A Horse Called Hero (18 page)

‘He’s a brave man. The coal masters are powerful and stubborn. Your father’s voice is a brave and lonely one. Moral courage is a rarer thing than physical courage.’

‘Hettie, if Pa – if Lord Seaton finds out what Pa is doing –’

‘Your position at Wynyard will become untenable if he discovers who your father is.’

Later, when the cake was eaten, the cards opened, Dodo saw that Hettie was grave and preoccupied.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

Hettie took a letter from her pocket and put it on the table for them to read.

The scent of oil and leather transported him, as if in a dream. Wolfie had a greasy cloth in his hand, a saddle on his lap. He could lose himself in the rubbing and polishing
of a bridle, could lose himself in the brushing of a horse, but sometimes beneath his fingers there’d be the coat of another horse, the velvet of a young muzzle, the thistledown breath on his
cheek. A wave of nausea would roll, gulping and choking from the pit of him.

‘
Learn him by heart, Wolfie, learn your horse by heart
,’ Pa had said. And he had: he had the whole of Hero by heart, the touch of him, from nose to tail, the coat of him,
the muscle and vein of him, all by heart, and if he closed his eyes, there in the tack room at Wynyard, he could run his fingers from the dappled neck to the silver tail of him.

Only Ryland and his yard could breathe some warmth and life into the boy. The old groom’s father had worked in the mines, his son Jo worked there now. Wolfie would ask Ryland to talk about
the miners’ lives, to tell him what he knew so Wolfie felt close to Pa, close to the things that Pa cared for and fought for.

Ryland had been reluctant to have Wolfie’s help when Dodo had brought him to the yard, but they’d grown accustomed to each other. Ryland found that Wolfie had a good hand for a
horse, a soft hand. The boy had told him about his own horse and Ryland had softened, softened more when he’d seen the work was doing the boy good. To Dodo it seemed that Wolfie talked more
to Ryland than to anyone else.

‘Have you ever been down?’

Ryland was clipping Shannon in the yard. Holding her foreleg, he looked under her belly towards the boy and answered, ‘I never went down. Father was ostler in William Pit. Before I were
old enough to go down, there was an explosion . . .’ Ryland glanced across the park to the steam that rose from the distant winding shaft. ‘I never wanted Jo to go down, but there
weren’t no other work, nothing else but the pit.’

‘Does Jo like working there?’

‘Well enough. But he never heard what we heard . . . After the explosion, then there were the flood . . . twenty-six men drowned . . . children, young as five . . . six hundred feet
underground in a flood in the pitch dark.’

‘
Children?
’ Wolfie asked.

‘Aye, them’re cheaper, women and children came cheaper than the men.’

Wolfie hung up his bridle and collected another. Leaning against the door, watching Ryland at his work, he said, ‘My father writes speeches and papers for the miners. He’s fighting
to impose maximum working hours, maximum loads, and mechanical haulage.’

Ryland straightened up and lifted his cap and looked at the boy. ‘Oh, aye? . . . And does the master know?’ He gestured with his head to the house.

‘I don’t know. Dodo hopes he doesn’t but even when he’s in prison he’s in the papers. He is contrary-minded. He doesn’t think what other people
think.’

Ryland laughed. ‘Contrary-minded,’ he said, ‘is a fine thing to be.’

‘I don’t want to be contrary-minded. I want to think what everyone else does, otherwise life is difficult.’

‘I see no evidence of you thinking what everyone else does,’ said Ryland. ‘Aye, an’ your father’s right, I’m thinking.’ Ryland moved to Shannon’s
off side and picked up a hind leg. ‘The men are paid piece work – paid, that is, for each tub o’ coal. An’ if you don’t bring up enough o’ them tubs, you
can’t feed the family. The country needs coal and wants it cheap, and the master wants profits, but the miner just wants a living wage. He’s right, your father, the loads must be fixed
at what a horse can carry. Fifty tons a day, them horses down there . . . fifty tons . . . or else a man can’t feed his family. Fifty tons a day till their backs an’ legs are broken
an’ they’re shot where they fall. Or worse . . . Aye, hunger makes monsters of men an’ a hungry man’ll loose a tub of coal on a pony just to be given a faster one.’ He
stroked Shannon’s gleaming coat. ‘The master don’t want change, he wants profit.’

Shaking his head sadly, he went to the feed room to prepare the sugar beet for the horses.

Wolfie rose and wandered over to the window. He held the bridle in his hand, running his fingers across the metal bit of it, remembering the first time he’d put Hero to the bit, the young
horse’s indignation at the cold metal across his tongue.

When Dodo came down to the yard to find her brother, she saw him through the window of the tack room. He was tall now, she thought, older-looking than his years, tall and
strong. She saw his finger move across the dusty pane. She saw the letters emerge, in mirror image.

Dodo watched Wolfie sadly.

