Prince of Ponies

There was screaming and suddenly everyone was running everywhere. The horses were completely forgotten – all anyone cared about was getting to cover as the planes flew closer and closer, all the while firing on us relentlessly. I saw a horse fall in a hail of machinegun fire, and at that moment I knew this was all too real.

“Don’t they see we aren’t soldiers?” my father was shouting. “There are women and children here!”

Bu the Germans didn’t seem to care. They were firing at us.

I wish I could say that I held my nerve enough to keep hold of Prince, but that would not be true. What happened next was not because I held him. It was my own nervous habit that bound us together. As we’d been walking, I’d been fiddling with the rope, looping it round my wrist. I didn’t realise how dangerous this could be or that, the instant the gunfire began and Prince startled and bolted, the rope would jerk into a tight knot and I would be literally dragged off my feet and into the forest behind the runaway colt.

I remember being flung about on the ground as if I were a sack of hay, and then the roughness of the bracken against my skin as Prince dragged me off the road and into the trees. And then I must have hit something with my head, because when I woke up, everything was woozy and I felt a lump on my skull almost as big as my fist, throbbing and hot from where I’d been struck. Prince, all heaving and sweaty, was still there, standing over me. And the rope was tight as a hangman’s noose round my wrist, so my fingers had turned white from lack of blood. When I wrenched off the rope, they tingled for ages with pins and needles, and there were rope burns and bruises. That rope saved me, though, because Prince had managed to wrap it round a tree when he’d bolted. The rope had pulled taut and had tethered him tight to the tree trunk, so in the end he can’t have dragged me very far. He’d tried to break free, but no matter how hard he pulled on that rope, it had only tightened more round the trunk and bound him to the tree. So the rope held him, and it held me. I had to cut myself loose with a pocketknife, but I left Prince tethered to the tree until I could figure out what to do.

I was still woozy. The last thing I remembered before I was knocked out was the machinegun rattle and the sky filled with German planes roaring above. Now the noise was gone. The sky was silent. And the forest too. And when I shouted out for my parents, again and again, there was nothing. Everybody had gone and we were alone …

***

Zofia rose to her feet, forcing little Rolf to stand up and leap off her lap on to the carpet. “We will finish now,” she said.

“No!” Mira was distraught. “We can’t stop now. I need to know what happens next!”

“It will have to wait until next time,” Zofia said, pointing at the clock above the fireplace. “Mira, you are late for school.”

The bus was running so slow that day! Mira sat in her seat with Rolf in her arms, feeling more and more anxious. By the time she’d handed over the dachshund to Frau Schmidt and run the two blocks down the street from there to her school, she was almost a full hour late for class.

“You need your teacher to sign your late slip,” the secretary at the office told her. Mira filled in the slip. She wrote her name and the date and then, under “Reason for lateness”, she scribbled the first thing that came into her head.

“What is this that you have written here?” her teacher, Herr Weren, asked her when she offered him the note as she entered the class.

Herr Weren read from the late slip out loud to the class: “Reason for lateness: Hitler invading Poland.”

He turned to Mira. “That is not funny, Mira.”

“I’m not trying to be funny, Herr Weren,” Mira said.

“Well, you are very successful, then!” Herr Weren said curtly. “Perhaps you had better stay behind in detention when everyone else goes to morning tea today and make up for wasting all of this time.”

“Yes, Herr Weren,” Mira said.

When the bell rang, Mira stayed in her seat. Herr Weren took out a newspaper, kicking his chair back and putting his feet up on the desk.

“Am I allowed to have my morning tea?” Mira asked.

Herr Weren looked up from his newspaper and raised an eyebrow. “Under the rules of the Geneva Convention, I believe you have the right to eat,” he said. Then he gave a chuckle at his own joke, which Mira didn’t understand. But she figured that he meant yes, she could, and so she unpacked her lunchbox from her bag. There was some hummus and carrots and a heavy brown German kind of bread that Mira didn’t like much at all, which her mother brought home from the bakery.

The clock on the classroom wall ticked very loudly. Herr Weren looked up at it wearily, already bored with disciplining his pupil. He put down his newspaper. “I think that’s enough,” he said. “You can go out and play now, Mira.”

“Do I have to?” Mira said.

“What?” Herr Weren was confused. “Yes, Mira, I’m letting you go now.”

“Oh.” Mira’s voice was heavy with disappointment. The truth was, she’d been delighted to get a detention and she was less than thrilled that it was now over.

Herr Weren walked to the door and held it open for her. Mira stuffed her lunchbox back in her bag and slung it over her back. Herr Weren stood waiting. She was moving so slowly, this child!

“Is there something wrong, Mira?” he asked.

“No, Herr Weren,” Mira said.

“Come on, then! Off you go.”

Outside in the playground the other kids had already eaten lunch. The boys were mostly on the field playing football. The girls’ activities, on the other hand, were much more divided. There was a big group of girls playing Fang on the field, and there were more playing netball on the courts. Mira hurried past them. There was a place, just at the end, where she usually sat at break times. No one else went there, and all she had to do was wait and hope that no one came by before the bell rang. Today, though, when she rounded the corner, there were already three girls there. They were playing a game they called elastics. Two of the girls, Hannah and Gisela, stood with knotted pairs of tights stretched like bands round their legs. They stood with their legs braced wide, so that the tights made a taut loop round them, and the third girl, whose name was Leni, had her back to Mira and was jumping back and forth, scissoring her legs across the tights as the other girls chanted a rhyme:

“Jingle jangle

Silver bangle

Inside – out – on!”

Leni was taller than the other two girls, so she had the advantage in this game because of her longer legs. She was wearing blue shorts and a white T-shirt and her ice-blonde hair was cropped in a very short bob, rather boyish in style; the other two girls were both much mousier, with long hair in ponytails.

“Hey!” Hannah caught sight of Mira before the others. “Look, Leni, it’s Cockroach.”

Leni stopped jumping. She turned round and smiled at Mira. It was a smile that made Mira feel sick. She knew what was coming.

“Cockroach!” Leni greeted her. “Have you come to play with us?”

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