turner our sworn enemy. We couldn’t imagine how, once upon a time, we’d considered him perfect and my sister remarked that that was the thing about love. He was a liar and a dog-shooter and he was fat and we used to hear his distinctive voice booming out of the Bull’s Head of an evening
saying aggressive things and laughing. I imagined him leaning back on a stool and I used to wish he’d fall off it. We three all worried constantly when Debbie was out – that she might accidentally end up near the ewe field and that Farmer Turner would shoot her. Our sensible mother said if we were that bothered, why didn’t we ever shut the fucking gate.

He never did shoot Debbie, as such, but one day someone ran her over, picked up her injured body and chucked her into the ditch by the road and we put it down to him. It was almost a relief to have it over and done with.

A woman called Doris who always wore ill-fitting slippers shuffled up to us as we played. She was always shuffling around near our house and we used to laugh, carefully, at her snail’s pace. She’d have been quite sprightly without the slippers – she had to shuffle to keep them on. Doris was the woman who, like Mr Nesbit, had apparently lived in one of the cottages that previously made up our house and apparently been evicted by force from it. She had a moustache above her wobbly top lip and you could tell from the dark hairs that her pale blue eyes had once been brown.

When she reached us that day we realized she wanted to tell us something, so we stopped playing and listened to her whispery voice. She’d seen a stricken dog in a ditch. ‘It looks like your’n,’ she whispered and lifted a wobbly arm, and added, ‘By the paddock there, in that ditch runs along the road, someun’s hit’n an flung it in, I reckon.’

We pelted, me already crying, and my sister planning ahead with every stride. We got to the ditch and there was Debbie half submerged, sides heaving and wet and her eyes looking frightened and pleased to see us all at once. My sister was down there beside Debbie in an instant, lifting her face out of the water and shouting instructions.

‘Lizzie, go get Mum. Send her here in the car. You ring ahead to the vet, Mr Swift, the number’s in the book under S for Swift,’ she said.

‘Jack, you go with her now and you get a big towel and come straight back, quick as you can, Jack, all right?’

We watched my sister wiping Debbie’s face with her sleeve. ‘Go on, hurry!’

As I ran I planned how I’d word it. Our mother needed things simple and clear. I needed to avoid any ambiguity or irrationality – our mother loved to ask penetrating questions to undermine authority and upset assumption. But there was no time for that.

I stood in front of her. She was scribbling in a Silvine spiral-bound notebook. I saw the word ‘imperative’, which cheered me and jumped off the page and into my mouth.

‘Mum, Debbie is seriously injured. It’s imperative we get her to the vet,’ I said.

Through the window I saw Little Jack running along, tripping himself up on a huge sand-coloured towel – the largest (the so-called ‘bath sheet’) of a set of top-quality Christy’s Soft Sensations that our mother had bought from Fenwick’s of Leicester to replace those lost when a crate had gone missing with some of our linens on the day we moved and the lorry brought the tree bough down and cracked the listed arch and so on.

‘She is very injured in the paddock ditch,’ I told our mother.

‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘I don’t know, but it looks bad,’ I said. ‘We need to get her to Mr Swift.’

‘No. Not Mr Swift, I am
not
going to him,’ said our mother, staring at me as if I’d said something outrageous.

‘But Mr Swift is our usual vet,’ I said, ‘he knows Debbie, he saw the teabags on the lawn – remember?’

‘I am not going to Mr Swift,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to find an alternative.’

I leafed desperately through the phone book and scanned down the list of veterinary surgeons (surprised at the spelling of veterinary) and came to a Mr Nightingale in Longston.

‘Mr Nightingale in Longston?’ I checked with our mother.

‘Another bird,’ she said. ‘Where is he?’

‘24 The Parade, Longston.’

She closed her book. ‘Come on, then,’ she said.

‘Shouldn’t I ring ahead?’ I said.

‘Never ring ahead,’ she said.

Then she and I arrived at the ditch and saw Debbie wrapped in the sand-coloured Soft Sensation bath sheet and my sister sitting in three inches of ditch water talking into Debbie’s bedraggled ear.

Our mother clambered down into the ditch. ‘Oh baby,’ she said to Debbie, ‘what have you been up to?’

