Everyone who lived at Tall Trees looked at the rector in bemusement as the thought of him driving something as old-fashioned as a trap was comical. As wonderful a clergyman as he was, they all knew that the general practicalities of life, and Roger, were not easy bedfellows.
Roger pretended not to notice the joshing expressions of those sitting around the kitchen table, reminding everyone instead that although he was able to keep a car, petrol rationing meant it wasn’t for everyday use. And probably no one needed reminding (they didn’t!) that he kept losing the bit of the engine he’d regularly remove – was it the distributor cap? Roger couldn’t remember – when he left the vehicle immobilised at night in accordance with the authorities’ instructions that all vehicle owners take something out of the engine when parked up, in order to make it as difficult as possible for Jerry to use if he were to invade. It was a good thing to do, obviously, but it was trying for everyone to keep tabs on where Roger had put the ‘thingymebob’.
Every single one of them had, at various times, helped Roger find something that he had put down somewhere and promptly forgotten about, usually because he placed his woolly, or his newspaper, or a tea towel on top, or because it had got buried by the muddle of papers on his overflowing desk in the study. More than once Peggy had found herself sitting down at the kitchen table only to jump up again immediately when she’d eased herself down on top of Roger’s favourite Swan fountain pen, the one he used to write his sermons. Only the week before she’d sat on his horn-rimmed reading spectacles that had been missing for over a day. Of course Mabel was always on at Roger to be more tidy, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she was just as bad at failing to put things in their proper place. In fact, it was only Peggy’s eye for detail and workman-like attitude for sorting things out, and using the scullery as a hiding place for the mountains of washing, that prevented the large, stone-flagged kitchen descending into chaos.
‘So, from now on, for ordinary parish business it’s going to be pony- (as opposed to horse-)power, with the car being reserved for real emergencies. What do you all think of that?’ Roger asked the table, encouragingly.
‘Madness.’ Mabel’s reply was eloquent in its brevity. She knew her husband well, so she didn’t think much more needed to be said.
‘I don’t like ’orses much,’ said Tommy, not that he really knew anything about them but this didn’t daunt him, ‘anyways, not as much as machine-guns like the…’, the words dying on his lips under Mabel’s stern look. She was trying to encourage her eleven-year-old son to think a bit less about weapons than he did, but it was an uphill battle as the Tall Trees boys did love to make competitive lists of guns or bombers or tanks, and they would spend hours carefully tracing photographs they saw in the newspaper and colouring them in.
Gracie added her bit with, ‘I’ve never taken to them – ’orses – either. Their big yellow teeth put me right off.’
‘Sounds like their mummies haven’t made them brush their teeth,’ joked Connie as she, quickly followed by her twin brother Jessie, bared her teeth, pulling her lips back with her fingers as far as she could, which of course the other children had to copy immediately too, accompanied by lots of sniggering.
Roger, Mabel, Peggy and Gracie dramatically rolled their eyes up to the ceiling, which made the youngsters do it all the more.
Despairing of the table manners of her niece and nephew but not wanting to spoil the moment, Peggy was surprised too about the pony arriving. Tall Trees was a very splendid rectory certainly, with massive windows and generously proportioned rooms. Although a sizeable amount of the large garden had been given over to the chickens and the vegetable plots, she supposed there was still quite a lot of lawn and patches of grass a pony could nibble. But this wouldn’t get around the fact that Harrogate was a bustling place and it seemed odd to Peggy for Roger to be contemplating having a pony and trap in a relatively built-up area. Then she reminded herself how spacious, grand and grassy Harrogate had seemed when she and ten-year-old Connie and Jessie had arrived to their new billet on their evacuation from London the previous September, so used were they to Bermondsey’s tightly packed terraced streets and the River Thames flowing silently out to sea only a stone’s throw away from where they lived. ‘How did the offer of the pony and trap come about?’ Peggy asked Roger.
A farmer called Mr Hobbs was fed up with an extra mouth to feed that wasn’t earning its keep in these straightened times, Roger explained, and so following a sermon he’d given one Sunday that managed to speak about the value of Shank’s pony, and Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus (Roger having been inordinately proud of a joke he had been able to construct around these two things), Mr Hobbs had offered Roger the pony and trap on loan to use as an alternative to the car when out and about his parish.
‘I thought at once of our unused stables just across the back yard and so I just heard myself replying “what a wonderful offer” and “of course we’d love to have the pony and its trap”,’ Roger said.
Mabel shook her head as if to say that Roger had very possibly taken leave of his senses. But there was a twinkle in her eye and Peggy didn’t think Mabel was really put out by what Roger had agreed.
‘I suppose my acceptance might have been hastened by having already had to bicycle to old Mr Bennett at dawn – he’s on his last legs, poor chap, and there’ll be bad news soon – and then go straight over to see Mrs Daley as her own brood and their evacuees have all got chickenpox. And all before breakfast, might I say, which was a lot of pedalling on the boneshaker, I can tell you,’ mused Roger, ‘and I thought of a pony and trap, and sitting there thinking up ideas for my sermon, and it seemed a good thing…’
Peggy knew how heavy Roger’s ancient bicycle was, and she saw his point.
Mabel didn’t look so sympathetic. ‘’Onestly, Roger, what are you like? Well, you kiddies shall take care of t’ pony,’ Mabel told the children, ‘an’, you all mark this, I’ll send ’im back the first sign o’ trouble, you see if I don’t.’
‘Deal!’ they yelled in chorus, clearly delighted with the furry new arrival, and the long summer holidays stretching ahead not too far away.
Mabel had taken charge of getting everything ready for the pony, and after school she had set the children to cleaning out one of the shabby old stables and slapping a new coat of whitewash over the ancient brick walls. After, that is, they had dealt with a veritable festoon of cobwebs that needed pulling down. Connie turned out to be the only one without any fear of the host of understandably now tetchy spiders, much to the embarrassment of the boys, Tommy and Jessie, but Aiden too. He was a Harrogate lad in Tommy’s class and was also staying at the rectory where the boys all bunked up together in a huge but always messy bedroom. This meant that Aiden’s parents could rent out his room as there had been such an influx of people to the area since the war had begun.
Next, Mabel made the gang swish the tail end of a bar of red Lifebuoy carbolic soap about in piping-hot water from the kettle on the hob that had been poured into a couple of metal pails until the water looked opaque and medicinal. Then the children happily sloshed it about in the stall to thoroughly disinfect the floor, before using a stiff broom to swoosh the dirtied water outside. Then they neatly piled some bales of straw and hay, which had arrived while they were at school, into the stall next door, all the boys except Jessie trying to show how strong they were for the benefit of the girls.
The two buckets they’d used had been scrubbed and rinsed to within an inch of their lives to remove any smell of the Lifebuoy, after which Connie and Aiden chased each other around with the buckets half-filled with clean water trying to splash each other. Once the children were worn out, the buckets had been allowed to air-dry, as had an old zinc dustbin with a tightly fitting lid that had also been disinfected and would keep vermin out so the pony’s hard feed could be kept clean and dry. Afterwards, even Mabel couldn’t bring to mind anything else that needed doing.
This wasn’t like Mabel at all, and so