Pony Passion. Harriet Castor

still felt as if every step I took gave it a hideous jolt.

      Call me crazy, but in the hospital all I could think was: Kenny should be here! Kenny, as you probably know, is dead set on being a doctor when she grows up, like her dad. She just loves all that gruesome medical stuff. If she’d been sitting next to me while I waited in Casualty she would’ve been bouncing up and down in her chair with excitement and trying to guess what hideous diseases everyone else had.

      As it was, I was sandwiched between Mrs McAllister on one side of me and Mum on the other. Miranda, Mrs McA’s assistant, had rung my house as soon as we set off for the hospital.

      Mum kept saying relieved things like, “Thank goodness you were wearing a hard hat, poppet!”

      And Mrs McAllister kept saying apologetic things like, “Believe me, Mrs Collins, I would never let anyone out of the yard without one.”

      Mrs McAllister was looking quite shaken, actually. I guess it’s really rare that anyone hurts themselves at the stables.

      They’d given me some majorly strong painkillers, so I was feeling a bit better, though still really sore. It took ages to get everything sorted. They did an X-ray (Kenny would’ve been in orbit!), which showed that my arm was broken. Then, after another long wait, I had my plaster cast made. That felt mega weird.

      The cast went from my wrist to just above my elbow, and I was going to have to wear my arm in a sling, the nurse said, to hold it in place. Some slings are quite small, I think, but mine was like an enormous napkin. I felt like an Egyptian mummy!

      “How long do I have to wear the cast for?” I asked Mum on the way home.

      “Six weeks, the nurse said,” Mum replied. We stopped at some traffic lights and she turned to look at me. “Poor pumpkin. You were very brave.”

      Famous last words! For some reason that just made me burst into tears again. It was probably the shock of it all, Mum said later.

      When we got home, Dad came bounding out of the house and opened the car door for me. “But – what’s happened to you?” he said, gasping and staring at my plaster cast as if I’d just sprouted an alien growth.

      “Daaad! You are such a bad actor!” I shrieked. “Mum was on the phone to you every five minutes when we were in the hospital. I heard her!”

      “Oh. Right you are, then,” Dad said, slamming the car door behind me and ruffling my hair in the way that usually really annoys me. Tonight, for some reason, I didn’t mind.

      Ben and the baby, Spike, were already in bed, but my older brothers Stuart and Tom piled downstairs when they heard us come in. They’d even made a welcome home banner for me out of a couple of old tea towels stapled together.