Stacy Gregg - Prince of Ponies

“Really?” I asked.

“Sure,” the groom said. He tied the rope to the shank of the colt’s halter and then he passed the end to me. I took hold of it, like I was grasping the tail of a snake.

The young groom laughed at me. “No. You must get in close. Hold the colt tight, right up at the shank of the rope. You are safer being close to him – he cannot take a hoof to you if you are right beside him.”

“A hoof?” I squeaked.

The young groom nodded. “Prince is pretty handy with his front hooves. I was leading him back to the stables the other day and he rose up on his hindquarters and struck me across the back of the head. Knocked me out.” He saw the look of fear on my face. “He was just playing. He’s spirited, that’s all – not a bad horse, just a hothead. You can do this. Just keep your eyes on him and stay at his shoulder and move with him whenever he moves. Yes, there! You’re doing much better already. You see how you can use your body to block him and keep him in line? That’s it …”

Looking back, it was crazy to give me such an unpredictable horse to handle. I was only nine! But it certainly took my mind off the Russians. I had my eyes glued to Prince as he danced and fretted. I should have been afraid, I suppose, with all the talk of deadly flying hooves and this half-wild horse dancing wildly at my side. But there was so much else to fear that day that the horse slipped down the list of things that I needed to be afraid of. And, after a while, it seemed to me to be second nature to have him bouncing and prancing along beside me.

That groom needn’t have bothered to tell me to watch Prince, because at that moment I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was so beautiful the way his sinew and muscle rippled beneath grey steel. The black stockings that marked his elegant ballerina legs, and the gossamer silver of his silken mane. The proportions of his face were so perfect they were almost unreal, from the deep curve of his concave profile to the taper and flare of his sooty velvet muzzle. And his ears. He had such small, delicate ears, curved in a little and short and sharp. They swivelled about to catch my words as I spoke to him. This horse was smart, and he was listening intently to everything I said. Horses do not talk, of course, but they are good listeners.

As we walked down the road that day, with the sun setting, I talked and talked with Prince beside me, his ears swivelling the whole time. I told him all about my life and my family. I knew nothing of his own family at that point, of course. It was only later that I would find out that Prince’s own parents, like mine, were here on the road with us. In fact, Prince’s sire, his father, was that impressive, powerful white stallion the head groom himself was riding. Prince’s mother was with us too, running with the mares. She was a dark bay with limpid brown eyes. I wish I’d realised who they were, because I would so have liked to have gazed at them, just that once. After this day was over, I would never get the chance again.

We were on the road and I was just thinking it must almost be time to set up camp for the night, when the planes came. There was the roar of engines and then the black shapes silhouetted in the sky above the trees. Three aircraft, coming from the south-west. There could be no doubt that they were German Luftwaffe, the airborne attacking force, and a moment after they came into sight, the planes directly opened fire!

There was screaming and suddenly everyone was running everywhere. The horses were completely forgotten – all anyone cared about was getting to cover as the planes flew closer and closer, all the while firing on us relentlessly. I saw a horse fall in a hail of machinegun fire, and at that moment I knew this was all too real.

“Don’t they see we aren’t soldiers?” my father was shouting. “There are women and children here!”

Bu the Germans didn’t seem to care. They were firing at us.

I wish I could say that I held my nerve enough to keep hold of Prince, but that would not be true. What happened next was not because I held him. It was my own nervous habit that bound us together. As we’d been walking, I’d been fiddling with the rope, looping it round my wrist. I didn’t realise how dangerous this could be or that, the instant the gunfire began and Prince startled and bolted, the rope would jerk into a tight knot and I would be literally dragged off my feet and into the forest behind the runaway colt.

I remember being flung about on the ground as if I were a sack of hay, and then the roughness of the bracken against my skin as Prince dragged me off the road and into the trees. And then I must have hit something with my head, because when I woke up, everything was woozy and I felt a lump on my skull almost as big as my fist, throbbing and hot from where I’d been struck. Prince, all heaving and sweaty, was still there, standing over me. And the rope was tight as a hangman’s noose round my wrist, so my fingers had turned white from lack of blood. When I wrenched off the rope, they tingled for ages with pins and needles, and there were rope burns and bruises. That rope saved me, though, because Prince had managed to wrap it round a tree when he’d bolted. The rope had pulled taut and had tethered him tight to the tree trunk, so in the end he can’t have dragged me very far. He’d tried to break free, but no matter how hard he pulled on that rope, it had only tightened more round the trunk and bound him to the tree. So the rope held him, and it held me. I had to cut myself loose with a pocketknife, but I left Prince tethered to the tree until I could figure out what to do.

I was still woozy. The last thing I remembered before I was knocked out was the machinegun rattle and the sky filled with German planes roaring above. Now the noise was gone. The sky was silent. And the forest too. And when I shouted out for my parents, again and again, there was nothing. Everybody had gone and we were alone …

***

Zofia rose to her feet, forcing little Rolf to stand up and leap off her lap on to the carpet. “We will finish now,” she said.

“No!” Mira was distraught. “We can’t stop now. I need to know what happens next!”

“It will have to wait until next time,” Zofia said, pointing at the clock above the fireplace. “Mira, you are late for school.”

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