Authors: Dawn French
The first time we lived off camp was around 1971–3 when my dad was posted close to home at St Mawgan in Cornwall. My parents rented a farmhouse called Roskear Farm in St Breock near Wadebridge. At last, we had a couple of meadows and a barn. There was NO excuse now. My dad would have to have a heart of ice to deny me the pony-love I craved. Imagine my total joy when one day he told me there would be a horse in the barn when I returned from school that coming Friday night. For me. A horse, for me. Actually, not just one horse, but two! Oh my
actual
God, at last, all of my clippy-cloppy dreams had come true. I had to endure four more sleeps before I could meet them, and each one of the sleeps was full of pony dreams, where I was astride a powerful thoroughbred, cantering bareback along the seashore with my hair fluttering in the wind, like a Timotei advert.
Imagine, then, my surprise when I was introduced to a little fat chestnut pony and her wall-eyed foal. It transpired that my dad had come across these two abandoned dobbins on a garage fore-court, left in lieu of a debt, and my dad, feeling sorry for them and seeing a chance to fulfil my dream, had struck some curious deal. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful and, actually, I was devoted to them both, but it was a typical example of the Frenchies not getting it quite right. I renamed the pony Shula, after a character on
The Archers
, and her unbroken, uncontrollable foal Marty, after Marty Feldman, who was one of my favourite funnymen and who also had wonky eyes. Shula hadn’t been ridden for ages and was quite unwilling, initially, to have a tubby sack of potatoes like me clambering all over her. Her saddle didn’t fit her properly and neither did her bridle. We couldn’t afford to replace them, so my dad set to with his toolkit, did a bit of tack tailoring, and somehow we made do. Shula was just beginning to get used to me riding her each weekend, when the spring came – and to my horror her entire mane fell out and so did her tail, leaving cracked skin and festering sores everywhere. We called the vet and found out that this was a disease called ‘sweet itch’, which only shows up when ponies who suffer from it eat the spring grass. Of course there was no sign of it when Dad brought them home. We had to bring her in and keep
the
flies from her, cover her in greasy white antibiotic cream and put her on a strict diet of garlic and nettles. We even sought advice from the local witch, recommended by the farmer next door, who vouched for her traditional potions which had cured many of his cattle’s various illnesses. She made up a cream from God knows what mixed with what the hell’s that, and we tried that for a while but to no avail. Gradually, as the months went by, Shula started to heal up a bit but the hair didn’t grow back. So there I was, at the local county show, having brought my precious pony to take part in the prestigious gymkhana. All the pony-club girls were turned out like new pennies in their correct gear, with their shiny hair in nets, their shiny buffed-up boots, and their shiny tack, mounted on their shiny, muscly big horses. Then there was me, in one of my dad’s old gardening jackets and my welly boots, wobbling about on a scuffed old saddle atop a scabby, bald, fat pony with zero interest in completing the course. We were straight out of a Thelwell cartoon. However, I held my head high and we finished the course with no panache whatsoever. As we romped home, with Shula farting on every stride, in last place in the gymkhana games, the final humiliation happened, and the saddle, which had never fitted properly and which had gradually worked its way up to Shula’s shoulders where it was utterly loose, just slid slowly all the way round, with me still attached. For a brief second before I hit the grass I was actually riding my pony upside down. No one could accuse us of unoriginality!
So, you see, Shula was essentially pretty much pants at all the classic pony stuff, but I tell you what she was great for – hugging. I used to spend ages in that barn with my brush and currycomb
and
hoof pick, just grooming and primping her. I would have liked to plait her mane and tail but sadly the baldness prevented it. So I would put my arms about her neck and hug her. We would stand in this quiet loving embrace for hours, just hugging and breathing.
I settled happily for that sweetness. As is so often the case with me. I know I won’t get most things exactly right, so I seek the parts I
can
do, and love, and enjoy those, in the full knowledge that someone is doing the other, perfect stuff confidently elsewhere. Just not me. Hey-ho.
