PrintWhen I was in college, I spent a year in England as an exchange student. To help pay expenses, I worked as a combination au pair girl and stable manager for a woman who showed jumpers internationally. To say this was a learning experience would have been putting it mildly. The farm was five miles from the nearest village, and our closest neighbors were a mile down the lane. When I tell you that I grew up in some of the major capital cities of the world, you’ll realize the culture shock. And when I add that 2-year-old kiddies are not my favorite people, you will realize that I was desperately short of “the ready” when I took the job.
The master of the place where I lived was a Scot, and he played the bagpipes and the accordion. I am an opera buff. Enough said. The bagpipes were kept in a Harry Potter-style cupboard under the stairs, and the door had a distinctive squeak. The instant that cupboard door squeaked, both Border Collies, the kid I cared for and any horses currently turned out within earshot would head for the far end of the property. The less said about the accordion, the better.
The Border Collies were great. They helped me bring the horses in at feeding time, and they would herd a particular pony for me when it was being difficult to catch. They slept on or in my bed (particularly nice in the wintertime when the owners didn’t believe in overheating the place), which was fine until the night of the Big Storm. The owners were away for the weekend with the kid, and I was a big-city girl alone five miles from anywhere with a stable full of very expensive show jumpers and two Border Collies. In the middle of the night Collie No. 1 suddenly leapt up, all his fur standing straight up, growling. So I grabbed the cricket bat that I always kept handy and proceeded to investigate to the accompaniment of enormous thunder-and-lightning cacophony and rain coming down in buckets. The horses were fine, there were no intruders, just a lot of thunder, and the dog probably had had a nightmare. It took me a long time to get back to sleep.
These were the two dogs that we left in the house when the family took me along for a night on the town. We came home to find the lower level of the house in complete disarray. The dogs, bored by being shut up in the house (even though the weather outside was ghastly), had experimented and discovered that if you pounced on the foot pedal on the refrigerator, the door flew open. By the time we got home, there was nothing left in the refrigerator, a great deal of scrap and glass on the kitchen floor, and those dear doggies spent the rest of the night outdoors in the nasty weather. Then we took the pedal off the refrigerator.
