It was a warning of things to come, a message about the trouble animals can bring into your life. Maybe we should have listened. But we didn’t.
After much searching, we found a house we both liked, near Dartmoor. What sold it to us was a stunning five-foot-wide solid oak door with iron studding, which led into a small porch with oak seating and a tiny room above with a diamond-paned window. The door and the porch were probably worth more than the rest of the house and the garden put together. The property was surrounded by fields on all sides, and there were several outbuildings we could renovate. That was the good news. The downside was the carnage left by previous attempts at modernisation: concrete floors, orange and green painted beams, and the obligatory 1970s avocado bathroom suite. Undeterred, we moved in, along with our four Jack Russells, and began to do it up to our own taste, sourcing original Devon slate for the floors and ripping out the ancient plumbing.
The barns were over-run by cats and kittens, some of them feral, all in pretty bad shape. Michael’s daughter Clare (one of his five grown-up children) had come to help, so she and I set about rounding up these cats in order to take them to the Cat Protection League, where they could be spayed, wormed and eventually re-homed. We caught fifteen of them altogether, and ended up covered in scratches and bites, but we knew they would have a much better future with the charity than they would have had in our barns, where they were interbreeding and relying on whatever food they could catch. And we were better off without them as well, we mused, as we applied antiseptic and bandages to our wounds.
However, Michael and I are animal lovers. I grew up on a farm in Wiltshire and Michael had previously owned racehorses, so animals have always been a part of our lives. Once we found ourselves in a country setting with barns and fields, it was only a matter of time before we started filling them. Nature abhors a vacuum, so they say.
Walking down a lane near the house one day, Michael and I heard a pathetic bleating sound and peered under a hedge to see a goat tethered to a trailer. She was white, with pricked ears, and her rope had become tangled round the wheels of the trailer so she couldn’t reach her water bucket. Our neighbour, George, appeared round the corner.
‘Is that your goat?’ I asked.
‘Bloody nuisance, she is,’ he exclaimed. ‘My daughter brought her home, but unless we keep her tied up she runs off and eats everything she can reach in the garden, and some of the plants are poisonous. She seems to have some sort of homing device because every time my wife plants something a bit special, she immediately finds and demolishes it.’
I knew nothing at all about goats but I felt this one deserved more of a life than she had at present, grazing on a bare patch of earth and weeds attached to a rope that was just a few feet long.
‘I’ll probably have to send her to market,’ George added.
Michael and I looked at each other. There was something about this funny little goat that captivated me. As I watched her try to unwind the tangled tether she gazed up at me with an anxious bleat, asking me to help. She seemed quite smart. ‘I think she’s great, but it’s a shame she can’t enjoy a bit of freedom.’
Michael glanced at me with a weary expression. He knew what was coming.
‘She should be able to run around instead of being tied up.’
George raised an eyebrow, clearly deciding that we were ‘up-country’ folk with romanticised rural notions who might just be stupid enough to take on this troublesome creature. By this time I’d made my way through the hedge and was stroking the goat’s head.
‘I s’pose I could let you have her, if you want,’ he mused. ‘Course she did cost us a bit o’ money. ’Spect you wouldn’t mind giving us a tenner to make up for the loss.’
Michael reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a crumpled tenner, and George untethered the goat, whose name, it transpired, was Angie, and handed me the rope.
‘There you go,’ he said, and I think we caught the sound of a cackle as he disappeared off down the lane.
We looked at Angie and she looked up at us expectantly, then we took her down to her new home, where she lost no time in befriending the dogs. In fact, before long she was behaving just like a dog: coming when we called her name, joining us all for walks, and wandering into the house when she felt like it. She stole bread in the kitchen if we were foolish enough to leave it lying out, and she was even found upstairs in the bedroom a few times, nosing about amongst my clothes.
Next we decided we really should have a few hens – just enough to provide us with fresh eggs. We went to a livestock auction in Hatherleigh, the nearest village, but our lack of experience at auctions such as these told against us and we kept accidentally buying the scrawny, pecked hen in the cage next to the white silky one we’d had our eye on. Just the slightest twitch of the hand and I found myself the not-so-proud owner of yet another straggly specimen. Once the hammer had gone down, it was far too late to admit that I had bid for the wrong hen. Thereafter it was a little disconcerting to realise that the auctioneer always looked across at me when a particularly bedraggled specimen was held up to auction, waiting for my bid.
Flirty Gertie was definitely an accidental purchase. She was one of the ugliest hens you’ve ever seen, with dull grey feathers, a damaged eye and an extremely loud voice, especially if anything didn’t meet her approval. She didn’t lay eggs on a regular basis but she liked human contact and would always rush up to greet us, and she was happy to be lifted and cuddled. One of her special talents was stowing away in the back of the Land Rover when we were going out. Once, when Michael was in a bakery in Jacobstowe, he looked out the window to see Flirty Gertie holding up traffic as she pecked in the road outside, having hopped out of the back of the vehicle. Another time, she appeared in the churchyard as we were emerging from a service and it took most of the congregation chasing around in their Sunday-best clothes to recapture her. She was finally trapped in the church porch by the organist’s wife, who expertly hurled her best Sunday hat in such a way that it covered Gertie almost completely, and we could pick her up with relative ease.
So we had four dogs, umpteen scruffy hens, a goat and Michael’s mother all living with us. Michael’s children frequently came to visit, and we settled down to enjoy life in our new home. At no time had we ever discussed getting horses. We’d both grown up with horses and loved them but we knew what a huge commitment they required, in terms of both time and money. But then we met a woman called Pam in the local pub. She had bred horses all her life and had a yearling for which she was keen to find a home.
‘We’ll come and have a look,’ I said, ‘but only out of curiosity. We need a horse like we need a hole in the head.’
Poppy was a chestnut filly with huge brown eyes and a white blaze down her face. She had a wild, feisty expression and there was something about her that made me cautious. She was pretty but she was going to take some work. Was this really something I wanted to take on?
‘I think we should have her. How much do you want for her?’ Michael asked, and I turned to him, open-mouthed in disbelief. Whatever happened to discussion and consensus?
I realised my instincts about Poppy were correct as soon as we got her home, when she bolted out of the trailer. As I was attempting to lead her into the field we both ricocheted up the lane from one side to the other. She was clearly wilful and hadn’t had a lot of handling and, as I had originally suspected, it would probably take a while to teach her some manners. We had problems every time we moved her from barn to field and back again, but I’d had a lot of experience in dealing with youngsters and because she was quick and clever she soon began to understand the ground rules. However, she had a temper if things didn’t go her way, and we had many a battle of wills.
I have never liked to see animals on their own, and Poppy needed some company. On a hunch, I decided to put Angie the goat in the same field to see how they got on, and after a bit of mutual sniffing and nudging, they became instant best pals. Angie showed Poppy how to clamber up steep banks to eat blackberries from the bush. It was fascinating watching a horse delicately pluck a ripe fruit from its bed of thorns. Their mouths aren’t precise enough and