The Horses Didn't Come Home

By Pamela Rushby

A story about a boy, a horse and the last great cavalry charge in history.

In an army camp in a Middle Eastern desert, a young Australian soldier named Harry is saddling and grooming his horse, Bunty. She is sturdy and strong; an Australian waler who belongs to Harry's sister, Laura, back home in Australia.

As Harry finishes the grooming he stands in front of Bunty. The two of them, horse and master, stand totally still. Then Harry swings up into the saddle and turns away from the camp into the desert. A few soldiers watch them as they ride out. No one says a word.

It's their last ride together.

The last great cavalry charge in history took place at Beersheba in the Sinai Desert in 1917. It was Australian soldiers and horses that took part in, and won, this amazing, unexpected, unorthodox victory.

The men proudly claimed it was their great-hearted horses that won the day.

But in the end, the horses didn't come home ...

PRAISE
'A superb story about an extraordinary corner of our past' - Jackie French

'The Horses Didn't Come Home is an emotional and moving story that transports the reader back to 1917 and the First World War' - Toowoomba Chronicle

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Apr 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780730496304

Pamela Rushby

Pamela Rushby is a well- known, award-winning Australian author. Her YA title When the Hipchicks Went to War won the Ethel Turner Prize in the 2010 NSW Premier’s Awards. HCPA published Circles of Stone in 2003 and The Horses Didn’t Come Home in 2012. Pam lives in Brisbane.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Laura

Henderson’s Run, 1914

Bunty hadn’t always been Harry’s horse. In 1914, when the war first began, she was my horse, my very special horse. She belonged to me — Laura, Harry’s younger sister.

This is how she came to be in Tripoli, half the world away, with Harry, at the very end of the war.

I’d had Bunty since we were both very young. Dad gave her to me when she was just the most adorable, wobbly-legged little foal you ever saw, and we’d grown up together. I’d chosen her name from a book of English school stories that a governess, Miss Hadley, had brought with her when she came to our property, Henderson’s Run, in Queensland.

Miss Hadley was the very first of a very long line of governesses that my mother had employed to teach me. She hadn’t stayed long. I watched as she’d arrived, driven in the buggy from the point where the Cobb & Co coach came closest to our place. I wasn’t keen on this latest notion of Mother’s at all. A governess? What for? I could read and write, couldn’t I? All that this governess business was going to do, I suspected, was to cut down drastically on the time I spent riding.

But I needn’t have worried.

Miss Hadley stepped out of the buggy. Her feet hit the ground. She looked down in dismay at the red dust that instantly coated her smart little white boots. She took a breath and bravely trudged through it, her skirt raising red puffs as it trailed on the ground. On the verandah she shook hands with my mother.

‘How do you do, Mrs Henderson?’ she said politely.

Then, when Mother went to get tea for her, she’d looked out at the miles and miles of pale yellow, sun-bleached grass, rolling like blonde waves until it met a burning blue sky. Her eyes widened. Her hands gripped the verandah rail.

‘How — how far is it?’ she asked. ‘To the nearest town, I mean?’

I glanced sideways at her. Clearly not a country girl, then. I can do something with that, I thought.

‘To the town?’ I said. ‘About two hours. If the road’s dry and you can get through, that is.’ I could see that didn’t impress her, so I built on it at once. ‘But it’s not so far to our nearest neighbours,’ I said reassuringly. ‘They’re really close. About half an hour’s ride, over the hill.’

‘Over that hill?’ echoed Miss Hadley. She looked at the hill, bare and rocky, emerging from the grass, sharply outlined against the sky. ‘And there’s nothing, nothing in between?’

‘In between?’ I said, all innocence. ‘Yes, of course there is. There’re a couple of creeks. And another hill: a very steep hill. You just have to go a bit carefully there, because of the snakes in the rocks. But that’s all right. They usually hear you coming and get out of the way. And after that you come to the Bentleys’ place. That’s where Mr and Mrs Bentley and their son Jack live. He’s my big brother Harry’s friend. We go there a lot. It’s not far.’

‘Not far,’ said Miss Hadley. Her voice wobbled a little. ‘Not far.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Only about half an hour. Not far.’

Miss Hadley was gone within a week. She couldn’t wait to shake our red dust off her dainty boots. But, to my delight, she left that book of English school stories behind.

I’ve said I could read. Of course I could. I just didn’t like to do it much. But once I started on that book of English school stories, things — well, changed. I loved those English school stories. I perched up in the pepperina tree and devoured them, gulped them down like delectable, feather-light iced cakes. They were about a world that was totally different from the one I lived in. They were about girls who played games I’d never heard of: hockey and lacrosse. Girls who had midnight feasts in dorms, and took part in swimming galas and paper chases and who had all kinds of amazing adventures. They were girls with names like Bunty and Midge, Topsy and Tilly and Trixie, Dolly and Daisy. I read wide-eyed as they captured robbers, played tricks on strict teachers and prefects, and went off camping and exploring caves and paddling canoes. I wanted to be like those girls. I desperately wished I’d been called a friendly nickname like Bunty or Midge instead of Laura — that had been Mother’s choice, and though Dad and Harry sometimes called me Laurie, Mother never did.

