Chewing the Cud (3 page)

Every day started among the horses, for first thing in the morning Howard the foreman gave his orders in the stables. In the gloom of the long, narrow building, a barred window at either end, he would stand with one arm thrown over a huge shining bottom and allot the different jobs to be done, depending on weather and season. And the air was a marvellous mixture of the smells of hay and leather and dung and just plain horse, and the sounds were of soft snortings and bubbly blowings through velvet lips and now and then the stamp of a heavy hoof on the cobbled floor.

We would stand facing that long row of backsides, which were of several sizes and of many colors, for they were a motley lot at Tytherington Farm. Some, like the motorcars, had known better times — two or three heavy hunters and one animal with a bit of blood in him who had had to forget their palmier days and mingle with a lower class of person; halfway horses with hairy heels and common features. The poultrymen especially had strange beasts to pull their light loads — like Ginger, a rawboned chestnut with a lot of yellow teeth (very like her namesake in
Black Beauty
, for “the ears were laid back and the eye
looked rather ill-tempered”), and a kind of outsize pony called Pony, who could trot at lightning speed despite having very short legs and sported a forelock that completely covered its face. The queen of them all, to my mind, was Flower, a purebred Shire mare. The only one to look the part, she dwarfed the rest.

Outside the stables, there were horses all over the place. The farmer and his wife hunted with the Wylye Valley, and there were always a number of fine animals turned out up on the downs in the off-season. And in an orchard behind the farm buildings there lived a strange assortment of very old pensioners — one mare was reputed to be forty-five years of age. And with them three gaunt mules, survivors of an eight-mule team that had done the plowing of the farm in the early twenties. Despite their impotence they dreamed vain dreams of virility and leaped upon the ancients with loud, pretentious brays.

Most of the working horses were quirky beasts, each with its own pet phobia. Alice, for example, half-Shire, half-something, and a sprightly thirty-eight, was totally trustworthy in traffic but terrified of gateposts. Driving Alice through a gateway, which might occur many times a day, was something to be done with maximum concentration and a firm hold of the reins. She had to be steered exactly between the posts — fearful monsters, as
you could see by her pricked ears, braced neck, and rolling eyes. They were waiting, she knew, to do her a terrible mischief, and if you should touch a careless wheel against one as you went through, Alice was off, no matter what the load, straight into a gallop that would have done justice to a two-year-old.

The great Flower had one bête noire or pet aversion (she was green, in fact) and that was a beast even larger than herself — the local bus. And her reaction was not to bolt but to buck. At sight of the approaching titan, she would throw herself against the breeching, tossing her head, whinnying, and paddling madly at the ground with her huge soup-plate hooves, the frenzy increasing as the bus drew nearer. Better to be in an empty Scotch cart than a loaded four-wheeled wagon when the giants met.

And then there was Foxianna. She was a liver-chestnut mare with rusty mane and tail who had served her time in the hunting field and was as biddable as you could wish. Until she saw a pig. Pigs to her were devils incarnate, and even the smell or the distant sound of them was enough to give her the vapors.

I drove her in a hay rake once, sitting contentedly in the iron seat as we swept up the rakings in a roadside field. The sun was shining, the mare plodded along sensibly, and I had learned to make her stop and start and turn and to
work the machine, leaving neat rollers of hay at regular intervals. But though there were no pigs on Tytherington Farm, there was a herd of Saddlebacks on the land beyond the road, and as we made a turn at the headland nearest to it, there they were, dozens of them, big ones and small ones, staring through the fence at us with malevolent little eyes.

“Pi-i-i-i-i-igs!” screamed Foxianna, or that's what it sounded like. And in one violent crashing movement she lunged backwards, digging the long, curved tines into the ground and sending me shooting out over the back, and then she was gone like the wind with the hay rake bouncing and clanging behind her flying ginger tail.

So I was run away from, but it was Billy Ball who was run away with. We had been picking up a field of wheat. The combine, or harvester-thresher as it was at first called, was beginning to be used in English cornfields, but the old reaper-and-binder was still the principal machine at work. The cut corn stood in shocks, or stooks, each of ten sheaves, stacked four against four with one to close each end off, their butts to the ground, their heads upright to catch the air and dry the moisture in the grain. Then, in time, they were loaded onto wagons and carried to the corn mow, built on a layer of brushwood — a “stavel” by name — to keep the bottom layers from the ground.
And there the wheat or barley or oats stayed, secure under a roof of thatch, until threshing time after the turn of the year.

