The Swallow Tales
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Introduction
The Swallow Tale
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
The Swallow Summer
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Swallow, the Star
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
About the Author
Also by K. M. Peyton
Copyright
About the Book
Rowan is desperate for a horse of her own, so when her father narrowly misses colliding with a dark, beautiful stray, she feels he was always supposed to be hers. But Swallow is as wild and spirited as his name, and fate threatens to tear them apart.
Three classic pony stories from one of our best-loved and most outstanding writers, now collected together for the first time.
Introduction
Like many readers of my generation, I first discovered K. M. Peyton via the extraordinarily evocative Flambards, a book overflowing with glorious heroes and villains, affairs of the heart and history – and horses. For me, it was love at first paragraph.
It was nearly thirty years later that a wise bookseller put me onto more of Peyton’s books – Fly-by-Night, The Team and, of course, the delightful Swallow series – and turned me into a bona fide Peyton groupie. I devoured book after book with the joy of a twelve-year-old pony-lover and the critic faculties of a hard-to-please middle-aged writer and reviewer. Neither version of myself was ever disappointed, except in the realization that so many of her books were ones I wished I’d written.
We were obviously destined to meet.
Ever the shameless American, I tracked her down and discovered not some doddery old grande dame, but a brilliant, sparkling writer, wit and horse-lover who had only recently given up riding following the death of her beloved mare, Essie.
‘That mare would jump anything,’ she told me on our first meeting, and it struck me that the same was true of the eighty-one-year-old Kathleen. Her own life has been an extraordinary tale of sailing, hiking and mountain climbing with her husband, tearing cross country on horseback, while putting dinner on the table and bringing up two daughters. What more do we ask of a true adventure heroine?
It’s no surprise, then, that the details I most love in Kathleen’s books are the ones she swears are true – the abandoned ponies and hopeful owners, the crashing falls and soaring jumps, the plots to save one horse or buy another, while all the time learning to ride and saving up for a bale of hay or a pair of jodhpurs without holes in the knees.
Pick up any of her novels and you enter a world of triumphs and disappointments, of young life and young love, all rendered with perfect emotional insight and subtlety. I have fallen in love with her heroes, identified with her heroines and ridden her ponies in my dreams.
Meg Rosoff
THE Swallow TALE
For Primrose
Chapter One
ROWAN WAS SILENT, sitting in the car beside her father as they came over the brow of the hill above Long Bottom. Her father was in a bad mood, she could tell. He usually was when he came home, after the hassle of commuting from London. He wasn’t a country man at all and Rowan suspected that he was regretting their move out of suburbia and into the country. Last year she had dreaded leaving London, but now she would dread moving back even more.
He drove too fast, fresh off the motorway. It was going dusk. The hedges were high and the early sloe blossom made a blurred wall, shutting out the view.
‘What?’
The brakes screamed. Rowan was flung violently forward into her seat belt as the car skidded sideways and slammed up against the left-hand bank. Soft earth rained on the windows and sparks spun across the road ahead. Sparks? Rowan could not think, shocked rigid. A black shape like a flying witch’s cloak filled the windscreen then disappeared into the sloe hedge. There was a crashing sound and what sounded like an animal scream mixed with the awful noise of her father swearing. His new BMW was his most darling possession.
John Watkins leaped out of the car to see the damage and Rowan followed warily. There was glass over the road, plain and coloured.
‘My headlight! And the indicator! God in heaven – just what I need! Look at it!’
Rowan looked. On the bent metal frame of the headlight blood and fur were imbedded.
‘It was an animal! Look! You’ve injured it!’
‘Injured it! Pity I didn’t break its ruddy neck!’
‘You can’t leave it. It might have a broken leg!’
Rowan ran to the hedge, standing on tiptoe to peer over. She was small for her eleven years and had difficulty making anything out. The black animal had blended into the dusk. It had gone through the hedge – she could see the broken twigs – and into the grass field, but the field was large, stretching right down to the back gardens of the village houses below and she could see nothing moving.
She helped her father kick the glass into the ditch. The front light still worked but shone crookedly sideways.
‘That’s a garage job! But I can claim insurance – animals are the owner’s responsibility—’
‘We can’t just leave it,’ Rowan said. ‘You hit it. It’s hurt.’
‘Serves it right – bally animal—’
Rowan thought her father was ridiculous. Her mind was full of the black shape and the scream . . . whinny? It was a pony! The sparks had been its shoes on the road, skidding. A pony—
‘I know! It’s the pony Charlie was talking about! He saw it – loose on the down last week! They tried to catch it but couldn’t. He said a few people had tried to catch it. No one knows where it’s come from.’
‘It’s a disgrace! Animals roaming loose! We might have been killed!’
Sometimes her father was very childish. It wouldn’t be wise to tell him he had been going too fast. Best to wait until he cooled down. No way could they leave that pony injured, but he didn’t seem to realize that. They drove down through the village to their house, called Home Farm, in the middle. What had once been the farm’s barns had been converted into smart houses behind it. The burglar lights came on as the car swung into the drive.
