If it had not been for Dandy I think I would have run away as soon as I was old enough to leave. I would have upped and gone, run off to one of the sleepy little villages in the New Forest in that hot summer of 1805 when I was fifteen. That was the summer I turned on Da and stood up to him for the first time ever.

We had been breaking a pony to sell as a lady’s ride. I said the horse was not ready for a rider. Da swore she was. He was wrong. Anyone but an idiot could have seen that the horse was nervy and half wild. But Da had put her on the lunge rein two or three times and she had gone well enough. He wanted to put me up on her. He didn’t waste his breath asking Dandy to do it. She would have smiled one of her sweet slow smiles and disappeared off for the rest of the day with a hunk of bread and rind of cheese in her pocket. She’d come back in the evening with a dead chicken tucked in her shawl so there was never a beating for Dandy.

But he ordered me up on the animal. A half-wild, half-foolish foal too young to be broke, too frightened to be ridden.

‘She’s not ready,’ I said looking at the flaring nostrils and the rolling whites of her eyes and smelling that special acrid smell of fearful sweat.

‘She’ll do,’ Da said. ‘Get up on her.’

I looked at Da, not at the horse. Da’s dark eyes were red rimmed, the stubble on his chin stained his face blue. The red kerchief at his neck showed bright against his pallor. He had been drinking last night and I guessed he felt ill. He had no patience to stand in the midday sunshine with a skittish pony on a lunge rein.

‘I’ll lunge her,’ I offered. ‘I’ll train her for you.’

‘You’ll ride her, you cheeky dog,’ he said to me harshly. ‘No whelp tells me how to train a horse.’

‘What’s the hurry?’ I asked, backing out of arm’s reach. Da had to hold the horse and could not grab me.

‘I got a buyer,’ he said. ‘A farmer at Beaulieu wants her for his daughter. But he wants her next week for her birthday or summat. So she’s got to be ready for then.’

‘I’ll lunge her,’ I offered again. ‘I’ll work her all day, and tomorrow or the day after I’ll get up on her.’

‘You get up now,’ he said harshly. Then he raised his voice and yelled: ‘Zima!’ and my stepmother came out into the sunshine from the gloomy caravan. ‘Hold ‘er,’ he said nodding at the horse and she jumped down from the caravan step, and went past me without a word.