So if I couldn’t be called Topsy or Trixie or something like that, I did the next best thing. I named my little mare, the horse Dad gave me for my ninth birthday, Bunty. And because I had no group of girlfriends to have midnight feasts or plan jolly practical jokes with, or play lacrosse games against, I made a friend of Bunty. She was my best friend. My only friend, really. Well, there was my brother, Harry, but Harry was years older than I was, and he had his friend, Jack Bentley. And they’d been away at school in the city for a couple of years anyway, and only came home for holidays. So Bunty and I spent most of our time together. We rode, of course, but I did more than ride Bunty. I taught her tricks. Morgan helped me with that. He was Dad’s head stockman, and he was wonderful. He knew everything, just everything, about horses and he didn’t mind teaching me some of what he knew.

Harry and Jack had their own special horses too, Tallyman and Taylor, that were kept especially for them when they came home on their holidays. But the boys weren’t interested in teaching their horses tricks; they liked to spend their time jumping logs and fences, and going out shooting kangaroos and scrub turkeys.

Our three horses, Bunty, Tallyman and Taylor, and just about all the other horses on our properties, were walers. Walers are a special kind of horse. A very special kind, my father was always quick to remind us. Dad was very, very proud of our walers. He said they could trace their ancestry (except horses can’t actually trace their ancestry, can they, he’d joke, so what he meant, he said, was that their ancestry could be traced) right back to the First Fleet.

Just seven horses, my father told us — usually at dinner when we had guests, so he got to tell the story of the walers to people who hadn’t heard it before, while my mother managed to look politely interested, and Harry and I wilted in our chairs. Just one stallion, five mares and one colt came ashore at Sydney Cove. Then later, my father would go on, other horses came to Australia and bred with these. He ticked the different breeds off on his fingers. English thoroughbreds and sturdy Timor ponies, and even Arabs. And the result, my father would go on, was a completely new kind of horse, light and medium-sized, but most of all, strong. Horses particularly suited to Australian conditions.

These horses could be any colour, bay, chestnut, black, brown, grey, but they were all walers. And they were called that, my father explained to the guests (most of whom were now wilting in their chairs, just as Harry and I were, if they weren’t actually face down in the soup through boredom), because they were first bred in New South Wales, but the name stayed, even when they came from other places like Victoria and Queensland. And the best walers, of course, my father said proudly, the very best ones, came from Queensland. Walers like ours.

The guests often looked up hopefully at that point, because they thought he’d finished, but my father went on relentlessly. Walers, my father said, could take long strides and gallop quickly. They had strong backs and could carry heavy loads for long distances. They could exist in harsh conditions on small amounts of food and water. And they developed especially well in Queensland, my father explained carefully to his captive, sagging audience, because here they could run in the open all year, and our heavy seeding grasses contributed to their development of bone and muscle. And our artesian water, rich in salt and lime and chemicals, helped to form solid bone too. He’d pause and look around to make sure everyone was still paying attention.

At that point, Mother often managed to break in and take the ladies away for tea. If the men were quick they’d get away too, but if they weren’t, they had to stay at the table and learn more — much more than they probably ever cared to — about walers.

I’d heard it all before, many times, but though Harry and I laughed together about Dad’s walers lecture, I was always proud to see our horses rounded up and brought in every year. They were so sturdy and sure-footed, our walers. They came from our broken, rocky, hilly country, country that was covered with fallen timber and stones, and crisscrossed by dry creek and river beds. They were horses that had learned, in that country, to pick up their feet and watch where they were going. They could be self-willed and headstrong, and they were practically wild, but they were magnificent horses, our walers. They were one-person horses, intelligent, and once they learned something they never forgot it. And my lovely, my beautiful Bunty was one of the best of these.

I was twelve when Bunty left me. Miss Hadley had long departed. Other governesses had come and gone. Mostly gone. Harry, and his friend Jack, had just come home from school in the city. They’d come home for good this time — they’d left school forever — and Harry was delighted, just delighted, about that. School had been all right, he told me, particularly the football and cricket, but working with horses on our property was what he wanted to do. All he really wanted to do.

I could see the time coming, and not too far off, when I’d be sent away to school in my turn, because my mother was tired of advertising for governesses who came and stayed for ten minutes and left again, and I knew she had it in her mind to send me to school. Well, if it had been going to be like one of those jolly English boarding schools in the book that I’d almost read to pieces by now, I wouldn’t have minded, but from things Harry and Jack had said I suspected real school was rather different from that. I wasn’t looking forward to it. Especially to leaving my Bunty.

Then the war happened — and I didn’t leave Bunty after all.

Instead, Bunty left me.

CHAPTER 2

Harry

Henderson’s Run, 1914

I couldn’t wait to get home, just couldn’t wait. School had been something I knew I had to do; school had been all right in its way — I supposed — but the day I got onto the train to head west and home for good was one of the best of my life. No more rules, no more prefects, no more boring mathematics or stodgy history or incomprehensible Latin, just working with horses on our property for the rest of my life. It sounded good to me, very good indeed — practically perfect, in fact.

