Poor Badger (4 page)

Mr Smith guessed who had told the RSPCA.

Leo said to Ros, ‘He’ll skin you alive if he sees you.’

‘Don’t be silly!’

But she was frightened all the same.

When the weather started to get colder, she feared for Badger. Mr and Mrs Palfrey feared for Ros.

‘If only she didn’t have to pass the wretched pony every day, she would forget about it! It makes her so miserable!’

‘It’s a very sad situation. But we can’t do anything about it! We can’t afford to buy him, and Smith would be very unlikely to sell to us anyway – not the way he thinks about us!’

‘No. There’s no way we can buy him.’

‘I can’t think of anything we can do.’

One night in November, it started to snow. ‘Very early for snow!’ said Ros’s father, pulling the curtains across. They all sat round a coal fire, watching television.

When Ros went to bed, she lay watching the snowflakes drifting across her bedroom window, thinking of Badger. She was warm and comfortable and had her mother and father next door, but Badger was cold and hungry and alone, and had nothing to look
forward
to. There was the whole winter to go yet.

Ros sat up.

‘I will do something,’ she decided. She couldn’t go on feeling so miserable about Badger, and not doing anything. Not for the whole winter! It was too long. She wasn’t a worm, after all. At school she was known as bossy and resourceful, and yet when it came to Badger she was just useless. And Badger deserved more than that.

‘I’ll steal him away, and put him somewhere nice,’ she decided.

‘You can’t!’ Leo said the next day.

‘I can. I’ve only told you because I might want some help, not so that you can say stupid things like that. No one will know who’s done it, not if we do it in the middle of the night, and take care no one sees us.’

Leo considered.

‘In the middle of the night?’

‘It would have to be, I think.’

‘The car park is lit up all night. You can see it from here. And the police drive through it, my dad says, to stop the public toilets getting vandalized.’

The car park was the only way out of the rough field, apart from the footbridge over the railway. One side was all houses, and the other had a high wire fence and the back of an industrial estate.

‘I’ll work it out,’ Ros said defiantly.

The idea, having taken hold, possessed her.

‘The only way out is over the footbridge, and across the main road,’ Leo said. ‘You can’t do that!’

‘Who says I can’t?’

‘Mr Smith will know it’s you.’

‘He’ll have to prove it. We’ll leave no clues. No clues at all.’

Leo didn’t like the ‘we’. He wriggled anxiously.

Ros, softening, said, ‘Honestly, Leo. It will work if we plan it very carefully. I will think it out.’

‘Like a general?’

‘Yes, like a general.’ General Palfrey. It sounded good. Badger could depend on General Palfrey.

Armies had training exercises. She would have a training exercise.

‘I’ll have a practice! I’ll try it out, going to Badger when everyone is asleep! I’ll try it!’

‘When? Tonight?’

‘Tonight!’ Ros was startled. The snow lay slushy and uninviting over the damp fields and sleet was forecast. But the title she had just given herself put the prospect in a different light.

‘Yes. Why not? Tonight. I will go tonight!’

‘Me too?’ Leo’s voice was deeply apprehensive.

‘Not this time, no.’

‘What shall I do then?’

Ros considered.

‘We’ve got to find somewhere to take him to. That’s going to be tricky. You could think about that.’ Leo was good at thinking. He got high marks at school. He wasn’t a lot of good at doing though.

‘Over this way would be easiest, not far from home,’ she said.

‘You’ll never get him over the bridge!’

Generals overcame all obstacles. Ros was not going to make the bridge an obstacle. She stuck out her jaw.

‘Why not?’

The idea, having take root, would not leave her. But as the day wore on, she decided to shelve the practice run . . . not tonight, anyway. The thought of it, even just the practice, frightened her quite a lot. She must have time to get up her courage. Finding the place to take him to could
be
tackled first. It was the most important thing, after all.

‘We’ll go looking on Saturday,’ she decided. ‘Both of us. And when we’ve found a place, I’ll have the practice.’

