That was it. I was very young, and I was living in Somerset with an old man, my father, The Major, and an old woman, my mother. There was a church and perhaps four or five very old houses in this hamlet.
The Major had a dozen or so almost feral horses. I went to work for him to learn how to ride these animals. For the first three months, he didn’t let me hold the reins. In fact, he wouldn’t even allow reins on the bridle.
Several of the horses were fairly crazy stallions and one was blind. Sweetie, he was called. An incredibly beautiful animal. But The Major—even with the blind Sweetie—insisted that I learn to ride him without reins, using only my weight and the rhythm of my body, to guide and control these thoroughbreds.
My bedroom window was made from a sort of thickened cling film. I rarely washed in winter because I couldn’t contemplate taking my clothes off, it was so cold. And every day we’d basically eat the same thing: Heinz baked beans on toast and black treacle porridge biscuits. The Major also fed black treacle to the horses, which is fed to horses when they have worked hard in the winter. And sometimes the cows. There was a large tin of this treacle in the barn.
In the winter, the treacle hardened. It never froze, but it became so thick, it was difficult to stir or spoon. We’d have to put the tin in a pan of hot water to soften it.
And the thing about black treacle is that, although it’s good enough in a porridge biscuit, it is really not something you want to eat on its own. It was like eating sweetened petroleum when I ate it—and I always ate it.
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Used with permission of the publisher, NOON. Copyright © 2026 by Lara Pawson.