‘Wolfie,’ she called to him, ‘I’ve got a picnic tea – we’ve ham and melon . . .’

‘Melon?’ Wolfie asked in wonder as he came to the door.

‘. . . And egg sandwiches, specially for you. I said every picnic had to have an egg in it.’

‘Every picnic has to have horses, and streams,’ said Wolfie.

Dodo tried again, holding out a pamphlet to him. ‘Look, Wolfie, there’s going to be races – the pit ponies racing,’ she said. ‘It’s their only week above
ground – the only chance to see them.’

Ryland joined them, raising his cap to Dodo. He picked up the hamper at her feet, weighed it in his hand, disapproving.

‘There’s more in this than most here put on their table in a year.’

Wolfie read the Pitman’s Derby pamphlet, then turned to Dodo. ‘Do you remember the race, do you remember Comer’s Gate?’

‘I do, and I remember you flying about like a small bobbin!’ She laughed.

‘Nothing will ever be the same, Dodo.’

Ryland took the paper from Wolfie’s hand.

‘Will you come, Ryland?’ asked Dodo.

‘No. I don’t like to think on t’others, on them you won’t see, as have the broken knees, the ones who can’t breathe for the dust in their lungs, the stones in their
guts.’

Ryland put the paper back in Wolfie’s hands and made for the tack room. At the door he paused and said, his back to them, ‘Them ponies pull tubs o’ coal, seven tubs, seven
tons, between rails half a yard wide, through pitch dark, their knees doubled a’most to the ground . . . No, you won’ find me at them races.’

‘Hettie’s asked me to go with her,’ said Dodo quietly.

‘We’ll stay here, you and I,’ said Ryland.

Wolfie nodded.

Ryland went about his work in the tack room.

‘Come on, Wolfie, take the handle, help me,’ said Dodo, trying to recover the afternoon. She called goodbye to Ryland and they made their way out of the park.

‘It would be quicker on a horse,’ said Wolfie, always resistant to walking.

At the park gates he looked doubtfully at the drear chimneys and brooding slag heaps, the Lilliputian houses that cowered in silent and bitter file.

‘I miss Lilycombe,’ he said simply.

‘I know, Wolfie, I know,’ said Dodo gently. ‘Nowhere will ever be as lovely.’

‘Do you think about it too?’

‘All the time,’ she answered. ‘All the time.’

Wolfie put the letter on the table for Hettie to read.

‘I couldn’t ever go back,’ he said.

A school holiday was given for the Derby. Wolfie went early to the stables at Wynyard, passing Dodo on her way to meet Hettie at the school house.

‘Always put your money on a grey,’ Wolfie said to her.

He found Ryland washing down the immense dark horse the master had named Black Diamond. As Wolfie approached, Ryland leaned forward over the horse, his arms folded, head resting there, watching
Wolfie, seeing the deadness in the boy’s step and wondering. The boy had lost his mother, his father was jailed, the horse he’d had once had gone. Ryland saw the sadness in the
boy’s step.

‘Nothing can’t ever replace a horse you’ve really loved,’ he said as Wolfie came close.

Wolfie smiled and shook his head. He took the hose from Ryland, and the sponge.

‘What happened to ’im?’ Ryland asked.

‘Stolen.’

‘Aye,’ Ryland said to himself, coiling the hose. ‘Aye, an’ they were takin’ from all over in the war . . . an’ after it.’

Wolfie went to the tack room to fetch a towel. From outside he heard the determined tread of a boot on the cobbles, then a voice rising. When he came out someone had Ryland by the collar, their
two heads only a few inches apart, the hose water from the pipe spreading in a lake around Black Diamond’s polished hoofs. Wolfie turned the tap off and coiled the hose.

‘You tell ’im. You tell your boy. If he makes any more trouble he’s out. If it weren’t for you, an’ my fondness for your father, your boy’d ’a lost his
job a while back . . .’

Ryland submitted to the rant in silence. The man saw Wolfie. Reluctantly he relinquished his hold of Ryland’s collar, turned and made as if to leave.

‘Who was that?’ whispered Wolfie.

‘Ostler from William Pit,’ answered Ryland.

‘An’ I’ll tell you one more thing.’ The man had turned, was yanking Ryland round by the shoulder. ‘Once more and there’ll be no work for ’im, if I find
’im at it again . . . It’s a good pit, an’ the men’re happy an’ I don’t want no problems from your boy, makin’ trouble where there ain’t none
an’ stirring men up.’

Ryland heard the man out, then said, ‘You won’t lay a finger on Jo an’ you know that well as I. You can’t threaten me with what I know as you’ll never do.
You’re too scared, Jervis, that I’ll tell all as I know.’

Wolfie sprang forward. ‘Jervis?’

The man kept his hold on Ryland and turned to Wolfie, considered him briefly then turned back as Ryland spoke.