Follyfoot Read online

  After what the groom had told them, Steve and the Colonel were surprised to find him quite an agreeable man, a bit soapy and smiling too much, with an oiled wave in his hair and small pointed teeth like a saw, but not the mean and brutish tyrant they had expected.

  The Colonel was thrown out of gear. They chatted politely about nothing much, and although he kept trying to start his piece about the Agricultural and Domestic Animals County Surveyor, he could never quite get it out. Instead of being put at his ease by the smiling Hammonds, he was even more nervous. He shifted his feet. He blew his nose. He bit round his nails – what a giveaway. Steve wanted to slap at his hand as Anna would have done.

  When Mr Hammond finally stopped vapourizing about the weather and taxes and asked him, ‘And what can I do for you, sir?’ the Colonel lost his nerve completely and blurted out, ‘Well, it’s like this. I’m from the Home of Rest for Horses, up at Follyfoot Farm.’

  That did it. Steve had told him at least twice. ‘Keep quiet about the farm, till we see the mare.’ But Mr Hammond said without relaxing his smile, ‘I know that, of course.’

  ‘You know the Colonel?’ Steve asked, surprised.

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve heard a lot about the Brigadier.’ Mr Hammond deliberately upgraded him. ‘It’s wonderful work you’re doing up there.’

  ‘Yes indeed, very wonderful. The poor dumb beasts.’ Mrs Hammond’s anxious eyes misted over slightly under the rollers.

  ‘Of course,’ said the Colonel, trying to get the talk round his way, ‘most of my horses are past working, but in a stable like yours, they have to earn their keep.’

  ‘You’ve hit it on the nail, Brigadier,’ Mr Hammond complimented him as if he had said something clever. ‘I’m not a rich man, but I feed the best. Hard food, hard grooming, hard work, and what do you get?’

  The Colonel’s eyes were glazing over. They were all sitting down, too comfortable, and Mrs Hammond had sent the noisy maid for coffee. Would they ever get out to the stables?

  ‘What do you get? I’ll tell you what you get.’ Mr Hammond, with his long glossy sideburns and his smiling sharp teeth, was an unstoppable tap of horse hokum. ‘You get a fit horse, as you and I, sir, very well know, eh? Eh, lad?’ He winked at Steve, as if this was a chummy secret.

  The Colonel cleared his throat desperately. ‘How about stable help? Hard to get these days.’

  ‘You’ve hit the nail again, Brigadier. I’m not a rich man, but I pay the best. But they don’t want to work, that’s where it is. Had to get rid of a chap just the other day. Lazy! You’ve no idea. And when my son had to speak to him about neglecting the horses, he went for the boy. Like a madman, Brigadier. He had to go. I’m running the stable now with my boys, though one’s still at school. Too much for me, with the hotel as well, but the horses come first.’

  ‘I’d love to see them.’ The Colonel stood up quickly and moved towards the passage door, but Mr Hammond was quicker.

  ‘Flattered, Brigadier, flattered.’ He moved casually but swiftly in front of the door. ‘A man of your experience, interested in our modest—’

  ‘I am,’ said the Colonel firmly. ‘Let’s have a look at ’em.’

  Still smiling, still soapy, Mr Hammond managed to say No without saying it. ‘Feeding time … highly sensitive animals … nervous when they’re disturbed …’ The coffee arrived right on cue, and the Colonel and Steve had to sit down again and drink it. It was as soapy as its owner, with scummy milk and bitter grounds. Steve’s cup had lipstick on it.

  They left in a flurry of smiles and compliments. ‘So kind of you to drop in … always nice to swap horse yarns …’ and a shout from the grey-haired lady who was back in the flower-bed, cutting everything down with a pair of rusty sheep shears, ‘I didn’t think you’d stay!’

  Steve drove out by the back gate, past the stables, a patched together, rickety line of uneven sheds with a couple of thin horses in a yard outside, nosing sadly about in the trodden mud. Bales of mouldy hay were piled in an open shed. A boy was leaning against them, a cigarette smoking on his hanging lip.

  It was the boy Lewis, who had tripped Callie up in the yard at the farm.

  Chapter 4

  ‘HE BLUFFED ME out,’ the Colonel said.

  ‘That wasn’t difficult,’ Steve said glumly.

  ‘Don’t talk to the Colonel like that,’ Anna said, and the Colonel said, ‘He’s right. I was a flop.’

