Pony Passion. Harriet Castor

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      It took me a moment or two to work out what had happened. I just lay there like a sack of potatoes, with my face in the muddy grass.

      “Lyndsey! Lyndsey! Are you all right?” I heard Mrs McAllister’s voice right in my ear. She was out of breath; she must’ve shot across the field like an Olympic sprinter.

      I groaned and tried to sit up. But when I pushed on my left hand the most horrible pain shot up my arm. “Owww!” I yelped.

      “Don’t move yet,” said Mrs McAllister. “Where does it hurt?”

      “My arm,” I gasped. “Left… arm.”

      Straight away Mrs McAllister sprang into super-efficient emergency gear. First she checked me all over to make sure my arm was the only bit that hurt. Then, ever so gently, she helped me sit up. I was crying by this time, blubbing worse than my little brother Ben (who is the biggest cry-baby in the world, in case you didn’t know). I never knew part of me could hurt that much. I swear, if your arm felt like mine did right then, you’d have been bawling too!

      “All right, Lyndsey. We’re going to get you to the hospital,” said Mrs McAllister.

      “Where’s Bramble?” I said, turning my head. My eyes were so full of tears, everything was a splodgy blur.

      “She’s fine,” said Mrs McAllister. “She’s away by the fence, nosing about in the grass. Think you can stand?”

      I nodded, sniffing loudly. I hoped I hadn’t yanked on the reins in my panic and hurt Bramble’s mouth. But I couldn’t worry about Bramble for long. Getting to Mrs McAllister’s Land Rover took all my concentration. My right hand was holding my left arm close to my body to stop it moving, but somehow it still felt as if every step I took gave it a hideous jolt.

      Call me crazy, but in the hospital all I could think was: Kenny should be here! Kenny, as you probably know, is dead set on being a doctor when she grows up, like her dad. She just loves all that gruesome medical stuff. If she’d been sitting next to me while I waited in Casualty she would’ve been bouncing up and down in her chair with excitement and trying to guess what hideous diseases everyone else had.

      As it was, I was sandwiched between Mrs McAllister on one side of me and Mum on the other. Miranda, Mrs McA’s assistant, had rung my house as soon as we set off for the hospital.

      Mum kept saying relieved things like, “Thank goodness you were wearing a hard hat, poppet!”

      And Mrs McAllister kept saying apologetic things like, “Believe me, Mrs Collins, I would never let anyone out of the yard without one.”

      Mrs McAllister was looking quite shaken, actually. I guess it’s really rare that anyone hurts themselves at the stables.

      They’d given me some majorly strong painkillers, so I was feeling a bit better, though still really sore. It took ages to get everything sorted. They did an X-ray (Kenny would’ve been in orbit!), which showed that my arm was broken. Then, after another long wait, I had my plaster cast made. That felt mega weird.

      The cast went from my wrist to just above my elbow, and I was going to have to wear my arm in a sling, the nurse said, to hold it in place. Some slings are quite small, I think, but mine was like an enormous napkin. I felt like an Egyptian mummy!

      “How long do I have to wear the cast for?” I asked Mum on the way home.

      “Six weeks, the nurse said,” Mum replied. We stopped at some traffic lights and she turned to look at me. “Poor pumpkin. You were very brave.”

      Famous last words! For some reason that just made me burst into tears again. It was probably the shock of it all, Mum said later.

      When we got home, Dad came bounding out of the house and opened the car door for me. “But – what’s happened to you?” he said, gasping and staring at my plaster cast as if I’d just sprouted an alien growth.

      “Daaad! You are such a bad actor!” I shrieked. “Mum was on the phone to you every five minutes when we were in the hospital. I heard her!”

      “Oh. Right you are, then,” Dad said, slamming the car door behind me and ruffling my hair in the way that usually really annoys me. Tonight, for some reason, I didn’t mind.

      Ben and the baby, Spike, were already in bed, but my older brothers Stuart and Tom piled downstairs when they heard us come in. They’d even made a welcome home banner for me out of a couple of old tea towels stapled together.