Prince of Ponies. Stacy Gregg

and a moment after they came into sight, the planes directly opened fire!

      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.”