Country Matters – Arrowsmith March 26: Life in Measured Animals

PICTURED ABOVE: Muddy Polo Pony

In June 1915, TS Eliot published a poem which said: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”  Aged 26 he was not yet old enough to have to pick a large unit of measurement, but in the previous month he got the news that a close friend had been killed at Gallipoli, and then, in June, Eliot married his first wife – a relationship destined to fail through mental illness. Young people tend to assume that human friendships and marriages shall last a lifetime, but it’s universally accepted – animals do not live as long as their keepers.

After Arrowsmith’s mother, Mollie died in 2017, amongst the photographs and memorabilia left behind were records of animals with which her life could be measured. Born in 1923 she had animals around her from infancy. Photographs show pairs of cats and invariably dogs with kennelmates, as Arrowsmith’s grandparents believed cats and dogs should have companions of their own kind.

When she was old enough – in her early teens – Mollie was given an Irish cob which she named ‘Larney’ – short for Killarney. Larney was her first exclusive responsibility, and Mollie’s life would have ripened gently into maturity had it not been for what happened in the September of 1939, when she was sixteen. Firstly, her father went out to France with the Royal Engineers to build airfields, and secondly, the Army requisitioned Larney by compulsory purchase.

Knowing what had happened to horses in the First World War, farmers and private individuals whose animals were commandeered anticipated the permanent loss of their horses, which took a lot to get over. By the time she was twenty years old, Mollie had come to terms with the probability Larney had been killed – perhaps somewhere horses, mules and donkeys were used to carry supplies across difficult battlefield terrain.

Commissioned into the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a Second Lieutenant and posted to Larkhill in support of the Royal Artillery, in early 1944, Mollie spotted a field of horses within the camp boundary, and when she approached, was amazed that one of the horses bounded across to the fence. It was Larney.

Refused permission to have further contact with her horse, she tried to ‘happen upon Larney by chance’ although after a while many of the horses, including Larney, seemed to get posted to other camps and combat zones. Horses served in the advance through Italy and in the Burma Campaign, but in contrast with the First World War far fewer were killed.  During the First conflict it’s thought as many as eight million Allied horses were killed, but as few as 6,500 horses were recorded as being on charge to the British Army in 1942, therefore across all operations and from 1939 until 1945 possibly fewer than two million equines (horses, mules and donkeys) were killed or injured.

Demobbed in early 1946, Mollie asked her father – by then a Lieutenant Colonel – to ask if she could buy Larney back. The response was, if Larney was not already dead, policy was to shoot surplus horses. Mollie immediately bought a Cocker Spaniel in Salisbury, January 1946. She named it ‘Berry’. Pedigree certificates followed for Jonty, another Cocker Spaniel born in 1957, but put down in 1962 because of ‘Spaniel Rage’, replaced by Badger, yet another Cocker, Gus, an English Setter in 1972, Jason – an Irish Setter in1985. Tumbles, a tricolour Spaniel was Mollie’s final dog, euthanised in 2008 due to untreatable cancer.  Sixty-two years of animal responsibility!

 Deprived of her daily walk from aged 85, Mollie later died aged 94.

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