Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

I take out another photo from the Magical Memory Box – it is a photo of Tea Cake and Dobbin, our two favorite friendly horses that we always visited when we go to Eskdale. 

Whenever we reach Eskdale, they are typically the first things we see in the property. They would already be grazing in the field near the wooded area where we will be picking blackberries for my mother’s jam; she was a practical woman and loved the countryside for picking berries. She was a master at making apple pies, as well as rhubarb pies!

One time, my mother had finally given us the go-signal to go to the horses so we could feed them grass over the fence. Mum, Alistair, and I walked over to Dobbin, while Stuart, Sandy, and dad walked over to Tea Cake, the ‘friendlier’ of the two. Alistair and I would be laughing as we pretend-played – he was Dobbin and I was ‘me’; he would say things like, “Tanks so mooch for the grass my little fwend!” 

My father had just turned his back on Tea Cake to pull up more grass. All of a sudden, he let out a booming yell. Unprovoked, the so-called ‘friendly’ Tea Cake had bitten my father in the back! It seems Tea Cake wasn’t so friendly after all! That sort of destroyed our idea of our two friendly horses in the countryside! Of course, this also meant no more blackberry picking that day.

We went back to the car, and fortunately my father always kept a first-aid kit in the car so my mother could attend to his wound. She didn’t want the boys getting in the way while she was doing this, so she told my older brothers to go and play in the nearby stream, but to take off those best clothes first! I was too young to play in the stream, so I just had to sit on the back seat of the car and wait. Fortunately, my father’s wound wasn’t too bad – it was more like a bruise.

On the way back (we were going to visit the Chapmans), I was lucky again to have a window seat, as I liked staring out at the undulating hills we passed by. 

Looking back, this nostalgic afternoon may or may not have been completely true in the factual sense, but as I have mentioned, that was not the point of these recollections.

To read more of our adventures in Eskdale, you can check out my other stories here:
Romanticism in Painting and Poetry | Mother and Son: the Boo Game | Brookes and Rivers in Eskdale |
West Ferry | Birth Origins