  They were all sitting round the kitchen table at the farmhouse, trying to work out the next move. Anna, the Colonel’s wife and Callie’s mother, with her long pale hair pinned on top of her head. Callie in her school uniform, trying to do homework and be part of the talk at the same time. Steve disgusted, but eating slice after slice of home-made bread as Anna cut it. Dora with her untidy hair and brown blunt face, two puppies snoring in her lap. Little Slugger Jones, ex-jockey, ex-boxer, who worked with Steve and Dora in the stables.

  ‘He wants to keep his nose out of trouble,’ Slugger said. ‘That’s what he wants to do.’ He had been punched about so much in his boxing days that he could no longer talk directly to anybody, only to himself.

  ‘That’s no help to that poor mare,’ Dora said.

  ‘There she goes again.’ Slugger munched cake with his gums. He was losing his teeth and hair at an equal rate. ‘All excited over hearsay talk.’

  ‘Slugger might be right, you know,’ the Colonel said. ‘Sometimes he is. How do we know that groom was telling the truth?’

  ‘Of course he was. You heard him.’ Callie drew beautiful lines under her Earth Science heading, but could write nothing more.

  ‘Suppose he was trying to get back at them for sacking him?’

  ‘But suppose—’ Callie was having an idea – ‘suppose those boys came up on the bike yesterday because they thought the groom might be here?’

  ‘Good grief, she’s brilliant,’ Dora said.

  Steve said, ‘She’s almost human.’

  ‘That boy Steve saw at the Pinecrest. Lewis. Louse. I’ve seen him too, but I can’t think where. He’s no good. Oh, Colonel.’ She still called him that, although he was her stepfather. ‘Please – you must go back!’

  ‘When the Cruelty to Animals man gets home—’

  ‘It can’t wait!’

  ‘That wretched mare—’

  ‘An infected sore on a thoroughbred—’

  They rounded on him, Dora, Steve, Callie, even Anna who was quickly moved to pity.

  ‘I can’t go in. He’ll bar the way with those teeth.’

  ‘Pretend you want to hire a horse.’

  ‘I can’t. They know me.’

  ‘But they don’t know me.’ Dora stood up, spilling sleepy puppies. ‘I wasn’t here when the boys came. “Good morning, Mr Hammond, I want to hire a hack” (anyone got any money?) “Certainly, madam.” “Let me see all your horses, and I’ll choose.”’

  ‘They’ll rumble you,’ Steve said. ‘One look at your hands and they’ll know you work in a stable.’

  ‘No they won’t. I’ll go disguised as one of those silly women who say they can ride and then don’t even know how to hold the reins. Anna – lend me those pink flowered pants.’

  ‘Yes, and that nylon top with the frills.’

  ‘What on my feet?’

  ‘Those plastic sandals Corinne left.’

  ‘Long dangly earrings.’

  ‘Lots of make-up.’

  ‘Nail varnish.’

  ‘Scent. My “Passion Flowers”.’

  ‘Love beads.’

  ‘A hair ribbon.’

  ‘You’re putting me off me off my tea.’ Dora pushed away her plate. ‘But I’ll do it. For poor old Beauty Queen, I’ll do it.’

  Steve drove her in the farm truck to a crossroads half a mile from the Pinecrest Hotel, and got her bicycle out of the back.

  ‘Be sure and wait for me,’ she told him. ‘I’m not going to ride this thing ten miles home and up that hill. Especially in this outfit.’

  Dora never w
ore anything but jeans and sweaters and old shirts of Steve’s that had shrunk in the wash. She had one skirt for going home to her mother. She felt ridiculous in the flowered pants and the earrings, with the garish eye make-up and the pale shiny lipstick and silver nail varnish with which Anna and Callie had prepared her as carefully as if she were a film star going on the set. The ‘Passion Flowers’ scent made her slightly sick. Horses were her natural perfume.

  She approached the Pinecrest stables doubtfully, but the man who came out greeted her without surprise.

  ‘Looking for someone, dear?’

  ‘I want to hire a horse to go for a horseback ride,’ said Dora in the kind of voice someone would have who would go riding dressed like this.

  ‘All right, dear,’ said the man, still unsurprised. First bad mark to him. If he ran a decent riding stable, he would have said, Go home and get a proper outfit.

