Remembering Pandora

A Childhood of Possibility

Heat Incoming

It is 5am and Neil is shuffling around making coffee. Today is Tuesday, the day after a long ‘Bank Holiday’ weekend. Two of those three days, we spent re-covering our old polytunnels. They are small, domestic scale tunnels. One has been out of service for a couple of years and was completely bare. The other got torn in a bad wind this winter just passed.

The heatwave that accompanied this period was perhaps unexpected, since it’s a standing joke that it always rains on holiday weekends. We covered our first tunnel on Friday in 28C and our second on Monday in 31C. This may not sound punishing to any Australian or Southern USAian friends, but until you’ve experienced the humidity of an unseasonably hot day in England, you cannot know how debilitating they can be.

Now that they are covered, I must make haste to plant out some of the suffering tomato, cucumber, and pepper plants which have been struggling to keep going in my greenhouse for far too long, but today is also forecast to be blistering, so the only way to get anything done is now. As I potter courageously from my mid sixties towards the unthinkable 70, I feel less and less like sallying forth at 5.30am to plant out San Marzano and Shirley, but here we all are.

1976

The “heatwave” brings to mind, as it seems to for many of my contemporaries, the blistering summer of 1976.

It was, of course, a satisfyingly neat half century ago, and I was 16. It was the year of my GCE ‘O’ Level exams, when I was still pretty much a straight A student, and directly before I decided to veer off the rails and sabotage my own life.

It was the year my best friend fell off a horse while trying it out with a view to purchase, broke her leg horribly, and spent half the summer holiday in a hospital bed an hour from home by car, a journey which I undertook many, many times with her mother, and a Tupperware box of sandwiches and cake, long before the days of air conditioned cars.

It was the last year I had Pandora, the iron grey Connemara cross pony I was rapidly outgrowing, and who now finally lived in the paddock next to our cottage.

Wherever You Start, There’s a Way

Let’s begin with how I was living in an old brick cottage, with a paddock outside my back gate, and my pony in the paddock - because it’s very much about the message I bring to this day:

Don’t wait until you own land, until you can build your off grid home, until you have the picture book house and garden, to become your self-sufficient, smallholding self. Whoever you are, wherever you are starting, there IS a way.

When I was 12, my parents, in a signature move of madness I was myself to replicate many years in the future, left their four bedroom detached house in a lovely suburb of Coventry (in the less than reliable care of my brother) and moved to a cottage in an estate village, which came attached to my my ma’s new job as housekeeper, and, indeed, was attached physically to the house she was to keep. My dad retained his job, but increased his commute. I, in line with my heart’s desire, landed in a world of ponies and riding schools, dogs, long walks in a deer park, and very long bus journeys to school.

The pony they had rather foolishly facilitated was now boarding at the local (walking distance) riding school on the estate where he (and I) would learn how to behave and do some useful things. He was called Shadow, and he was a fat, stubborn, Welsh Section C with two low gears and a grass gut.

They had taken the least promising of circumstances, and found a way in which their petulant and rather spoilt daughter could work Saturdays at the yard, join the Pony Club, enter competitions, and ultimately (though definitely unwisely) pursue a career in the equestrian world.

Very much not Pandora. When all my parents things were taken, all my photographs went too, so this is a Photo by Oscar Nilsson on Unsplash

Pandora

A year or two later, Shadow was lame, having stood on a stone, or some such equine sick note scheme, when a tragic accident hit the local equestrian world hard. A young girl, aged I think 14, talented and popular member of the Pony Club and (unlike me) of the exact right sort, and a gifted mounted games competitor, had been killed in a car accident.

Her parents wanted to sell her pony, in fact for preference, never to have to look at him again, understandably, but until that could happen, someone needed to exercise him. The District Commissioner (which is the rather military and colonial name given to this day to the local organiser) thought of me, and asked if, while my own pony was hopping, I could be driven over to ride Pandora.

I have a terrible memory, and can recall precious few details about my youth, but I will never forget that day. To her credit, the girl’s sister, who can’t have been above 16 herself, and had been in the car, escaping unscathed, was nothing but kind and courteous to me, as she accompanied me out on her own horse. I remember both their names. When I look back I find it remarkable that she had such courage and decency.

I fell immediately in love with Pandora - who confusingly was male. He was of a similar colour to Shadow, but a hand taller and infinitely higher quality and better schooled. My ever over indulgent parents, somehow found the £400 asking price (today it sounds like pocket change for a pony, but back then, it was solid middle ground money, and I have no idea how they could possibly have afforded it, the factory worker and the housekeeper, but somehow they did.)

Pandora moved to the yard. He was wonderful, and boosted my confidence no end. We started to win some small competitions together. I was on cloud nine. Until Pony Club events came up.

The mob did not have the dignity and character of the bereaved sister. They called me names, they said I could never be her. I was rubbish, I was not People Like Us, I was not as clever, as funny, as good a rider, and I didn’t deserve her pony. I was just a common riding school kid, and he was far too good for me.

Justin

Not very much later, another tragic accident took place. The owners of the big house where my mother kept house had two teenage daughters. They were away as weekly boarders at school mostly, but they had their old shared pony, Justin, in the paddock beside our house, and when they were away their mother took care of him, and when they came home they would catch him and take him out now and again. They were really at the end of their lives as pony loving children, and about to do The Season, get married, and become just like their mother. They were nice girls, and gave me hand me down clothes sometimes. I was always rather excited to get something with a London label.

One half term, one of them, the younger I think, took Justin out for a hack, and he was hit by a car, breaking his back. He had to be put to sleep immediately. My mother remembered their mother telling them they must not cry in front of staff, and sending them to their rooms. I basically grew up downstairs in Downton Abbey.

As a result of this tragic slight foreshortening of their equestrian careers, mine took a turn for the better, because I was told I could have the paddock and shelter, and Pandora could come and live outside my bedroom window.

Our Long Hot Summer

By this time, I was quite an unhappy teenager, not least because I was mercilessly bullied by anyone who’d known my pony’s previous owner, and my only alternative was to dip my toes into the much scarier and rough around the edges world of proper show jumping frequented by my friend Sue, (but as the more observant among you may recall, she was in hospital in Northamptonshire with a broken leg), or pull myself together and set sail for A Levels and University.

So I spent a great deal of that long hot summer, just simply being with Pan. I would take my school books out to a slightly shaded dip in the far corner of his field to revise, and end up mostly talking to him, and dreaming dreams. The blistering, punishing temperatures bring back to me the scent of a pony, and the long grasses and plants along the hedgerow. Early morning hacks in the park, avoiding the heat and the horrors of being hunted down by the Prince Phillip Cup brigade.

The year afterwards, I was talked into selling him for ‘something more suitable’ for my age and height (honestly, I’m still not too tall to ride that pony today!) a deal which ended really badly.

For that one golden summer, my perfect pony was my only friend.

The Good Life Starts With What You’ve Got

Half a century later, I still believe you have to take dreams by the scruff of the throat and if necessary, rearrange all the moveable parts of your life until you can create what might at first be an illusion of your longed for life, but will eventually become your own version.

How and why my parents undertook a move to the country on one blue collar wage, I didn’t ever really ask. Being a ghastly teenager, I just took it for granted. My mother I think enjoyed her first few years in the job, but later grew to hate it. Other things happened, and my father went to work abroad to get them out of the next financial crisis that hit. But for that short period, they refused to be told. They knew there was a way they could give themselves, and me, a foot into a life we longed for, and they did it.

How much do you want to make this simple life for yourself? There’s a way. There’s always a way.