Black Beauty's Family Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  FOREWORD

  BY BLACK ABBOT

  Black Beauty’s great-great-great-great nephew

  BLACK EBONY

  By Josephine Pullein-Thompson

  BLACK PRINCESS

  By Diana Pullein-Thompson

  BLACK VELVET

  By Christine Pullein-Thompson

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Everyone’s heard about Black Beauty, probably the greatest horse that ever lived. But what about the rest of his family? Here we meet some of his other extraordinary relations, each with an amazing story to tell. There’s his brother, Black Ebony, who is involved in a terrible mining accident; his great niece, Black Princess, a heroine in World War One; and Black Velvet, a distant relation whose life as a show jumper is about to change dramatically.

  Black Beauty’s Family

  Josephine, Diana and Christine Pullein-Thompson

  FOREWORD

  BY BLACK ABBOT

  Black Beauty’s great-great-great-great nephew

  Because of the world-wide interest shown in the autobiography of my kinsman, Black Beauty, I have now taken the liberty of gathering together the life stories written by three other members of my extraordinarily talented family.

  These three mildewed manuscripts were found in a loft, in a saddle room medicine cupboard and beneath a pile of rubbish in a deserted loosebox, and, except for the occasional indecipherable word, have been published exactly as they were written.

  I feel sure that readers will enjoy Black Ebony’s tale of the 1880s and 90s, his life among the pit ponies, his rather raffish episode as a theatrical horse; Black Princess’s story which includes her adventures in the Great War of 1914–18 and Black Velvet’s account of the difficult years of the 1930s and the early days of showjumping.

  I have also compiled a simple family tree to help those who wish to know the exact relationship each story-teller bears to our famous kinsmen.

  BLACK EBONY

  Josephine Pullein-Thompson

  Black Beauty’s Family

  1

  MY FOALHOOD

  I DID NOT enjoy being Black Beauty’s youngest brother. Our mother, Duchess, had grown very old by the time I arrived; she was rather lame, a little blind and preferred to think about the past rather than the present or the future. Because Rob Roy her eldest foal had died young in a hunting accident, most of her thoughts had centred on her second foal, Black Beauty, and though there had been four fillies and an unsatisfactory colt in between us, it was Black Beauty who was held up as an example of all goodness and elegance and correct behaviour throughout my foalhood. When she talked to the other mares about him he sounded more like a saint than a horse and whenever I misbehaved I was told that Black Beauty would never have thought of doing such a thing. I grew to dislike my famous brother very much and I early decided that since I had no hope of rivalling him in goodness I would be as bad as possible and perhaps collect some fame for that.

  Farmer Grey’s big field was a perfect place to rear foals. There were trees for shade, a large shed in which to shelter from flies or bad weather, a brook for drinking water and a pond for paddling and from which a naughty foal could drive the ducks in wing-flapping hysteria.

  I had been named Ebony. The story went that soon after my birth old Farmer Grey and old Daniel, the head horse-man on the farm, and Ned his son had been looking me over and they had said, ‘Not a white hair on him, he’s as black as ebony!’ and the name had stuck. My mother always seemed rather disappointed by my lack of white markings. ‘Your brother had a very pretty star,’ she would say, ‘and one neat little white sock.’ I never needed to ask which brother, Rob Roy and Black Warrior were rarely mentioned.

  There were three middle-aged mares, all old friends of my mother’s, turned out with us and I was supposed to play with their foals but they were all younger than I was and less adventurous and I hankered after the company of the yearling cart colts who lived in the adjoining field. I would watch them at their exciting games and hold cheeky conversations with them over the hedge. My mother was always calling me away, ‘They are not our class, dear,’ she would say. ‘You must remember that you are well-bred and high born, your grandfather won the cup at Newmarket two years running.’ I didn’t care about being high born, I wanted to play rough games, and when I grew older and stronger I found a low place in the hedge and I would jump over and spend a happy hour racing and chasing, biting, rearing and kicking with the much larger but slower and less nimble cart colts, while my mother and her friends stood in a row watching over the hedge and neighing anxiously for me to come back.

  My mother was very shocked by this behaviour, but when Farmer Grey learned what I was up to he only laughed and told her, ‘You’ve got a proper little monkey this time, old Pet.’ And he always gave me pieces of bread and told me that I would make a fine hunter one day and that Sir Clarence was already inquiring about Duchess’s new foal.

  My mother disapproved of hunting. She didn’t explain to me that it was because Rob Roy had broken a leg and had to be shot, she just grumbled about foolish men who broke their necks and ruined good horses all for the sake of chasing one little fox or hare, so I’m afraid I paid no attention to her but went off to boast to my cart horse friends that I was soon to be a hunter and must practise galloping and leaping.

  I never saw hounds until one day in early spring when I was nearly two years old. In the distance we heard this stirring, musical sound. My mother listened and declared it to be the horn and then, as it came nearer and nearer, all the horses became very excited and stood with their heads high and ears pricked or galloped round their fields. Suddenly hounds came in view: thirty or forty of them black, brown and white, all giving tongue and behind them came the huntsman blowing his horn and behind him a great many people in scarlet or black coats mounted on fine looking horses.