  ‘My friend told me you had beautiful animals here.’ Girls who looked like this always had ‘my friend’ who told them this or that fantasy. The man was grinning as if he liked girls who looked like this, so Dora risked a seductive smile and a bit of a hip swing through the muddy yard. ‘Might I see them all?’

  ‘Come along in, my dear.’

  Steve had said, ‘Yuch!’ when Dora got into the truck with him, but Mr Hammond (‘Call me Sidney’) seemed to find her divine.

  The stables were what you would expect of a second-rate riding school just managing to sneak in under the law. Outside, a scrubby paddock with a trodden ring and a few flimsy jumps made of oil drums and old doors. Inside, jerry-built loose boxes with no windows, and narrow standing stalls, with a clay floor stamped into holes and hillocks. Woodwork chewed from boredom – or hunger. Scanty, dirty bedding. Flies. Thin horses with dusty coats, many of them with telltale patches of white where the hair had grown in over an old sore. As far as Dora could see, most of them needed shoeing.

  ‘What a pretty horse. Oh, I like that spotted one. Why is he waving his head like that? What’s he trying to say? Ah, the wee pony. Got the moth a bit, hasn’t he?’

  As Sidney Hammond showed her round the stable, she made stupid remarks to disguise what she thought. Some of the horses were fat enough, the chunky, cobby kind who wouldn’t lose weight if you fed them diet pills; but many of them were ribby and hippy, gone over at the knee, and you could tell by their eyes that they had lost hope. Dora wanted to untie all their broken and knotted rope halters, let them all out, and herd them slowly back to the farm, wobbling behind them on her bicycle. But, as the Colonel said, ‘Face it, everyone isn’t like us. If we took away every horse that wasn’t kept by our standards, we’d have half the horses in the county up here.’

  And she was here to look at Beauty Queen. That was her job.

  And Sidney Hammond, although ignorant and probably miserly, was quite nice to his horses. He slapped them on their bony rumps and thin ewe necks, and told tall tales about their breeding and performance.

  ‘This little grey. Irish bred. What a goer across country! Now here’s a bay mare. Perfect lady’s hack. Suit you all the way, she would. Todd!’ He shouted towards the tack room, where a transistor radio was blasting.

  A tall weedy boy with a feeble growth of beard appeared in the doorway. ‘What do you want?’ he shouted back. He inspected Dora from head to foot and back up again, and favoured her with a breathy wolf whistle.

  ‘Get the tack for Penny.’

  ‘Oh, just a moment, there’s one horse I didn’t give a sugar lump to.’ In a dark corner box, Dora had spotted an unmistakable thoroughbred head beyond the cobwebby bars. She ran down the littered aisle, stumbling in the loose sandals. Before Sidney could reach her, she slid back the bolt and went into the box, where a thin chestnut mare rested a back leg in the dirty straw, wearing a torn rug.

  ‘Why is she wearing pyjamas?’ Dora looked innocently up at Sidney. Anna had put so much black stuff on her lashes that she could hardly see.

  ‘Keep her warm, love.’

  ‘But she’s sweating. Let me—’

  ‘Best not touch her,’ Sidney said quickly. ‘She’s nervous.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not afraid of her.’ She reached up and quickly but carefully folded the rug back on to the neck of the mare, who jumped away in pain.

  No wonder. The saddle sore on her high withers was two or three inches wide, oozing and raw.

  ‘Oh God!’ Dora said in her normal voice, but Sidney Hammond was too busy explaining to notice.

  ‘Looks worse than it is. All my groom’s fault. I sacked him for letting it get so bad. It’s clearing up with this new ointment.’

  ‘Have you had the vet?’

  ‘Of course, love.’ When he was telling a full scale lie, his mouth went on smiling, but his eyes did not.

  ‘He can’t be much good. I know someone who could help.’

  ‘I’m not a rich man, you know. I can’t afford these huge fees.’

  ‘No, I mean at Follyfoot Farm. The place where they have the old horses.’

  ‘But Beauty Queen isn’t old.’ If Mr Hammond guessed at a connection between Dora and the Colonel, his soft-soaping smile didn’t show it.

  ‘They might take her though. I know a boy—’ Dora. lowered the heavy lashes coyly – ‘a boy who works there. Shall I ask?’