Rowan waited until her father had huffed and puffed about the accident to his wife, and then she stated that it was their duty to follow up the wounded animal.
‘If you think I’m going to go out chasing the damned thing in the dark—’
‘Charlie will catch it. Just run me up to the farm and I’ll tell them what’s happened – or I’ll go on my bike – we’ll do it—’
‘It’s dark. Daddy will run you, won’t you, darling? I do think Rowan’s right, dear. But won’t you have your tea first?’
‘No. It’s urgent. I can go on my bike, Dad, honest.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said.
Why did parents think there were murderers lurking all over the place? Rowan liked the village darkness with just the house windows showing golden lamps and flickering television, but her father was already agitating for street lighting. When they had had their accident he had been driving her home from her piano lesson, which she could easily have gone to on her bike (save it was a bit hilly).
‘Come on, then. Jump in.’
With one headlamp doused, he drove her up the hill. The farm where Charlie lived, High Hawes, was half a mile up on the right, a scrambling old farm whose barns had been turned not into houses but into stables. John Watkins was impressed by the fact that the family that lived there was called Hawes as well as the house, but this was actually a coincidence, not a sign of ancient family bloodlines. Certainly the family had lived there for many years – they didn’t count as ‘incomers’ like the Watkins – but they were not real farmers like Mr Flint and Mr Bailey down in the valley – they hadn’t enough land for that, only fifty acres. Mr Hawes was said to live on his wits, although he called himself a horse dealer. He had five children who were all into horses, and an absent-minded wife called Joan who was a brilliant cook.
Mr Watkins pulled up in the entrance to the yard and let Rowan out.
‘Don’t be all night, now. Ring me if you want a lift back.’
‘No. I’ll be all right.’ Did he think she had no legs?
To her relief he backed out and drove away. Rowan walked up the slope into the main yard where the lights were shining. There were looseboxes all round and eager heads looked over doors at the sounds coming from the feed shed. Rowan had discovered her own paradise on earth here since coming to Long Bottom and haunted this place, doing lowly chores to earn her acceptance.
‘Charlie?’
She went towards the feed shed and Charlie came out, hearing the car drive away. Charlie was seventeen, the second eldest of the Hawes children after his sister Josephine. Josephine never spoke to
Rowan, but Charlie was easy-going and friendly.
‘What’s up?’
Rowan told him.
‘Several people have seen that pony,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen it up on the downs above us. But no one can catch it. It’s been down by our fences several times but every time you go near it it runs off.’
‘It’s in Mr Bailey’s big cow field now.’
‘It jumps like a stag. If we go after it, it’ll jump out.’
‘But it’s hurt. We gave it a real crack, bashed in the headlight.’
‘Fair enough. I’ll come down with you. We can’t leave it if it’s injured. I’ll just finish feeding and we’ll go down in the Land Rover.’
Charlie was tall and gangly, long-legged. He looked fantastic on a horse. The Hawes children all rode brilliantly, from cool Josephine down to Shrimp the nine-year-old. Rowan had first met them – the younger ones – on the school bus. She got on well with the two middle ones, Lizzie and Hugh (she had been put in the same class as Hugh), but Charlie was her darling. He had a gypsyish look, with thick black curls, very dark eyes and spare, hollow cheeks. The others were all fair or mousy and quite ordinary in looks. Rowan was slightly nervous of Charlie, liking him so much. She would never have presumed to ask him favours ordinarily, but an injured pony – one was bound to seek help.
He told his parents where he was going – Hugh and Shrimp wanted to come too but were not allowed – and Rowan scrambled into the Land Rover beside him. She was so excited she could feel her heart bumping. If they caught the pony . . . no one knew who it belonged to . . . finders-keepers? Would her father agree? She longed to have her own pony.
‘It’s not a scruff,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s nice – a Welshman by the look of him.’
They drove down the hill and turned right when they came to the village street. Rowan had a glimpse through the windows of her father getting himself a gin and tonic from the sideboard, to calm his nerves. He would be in a dreadful temper over the car. The Hawes parents didn’t fuss at all and never drank gin and tonic. Rowan sighed. Life as lived by the Hawes had been a revelation to her. They all worked incredibly hard, and yet there was no coercion. The ponies and horses were a full-time job and they enjoyed it and accepted it, on top of working hard at school. The three of them at school were bright, and never took days off, in spite of all they had to do at home.
They drove up the street to the Baileys’ farm, which was the last building. It was called Low Bottom. There was a house further up called, amazingly, High Bottom, and just below it one called Middle Bottom, and in the village street there was a Bottoms Up, which Rowan thought was great but her parents thought vulgar.
‘I’ll just call and tell Ted Bailey what we’re up to. Don’t want him to think he’s got rustlers in the field.’
They got out of the Land Rover and Rowan walked on past the stockyards to where the gate let into the field. It was going dark and a mist lay across the bottom of the hill, out of which Ted Bailey’s Friesian cows loomed menacingly. Their breath made clouds around their monotonously revolving jaws and their sad eyes stared at her. Rowan, a London girl, wasn’t sure about cows.