I HAVEN’T SEEN
you or heard anything about you for a lot of years now. Whenever I was visiting Plymouth or Cornwall, I used to get little snippets of information about you. Sightings of you in various places, or stories about what you’d been up to, the jobs you had, the people you hung around with. Such was the residual strength of our adolescent relationship in the minds of others, they felt the need to update me about you. I didn’t mind at all. It was good to be still aware of you, still interested in you. I haven’t heard anything for some time now, though, so I hope you’re all right. I suddenly feel concerned for you, and that concern is very familiar. I was always worried for and about you. Your life seemed so stormy and often very difficult.
I was 16. You were the first boy I felt the right, or right
about
, to call ‘my boyfriend’ in public. Plenty of boys disliked this kind of proprietorial display, but you were cool about it. I liked that. We were included in each other. I was part of you, and you were part of me. Quite often our couplenicity was camouflaged by the busy groups we hung around in. We would hold hands proudly, but the intimacy and exclusivity I so enjoyed were inevitably diluted by the distraction of so many others. We sat endlessly in sweaty clusters in pubs trying to be, and for the most part succeeding in being, served alcohol when we were so obviously underage. Dubonnet and lemonade. Lager and lime. Rum and Coke. Always something AND something. Never just
something
. Never just wine, or just cider. The AND something helped the drink to be sweeter, more like pop, which was what I really wanted to drink all along.
Rather than boisterous evenings in big gangs, I preferred the quieter times, because in you I found probably the first boy I could talk to properly, about virtually anything. We were easy in each other’s company and I was so very impressed with you, with everything you thought and said. I was consumed with thinking about you all week at school. Images of you, constantly pulsing through me, and I couldn’t wait till Friday afternoons when we could be together again. I loved how funny you were, and how utterly irreverant. You were without doubt the cheekiest chap in Cheekyville.
My friend Jane was dating your friend John and a considerable amount of time was spent sneaking off to a flat somewhere in Mutley that John had keys to. Do you remember? We took boxes of cheap Spanish wine-inspired liquid, and got bladdered and laughed A LOT. The booze helped with any shyness or awkwardness. It was fabulous to be in a proper flat, pretending we all lived there, slobbing about, drinking and listening to Thin Lizzy, T. Rex and The Sweet. Eventually the laughing and flirting would dwindle and in our separate partnerships and on opposite sofas, we got down to the serious business of petting. Light petting, heavy petting, moderate to heavy petting and a healthy dose of extreme and nearly dangerous petting. Hours and hours of mutual, delightful exploration. I can still remember the excitement of going practically all the way but stopping just inches this side of trouble, pulling in to the temptation lay-by for refreshments and a cool-down. All blood returning from groin to brain,
momentarily
. Lovely. Safe … And then we’d be at it again, just to test if we dared go further each time. It’s amazing how inventive you can be when you are both aware of the limitations. The constraints demand creativity. In fact, I would definitely say that once you have crossed the line of propriety into the full penetrative mode, I’m not sure you can ever reclaim the bliss that was those endless hours of innocent twiddling.
I remember you lived in Modbury, an impossibly pretty town built on a huge hill. When I first knew you, your mum ran the cafe called The Teapot, I think, which stood at a 45-degree angle to the steep gradient of the high street. I liked your mum Mary very much, she seemed liberal and exciting to me. You and your brothers and your cool, handsome dad could so easily have run any mum ragged but she seemed to revel in the testosterone-charged energy in that house. It was a loud, muscular, masculine environment, but she was the feisty feminine buoy you all tethered your roaring adolescent engines to. Lots of men and then Mary, running her tea shop with great panache, and with
great
scones. Oh Lord, those scones were the utmost in tip-topness, they were sublime tasty treats, they looked good enough to eat. Oh, that’s right, they
were
good enough to eat. So we did. Plenty. Plenty. Heaving with home-made strawberry jam and lashings of crusty clotted cream. Probably travelling directly from mouth to arteries, but hey, they were young arteries, and anyway, what price Elysium? Yum-yum in my tum.
It seemed pretty much perfect, our tender, young relationship. Somewhere in the midst of the perfectness, you arranged a party. Was it a birthday party? Maybe not – your parents were chilled out and would, I think, have let you have a party for no particular
reason
so long as it was well organised. The excitement of it all was massive. I remember lots of frantic phone calls (not easy or cheap from boarding school where the queue for the phone was constant and achingly slow) to discuss everything. Who should come? What music should there be? How would we all get there? What to drink? Eat? Wear? We were determined that we should all get a bit drunk, but the skill was to be drunk enough to party but not so bladdered that anyone was sick all over your nice house thereby compromising any future parties.