And she took the sand-coloured bundle softly on to the shelves of her arms. I offered my arm down to pull my sister up. Then we all helped our mother out of the ditch.

‘OK, Princess Debbie Reynolds,’ said our mother, using Debbie’s official kennel name, ‘let’s get you to 25 The Parade, Longston.’

I didn’t correct her, because it was the thought that counted.

My sister sat in the back seat next to Little Jack with Debbie across her lap, and I sat in the front but was turned facing them all the way.

‘Have you seen the injury?’ our mother asked.

‘There’s a lot of blood on her left side and I think she’s a bit crushed. It might be her ribs.’ My sister’s voice let her down then and Little Jack began to cry. My sister questioned our mother’s route.

‘Why are you going through Hilfield?’

‘Mr Swift isn’t available today, we’re seeing a Mr Starling,’ she said.

‘Nightingale,’ I corrected.

Soon we were there at 24 The Parade. I held the door open and our mother carried Debbie in.

‘We need to see Mr Starling – it’s an emergency, I think she’s been hit by a car,’ said our mother to the veterinary receptionist.

‘Mr Nightingale,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ said the girl. ‘Come this way.’ Our mother followed the girl and placed Debbie in a shallow container on a table and stroked her nose.

‘It’s actually Mr Swift in surgery today. I’ll get him right away.’

Our mother swore under her breath.

The nurse heard and looked sympathetic. ‘Don’t worry, he’s a wonderful veterinarian.’

Mr Swift was very caring and nice and made no sign of acknowledging the unbelievable thing that had passed between himself and our mother. And our mother held up well too. He wanted some time with Debbie and asked us to wait in the waiting area. We waited. We were too sad to pick up a magazine, but I read an article over a woman’s shoulder in which a milkman is crushed to death by his own float and yet an eight-stone woman is imbued with power and lifts a truck off her young son. It seemed terribly unfair (on the milkman). After about fifteen minutes Mr Swift appeared at the door of the surgery.

‘Mrs Vogel, would you …?’ and he gestured her to enter the treatment room.

We followed her.

Mr Swift wondered whether it might be best for us to wait in the waiting area but our mother said Debbie was our dog and if
we were big enough to have a dog, we were big enough to hear whatever he had to say.

‘Debbie’s injuries are serious and complex and, as you suggest, most likely the result of a road accident. She’s suffered trauma to her chest and left hind leg.’

‘Can you save her?’ our mother asked.

‘I can try. The leg looks straightforward and the ribs should mend with rest, but there’s something else. Has she been in water?’ Mr Swift asked.

‘Yes, she was found in a shallow ditch,’ our mother said.

‘Hmm, thought so. Her breathing suggests the early stages of pneumonia,’ he said, ‘and that complicates matters a bit.’

‘Can you save her?’ our mother said.

‘I can try, if you want me to,’ he said. ‘The other option is to put her to sleep.’

‘What’s best for Debbie?’ our mother said.

‘It’s hard to know, but I would like to try and save your dog,’ said the vet.

‘Very well,’ said our mother.

And then we spoke about various treatments, operations and so forth and we went home leaving Debbie there at 24 The Parade in a critical condition.

That evening my sister and I glued ourselves to the telly. And Little Jack wrote a mature letter, which made us very proud. He even asked how to spell ‘definitely’.

Dear person who ran over our dog,

You are a cruel person. First you ran our dog over, then you chucked her into a ditch to die. Or maybe you thought she was already dead. I would like to run you over. I would not chuck you in a ditch because you are too fat to lift. So I would just keep running you over until I knew that you were definitely dead.
Everyone in this house hates you. And I bet we’re not the only ones. I feel sorry for your kids and dog.

 

From,

Jack Vogel

The next morning we rang the veterinary surgery at eight on the dot and heard the news that Debbie had pulled through and had even wagged her tail at the nurse. We heard just how much against the odds it had been and we all cried and our mother said, ‘Let’s all promise to be better.’ Which none of us really understood then. But I do now.

Debbie made a slow recovery and was always a bit wonky after that, and one eye bulged a bit and she didn’t live as long as she might have had she not been chucked in that ditch, but she survived and that was the main thing. Debbie surviving against the odds that time was a real boost to morale, as things like that can be, unless they’re a downer, and we felt quite blessed.