The Swallow Tales by K M Peyton

Author:K M Peyton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448121854
Publisher: Penguin Random House Children's UK

Chapter Seven

IT WAS QUITE late in the evening when they all rode back together over the downs to High Hawes. Bonzo ran behind bucking and kicking, relieved to be free after his week of confinement. All the ponies, even Swallow, went rather wearily, but the mood was one of satisfaction, and the late, golden light still flooding over the open grass sent their shadows in long, bobbing patterns behind them as they breasted the steep hill. The eternal breeze up there lifted the ponies’ manes off their sweaty necks and cooled the riders’ hot and dirty faces, and the skylarks sang as if the day would last for ever.

I shall remember this, always, Rowan thought, again deeply aware of the pleasure that had come into her life with the High Hawes ponies. There were all sorts of problems ahead for them, but just now none of it mattered, the small successes of the day – the week – more important and more rewarding than anything they might encounter. It was far, far from Olympic gold, but the rosette that fluttered on Jones’s browband meant more to Rowan, and always would, than any more illustrious ones that might come later. It was only a second, as one beastly girl had gone faster than Jones, but Rowan could not keep her eyes off the bright ribbon nestling in his thick mane. He should have worn another one, as he had gone third for Roma, but Roma had kept it. It was her first ever too. Her delirious joy had rather impressed her gloomy parents and her father had half promised to bring Honeypot over to High Hawes for ‘a bit of schooling’. (‘Starving is what he’ll get,’ Charlie had remarked, ‘before anything else.’)

Birdie’s silver cup and rosette, for the overall Intermediate winner, had been appropriated by the incensed Mrs Prebble. She had rattled Birdie away in her trailer at angry speed, promising that they would all hear more from her ‘very shortly’.

‘More what?’ said Charlie afterwards. ‘Lizzie showed everybody Birdie is a really good pony.’

Lizzie was the heroine. Mrs Mildmay, presenting her with the cup, made the most tactful speech of her career, managing to infer what a brilliant pony Birdie was and declaiming how everyone at camp wished Matty Prebble a speedy return to health and action. She phrased it so cleverly that it made it seem that the applause and cheering that followed was all for Matty, so Mrs Prebble was overwhelmed with people’s general niceness and unable to utter a word. It was only later that her habitual resentment returned.

Roma remarked, ‘Matty might be quite nice underneath it if she didn’t have her for a mother.’

‘Perhaps we ought to visit her in hospital,’ Lizzie said. ‘It must be terribly boring lying there. The summer holidays too.’

They vaguely decided that they would.

Mrs Mildmay had given Lizzie a real piece of her mind after she had realized what she had done, but Lizzie said, even thought she was foul, you somehow knew that it was more for the sake of form, and underneath she thought it was great.

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