The day of the party came and I remember we spent quite a lot of time and effort making the house ready. Your mum and dad had agreed they would stay out of the way and watch telly upstairs. Close enough to help in a crisis but far enough away so’s not to interfere or cramp anyone’s style. We had the rum AND the Coke, the lager AND the lime. We had home-edited tapes made with meticulous care by recording particular songs directly from the radio during the Sunday-evening chart show.
All
our favourite music! – one song after another! – on the
same
tape! Omigod. Modern state of the art technology.
Contrary to your typical party-thrower’s last-minute paranoia, our mates actually turned up and the party started. It was just right. People got drunk quite quickly and unexpected couplings started to happen, which is the stuff of a great party. Various abandoned partners were in various states of despair on various front steps in the street. You were in your element as the host, chiefly finding interesting new mixes of alcohol. I’m not sure vodka and lager were ever going to be happy bedfellows but I was glad to be part of their inaugural outing. The atmosphere was loud with the tapes blaring out and the clamouring of teenagers
trying
to be heard above the music. There was laughing and sobbing and singing in equal measure. We were sweaty from snogging and dancing, and we were hoarse from shouting and crying. The room oozed that fantastic funk of hot hormones and alcohol, and we couldn’t have been happier. Teenage kicks all through the night …
The next thing I remember was your mum shrieking for you. The kind of shrieking that pierced the din like a pin through a balloon. I heard her. You heard her. It was a painful sound to hear. It was an urgent and frightened cry. The party lumbered on but through the swaying bodies I saw you stumbling towards your mum and I saw fear in her eyes. What was going on? You disappeared upstairs with her and my memories of the following hour or so are a jagged blurry collage of strangeness and horror. I waited a while, then I started to climb the stairs to find you. One of your brothers stopped me and said something was wrong. Your dad. He had passed out. Call an ambulance. Don’t go up there. Don’t call an ambulance. Someone had already done that. Get everyone out. Stop the party. Send them all home. Your mum crying. Turn off the music. Drunken complaints. You shouting and telling everyone to go home. Tears in your eyes. People staggering about, drunk and confused. You darting out to the front door to check for the ambulance. Teenagers on the dark street. They expected to crash on the floor tonight. How were they to get home? Plymouth was twelve miles away. What’s happened? Shock and fear. A creeping dread. Still your mum crying. Your brothers shaking. You pacing like an angry animal, ashen and anxious. A taut and strange stillness. The ambulance arriving. The rush of fresh air coming in with the paramedics. The
urgency
of action. Some quiet mumbling from the upstairs room. The muffled calling of your dad’s name. Heavy footfalls on the stairs. Your dad on a stretcher. An awkward descent. A glimpse of his pallid face. I knew. I knew. Random puzzled party kids colliding with the stretcher by mistake. Apologies. Sirens. You were gone. All your family were suddenly gone. Only the chaotic debris of a broken party was left.
I can’t remember what happened next. How did I get home? Where and how did we all go? Who locked up? Did we clear up? I don’t know.
My next memory is the following day at home, sobbing into my dad’s chest and feeling the hard buttons of his shirt making marks on my face. He held me so tight and stroked my head and tried to comfort me through the shock. It was the first time I ever dared to imagine a death in the family or what it might be like to lose my own father. How unbearably painful that would be. How were you, Nick, going to cope with it? I knew I would be devastated if it was him,
my
precious father. I would be lost. The sorrow would surely melt me away. It was unthinkable. Then my dad spoke to me about you properly for the first time. How one of the things he liked about you was your irrepressible cheek. He said it took some courage to be so cheeky, that it was a risky strategy to adopt in life because it could backfire so easily. That your pluck and wit combined to make you a person of substance. He told me that you would feel bereft but that you were a reinforced person, a survivor, whose close-knit family would sustain you through your grief, and prop up your courage. I knew he was right. I knew you would have to be brave about it eventually but at that very moment I was apart
from
you and had no concept of how you could still be breathing. How could you be doing anything normal, that other people whose fathers HADN’T just died were doing? How were you functioning? At all?