She studied the footbridge carefully the next morning on the way to school. Leo was right. It was the only way to take Badger; the car park was out of the question, leading as it did into the main shopping centre. The footbridge was not used much, even in daytime, and Ros thought it was unlikely they would meet anyone after midnight. Crossing the main road would be tricky, as cars went along it more or less all night. Perhaps at three in the morning there would a gap, after late-night parties, before work . . .

The footbridge was stoutly built, and the steps up and down were shallow and fairly wide so that bicycles and pushchairs could be manhandled without too much difficulty.

‘You will go over it, won’t you, Badger?’

Badger gobbled her carrots greedily and pushed at her pockets for more. Ros thought that for food he would follow her anywhere, now he was so hungry. If they took a bucket of carrots and porridge oats, and Leo walked in front . . . she would need Leo.

She told him that. He looked wan.

On Saturday they took their bikes and went exploring, to find a place. It needed to be as close as possible, so that they could get home and back in bed without being discovered. The land on their side of the main road was all farms, but mostly crops, and what cow fields there were were all empty now and the gates padlocked. Although Ros was friendly with all the neighbouring farmers, none of them were likely to want to have anything to do with stolen property, even if they were sympathetic. There was a riding school a mile away, but all the ponies were now stabled and the fields empty.

‘We could bring him here and leave him in the field.’ Leo noticed that there was no padlock on the gate. ‘They’d find him in the morning.’

‘And tell the police,’ Ros said darkly.

‘Well, anyone would. Anyone honest.’

‘We want someone dishonest then.’

‘Sid the Pigman is dishonest,’ Leo said.

Sid the Pigman lived quite close, in a caravan. He had been turned out of a farm cottage when the farm had changed hands, but had been given the use of a field and a site for a caravan by the farmer. His place was along the arterial road,
separated
from it by a wide stretch of scrubby woodland. His caravan had its back to the wood, and looked down the field which sloped steeply to a stream. He kept a cow and a donkey in the field, and a large barn housed them at night. Half of it was filled with good hay provided by the farmer. The caravan was full of greyhounds, which Sid led out on leashes down the side of the arterial, and raced on Saturday nights.

‘Who says he’s dishonest?’ Ros enquired, feeling a lift of interest.

‘My dad.’

Leo’s dad, Ros knew, would assume that anyone who lived in a caravan and raced greyhounds was dishonest. Leo’s dad was a terrible snob. He called his cottage Rose Manor End. Rose Manor was the old farmhouse that had been pulled down years ago, and End meant the cottage was the end one of the terrace. But it sounded very smart. Ros’s house was called Enuff. It was called Enuff when they bought it, and her parents thought it was funny and had never bothered to change it. ‘Enuff money, you can say that again,’ Harry said. ‘That’s what it means.’

Ros asked her dad about Sid the Pigman.

‘Leo’s dad says he’s dishonest.’

‘Dishonest? Not that I know of. If something came his way, mind you, he wouldn’t go looking for the owner.’

Ros felt a prickling of anxiety at her father’s words. It was almost as if he knew what was in her mind. But he was reading the newspaper at the time and answered in an offhand way, not very interested. He didn’t ask her why she wanted to know. His answer fitted Ros’s requirements exactly. If he found a piebald pony in his field one morning, he wouldn’t go looking for the owner.

The more she thought about Sid the Pigman, the more Ros felt he was the answer to her problem. The riding school people would be bound to call the police, if she left Badger in their field, but Sid’s field was hidden away behind overgrown hedges, and if Sid didn’t say anything . . .

‘We’ll go and spy it out,’ she said to Leo. ‘See if it will do.’

It was very difficult, the days being dark as soon as they were home from school. She could only do her spying at the weekend. If Sid’s place was suitable, she decided she would move Badger as soon as possible.

