Perhaps it was that tomboy bit of Selma he was attracted to. How he’d love to lend her Jemima, Mother’s chestnut, which she hardly rode, but he knew it wouldn’t be proper to single her out. The Bartleys and Cantrells didn’t mix socially and it would be taken amiss if they did. Pity, he sighed as he searched the crowd again. Riding high it was so easy to look down on villagers as if you were somehow above them.
Then he saw her watching him from the corner of Prospect Row, almost hidden. She was wearing a bright scarlet beret and scarf over her usual winter coat. He gave a short wave so as not to embarrass her and she smiled back mouthing ‘Good luck’. How he wished he could ask her to come and join them. Now the landlord was carrying a tray full of stirrup cups. Soon the 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…
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 Hester’s hunter is still in the barn out of the way. It was a good job she was being shoed here but I expect she’ll go with Master Guy or Angus before long.’
Selma wept over these dumb beasts that had no say in their fate. Next it would be her brothers and the boys who stood at the notice board regarding Lord Kitchener’s big poster: ‘Your Country Needs You’, his finger pointing accusingly towards her. Well, he wasn’t having any of her family. They were blacksmiths and farriers; important trades that kept the farm machines at work. Men could volunteer but her dad would have more sense and her brothers were too young. They knew nothing about fighting wars.
Suddenly it felt as if the whole world had gone mad. There were flags and bunting in the streets, and cheering processions as if this was something to shout about. Soon the village horses would pull guns and the guns would be let off and people would be getting killed. All because some duke they had never heard of got shot in a country she couldn’t find on the map. Why had they got to get involved? No one had explained it to her satisfaction, not even the Head, Mr Pierce, whom she’d heard was enlisting in the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, the famous ‘Havercake lads’.
‘Now the army’s gone, take Jemima out of the barn and into the paddock, Selma. Keep busy and don’t fret is my motto,’ Asa smiled. ‘Go and take that miserable face into the sunshine. Happen it’s time to stop the bullyboys in their tracks and show them what all our King’s men can do. Go on…wipe yer tears and get a bit of fresh air in your lungs.’
Selma led the tall chestnut mare out into the sunshine. She loved this gentle giant who had carried Guy on her back. The groom would be ages before he came to collect her, and then she remembered that Stanley and the stable boy had enlisted together to go with the horses. There was just the chance that Guy might…No, she mustn’t hope too much.
The late August afternoon sun beat on her forehead as she led the horse into shade and towards the slate trough where cool fresh water bubbled up from a natural spring. Soon the holidays would be over and she would take her post as proper teaching assistant alongside Marigold. Her brother, Jack, was with the Territorials and she kept boasting about him being the first in West Sharland to take the King’s shilling and asking why her brothers weren’t in uniform yet.
‘You have to be eighteen,’ Selma replied.
‘Who says?’ Marie sneered. ‘You don’t have to take your birth certificate. No one in Skipton would guess that Newton was underage if he signed on there.’
‘He has to help Dad.’
‘Frank can do that…Anyroad, when the horses go, he’ll have nowt to do, my dad says.’ There was no arguing with Marie. She was always right, but not this time. It was official. Dad needed an assistant and Frank was only sixteen and not very tall.
The urge to mount Jem was now just too hard to resist. They were old friends and riding bareback was no problem for Selma. ‘We’ll not let you go with those soldiers,’ she whispered in her ear. ‘You can hide in our barn any day. Now you and me can have a little trot round the paddock or I can ride you home, if no one comes for you.’ Guiding the horse to the mounting block by the gate, she slid onto