Summer at World's End
Read Summer at World's End Online
Authors: Monica Dickens
Monica Dickens
AT WORLD’S END
1
‘Quick, Carrie – come quick! There’s a horse in my garden!’
Michael’s garden was only a small plot behind the hen house where a few carrots and radishes fought a hopeless battle against strong weeds, but Carrie’s young brother was furious. His pyjama trousers were drooping, his straw hair on end, his face red with sleep and anger.
‘I
dug
that garden. I
sowed
those seeds.
Watered
them. Gave them the best years of my
life
!’
Michael kept thumping the bed to make Carrie open her eyes, but Carrie only said, without opening them or even waking properly out of a dream of moonlight steeple-chasing, ‘Get the horse out then.’
The gaps in the hedge of the meadow behind the house were patched with old bedsteads and bits of planking and broken hurdles. Carrie’s horse, John, or the piebald pony Oliver Twist, or Leonora the donkey, quite often broke out. They wandered over the garden and stuck their heads through windows to see what was going on indoors; but they never went off anywhere.
‘It’s not one of ours.’ Michael pulled down the blanket and found Harry, the smallest puppy, sleeping beside Carrie.
Carrie sat up. Harry sighed and shifted into the warm dent where her shoulder had been. She went to the window. It was a gusty night. The moon swept over the slope
of the meadow, chasing the wind. John was standing by the bottom gate, head up, mane and tail blowing like a prairie horse, watching the dark shape that moved in the shadow behind the hen house.
Carrie called to him. John answered softly and swung his head up and down, putting his foot on the bottom bar of the gate to rattle it The dark shape lifted its head and moved into a patch of moonlight where bits of laundry were drying on the gooseberry bushes.
It was a small chestnut horse, short-backed with a fine head well set on an arched neck.
‘They come to you,’ Carrie’s friend the dairy farmer had told her long ago when they first came to live here. ‘If you’re a born horse fool, they’ll come to you.’
And John had come. Well … they had stolen him. Snatched him from the jaws of death, to be exact. The donkey had escaped from a cruel junk man, been hit by a car, and brought here, blind in one beautiful eye. Oliver the Welsh pony had come, needing a home. And now this little chestnut horse. Carrie knew everybody’s horses round about. This one was a stranger.
‘You see,’ she said to Michael, ‘the word does get round. Animals know they’re welcome here.’
‘They’re not welcome in my vegable garden.’ Michael hitched up his pyjama trousers and Carrie noticed that his feet were muddy.
‘Did you try to catch him?’
‘He put back his ears and wanted to bite me.’
‘Perhaps he wants to stay.’
‘I don’t want him.’
‘Mike - he’s a
horse
!’
Carrie put Michael into bed with the puppy, and went down the wide creaking stairs and out through the kitchen. Joey, the black woolly monkey, was sleeping in a chair by
the stove, hunched like a little old lady, with his piece of torn blanket over his head. He opened one eye at Carrie, then closed it again, munching his gums.
The path outside was dazzling white. The moon raced into a cloud and out again, travelling the wind. Trees moved and murmured. Bushes were alive with wind. The weeping willow by the pond floated like hair. Carrie’s long sand-coloured hair blew round her face. She took it out of her mouth to call to John, ‘Who’s your friend?’
‘What a ghastly shock,’ her father sometimes said, ‘if one day he answered you.’
‘He does.’
Horses could tell you things without speaking. It was only people who had to tie things down with words. It was obvious what the strange horse in the vegetable garden was saying. As Carrie went towards him, he laid back his small ears and backed away, snorting.
‘Don’t you like the smell of people?’ Carrie put her hands behind her back and leaned forward to blow gently down her nose. Most horses would respond to this. Not this one. Perhaps he didn’t like Carrie using horses’ language. He didn’t trust people.
She moved forward. He backed away. Over Michael’s radishes. Over the sunflowers that had sprouted from last winter’s seed falling out of the bird house on the elm tree.
He watched Carrie. She watched him. A good thing, because he suddenly whipped round and lashed out with his heels. His shoes flashed in the moonlight.
Once there was a famous horse trainer called the Whisperer, who could gentle the wildest rogue horse by whispering into its ear. But Carrie couldn’t get anywhere near this horse, much less its ear.
Idea. She went to the shed and took out Lucy, the brown Nubian goat. Lucy loved horses. She stood underneath
John to get shade in the summer. In winter, she slept with him in the stable, chewing her cud while he chewed hay. In the vegetable garden, she raised her head with the long silky ears like a girl’s hair. The chestnut horse dropped his nose. They discussed. His ears moved back and forth. Perhaps he would follow the goat.
‘Come on, Lucy.’