* * *

It was now nearly Christmas. They broke up from school and the same afternoon bicycled down the lane to Sid the Pigman and saw that his gate had no padlock on it and that it would be an easy matter to let Badger in. The greyhounds did not bark, and the cow and donkey looked at them serenely. At the top of the field was the barn where the animals could stand out of the rain, and at the bottom a stream of clear running water where they could drink. The grass was good, and the field sheltered by the wood and high hedges. It was a perfect, happy field.

‘This is where we’ll bring him,’ Ros said.

‘What about your practice?’

Ros rather wished she’d never mentioned the practice. Suppose she was caught practising? The real thing would then be very difficult. But the General Palfrey tag had taken hold: real campaigns were worked out in great detail. She said nothing to Leo, but put on her general’s face, bossy and superior.

‘Wait and see.’

She knew she had to go.

She must make a decision, and hold to it. There was really no alternative: tonight.

Her parents went to bed at around eleven o’clock, but the traffic on the arterial road went
on
until after midnight. The best time to go would be about one o’clock. Ros had an alarm clock but wasn’t very good at setting it. She put it under her pillow timed for one o’clock, but if it went off she never heard it, for she didn’t wake until five o’clock, by which time it was too late. But while they were having lunch the next day, a frantic burring noise came from upstairs, and Dora Palfrey said, ‘What ever’s that?’ It was just one o’clock.

‘It sounds like an alarm clock,’ Ros said feebly.

Not much of a general . . . lucky Leo didn’t know about it.

The next night she determined to stay awake.

She heard her parents come to bed, and lay listening to the wind and rain on the window. She had to stay awake for two more hours. She didn’t feel very general-like at all, but during the time she had to think about it, she supposed that generals were quite often as worried as she was about what they were planning. It was a part of being a general, being worried. She dozed off, and awoke with a start. Her clock said ten to one.

She pressed the button to stop the alarm going off (she hoped), and lay listening. The distant swishes of the cars on the arterial were
down
to almost nothing, and nothing stirred in the house.

She slithered out of bed and got dressed. She had a torch, and had arranged her clothes very tidily, in order of putting on, and her anorak and gumboots were handy in the back porch.

She had already prospected squeaking floorboards and had left her bedroom door ajar, and so managed to get downstairs without a sound. She had to go out the back way, through the kitchen, which meant Erm lumbered out of her basket looking expectantly for a walk, even in the middle of the night. Thank goodness she was old and didn’t caper about and bark. The only noise she made was a wheeze, and the thump of her tail against the cooker.

Ros pushed her to one side and unbolted the kitchen door. The bolt was well-oiled and did not make a sound. It was all surprisingly easy. None of the doors stuck or squeaked, and Ros was out in the garden without any hitches. The night was very dark and cold, with sleet on the wind, but the way was well-trodden and the lights from the road cast an orange glow over the field.

Ros set off across the familiar path. She was excited rather than frightened. Her senses seemed much sharper than usual, and she could feel herself shivering, although she wasn’t cold. There was a moon that came fleetingly through the flying clouds and disappeared again, but its lightness remained, silvery above the golden glow of the town.

There was no need to use the road crossing, for there were no cars. Ros hopped over the central reservation, and was across and climbing the railway bridge only five minutes after leaving home. It was much quicker, not having to make a detour for the crossing. Over the bridge and, from the top of the steps, she could make out Badger in the moonlight, standing hunchbacked against the wind, his thick tail tucked tightly between his legs. Ros ran down the steps and across the muddy slime of the bedraggled field.

When she got to Badger, she burst into tears.

‘Oh, Badger! Poor Badger!’ she wept, seeing him so forlorn in the rain and the wind. Unable to move freely, he had no way of finding shelter or keeping warm. Her pockets were stocked with carrots and old crusts which he gobbled eagerly. She flung her arms round his neck and wept copiously into his muddy tangled mane. She could not bear to think of him abandoned day and night with his mouldy hay blown away by the wind and his water bucket kicked over.
His
thick coat barely hid his staring ribs, and his once proud head drooped sadly, all the fire and enthusiasm gone from his eyes. And yet his name was Mountfitchet Meteor Light and he had once been a famous showjumper.