  Mr Hammond sighed, and surrendered. ‘If it’s best for Beauty. I’m up to my neck here, short-handed, all these animals and a hotel full of guests …’

  He started to cover the mare’s back, but Dora said, ‘Let’s take off the rug and put ointment on, and a clean rag or something.’

  ‘You’re a great girl.’ Sidney squeezed her hand. ‘A real little Samaritan.’

  When they left the box, Penny, the bay mare was drooping between pillar reins, with a long-cheeked curb bridle and an ugly old saddle that made Beauty’s back understandable. ‘You pay in advance,’ said smiling Sidney.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Twenty-five pounds to you, my dear.’

  ‘Oh, I’m afraid that’s too much.’

  Some other people had come to ride, three women in tight jodhpurs who looked as if they were housewives hoping to lose weight, and other horses were being saddled.

  Sidney lowered his voice. ‘Twenty pounds then, but keep it dark.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Dora, glad to find a way out of riding poor Penny, although she would only have taken her round the nearest corner and let her graze for an hour. ‘That wouldn’t be fair on you. I’ll come back when I’m not so broke. I’ll ring up the farm about Beauty. Don’t worry.’

  She ducked under Penny’s pillar rein and got herself out to the yard, where one of the housewives already had her stout thighs across a hairy cob with its eyes half shut. Dora paused briefly to let out a couple of links in its curb chain, and ran slop, slop in the plastic sandals – to her bicycle.

  ‘Don’t forget to come back, my dear!’ Sidney Hammond was in the stable doorway, smiling and waving.

  Chapter 5

  ‘AND PERHAPS I will,’ Dora said. ‘Don’t laugh, but I quite liked him. He was nice to me.’

  Beauty Queen had been brought up to the farm, Sidney Hammond profuse with thanks, blessings, promises to pay whatever he could (‘though I’m not a rich man’), and make endowments in his will.

  ‘I’ve got to laugh,’ Steve said. ‘You had him cornered and he knew it. He had to be nice.’

  ‘He fancied me.’

  ‘Hah!’ said Steve. ‘Listen to that, Callie. Get her all dressed up, and look what happens.’

  ‘It was the Passion Flowers.’ Callie was standing on a box, very tenderly smoothing the ointment the vet had prescribed on to the chestnut mare’s back. ‘It went to her head.’

  *

  Callie had inherited from her mother a natural gift for caring for sick or injured animals. Beauty Queen, rechristened Miss America, was in the foaling stable behind the barn, and since Steve and Dora and Slugger were busy enough, it was Callie’s job to clean the wound with warm water an
d hydrogen peroxide, and put on ointment and antiseptic powder.

  She got up earlier to take care of Miss before she went to school, and rushed straight back to the mare as soon as she got home on the bus, so that her uniform was always smeared with ointment and powder and her school shoes full of bedding.

  When Anna complained, Callie said, ‘Then don’t make me go to school.’

  She had never liked the big rough school on the outskirts of the manufacturing town which lay farther along the valley; but it was the only one, unless she went to boarding school, and Callie would not hear of leaving the Farm.

  This year, school was worse than ever. There was a rotten gang of older boys who were always in trouble, except with those teachers who were afraid of them, and who got themselves through the boredom of the day by terrorizing some of the younger children. The sneaky kids sneaked, and got beaten up. The fighting kids fought back, and got left alone. The others simply tried to keep clear of the bullies. Callie was one of the others.

  But one day when she was sitting on the playground wall reading, because she got all the exercise she needed at the farm, and she hated games with balls because she was shortsighted, a foot suddenly came up underneath the open book and sent it flying.

  Three big brutish boys scrummed for it, knocking each other down, and when they got up, howling like inane hyenas, the book and cover were in shreds.

  It was a library book and she would have to pay for it, but Callie walked away in silence, stretching her eyes to keep tears back.

  ‘Hey!’ A hand took her arm and spun her round. ‘I know you, stupid cry-baby!’

  ‘Let me go. I’ll scream.’

  ‘Try it.’ The boy guffawed. ‘We’ll give you something to scream about.’ He had a broad stupid face, with a pudgy nose and thick hanging lips. It was Lewis the Louse. This was where she had seen him before. Hanging about with the bad crowd. This school was so big that you couldn’t know all the names, nor even all the faces.

  ‘Yeah.’ He dropped her arm, staring. ‘I do know you. You live up the hill, dontcha?’