hunting horn would round up the stragglers for the off; the hounds were champing for the chase.
Guy had promised his mother to keep an eye on Angus, but he was already ahead with Father in his scarlet jacket. Angus got very stroppy if he thought they were mollycoddling him and refused to discuss his last fit in the school changing rooms.
Guy took one final look but Selma had disappeared. It was sad that there were two villages in Sharland divided by an invisible bridge. On one side were the House and church, the vicarage, the public school and the gentleman farmers’ estates, on the other side were millworkers’ cottages, the chapel and board school and quarrymen’s houses. Once a year they met on the cricket pitch and sometimes in the Hart’s Head, and that was about it.
As he trotted down towards the river bridge and fields ahead, he thought how it was just like himself and Selma…all they could ever do was smile and wave across the yawning divide.
I smile thinking of those horses clattering off from Elm Tree Square all those years ago. Horses…horses, always horses close to my heart. I’d watched the Boxing Day meets since I was nobbut a child, little knowing this would be the last gathering before war came and things were never the same. Besides, how do you ever forget the day you first fell in love?
I can see him now resplendent in jodhpurs and hard hat on his mount, giving me that precious grin of recognition and, with it, a spark of knowing flashing between us. How innocent were those stolen glances but how I hugged them to myself for months on end. How I longed to be riding alongside Guy Cantrell as an equal, but knowing this was not how things would ever be in our staid Yorkshire village. The next time we met on horseback, the world was entirely changed…
Come on, old girl, concentrate, back to the ceremony. Will that young version of Guy turn up somewhere on the fringes of my vision if I’m patient?
One of the secrets of old age is the people you see that others do not: those long departed gathering in the corners, waiting to welcome you home. But not just yet.
The ceremony’s hardly begun but I can still hear hoofs on the trot and remember that awful day they took all our horses to war…
4
August 1914
‘They can’t take all the horses away! They just can’t!’ cried Selma, watching the men in khaki leading a line of them roped together like prisoners across the square. ‘Dad! Stop them!’
Asa shrugged his shoulders and sucked on his pipe, shaking his head. ‘They’ll be well looked after if they’re doing war work. Don’t take on so. The country needs them.’
‘But there’s Sybil’s pony!’ She pointed out a sturdy grey belonging to her school friend. ‘How can the farmers manage without them? You will have no shoeing…’ Selma turned indoors, unable to watch this terrible procession, hardly believing what was happening.
In just a few weeks since the Bank Holiday war had been declared, everything was topsy-turvy in the village. The Rifle Association had taken over Colonel Cantrell’s bottom field for target practice, there were posters everywhere demanding citizens be on guard for German spies. The railway line was patrolled day and night. The Territorials were making preparations to leave from Sowerthwaite station.
Poor Mr Jerome, the old German photographer, had had his windows smashed and his equipment taken in case he was in league with the enemy. All the talk in school was about the wicked Hun stealing poor little Belgium.
Now the district had to yield up a quota of serviceable animals: hunters, cart horses and drayhorses, ponies. How could the milkman manage without Barney, or Stamper, the coalman’s steady Dales horse? They were taking all the beasts she’d known all her life down the road and across the sea to a foreign land. They would be so bewildered and scared. Selma was sobbing as Essie tried to comfort her.
‘They’re not all gone. Don’t fret. Lady
Guy had promised his mother to keep an eye on Angus, but he was already ahead with Father in his scarlet jacket. Angus got very stroppy if he thought they were mollycoddling him and refused to discuss his last fit in the school changing rooms.
Guy took one final look but Selma had disappeared. It was sad that there were two villages in Sharland divided by an invisible bridge. On one side were the House and church, the vicarage, the public school and the gentleman farmers’ estates, on the other side were millworkers’ cottages, the chapel and board school and quarrymen’s houses. Once a year they met on the cricket pitch and sometimes in the Hart’s Head, and that was about it.
As he trotted down towards the river bridge and fields ahead, he thought how it was just like himself and Selma…all they could ever do was smile and wave across the yawning divide.
I smile thinking of those horses clattering off from Elm Tree Square all those years ago. Horses…horses, always horses close to my heart. I’d watched the Boxing Day meets since I was nobbut a child, little knowing this would be the last gathering before war came and things were never the same. Besides, how do you ever forget the day you first fell in love?
I can see him now resplendent in jodhpurs and hard hat on his mount, giving me that precious grin of recognition and, with it, a spark of knowing flashing between us. How innocent were those stolen glances but how I hugged them to myself for months on end. How I longed to be riding alongside Guy Cantrell as an equal, but knowing this was not how things would ever be in our staid Yorkshire village. The next time we met on horseback, the world was entirely changed…
Come on, old girl, concentrate, back to the ceremony. Will that young version of Guy turn up somewhere on the fringes of my vision if I’m patient?
One of the secrets of old age is the people you see that others do not: those long departed gathering in the corners, waiting to welcome you home. But not just yet.
The ceremony’s hardly begun but I can still hear hoofs on the trot and remember that awful day they took all our horses to war…
4
August 1914
‘They can’t take all the horses away! They just can’t!’ cried Selma, watching the men in khaki leading a line of them roped together like prisoners across the square. ‘Dad! Stop them!’
Asa shrugged his shoulders and sucked on his pipe, shaking his head. ‘They’ll be well looked after if they’re doing war work. Don’t take on so. The country needs them.’
‘But there’s Sybil’s pony!’ She pointed out a sturdy grey belonging to her school friend. ‘How can the farmers manage without them? You will have no shoeing…’ Selma turned indoors, unable to watch this terrible procession, hardly believing what was happening.
In just a few weeks since the Bank Holiday war had been declared, everything was topsy-turvy in the village. The Rifle Association had taken over Colonel Cantrell’s bottom field for target practice, there were posters everywhere demanding citizens be on guard for German spies. The railway line was patrolled day and night. The Territorials were making preparations to leave from Sowerthwaite station.
Poor Mr Jerome, the old German photographer, had had his windows smashed and his equipment taken in case he was in league with the enemy. All the talk in school was about the wicked Hun stealing poor little Belgium.
Now the district had to yield up a quota of serviceable animals: hunters, cart horses and drayhorses, ponies. How could the milkman manage without Barney, or Stamper, the coalman’s steady Dales horse? They were taking all the beasts she’d known all her life down the road and across the sea to a foreign land. They would be so bewildered and scared. Selma was sobbing as Essie tried to comfort her.
‘They’re not all gone. Don’t fret. Lady
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