Prince of Ponies

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“It’s the Germans!” she sobbed. “They are coming for us!”

It wasn’t just Agata – others were crying too, and as the thunder grew closer, people began running in all directions.

“We must escape into the trees!” Mama cried.

“No!” my father said. “It is too late now. They will shoot us if we try and run from them. Stay behind me. I will wave the white flag and they will know that we are unarmed.”

My father had his white pocket handkerchief in his hand, ready to wave as he stepped to the front of the cavalcade to face the Nazis. I felt my whole body shaking now as the thunder grew and grew, until at last they came into view.

I have never in my life seen such a sight as I saw that day.

What came at us round the bend in the road wasn’t the Nazis at all. It was horses – almost a hundred of them. Wild and loose, running together as a herd, so many of them jammed on the road that they were pressed up shoulder to shoulder. It was the pounding of their hooves, overwhelming in unison, that shook the ground under us!

Flanking this wild herd, mounted on horseback, were a dozen men. Each of them carried a rope and a whip, and they were attempting to keep the horses moving forward together, which was not easy. They might as well have been trying to herd cats! The most difficult were the young ones, tiny foals who ran, bewildered, at their mother’s side, flagging with exhaustion. Then there were the yearling colts and fillies, who kept breaking loose so that the men on horseback had to ride out in wide loops to bring them back to the herd again. Every time they rode out to rescue one of the colts who had bolted away, they would lose control of the rest of the group, and then there would be even more horses to muster back before they got lost in the trees.

Until this moment, the only horses I had known were the thick-set, plodding creatures who pulled the carts in our village. These horses were totally different. They were all fire and glory, and they almost floated above the ground, their paces were so smooth and balletic. It was as if, with each stride, they were held suspended in mid-air. I was mesmerised by their gracefulness.

Seeing that the horses were about to collide with our party, one of the men on horseback began shouting out orders to his men, and they rode swiftly forward to bring their own horses in front of the stampeding ones, turning about-face to create a blockade. Confronted with the men on horseback, the wild herd came to a standstill. Just like that, a hundred wild horses were brought to a halt, corralled right there in front of us on the road.

“Pavel?” The man who had given the orders now turned to us. He’d recognised my father and my father knew him too.

“Vaclav.” My father shook his hand. “It is good to see you, my friend.”

“Why are you turning back?” Vaclav asked.

“The Russians,” my father explained. “They’re advancing. For all we know, they’re already at the river.”

Vaclav shook his head ruefully. “So we are stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. If we turn back, the Nazis will certainly seize our horses.”

“Yes, but, sir,” one of his men shot back at him, “if we encounter the Russians, it will be worse! They will eat them!”

As the men were debating what to do, I was admiring the horses. There was one particular colt that caught my attention. He was dark steel-grey, with sooty black stockings that ran up all four of his legs and a white snip on his muzzle. He was so beautiful! It wasn’t just his looks that captivated me, though – it was the way he carried himself. He moved constantly, fretting and stomping, as if he had hot coals beneath his hooves. With his neck arched and his tail aloft, he pawed and pirouetted, flicking his noble head up and down in consternation. I remember that day – how all the other horses seemed to melt away, and at that moment there was only that grey colt right there in front of me.

One of the men on horseback, a young groom, noticed me staring at the colt.

“He’s beautiful, yes?” he said.

“Yes.” I nodded. “He’s my favourite.”

“You have a good eye!” the young groom said. “The Janów Estate breeds the best Arabians in the whole of Europe. And Prince is without a doubt the very finest of them all. He’s worth a lot of money.”

“Is that his name? I asked. “Prince?”

“Prince of Poland is his full name,” the young groom corrected me. And then he untied a rope from his saddle and handed it to me. “Put this on him if you want, and you can lead him back. He’s quite the escape artist this one – always bolting off away from the herd. It would help us if you led him on the journey back, since it appears we are now going home again.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Sure,” the groom said. He tied the rope to the shank of the colt’s halter and then he passed the end to me. I took hold of it, like I was grasping the tail of a snake.

The young groom laughed at me. “No. You must get in close. Hold the colt tight, right up at the shank of the rope. You are safer being close to him – he cannot take a hoof to you if you are right beside him.”

“A hoof?” I squeaked.