‘What you doin’?’
Rowan jumped. She turned and saw the farmer’s daughter behind her, a square girl called Barbara. The Hawes family called her Babar the Elephant, which she didn’t seem to mind.
‘There’s a pony . . .’ Rowan explained what had happened.
‘Aar, I saw ’um. ’E’s there.’
Babar talked like a simpleton, but got one hundred per cent in maths. She had a straight no-nonsense fringe, very direct currant-bun eyes in a puddingy face, and always wore a brown anorak and gumboots. She had a pony which she adored; it was a very odd shape – ‘a Fell pony gone wrong, frightened by the thoroughbred weed’ according to Fred Hawes. Its name was Black Diamond.
(‘Sounds like a beer,’ Hugh said. His pony was called Cascade.
‘Like washing-up liquid,’ said Shrimp. Hugh threw his dirty sponge at her and she hit him with a sweat-scraper. They fought a lot, the Hawes.)
‘I think he’s hurt. He ran across in front of our car and we hit him.’
‘We’ll need to catch ’um then.’
Charlie came back, carrying a head collar, and said, ‘You got a few nuts in a bucket, Babar, that we can rattle at him?’
Babar plodded off in her gumboots and fetched the bait, and they opened the gate and went in amongst the cows. It was all right with the others, Rowan found; she was terrified of being a fool in front of these calm country people. But she could still feel her heart lurching with excitement.
A black pony was hard to see in the mist-heavy dusk, but it gave itself away by a nervous snort up the hillside. They moved towards the snort, but Charlie told the girls to hang back and went on with the bucket, talking softly into the mist. Shortly the pony came whirling down towards the gate, swerving past Charlie and skittering to a stop when it saw the girls. Rowan had a dazzled look at it, the head held high and wild, forelock on end, eyes shining, before it did an about turn and went to join the cows.
‘Oh, he’s gorgeous!’
Babar said, ‘Darned contrary. He’ll never be caught, that one.’
Charlie came back. ‘He’s dead lame. He needs looking at.’ Rowan had never noticed. ‘We’ll block off the drive out to the road, open the gate, drive off the cows and see if we can tempt him into the stockyard. Tie your pony up out in the yard, Babar, and that might attract him.’
He went and manoeuvred his Land Rover so that it was across the drive, blocking off the road, and Babar fetched her pony from his stable and tied him up outside. Rowan saw why the Hawes tribe derided him, for he was a strange-looking beast, like an old-fashioned cab horse, with large knees, a slightly swayed back, a hogged mane and a sad expression. He was a clipped-out black, a dull mousey colour, and looked as if he would have very hairy heels were they not clipped. His tail looked as if the cows had been nibbling it.
‘Darling Diamond,’ Babar said, kissing him on the nose. Rowan was touched. Babar came back and went off to chase the cows away from the gate and Charlie told Rowan to stand just clear of the gate and try and deflect the pony in if he came her way.
‘Wave your arms at him.’
Rowan was terrified she would mess up the whole operation, being so unsure of these large and uncooperative animals, but Charlie knew what he was doing and was able to catch the pony’s attention with the rattling nuts in the bucket. Having attracted it, he walked slowly back towards the gate, shaking the bucket, and the pony followed hesitantly. Charlie walked into the stockyard and started feeding the nuts to Black Diamond, who made eager, starving noises as he dived his head into the bucket. This attracted the black pony and, as Rowan shrank back to make herself invisible, he walked through the gate and into the stockyard. Rowan nipped up and shut the gate into the field, and then the stockyard gate, and the pony was caught.
‘Well done!’ called Charlie.
He put the bucket down and managed to get the head collar on without any difficulty. Black Diamond stood with tragic eyes, watching his feed disappearing down the other pony’s throat.
‘Great. Good work. That could have taken all night. We were lucky,’ Charlie said.
‘Clever,’ said Babar admiringly.
‘It’s nice. Worth the bother. Finders keepers, eh, Rowan?’ Charlie winked at Rowan, and Rowan felt the heart-bumping excitement come back, suffocating her. If only! To have this pony for her own . . . it was a wish that felt like madness. And as if in appeal, the pony lifted his head out of the empty bucket, looked straight at her and let out a deafening whinny.
The pony, even to her ignorant eyes, looked a beauty, as elegant and classy as Black Diamond was ill bred. He was very dark brown or black, with a small snip of white between his nostrils and a star on his forehead. He stood about fourteen hands, and was strongly built, but with a fine neck and shoulders and a very pretty head.
‘A Welshman,’ Charlie said. ‘With a dash of thoroughbred, I’d say.’ He was looking at the pony’s legs to find the damage. ‘Hold him for me, will you?’
Rowan took the head-collar rope. She had never held a pony before. She could smell his hot, nervous breath on her hand and see the glint in his eye. He looked wild, but stood quietly, trembling.
There was a gash on his off foreleg just above the knee, and the knee was swollen, but nothing terrible.