This particular piece, of twenty or thirty acres I think, was of level downland and the spot chosen for the mow convenient; ideal therefore for the big four-wheeled horse-drawn wagons with their wooden “ladders” at either end, and in particular for the biggest of them all, that we called the Queen Mary, so enormous that no one but Flower was ever put to it, and even she could pull it only part-loaded. For a full load a trace horse was needed as well, and that day Albie was certainly building them full. With set weather, a dry flat ground, two of us pitching up on either side, and Billy up on the load to feed him, I wouldn't like to guess how many layings of long-strawed, heavy-headed wheat sheaves Albie built on the deck of the Queen Mary.

At last, from the top of the mountain, he said, “That'll do.” Tom stuck his prong into the side of the load for
Albie to grasp in his descent, and down he slid.

“Bist coming down, Uncle Billy?”

“I'll ride in to the mow, my dear, I'll ride in to the mow,” piped Billy, perched almost out of sight on the summit. But there was a fly in the ointment, or rather in the hot August air, that changed the whole idyllic scene in a flash. One moment the horses were standing quietly, waiting for the order to move on — Flower in the shafts and in the traces a much smaller but very strong and muscular animal, a bay horse called Mac — and the next they were all of a fidget, for though we could not, they could hear the gadfly's thin metallic whine. And then it struck.

It must have stung Mac, for before anyone could get to his head, he shot forward in one great galvanic bound, dragging Flower into her collar. And in terror she began to trundle, and immediately, it seemed, they were at the gallop, the Queen Mary sailing behind them, and on top of her, little Billy, flat on his belly, hanging on with every finger and toe.

If the field had been even bigger, it might have all ended happily as the horses tired. As it was, Mac ran slap into a five-strand barbed-wire fence and burst it. The pain of it brought him up short, and Flower executed an elephantine sort of swerve to miss him, and the Queen tipped up onto two wheels. Over went Albie's enormous load and down came Billy.

It could have been worse. Flower was all right, and Mac, though he was terribly cut all across his legs and broad chest, had suffered no irreparable harm and mended in due course. But at the time it was Billy we were worried about as we dashed up, convinced that a fall onto hard ground at speed from that height must have broken something, a leg maybe, possibly his scrawny neck.

And then we heard, coming from within that great pile of fallen sheaves, the familiar tones, even shriller than usual, and the familiar language, infinitely worse than ever, and out he popped like a little polecat. And seeing that he was all in one piece, we laughed till we cried. And the harder we laughed, the worse he swore.

I wouldn't put it past Billy Ball to be alive today, even though he'd have to be about a hundred and ten. But all the horses are long gone, and no hoof rings upon the cobblestones of the stables.

It was cold steel that ended my apprenticeship on Tytherington Farm. We were threshing barley at the side of a field called the Pig Ground (don't listen, Foxianna, I always thought). Excused, for once, being on the dust, I had been up in the pitch hole of the straw rick, feeding the sheaves to Albie. And when he had finished topping, I jumped down onto the wagon bed so that he could fill in the hole. Somebody, carelessly, had left a two-grain
prong leaning against the side of the wagon, points up, and as I swung off the bed to the ground, one tine went clean through my leg between the bone and the Achilles tendon and stuck out four inches clear on the other side.

I can't say it hurt that much going in, but it did coming out. Albie stood behind me and locked his arms round my chest, and Tom and Henry laid hold of the handle. And it was one, two, three, heave, and goodbye to the Wylye Valley.

I didn't see Tytherington again for five years. Caesar may just have come and seen and conquered. I went abroad and fought and came home full of holes. But that's a very different story.

N
ow let's go back a little bit in time. By the end of 1936, I had spent four years at my prep school, Beaudesert Park in the Cotswolds, and had just completed my first two terms at Marlborough.

I spent a lot of my school holidays with Jamie and his sister, Margaret, who lived just up the lane from me. We called ourselves the Red Hand Gang, a title whose blood-thirstiness was unwarranted, since all we did was to play endless card games or board games or, mostly, to wander around the countryside in a carefree way that no parents
these days could possibly allow. The gang's name came from the initiation ceremony (each scratched a finger with a pin and mingled the blood with that of the others) and certain tests had to be passed, such as leaping across ditches or climbing trees. My brother, Tony, was admitted when he reached the age of four or so, but with easier requirements (narrower ditches, shorter trees, no bloodshed).

On Christmas Day 1936, something happened that was to affect the whole of the rest of my life and, in due course, a large number of other lives.

I had been given an air rifle as a Christmas present and was trying it out, firing out of an upstairs window at the trunk of the old crab apple tree on the other side of the lawn, when, to my annoyance, I was required to stop and be introduced to a strange girl.

Mother and Father always had a large number of people, family and friends, for drinks on Christmas morning, and on this particular morning a couple who had recently moved into the district came with their two daughters. I didn't take much notice of the elder dark-haired one — she was sixteen, for goodness' sake, and of no interest to someone of my age. But the younger one was fourteen, like me, and she didn't look too bad as girls went. She had fair hair and large brown eyes and wasn't giggly or silly like most girls.