The young groom nodded. “Prince is pretty handy with his front hooves. I was leading him back to the stables the other day and he rose up on his hindquarters and struck me across the back of the head. Knocked me out.” He saw the look of fear on my face. “He was just playing. He’s spirited, that’s all – not a bad horse, just a hothead. You can do this. Just keep your eyes on him and stay at his shoulder and move with him whenever he moves. Yes, there! You’re doing much better already. You see how you can use your body to block him and keep him in line? That’s it …”

Looking back, it was crazy to give me such an unpredictable horse to handle. I was only nine! But it certainly took my mind off the Russians. I had my eyes glued to Prince as he danced and fretted. I should have been afraid, I suppose, with all the talk of deadly flying hooves and this half-wild horse dancing wildly at my side. But there was so much else to fear that day that the horse slipped down the list of things that I needed to be afraid of. And, after a while, it seemed to me to be second nature to have him bouncing and prancing along beside me.

That groom needn’t have bothered to tell me to watch Prince, because at that moment I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was so beautiful the way his sinew and muscle rippled beneath grey steel. The black stockings that marked his elegant ballerina legs, and the gossamer silver of his silken mane. The proportions of his face were so perfect they were almost unreal, from the deep curve of his concave profile to the taper and flare of his sooty velvet muzzle. And his ears. He had such small, delicate ears, curved in a little and short and sharp. They swivelled about to catch my words as I spoke to him. This horse was smart, and he was listening intently to everything I said. Horses do not talk, of course, but they are good listeners.

As we walked down the road that day, with the sun setting, I talked and talked with Prince beside me, his ears swivelling the whole time. I told him all about my life and my family. I knew nothing of his own family at that point, of course. It was only later that I would find out that Prince’s own parents, like mine, were here on the road with us. In fact, Prince’s sire, his father, was that impressive, powerful white stallion the head groom himself was riding. Prince’s mother was with us too, running with the mares. She was a dark bay with limpid brown eyes. I wish I’d realised who they were, because I would so have liked to have gazed at them, just that once. After this day was over, I would never get the chance again.

We were on the road and I was just thinking it must almost be time to set up camp for the night, when the planes came. There was the roar of engines and then the black shapes silhouetted in the sky above the trees. Three aircraft, coming from the south-west. There could be no doubt that they were German Luftwaffe, the airborne attacking force, and a moment after they came into sight, the planes directly opened fire!

There was screaming and suddenly everyone was running everywhere. The horses were completely forgotten – all anyone cared about was getting to cover as the planes flew closer and closer, all the while firing on us relentlessly. I saw a horse fall in a hail of machinegun fire, and at that moment I knew this was all too real.

“Don’t they see we aren’t soldiers?” my father was shouting. “There are women and children here!”

Bu the Germans didn’t seem to care. They were firing at us.

I wish I could say that I held my nerve enough to keep hold of Prince, but that would not be true. What happened next was not because I held him. It was my own nervous habit that bound us together. As we’d been walking, I’d been fiddling with the rope, looping it round my wrist. I didn’t realise how dangerous this could be or that, the instant the gunfire began and Prince startled and bolted, the rope would jerk into a tight knot and I would be literally dragged off my feet and into the forest behind the runaway colt.

I remember being flung about on the ground as if I were a sack of hay, and then the roughness of the bracken against my skin as Prince dragged me off the road and into the trees. And then I must have hit something with my head, because when I woke up, everything was woozy and I felt a lump on my skull almost as big as my fist, throbbing and hot from where I’d been struck. Prince, all heaving and sweaty, was still there, standing over me. And the rope was tight as a hangman’s noose round my wrist, so my fingers had turned white from lack of blood. When I wrenched off the rope, they tingled for ages with pins and needles, and there were rope burns and bruises. That rope saved me, though, because Prince had managed to wrap it round a tree when he’d bolted. The rope had pulled taut and had tethered him tight to the tree trunk, so in the end he can’t have dragged me very far. He’d tried to break free, but no matter how hard he pulled on that rope, it had only tightened more round the trunk and bound him to the tree. So the rope held him, and it held me. I had to cut myself loose with a pocketknife, but I left Prince tethered to the tree until I could figure out what to do.

