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Double Trouble

said one of the other riders. ‘If these hadn’t been bomb-proof horses...’

They weren’t all that bomb-proof at that. Pepe, the one I was riding, always leapt at the beginning of a canter anyway and after Miss Wellington’s frustrations he went into the air like Pegasus. Jasper, the big full-thoroughbred black, had only been held in check by the coolness and skill of his rider.

‘Silly old fool,’ echoed Charles when he heard about it. ‘She’ll come a cropper one of these days.’

She did. Though fortunately not off her bike.

Somewhere up in the Forest one morning she let the dogs off their leads, one of them spotted a rabbit – a rare enough occurrence since myxomatosis, but the rabbits are definitely coming back – and though three of them returned to her from the chase that followed, the fourth one just simply vanished. Hours after I’d seen her go through the Forestry gate – so long, indeed, that I thought she’d done a circular tour and must have been home hours ago – she appeared, hat awry, in the lane outside, clutching the other three dogs and her bicycle.

Gone now was this business of not speaking. ‘I’ve lost little Maybelle,’ she informed me tearfully. ‘I don’t know what to do... she’s terribly old... what will Mrs Warland say?’

Mrs Warland, I gathered, was the owner. And Maybelle

– casting a quick eye over the remainder of the pack –

must be the bad-tempered poodle with the sticking-out teeth who’d initiated the chase after Seeley. All the same, she was someone’s dog and she might have got stuck in a rabbit-hole...

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Doreen Tovey

If she liked to take the other dogs home, I told Miss Wellington, Charles and I would go up and search. We didn’t need to go far. Having called Charles down from the orchard, dumped the pastry I was making in the refrigerator and put on my boots, we were just going up the Forestry track when we spotted a dun-coloured figure puffing towards us. Teeth protruding, poodle-legs twinkling, Maybelle was on her way home. She didn’t stop for us – not even at our gate, where lost dogs and horses tend to accumulate. Straight on up the hill she went and in through Miss Wellington’s gate. Obviously Maybelle’s stomach had felt the call of elevenses.

We hadn’t done a thing, but Miss Wellington insisted we had. Whenever she brought the dogs past after that, Maybelle, securely on her rhinestoned lead, was instructed to Speak to the Nice Friends who’d Rescued Her. Maybelle, knowing that for a load of codswallop, lifted a dun-coloured lip at us and snarled. If the cats were in evidence Miss Wellington also, with fine disregard for personal safety, lifted Maybelle to shoulder height so that she could see them too and told her to Speak to the Dear Little Kitties. Maybelle did. At which Seeley had to be restrained and spent the next half-hour growling out of the window, Shebalu crossed her eyes and sat for safety on a doortop – and how Miss Wellington got Maybelle to the ground without, in the process, losing her nose was a continual testimonial to what Father Adams was always saying: ‘The Lord looks after Fools’.

We were back on speaking terms with her, anyway, which was one good thing. And before long she gave up the dog-exercising business. It was too much of a responsibility, she said. And she always had the dogs in 79

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Double Trouble

her kitchen after their walk and in winter they’d make everything so dirty... So, after crisis, we returned to normal. Only the original dog-lady exercised dogs en masse and hers were as well-ordered as Diana’s; Miss Wellington, once more on foot, returned to good works in the village; and the cats – we could hardly believe it

– went on being as good as gold.

It was all so different from when Seeley had been a kitten.

Then, having no one to play with, he was always going off on his own. There was the time, for instance, when he’d scared us over the fox-holes. We’d taken him with us when we went up to examine some trees, high up in our woods, which kept the sun off the cottage in the evening. Huge sycamores – which, said Charles, not only blocked out the sun but were a positive menace to his fruit trees. Digging near some apple tree roots, a good twenty yards away, he’d found sycamore roots intermingled with them, attracted there by all the watering he did and the food in the soil from the fertilisers. It was marvellous, admittedly, to think of roots being able to track down food and water... travelling through the soil like moles, a good twenty yards to reach their goal... but they were taking the nourishment from the apple trees; the sycamores would have to come down.

So there we were, debating the best way to do it so they wouldn’t crash on the apple trees anyway, and there was Seeley, still a tubby little kitten, exploring in all directions as we talked, and suddenly – when he thought we were suitably distracted – he was away across our boundary path and into the neighbouring woods. Uncultivated these were – a tangle of saplings and thorn bushes and low-growing brambles into which Seeley promptly vanished as into a jungle.

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Doreen Tovey

I plunged to my hands and knees immediately and scrambled after him, terrified of letting such a little mite go off on his own in fox country – and when, with threads pulled on my sweater and scratches everywhere, I eventually caught sight of him again, all my fears about foxes were crystallised. Seeley – small, so vulnerable-looking and never more dear to me than in that moment of peril, was standing in the entrance to a fox-earth. A huge, dark, gaping hole in the hillside which, from the freshness of the soil around it, was certainly inhabited and quite possibly recently dug. Even as I spotted him he vanished inside the hole... and even as I shouted for Charles he popped back out again. Not to come to me, however. That section of the woods was positively cratered with fox-earths. Seeley pranced across in front of me, almost within arm’s reach – and then nipped tantalisingly down another.

My fear, knowing his inquisitiveness, was that he might go on down one of those passages. Down there somewhere was a fox. Maybe a vixen with cubs. Seeley wouldn’t have a chance if he met up with her. So, afraid to go nearer in case it made him go deeper in, I kept calling him imploringly – and every few seconds he flashed out of a hole, yelled at me that Here he Was, this game was Fun, wasn’t it? – and then went down another.

We avoided Nemesis on that occasion by Charles crawling through the thicket on his hands and knees as well, crouching behind the fox-hole down which the truant was at the moment – and then, as I called ‘Seeleyweeley-weeley’ from a distance and he emerged once more to tantalise me, grabbing him like lightning before he realised Charles was there.

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Double Trouble

We couldn’t take him back through the brambles. With him hanging protesting down my back – I held on to his legs while Charles, as best he could, made a way for me to push through – we got him over the top fence, into a field, through the field gate and back down the lane.

We’d Tricked Him, howled Seeley, broadcasting his wrath to the Valley as we went. He was going Right Back In There, he bawled, struggling like mad as we passed the spot where he’d first gone in. He’d go back again as soon as he Could, anyway, he promised me, as, holding him in a grip of iron, I carted him, still struggling, back to the cottage.