27th January 2002

A continuation of the orginal manuscript 'When Sophie Met Darcy Day' published by Harper Collins:

We arrived back to Devon at about teatime and spent most of that night making sure that we had packed everything. We had arranged for a cattle truck to come to us the following morning as well as the horse lorry, so that we could load up the poultry, sheep and goats and all the outside equipment. I shut the poultry in their respective houses because it was an easy and safe way to transport them. Thus, they went to bed in Devon and woke up some hours later to find themselves miraculously transported to an entirely different world. Colin stayed overnight in his lorry, we managed to grab a little sleep and in next to no time it was time to load everybody and everything else. Our dogs by this time were a bit bemused, their home was empty and we knew that they sensed our stress. Beryl was more sensitive than the rest and kept hiding in corners, but they all had their tails between their legs and were nervous about what was happening.

We would be glad when we could get their routine back to normal.

The cattle truck was loaded and filled to the gunwales, we sent it on its way and began to load the horses. It was a nightmare and took ages. I had ordered tubes of sedation for some of them but they still played up and in the end, just as Al threw a wobbly in the lorry and put his head through the roof, I called in our vet for stronger sedation. Doris, one of the fillies refused to load. We did everything, and she got angrier and angrier, and in the end threw herself down upon the lorry ramp in a massive sulk. At one stage, I even thought that we would have to leave her behind and I would have to stay and try and find someone to look after her until such time we could come back for her. Finally out of desperation, we tried big bales of straw, we stacked them either side of the ramp to stop her running out and then about six of us rolled a further large bale of hay behind her and she had nowhere to go but up into the lorry.

The horses were stamping and fractious in the lorry because they had to wait such a long time for Doris to load but instead of nearly tearing my hair out, I was calm, even when Al’s emerged from the top of the lorry, all I could think was that I had inadvertently absorbed some of the sedation from my hands which I had tubed into the horses. We had to do then was to load Red and Toffee into the back of the lorry but we also had to do something very sad; say goodbye to our dear friend Peter.

A couple of months before we had told Peter that we were going to move to Wiltshire, he and his wife Greta were sad but understood the reason. I told Peter that if he so wished we would take Fasci with us, she was happy and she loved the company of Ben, it would have been a big wrench to have separated them. We had over the years managed her sweet itch ( the cause of her bald and sore mane and tail: biting midges had plagued her for years throughout the summer months). Peter knew that Fasci would not be happy to be on her own once more and told us that he would like us to take her with us. It was a hard thing for him to decide, he loved his little horse and not to be able to go and see her twice a day would leave a huge hole in his life. Nevertheless, he helped us load her into the lorry and as we drove off, he turned away. I was sad to leave Devon, I knew that our life would never be quite the same again.