I was still woozy. The last thing I remembered before I was knocked out was the machinegun rattle and the sky filled with German planes roaring above. Now the noise was gone. The sky was silent. And the forest too. And when I shouted out for my parents, again and again, there was nothing. Everybody had gone and we were alone …

***

Zofia rose to her feet, forcing little Rolf to stand up and leap off her lap on to the carpet. “We will finish now,” she said.

“No!” Mira was distraught. “We can’t stop now. I need to know what happens next!”

“It will have to wait until next time,” Zofia said, pointing at the clock above the fireplace. “Mira, you are late for school.”

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The bus was running so slow that day! Mira sat in her seat with Rolf in her arms, feeling more and more anxious. By the time she’d handed over the dachshund to Frau Schmidt and run the two blocks down the street from there to her school, she was almost a full hour late for class.

“You need your teacher to sign your late slip,” the secretary at the office told her. Mira filled in the slip. She wrote her name and the date and then, under “Reason for lateness”, she scribbled the first thing that came into her head.

“What is this that you have written here?” her teacher, Herr Weren, asked her when she offered him the note as she entered the class.

Herr Weren read from the late slip out loud to the class: “Reason for lateness: Hitler invading Poland.”

He turned to Mira. “That is not funny, Mira.”

“I’m not trying to be funny, Herr Weren,” Mira said.

“Well, you are very successful, then!” Herr Weren said curtly. “Perhaps you had better stay behind in detention when everyone else goes to morning tea today and make up for wasting all of this time.”

“Yes, Herr Weren,” Mira said.

When the bell rang, Mira stayed in her seat. Herr Weren took out a newspaper, kicking his chair back and putting his feet up on the desk.

“Am I allowed to have my morning tea?” Mira asked.

Herr Weren looked up from his newspaper and raised an eyebrow. “Under the rules of the Geneva Convention, I believe you have the right to eat,” he said. Then he gave a chuckle at his own joke, which Mira didn’t understand. But she figured that he meant yes, she could, and so she unpacked her lunchbox from her bag. There was some hummus and carrots and a heavy brown German kind of bread that Mira didn’t like much at all, which her mother brought home from the bakery.

The clock on the classroom wall ticked very loudly. Herr Weren looked up at it wearily, already bored with disciplining his pupil. He put down his newspaper. “I think that’s enough,” he said. “You can go out and play now, Mira.”

“Do I have to?” Mira said.

“What?” Herr Weren was confused. “Yes, Mira, I’m letting you go now.”

“Oh.” Mira’s voice was heavy with disappointment. The truth was, she’d been delighted to get a detention and she was less than thrilled that it was now over.

Herr Weren walked to the door and held it open for her. Mira stuffed her lunchbox back in her bag and slung it over her back. Herr Weren stood waiting. She was moving so slowly, this child!

“Is there something wrong, Mira?” he asked.

“No, Herr Weren,” Mira said.

“Come on, then! Off you go.”

Outside in the playground the other kids had already eaten lunch. The boys were mostly on the field playing football. The girls’ activities, on the other hand, were much more divided. There was a big group of girls playing Fang on the field, and there were more playing netball on the courts. Mira hurried past them. There was a place, just at the end, where she usually sat at break times. No one else went there, and all she had to do was wait and hope that no one came by before the bell rang. Today, though, when she rounded the corner, there were already three girls there. They were playing a game they called elastics. Two of the girls, Hannah and Gisela, stood with knotted pairs of tights stretched like bands round their legs. They stood with their legs braced wide, so that the tights made a taut loop round them, and the third girl, whose name was Leni, had her back to Mira and was jumping back and forth, scissoring her legs across the tights as the other girls chanted a rhyme:

“Jingle jangle

Silver bangle

Inside – out – on!”

Leni was taller than the other two girls, so she had the advantage in this game because of her longer legs. She was wearing blue shorts and a white T-shirt and her ice-blonde hair was cropped in a very short bob, rather boyish in style; the other two girls were both much mousier, with long hair in ponytails.

“Hey!” Hannah caught sight of Mira before the others. “Look, Leni, it’s Cockroach.”

Leni stopped jumping. She turned round and smiled at Mira. It was a smile that made Mira feel sick. She knew what was coming.

“Cockroach!” Leni greeted her. “Have you come to play with us?”