  In a flash I was in with the cart colts, in another flash I was over their hedge and following hounds, so excited by their deep cry and the wild thud of galloping hoofs that I scarcely knew what I was doing. Behind I heard the hedge break and crush beneath the feet of the cart colts as they followed me over.

  Some of the riders shouted and cracked whips at us but the pace was too hot and the horses too eager for anyone to stop and drive us back to our field. So we galloped on with them trying to take the fences as they did.

  I managed quite well for a time. Watching for a horse ahead to blunder, I would follow taking advantage of a smashed top rail or a battered hedge, but then a hedge with a terrible, dark ditch on the take-off side barred my way. My courage failed me and I refused and in doing so turned across the path of another horse. There was a furious shout from the rider and the stinging cut of a whip across my quarters. I wheeled away and then stopped at a safe distance to watch the huge and beautiful horses striding up full of confidence, and skimming over with the greatest of ease. One day, I told myself, I would leap like that.

  The cart colts caught up with me and we milled about confused and all dripping with sweat. The tail end of the field was passing us now and a stout cob whinnied to us. We followed his fat round quarters and docked tail to the corner of the field where he bucked over a small stile.

  I raced ahead of the cart colts and flew over after him, there was a crack and the sound of splintering wood as the others followed me. The cob’s rider was the same square shape as his horse and he wore a rusty black coat and not a smart scarlet one, but he certainly knew the countryside and cutting across two ploughed fields and through a small wood, he brought us up with hounds again. The pace was still fast and I was getting b
reathlesss and tired. My unshod feet were sore and the heavy, clinging plough had slowed me to a weary canter.

  The stout cob was fitter and had the staying power of an adult horse, sadly I watched his quarters grow smaller and smaller. The last stragglers, hounds and horsemen passed me, then the cart colts appeared. ‘Let’s go ’ome, Eb,’ they said. ‘Do you know the way?’ I didn’t, but obviously we couldn’t jump back over those fences in cold blood, so we looked for open gates and gaps in hedges and presently, just as the sun was going down, we came to a green lane. We wandered along, stopping to sample the patches of spring grass which had come through in the sheltered corners, for we were now very hungry. Then the lane widened and we saw a group of living carriages or painted wooden houses on wheels. There were two small fires burning and a number of horses and ponies tethered nearby.

  We stopped and snorted, but one of the ponies whinnied to us so we went on. Suddenly the shapes of men and boys sprang up silently all round us. I turned in my tracks and tried to flee, but there were gipsies behind us too. One man leaped at me and grabbed my forelock and my ear. Terrified I reared trying to shake him off, but he swung with me, all his weight on my ear and forelock. He hurt me very much and I hated the smell of him and the dark, swarthy face and the rings which dangled from his ears. One hand slid down my nose and he gripped my nostrils with a cruel force.

  I plunged and reared violently, I struck out with my forelegs and, still not dislodging him, I reared, higher and higher. He still clung to me and maddened by pain and terror I reared higher still. For a moment I was vertical, then I lost my balance and toppled backwards landing with such force that for a moment I lay stunned.

  Then I realised that I was free. There was no hand gripping my ear, no evil smelling fingers in my nostrils, I scrambled up and neighed to the cart colts as I charged the arm-waving, stick-brandishing men who tried to stop me. One stepped right into my path, but I was now so frantic with fear and so determined not to be captured that I would not swerve. My chest knocked him to the ground and I did my best not to tread on him as he sprawled beneath my feet.

  I neighed to the colts again as I galloped up the lane, not daring to look behind me. The lane led to a small road and there on a green, surrounded by cottages, grazed one of my friends. I stopped beside him. We looked back and neighed, then we listened. There was an answering neigh and presently a lone figure with a wide, white blaize came galloping through the dusk to join us. ‘They’ve got Punch,’ he said, ‘they’ve put ropes on him, he can’t get away.’

  Later we had stopped to graze when we heard the steady clip-clop of a shod horse approaching at the walk and the sound of cart wheels, and an old cob came along. The reins were loose on his back and a snoring noise came from the bottom of the cart. ‘Drunk again,’ he said crossly. ‘It’s the same every market day. You young fellows lost?’

  We fell in beside him and told him our story as we walked along.

  ‘Better come to our place,’ he said, ‘you’ll be safe there and I expect someone will come looking for you by and by.’

  So we followed him along the road and up the lane to his farm. We heard the farmer reproached by his son as he was pulled from the cart and supported indoors, we heard the old cob praised as he was unharnessed, watered and fed. We drank at the water trough and then hung about sheepishly waiting for attention and presently the yard gate was shut and we were thrown a couple of armfuls of hay.

  We spent a miserable day or two in that farmyard wondering whether we would ever see our own farm and our lovely fields again and then at last Farmer Grey came with Dick and Ned in the gig and they led us home.

  My mother and all the other horses were delighted to have us back safe and sound, but poor Punch never returned.

  2

  MY APPRENTICESHIP

  THIS EPISODE WITH the gipsies, followed by the operation which many colts undergo to turn them into geldings, combined to make me far less trusting. For a few months I was very nervous of all strange men, then the memories faded a little but I was never again the same reckless youngster; I knew that cruelty and danger existed.

