The Paradise Of Flies...

The English Bitch I was telling you about earlier reminded me somewhat of the Wicked Witch of the West- she even, ironically, kept her son's mangy little dog, whose name really was Toto, permanently chained up underneath the house on the flea infested blanket he called home.

Just like a witch would.

She had yellow buck teeth and long oily curly black hair and her unshaven armpits were constantly sweat stained and reeking. Her fingernails are the worst bitten that I have ever seen, even worse than mine- and don't forget that she picks the horse shit up with her bare hands, because that's how they did it in England when she worked at the riding school- yeah right- and doesn't use a glove or bread bag because that's not how it was done in the Motherland. She also tries to save money on groceries by baking her own bread, and funnily enough, or not, the only time her fingernails are ever really clean is after she has finished kneading her world famous Cheese and Burnt Onion-on-Top Rockhard Loaf.

This is especially nice when made into Thick Butter and Bantam Egg Sandwiches, which only seem half-coddled half the the time, which we have collected from the rundown chook house near the pig-sties.

Please...can someone get me a green bucket at the thought of albumen and thick warm butter and hot yellow yolk sandwiches? Yuck. I hope you get the point because it's making me sick just thinking about them. I liked collecting the eggs and collecting snails for the Bantams to peck out of their shells like delacacies. She also had a few quails running around the bottom of the roosting rack, but thank fuck she never got it into her head to use quail eggs in her cooking. I hope...The thought still sends a chill up my spine that I actually ate anything that she ever made for us- the Peas and Corn Pizza is a complete other story, believe me. But you have to remember that I was probably starving at the time.

Whenever we used to stay over on the weekend, which we used to strangely enjoy- in a macabre sort of way- it seemed that she would never feed us very much or often enough, so whatever she did throw our way we usually fell upon like wolves. Just like her poor horses attacked their pittance of a meal. And yes; she should have fed us plenty, and often., because we were the ones who washed her kids horses before Pony Club days and plaited their tails in the chilly dawn. We were the ones who lugged the buckets of water from the tap to fill up the trough while water sloshed into our ill-fitting boots that stretch and warp from being constantly wet or muddy. We were the ones who cleaned their tack on a Saturday afternoon in the kitchen and then deftly pieced the bridles back together after oiling them, surrounded by buckets of hot soapy water soaking the bits of a week's worth of grass-slobber that has hardened to a green crust.

Red Sunset at Night a Shephard's Delight and we're off, like a bucket of prawns in the sun, in the Land Rover that's illegally towing the horse float- they've swapped the number plates off the box trailer again- where upon arrival we will groom and saddle their horses while the kids chase each other with sticks or fight over who gets to use the best whip today. They have different horses now, both are Palomino, their discarded ponies sent off to a horse farm that bought and sold horses to people that didn't care about what sort of people they bought or sold their animals to. According to the English Bitch most people can only dream of owning one Palomino, and they have Two Palominos- have you ever heard the saying that Any Palomino Is A Pal Of Mino? Yeah- well, who the hell is Mino- that's what I want to know.

Her son's mare, Kitty, is so flogged out and skinny that one time she actually laid down when he was riding her and started grazing on the grass. What was worse was that it happened at Pony Club on a Ribbon Day, and that he stayed on her and hit her with his whip until she got up and finished doing the Pony Twist- well out of the placings of course.

His sister was much luckier- and only had one other boy and his foundering grey gelding, Snowy, as her competition, but she still only managed to be Reserve Champion that year in the Under Nine's Pointscore Championship. Cherie is the horse they've replaced the small grey filly who nearly necked herself in the rusty car with. They don't keep her very long either, as they try and get more competetive horses one after the other. Cherie gets swapped for Mindy- the horse who literally stopped traffic one day as she galloped down the main road at peak hour. The problem isn't the horses- not in the beginning anyway. At first, when they are new, they are fat and well-kept. Some of the horse's She bought were even quite promising when she first bought them home. Like Jethro, the black colt who was only about six months old when she got him.

After she had tethered this black baby on a rope for about a year, she put a saddle on him and decided that he was broken in. My Sister had a few rides on him, and I can't remember what he did wrong for her exactly, but after he began rearing up every time her son would get on him I guess she decided that enough was enough and sold him before he really hurt anybody. I know she sold him as a 'broken in gelding' but that poor animal was just broken, especially when I consider now that his life would have turned out very differently if she had never chanced upon him or even if she had known what she was doing with a young horse- which she clearly didn't. That horse should have been in his twenties by now, but instead he's been dead for almost eighteen years- as are the few greyhounds that he ended up being fed to.

The other young life that she ruined- aside from her own kids that is- was that of Penny-Weenie. They bought her home in the back of their Land Rover when she was only six weeks old after paying just ten dollars for her at the Sales. It's not the smartest of ideas- bringing a foal home in the back of a car, and she cuts her leg quite badly as they try and get her out. She is supposed to be fed on milk powder but it gets too expensive for the English Bitch so she puts Penny-Weenie on a tether rope as well. She is a Thoroughbred but her growth is permanently stunted from never getting enough milk as a baby. I don't know who she was sold to, but I doubt Penny-Weenie made it to an old age, either. All of the others; Rocky, Kitty, Cherie, Jethro, Frosty, Candy, Mindy and Shortarse would be dead too, by now- either from old age or because they had gone crazy after being starved and flogged by the English Bitch and her drunk husband and her two abused kids- and would've been sent to the knackery.

My Star must have been one of the lucky ones, because she got to escape the English Bitch from hell and got to live for the rest of her life at my Grandfather's Farm. Well- actually- if I'm going to tell the truth she died in a paddock across the road from his farm, but she should have died there, and maybe even would've if the place hadn't been sold back to the bastard National Parks for a steal of a price...

But Star did get to live at the Farm, with Peter, for quite a few years. I still remember the day that my Sister and Mel Smell and Myself walked her from the English Bitch's paddock to our house where the single horse float with it's haynet stuffed to the brim is waiting to take her to five hundred acres of grass and dams and more bush than we could ever see in a single day. And we're leaving Her as well.

The Bitch.

We never have to go back and see that bitch again if we don't want to.

As we walk to our house we are singing at the tops of our lungs- a song we have made up to commemorate this joyous occasion, called "It's A Long Way To The Farm". It's sung to the tune of "It's A Long Way To Tipperary", but we say "Goodbye (English Bitch's name inserted here), We hate your stinking lies, It's a long long way to the Farm, Away from the Paradise Of Flies". If you are going to try and make sense of that little bit, you'll have to sing along with it, and put your enemie's name in the place where the brackets are; and then you might get a feeling for what our sentiments were like towards this hag at the end.

I often wonder what happened to them all, Her and her husband and the poor messed up kids- but the truth is I wouldn't like to run into them ever again. That's why the day we took Star away from that awful place was one of the best days ever.

So why did I ever go back?