My mare has had a ‘misalliance’ with a pint-sized stallion

My favourite vet came to see Darcy and immediately put his finger on the problem.

Dusk was falling when he climbed out of his battered 4x4 in khaki shorts and crumpled T-shirt, sun-burned, muddy and sweaty from the day’s call-outs. He is a victim of his own brilliance, and the decades of experience that have made him invaluable. Everyone asks for him, and he tries to get to his favourite clients even though he ought to be retired.

It was 7.45 p.m. and after me he was heading for a traveller site in Croydon. He does not discriminate. He’s my kind of hero.

We had Darcy standing ready by the gate and immediately he dismissed the graze on her knee which was the only reason for the lameness I could find. He ran his hand down her back leg from one end to the other as I held her and the builder boyfriend watched. Within five seconds he found an almost imperceptible slit on her heel and announced: ‘She’s not happy about that.’

Right where the flesh of her foot met the back of her hoof, a shallow half-inch cut was opening and closing as she moved, which was why the poor girl was holding her foot in the air and only putting it down to walk by balancing on her toe.

Chattering on about events in the news, the vet sprayed the foot with antibiotic.

Straightening up, he said the cut would heal. But it did suggest the small stallion who got into her field had stood on her back feet as he did what stallions do. A misalliance, is what he called it.

One should never make the mistake of looking at an undergrown colt and a large mare and assume it’s not possible. ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way,’ he said, with his earthy realism, and then: ‘I should know, I’ve covered a lot of mares in my time!’

The builder boyfriend and he guffawed as I managed a faint giggle.

I was worrying too about Goldie the pony, Darcy’s companion, who at 13 hands was well within range of the pint-sized stallion, although I suspected Darcy would have done all she could to chaperone her.

I showed him a picture of the uncut pony in question, a raggedy black and white cob, and he agreed with me. Bless his heart, the pony was not the sort of match we would have sought for our beautiful bay thoroughbred, or the palomino pony, if we wanted to put either of them in foal, which we definitely do not.

And I tended to think neither Darcy nor Goldie had wanted it either. By the look of the place, the stallion had been kicked from one end of the field to the other.

By morning he was found in the next-door paddock with the builder boyfriend’s cobs.

From the twisted and bent wire, it looked as though he had been shoved through into the boys’ field by Darcy in a final act of retribution, or boredom: let Jimmy and Duey deal with him.

The BB’s heavy cobs were chasing him round when the owner arrived and rang me in a panic. I gave her the code to our gate padlock so she could pull the stallion out.

Two weeks later, she and her assorted friends have not mended the fencing through which their youngster walked out of his field and, having got the scent, pushed through my triple-stranded electric tape.

They continue to turn their scrawny horses into bald fields with bits of tape on the ground, fence posts down, wooden rails busted.

I don’t want Darcy having to look at that, never mind interact with it. But this is what you have to deal with when you rent land.

I have argued and argued with these people. And they have told me to shove my vet bill up my nether regions, although the estate manager has told them they have to pay.

Thankfully, my favourite vet was available because I couldn’t face a twenty-something slip of a girl just out of college.

His view of the ‘misalliance’ was, broadly, pro-choice. So I made the choice for Darcy and Goldie and he began rummaging among the boxes of medicine vials in the back of his car. ‘What about this abortion row in the States, eh?’ he ruminated, as he pulled out the prostaglandin.

He left me with two syringes to inject into the muscle of their necks in ten days’ time. If a slip of a girl can do this, I can do it, I thought.

After ten days of looking at the obscenely thick needles, I rang the office. And when she turned up, I was never so thankful to see a twenty-something vet just out of college.