put her in contact with more animals. And there was the white horse. Whatever its original English name, it now had a new Egyptian name, Mut Hotep, after the favorite horse of Ramesses II.
“It was as if he smelled a friend,” she said of their first meeting. The horse, who had been grazing, saw her and walked towards her until his head touched her arm and stayed there.
Mut Hotep was her ticket to a certain degree of freedom. A few miles from the village was the seaside town of Eastbourne with a well stocked public library. Every week or two she rode the obliging Mut Hotep to the library, where she would borrow all the books on Egyptology she could carry back with her. Fortunately, there were many, written by the prominent Egyptologists of the time – Sir William Flinders Petrie, a prolific scholar who regularly published his great discoveries in the Fayyum, Thebes, Memphis and, most important for Dorothy, Abydos; and Dr. Budge, whose long list of books was an absolute must for beginners and scholars alike. Of course she had already devoured some of Budge’s books.
Still, despite the comfort of her books and the large country house, her loneliness was sometimes acute. She longed to see her young aunt and have more nights of laughter and storytelling. No one here in the country, not even her dear granny, could know the thoughts that occupied her mind. Her affinity for animals would always be a solace to her, even if it was not always wise or prudent. There was one particular instance she recalled from that time:
“One day on the farm,” she said, “a man saw an adder, a very poisonous snake. It was close to the house and he wanted to kill it, so I snatched up the snake and ran off with it. The man pursued me but I could run faster and I got right away. When I was far out of sight of the house I sat down with the snake in my lap and was patting it and petting it when a voice behind me said, ‘What are you doing with that snake, Miss?’ I looked up and there was a Gypsy man. ‘Do leave my snake alone,’ I said.
“ ‘I won’t hurt it,’ he promised. ‘What are you doing with it?’
“I told him that they were trying to kill it and I’d run away with it. ‘But aren’t you afraid of it?’ he said, and I replied, ‘No – not at all.’
“ ‘Don’t you ever want to kill snakes?’ he said. ‘No,’ I said firmly.
“ ‘Well, kiss it on its head and swear that you will never harm any snake, and no snake will ever harm you.’ So I promptly kissed the snake and swore on its head that I would never harm any of its friends and relatives. ‘Now let it go,’ he said. I let the snake go and it went away.
“ ‘But when I grow up,’ I told him, ‘I’m going to live in Egypt, and there are poisonous snakes there, too.’
“ ‘So long as you don’t break the truce they will never harm you.’
“ ‘But how can a snake in England give news to snakes in Egypt?’
“ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but they can – and you will find it so.’
“And it has been so.”
A band of Gypsies had made their encampment on the outskirts of the village, just a few families living in rather casual tents surrounded by their carts and shabby horses. Dorothy decided one morning to visit them, but knew enough not to tell her grandmother. Gypsies were not welcome company anywhere. People in the English countryside kept their distance from them and were suspicious of their strange ways and reputed lack of cleanliness. The Gypsy camp did have a very peculiar smell about it, she recalled, but not nearly as awful as she had been told.
Dorothy approached the camp with some caution; Gypsies were known to resent intrusions on their privacy. The first thing that drew her attention was a handsome, dark-haired young man who was bent over, holding the right front hoof of his horse as if something were wrong. Dorothy watched from a safe distance as the man pulled something from the hoof, a nail or sharp piece of splintered wood.
“Is the horse badly hurt?” she called out and went closer. Drops of blood were trickling from the ailing hoof.
The man looked up at her. “It needs treatment. Can you keep him steady for me?”
While the man went to his tent to get something Dorothy held the horse with great concentration. The man returned with a thick ointment and a piece of clean linen to bind the foot.
“Can I come again tomorrow and see how he is doing?”
The man nodded and turned away, saying under his breath, “Thank you, Miss.”
That was the first of many visits to the Gypsy camp. Now another horse had become a good friend, always offering his head for a kiss. He was a beautiful beast, deep bronze with a white triangle on his face. She discovered that its owner was also a skillful juggler and Dorothy watched, captivated, as he performed his tricks for her. He tried to teach her some of them but she could never do them well.
She envied this clan of outsiders for the freedom they enjoyed and for the warmth of their feeling towards each other – which gradually came to include the lonely girl with the bright gold hair. She loved them, every one of them, even though she could never pronounce any of their names. She didn’t really know why she loved them. It certainly wasn’t for the juggling tricks – she had given up hope of learning them anyway. But she had heard the stories that they had come from Egypt long ago.
Her granny, a reasonably observant woman, was beginning to wonder where the child was disappearing to on horseback for hours on end. When she learned about the visitations to the Gypsy camp she was horrified and told her never to go there again. Dorothy simply ignored the order. Early the next morning she set out from her house to pay a visit to the camp. Nearly there, she stopped short, her heart beating wildly. Her eyes strained to make out familiar forms in the mist, but there were none to be seen. The entire camp had just vanished. She ran around the site, frantically looking for any trace of her friends, and then she collapsed onto the wet ground, sobbing.
Not long after, news ran through the Sussex village that an unexploded German bomb had fallen close to the main road outside of town and was lying half-buried in the ground. German planes rarely ventured that far from their London raids, but somehow a bomb had landed here with its head three feet into the earth at a sharp angle.
Learning about it from one of the workers on the farm, Dorothy went straightaway to find a friend, an older boy of 17. Together they rode their horses to have a look at the bomb. On their way they met a man on horseback who was galloping furiously in the opposite direction. “There’s a big bomb close to this road up ahead!” he yelled as he passed. “It could go off any moment. Turn round and go back!”
The young riders kept on going. When they got to within a hundred yards of the bomb site they spotted it sticking out of the ground, quite visible. Dorothy dismounted, but the boy was not so sure. Her mind was set on one thing: rendering the bomb harmless by doing whatever it was that people did to troublesome bombs. As for the boy, he suddenly became aware of the terrible danger they were in. A lengthy argument ensued before help finally arrived: A truck full of civil defense men and explosives experts pulled up next to them. “What the hell do you think you are doing here?” shouted the officer in charge. “Off with you both!”
Dorothy remounted her horse and followed her companion, already well down the road ahead of her. If she could have found a way to stay and join the fun she would have.
On their way home they passed several carts belonging to Gypsies about to settle in for the night. Dorothy eagerly asked their leader if they had seen her vanished friends, but the answer was
