Horse Sense

In the 1930s, The Depression-era, everyone was on a budget, and they improvised to make ends meet and then some. Cattle, goats, sheep and horses were free to graze on common land and their feed was usually supplemented with a bale of hay when they returned to their familiar barns.

One evening, outside a homestead in Comox, BC, a horse came to the Bennett’s gate as if looking expectantly for that bale of hay. Alfred Bennett opened the gate and the black stallion walked into the driveway, hobbling a bit. He had a festering wound at the top of his shoulder near the chest. Alfred, who’d served in the First World War in the medical corps, felt for a bullet and without wasting time, got a clean knife and removed this from Blackie (named by his eldest sons Reg and Alfred), then stitched the skin back in place. Blackie was given water, hay, plus a place to stay until the Bennett’s heard back from the RCMP as to who was missing a horse. After a day or so Alfred Bennett went to see the owner who had reported his horse missing. Blackie apparently had a bad habit of jumping the previous owner’s fence. He was fed up with the stallion and basically said, “Good riddance, you can keep him if you want.”

This was good news to the whole Bennett family – the children now had a pet horse who was fond of them, and Alfred Bennett, who had lots of land still to be cleared of trees, now had a ‘tractor.’ When veterans came back to Canada having served in the war, they were gifted a portion of land, and how they worked the land was up to each individual. Tractors, which had steel wheels and spikes were becoming popular then and made short work of what otherwise was a back-breaking job. They did, however, cost money, and in the Depression that was in short supply. Blackie was happy to be part of the farm and the family. The stumps were pulled out, and on the cleared land Alfred put up a very long greenhouse for growing vegetables all year. Although this was not his trade (he’d been a master carpenter before the war.) Alfred did very well farming. He had also built a ‘garage’ which, in reality, housed the family, and this was another example of improvisation. Two gas lamps were lit each evening, one for the kitchen and one for the living room area, so the daily rhythm was one of getting up with the sun and resting in the evening. When a party-line telephone was installed, “that was really something” – the Bennett’s ring was two shorts, and the neighbors on either side would answer their phone if it was a long and a short or two long rings, a bit like Morse code.

What I liked about the story, told to me by Arthur Bennett, Alfred’s youngest boy, is its elegant simplicity. Blackie jumped the fence to find help. His previous owner had probably not noticed the bullet wound. Alfred understood what the horse was saying, and the synchronicity of being gifted the ‘nuisance’ horse meant that farming, all of a sudden became easier and profitable.