When the train pulled out of the station, I knew I had to do something, something amazing, to celebrate. But what? I looked around. Not much to work with in a Queensland Railways train compartment. Then I had a flash of inspiration. I grabbed the stupid straw boater hat I’d been forced to wear on my head for the last few years, leaned out the window, pulled my arm back, and spun the hat through the air. It sailed over the heads of other boys from our school, some leaning from the windows of the train as I was, some still on the platform, and they looked up and stared as it revolved in the air, descended, hit the opposite line — and was squashed flat under the wheels of an oncoming train. The boys cheered. A few more hats followed mine. Then more, and more, until there wasn’t a boy on the platform with a straw boater still on his head.

I cheered back at them, waving my arms wildly. Then we went around a bend, and I couldn’t see them any more. Gone! Hooray! I sat back in my seat, grinning. ‘I think I could have started a whole new school breaking-up day tradition there,’ I said to Jack.

Jack glanced up. He was still wearing his boater, and he was reading a newspaper someone had left on the seat of our compartment.

‘You’re quite mad, you know that, don’t you?’ he said.

‘I really hope so,’ I said, still grinning.

Jack didn’t answer. I watched him as the train rattled on; he rustled through the pages of the newspaper.

‘Aren’t you feeling a bit mad yourself?’ I said at last. ‘I mean, here we are, school finished, out of it forever, going home —’

Jack looked up. There was a short silence. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said at last. ‘At least, going home … But, well, there’s so much happening in the world, the war I mean, and we’re just — well, going home …’

I thought about that. I didn’t really understand it. I knew about the war in Europe, of course: I wasn’t stupid and it was in all the newspapers. England was fighting Germany. That meant that we, in Australia, were fighting Germany too. But it was all too far off to affect us. Probably, I thought comfortably, it never would.

Jack was quiet all the long way home, quieter than I’d ever known him; we didn’t talk on the train west, nor when we changed to the Cobb & Co coach for the last leg of the journey. He stared silently out of the coach window at the thin, straggly trees, the long yellow grass, the red dust.

‘Nearly home!’ I crowed. ‘Nearly home!’

‘It looks so — so small,’ Jack said. Softly, nearly to himself.

‘Small?’ I said. ‘Small?’ I didn’t get it, there was mile upon mile of empty country out there. ‘What do you mean, small?’

‘Feels small to me,’ Jack said. ‘Not size, I don’t mean in size. I mean —’ He stopped. ‘I don’t know what I mean,’ he said at last.

‘I don’t either,’ I said. I looked at him sideways. I knew that Jack had liked school much better than I had: he’d actually listened, in some classes at least, and he’d got good marks. Now that I thought about it, he’d even won some prizes for history and English. But surely he wasn’t sorry about leaving school?

‘You didn’t actually want to stay on at school, did you?’ I asked. ‘You know, when they were talking about going on to university and all that.’

‘Me? No,’ Jack said. But he didn’t say it as if he really meant it. It was more as if he was just agreeing with me to keep me quiet.

‘You’ll be fine when we’ve been home for a few days,’ I assured him. ‘When we’ve been out on Taylor and Tallyman, done a bit of work, caught up with our friends.’ A thought struck me. ‘I wonder how the Bannerman girls are? And Amy and Amelia Lever? That Amy’s got her eye on you, you know.’

‘Has she now? I’ll remember that,’ Jack said. ‘Sure. It’ll be fine.’

But it wasn’t fine. Not really. Over the next few weeks, we did everything I’d said we would. We went out on Taylor and Tallyman. They’d been delighted to see us — itching to get out for rides. We met our friends, went to some parties, and saw girls I’d known for years, but who’d started to change in some very interesting ways (and who were looking better and better to me as they changed).

I slid back into my old life just as comfortably as I pulled on my old riding boots, which were moulded to the exact shape of my feet. But Jack’s boots didn’t seem to be fitting quite so well.

‘What’s wrong with Jack?’ Laura asked me one evening, as we watched him ride off home down the track.

Well. That was interesting. I’d thought I was the only one who’d noticed Jack had changed. But Laura had always been sharp-eyed. ‘Wrong? With Jack? What makes you think there’s something wrong?’

‘He doesn’t seem very happy to be back here,’ she said. ‘To be home.’

‘I’m happy to be home,’ I said.

Laura laughed. ‘Oh, you. Every man, woman and yellow-footed rock wallaby between here and Thargomindah knows you’re happy to be home.’ She thought for a moment. ‘But Jack’s maybe not. He’s always reading the newspapers. About the war, I suppose. He’s — different.’

I thought about it. ‘He says that around here is too — small — now,’ I said at last.

Laura looked at me. ‘All this?’ She waved her hand around, as we watched Jack disappear into the far, far distance. ‘All this? Too small?’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘That’s what he says.’

Later, I saw Laura reading the newspaper. I wondered if she was trying to understand what was making Jack look so much as if he was walking in the wrong shoes. Well, it can’t be the war, I thought. That’s got nothing to do with us!

Well, that’s what I thought … until the day the officers came to our