Black Beauty

straw and hay; he began to clean the harness, and
helped to wash the carriage. As he was too short to do anything in the way of
grooming, he walked underneath the horses and did what he could there.
    ‘You see,’ James said to
John, ‘I am leaving a great deal behind; my mother and Betsy, and you, and a
good master and “mistress”.’ The mistress would certainly miss him. ‘I will be
able to help my mother much better with a new wooden leg.’
    Merrylegs pined after him
and went off his food. John took him out several mornings with a leading rein.
He also exercised me — doing somersaults, the pole-vault, the long jump and the
one hundred metres breast stroke.
    Joe’s father would often
come in and do bugger all. He understood the work, and refused to do it.

18

GOING FOR THE DOCTOR
     
    Oh, I was called out one early morn
    Just as the day was about to dawn
    Mistress kept having to go
    Seventeen times an hour, she had filled the poe
    Get the doctor in a hurry
    And while you are out, get a takeaway curry
    We all galloped like hell
    When we got there, we rang the bell
    ‘Do you know what the time is?’ the doctor said
    ‘We’re all in bed’
    There we were covered in mud and grime
    And all he wanted to know was the bloody time
    We told him our mistress was ill
    Time after time the poe she would fill
    The doctor attended her and I could hear him speaking
    ‘I’m afraid, sir,your wife is leaking.’
     
    I had eaten my hay and was
lying down in my straw, fast asleep, when suddenly I was awakened by the stable
bell ringing, and I heard feet running up the hall. John called out, ‘Wake up,
Nigger, you must go well now, if ever you did.’
    ‘Now, John,’ said the
Squire, ‘ride for your life; she’s had an attack on her water works. She’s
filled the poe seven times in the last hour.’
    I galloped as fast as I
could lay my feet to the ground. When we came to the bridge, John pulled me up
a little and patted my neck. ‘Well done, Nigger! Good old fellow,’ he said. He
would have let me go slower, but my spirit was up, and I was off again as fast
as before. My legs were a blur; I had never had blurred legs before. It was all
quiet — everybody was asleep.
    As we drew up at Dr
White’s, John rang the bell twice and then knocked at the door like thunder.
The window was thrown up, and Dr White, in his nightcap, put his head out and
said, ‘What do you want?’
    ‘Our mistress is very ill,
come quickly.’
    ‘Do you know what time it
is?’ asked the doctor. Here we had galloped eight miles, and all he wanted to
know was the time. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘I will come.’
    His horse was ill, so they
decided to ride me. So the doctor rode off with me, leaving John with an eight
hour walk ahead of him.
    Soon we were at the
master’s house. He stood in the door with a blank cheque made out to the
doctor. He had sent his son to the village to kill the money lender. I was now
very ill; I must have caught something off the doctor while he was riding me.
    One day, my master came to
see me. ‘My poor Beauty,’ he said, ‘you saved your mistress’s life and saved us
all from drowning.’ Yes, I had done it for the mistress, but never again! Next
time, she would have to die.

19

ONLY IGNORANCE
     
    Oh, deary me, I have become very ill
    The vet has brought me a pill
    It is the size of a tennis ball
    And I have to swallow it all
    They started to bleed me, they took plenty
    When it was finished, I was nearly bloody empty
    My fever made me very sensitive to hearing
    I could hear ants on the walls through a clearing
    Then the vet gave me a tonic
    It gave me the shits something chronic
    It nearly was the death of me
    So they sent me to convalesce on the Isle of Capri.
     
    John held a pail for the
bloodletting. ‘You must get better soon or you are going to run out of it.’ I felt
very faint after it, and thought I should die. ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘we thought
you were going to die too.’
    The fever made me acute of
hearing. I could hear the Pope in the Vatican walking around. One night, John
made me as comfortable as he could with a pillow and an eiderdown. He said he
would wait half an hour to see how the medicine worked. It didn’t; it gave me
an attack of the shits. He sat down on a bench and put a lantern at their feet;
it set fire to his trousers.
    Tom Green and John had been
talking. Green said, ‘I wish you would say a bit of a kind word to Joe; the boy
is brokenhearted, he can’t eat his