A goat never comes unless you give it a good reason, so Carrie went to the dustbin and took out a soup tin. The glue under the labels was Lucy’s favourite snack. Carrie held out the tin. Lucy made a sideways chewing movement of her small prim mouth and came towards her. Carrie let her have a lick, then backed round by the side of the house towards the stable yard, holding out the tin. Lucy followed. The horse, as if he had nothing better to do, moved after her. The wind blew the moon into the clouds, and John galloped away into the dark.
The yard was closed in by buildings and an old brick wall. The front gate to the lane was shut. When Lucy and the horse were in the yard, Carrie dropped the soup tin, shut the side gate and went back to the house. From her window upstairs, in the coming and going of the fitful moon, she watched Lucy poking about, knocking over a bucket, bumping at the door of the feed shed, walking after the soup tin as it rolled away from her tongue. The horse stood still in the middle of the yard, head up, staring into the night.
He was very beautiful. Carrie’s fancy set her on his back, jumping the brick wall, the hedge across the road, sailing over the countryside while heads turned to stare at the beautiful horse, and Carrie the only one who could ride him.
In the morning, Lucy had licked the tin shining clean, put her foot through the old chair Michael used for a
mounting block, and broken into a sack of potatoes. The chestnut horse was gone.
There was a note on the kitchen table from Tom, who had gone early to work.
‘Girl came for horse. Was very rude. To me
and
to horse.’
Tom was Carrie’s older brother. He worked for a vet on the other side of the hills, where the beautiful green country was stained with new red brick houses and black streets. Tom wanted to be a vet too, but no one in this family had any money for college, except Uncle Rudolf, and he wasn’t going to cough any up.
Carrie’s younger sister had been christened Esmeralda, so she called herself Em. Michael was the youngest. He was small for his age, and one leg was shorter than the other, so he walked a bit up and down, as if he were on the side of a hill or the edge of a kerb. He sometimes wrote his name Micheal or Micel or Michale. Why should everyone spell the same? When he read aloud, it was like listening to a new and curious language. Miss McDrane at the school said he was impossible to teach. But it was her sort of teaching that was impossible. Not Michael.
Their father, Jerome Fielding, was a restless seafaring man with very white teeth that grinned through a black beard. He and Em both had thick curly hair that wouldn’t lie down. Em used to spend hours trying to flatten hers by wetting it, binding it down, even ironing it. But when her father came home from trying to sail round the world in a home-made boat, and she saw that his hair was like hers, she let her own spring up again in dark wild curls, like his.
He had only got about a quarter of the way round the
world. His boat had sunk without trace in the Roaring Forties, so he had come home to get another.
While he was at sea, the children’s mother, Alice Fielding, had almost died saving Michael’s life in a fire that burned down the old Army hut that was their home. She got Michael out just in time, but a falling timber broke her back. When she went to the hospital, her children had to go and live with rich Uncle Rudolf who had found money in plumbing, but not a kind heart. He didn’t want than, and they didn’t want to be there. His wife Valentina wore clothes made out of dead animals, and was driven mad by children. And dogs. And cats. Even a hibernating tortoise.
If they had stayed, there would have been murder done. So Uncle Rudolf let them move to his old stone house in the country, empty for years, except for rooks and mice and memories of olden day voices.
It was falling to bits and a long way from nowhere. It had once been an inn. Wood’s End Inn, because it stood on a corner where the road came out of the green tunnel of a tall beech wood. After the fast new road was built on the other side of the hills, no travellers came this way any more, so the village people began to call it World’s End Inn.
World’s End. It stood in grass, with the hill meadow behind. Thatched stables, cart sheds, a great black barn, weathered to grey, where field animals ran in and out through the broken boards. Grass in the thatch, the wall of the yard crumbling and green with moss and ferns. Everything leaning and dilapidated. Everything perfect.
Tom and Carrie and Em and Michael had cleaned it out and patched it up and lived there free and alone before their mother came out of the hospital and their father rolled in from the sea. Not alone. With animals. At first there was only Charlie – part poodle, part golden retriever,
part hearthrug - and the four cats who had made Valentina scream, ‘I am going mad!’ twenty times a day.
Gradually others had come. Other cats. Other dogs. Chickens. Lucy the goat and a sheep called Henry. A rabbit. A lovebird. The donkey Leonora. Oliver Twist and John. Joey, the black woolly monkey that Carrie had found, sad and shivering, in a pet shop.
Money was always short, but somehow they scraped along. Tom had his job with the vet. Em went out babysitting. Carrie’s horse John pulled the brown trap to do shopping errands, and also pulled the muck cart to sell manure over at the housing estates. Michael did odd jobs in the village for pennies. Carrie was going to sell her poems one day. Somehow they just managed to feed themselves and all the animals.