  I would still jump out of my field especially in the spring when the smell of fresh green grass tempted me from the other side of the hedge, but I never wandered far. I still longed to be a hunter, but I had decided to wait until I was old enough to carry a human guide.

  The summer I was three years old Farmer Grey sent me to live in the field by the railway line, as he did all his young horses, for this cured any nervousness of trains and enabled them to trot in and out of railway stations all their lives without the least fear.

  Then, at four years old, I was broken in. I was very glad to have work to do for I was heartily bored with my uneventful life and longed to be out in the world. I enjoyed learning to go round in a circle on the lunge rein and to walk, trot and canter on command. I didn’t object to the saddle but I found the feel of the girth very constricting at first, especially when it was pulled tight, and I made ferocious faces whenever this was done. I hated the bridle straps pressing close round my ears and I did not care overmuch for the feeling of a bit in my mouth.

  However, old Daniel and Ned were so kind and patient with me and they praised and petted me so much that I put up with all these discomforts and gradually they became part of the day’s routine and eventually I ceased to notice them. Ned was a good rider, very quiet and calm and I felt quite pleased to carry him. At first his extra weight made all my movements awkward and difficult, but, as I grew stronger, I learned to carry his weight as well as my own and regained the feeling of balance and power that I had always had when free.

  The next hurdle was being shod and this I found very hard to bear. Standing in the forge, endlessly picking up my feet. The smoke and smells, the clank of iron, the hiss of water; the strange feeling of having my feet hammered as the nails were driven in combined to make me very fidgety. I was not a very patient horse and if Ned hadn’t been there to comfort me I don’t think I could have stood it. Afterwards my feet felt very heavy and cumbersome and made a deafening clip clop on the road, but I became used to it all in time.

  The weeks that followed were very happy ones for Ned began to take me out for rides. Sometimes we took messages; to the Mill, to other farmers, to the saddler and harness maker and sometimes we just went where we would. I enjoyed trotting through the woods, talking to the charcoal burner and the woodmen watching the teams of huge horses pull the timber wagons laden with great trees. I enjoyed galloping over commons and fields, climbing to the tops of hills so that we could look over and see what lay on the other side.

  Everyone seemed to know Ned and we often stopped to chat to the postman on his pony, the carrier with his horse. In the early mornings we would meet all the donkey carts from the small farms on the hills taking the churns of milk to the station and in the evenings we would meet the horses coming home from their work in the fields, their drills and harrows and ploughs left behind, the ploughman would sit sideways on one horse and lead the other.

  I had begun to regard myself as an educated horse ready for the world but I soon found that Farmer Grey thought otherwise and, later on that summer, I was broken to harness. I hated being driven. All those straps; blinkers spoiling my view of the countryside and then, when you had gone through the whole fidgety process of putting the harness on, all you could do was to trot tamely along a road drawing a tiresome trap. You couldn’t gallop over fields or wind your way through leafy woods, it was just trotting forever on the hard roads. I kicked at cruppers, I refused to push my head into collars when they were held out to me or to back into the shafts. I sulked and stumbled and went with my ears back whenever I was driven.

  Ned laughed at me, but he sympathised and presently he gave up the harness work and started to teach me to jump, or leap as it was often called, and this was much more to my taste. We began over a log and a bundle or two of faggots in the paddock, then we tried hurdles and an old gate. Ned would lean back as we lan
ded but he always let the reins slip through his hands a little so that he never caught my mouth and soon I grew to enjoy jumping with him on my back even more than I did when alone.

  One autumn morning Farmer Grey came to watch.

  ‘Better take him round the farm and put him over a ditch or two,’ he told Ned, ‘then we’ll let him see hounds.’

  Ned and I spent some very pleasant days riding round the farm and jumping whatever took our fancy. We began over the small ditches and the low hedges and rails and, as our confidence in each other grew, we jumped higher and higher. Ned had a lot of sense and he would never let me go on until I was tired and began to make mistakes, so, except for the time I refused the brook and tipped him into it and the time I jumped too big and too boldly over a drop and pecked, we had no mishaps or accidents.

  At last the day of my first hunt came. We were fed very early and as we ate Blackbird warned me that it would only be cub hunting because the true foxhunting season does not begin until November the first. But I still set off full of high hopes and Ned, who was looking very spruce in a brown coat and breeches and black boots, gaiters and bowler, seemed cheerful too. The meet was at a remote crossroads deep in the water meadows and I who was obstinately expecting scarlet coats and magnificent horses was bitterly disappointed for only the hunt servants were properly dressed, and even their coats were old and faded, everyone else wore ‘ratcatcher’, dull browns and greys.

  There were a lot of young horses out, many of them much less worldly than I. They stood with bulging eyes snorting at hounds and when we moved off they proceeded crabwise, with wild clatterings of freshly shod hoofs.

  Most of the riders looked like farmers, but there were a good many grooms and nagsmen out on young horses, a fair number of children, especially boys, a sprinkling of ladies and gentlemen and two or three soldiers.