Duncan's Dunromin

When I was a kid, my family and I used to travel down from Barnstable, in Devon, to Redruth, in Cornwall, to see our relatives. The majority of both my Mum and Dad’s families lived in Cornwall and so it often made visiting tiring, but nonetheless it was something I always looked forward to. The journey itself took about two hours with regular cries of ‘are we nearly there yet’ but we always bought stuff to occupy us in the car. This time I was reading George’s Marvellous Medicine and my head was filled with the possibilities mutant animals could mean. The visits to Cornwall were as regular as every couple of months and we usually stayed for a long weekend with my Dad’s sister, Auntie Jayne and her husband Uncle Jeremy.

         One weekend we were staying with them but it was a Friday and they were at work and their kids, Sam and Kate were at school. We were going to spend the day at Gran and Gramps’ house just outside the town. It was a big old house called Dunromin which was painted a light shade of yellow and had dark red guttering and trim. At the front of the house there was a large garden complete with flower beds which me and my brother were always told to stay off. Surrounding the front garden there was a high slate wall, and beyond that a pavement and the main road. I was always amazed at the amount of snail shells that could be found on the wall – it was as if the snails had got tired of carrying around their homes on their backs and had opted for an easier life as a slug.

         At the back of the house there was another large garden, again complete with flower beds and the warnings that came with them. In the middle of the garden there was a greenhouse where my Grandpa grew all sorts of vegetables. We weren’t allowed in the greenhouse unless Gramps came too. Behind the garden there were was a farm and several fields, which is where we met Duncan, the horse. 

         That Friday my Mum said Auntie Julie and Kensa would be coming over too because Kensa was ill and couldn’t go to school. I was eight or nine at the time and my cousin was two years younger than me, but that didn’t matter because we always found something to do in the garden. The last few times I had been to Dunromin, Kensa and I had made friends with Duncan and we decided to see if he was there this time. He was. And because he was our friend we both decided to make him a little treat.

         Getting into the greenhouse wasn’t a problem – we’d learned how to open the door all by ourselves. We were just worried that Gran or Gramps might see us and come out shouting. We soon forgot about this though as we started to make our special Duncan treat. There were plenty of bottles of stuff lying around; dark brown liquids that made us wrinkle our noses, and ones that looked just like water but had the sweetest smell we could think of. So in they all went, along with bits of rotten vegetables and the leaves and flowers from all the plants.

After we had our concoction we used a tomato as a way of feeding Duncan – we’d make a hole in the top of the tomato and squeeze all the juice out, only to refill it with our special blend.

         After feeding time I had to go – our family was going out for the evening with Auntie Jayne, Uncle Jeremy, Sam and Katy – so I said my goodbyes to Duncan and Kensa and Auntie Julie and Gran and Gramps. They said ‘see you in a few days’ and that was that.



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On Sunday we were back at Dunromin and the first thing that was on my mind was getting to see Duncan to see if anything had happened; my impressionable young mind was overactive with images of giant mutant horses and I was desperate to see what our marvellous medicine had done to Duncan. I was imagining rapid growth or bulging muscles, but that was not the case. Kensa and I couldn’t see Duncan at first so we took the risk of climbing over the wall and into the farmer’s field to see if we could find him anywhere. It didn’t take us long but there was definitely something wrong with him. He turned his head to look at us, but as he did he started rearing up on his hind legs. We’d never seen him do this before and decided it was probably a good idea to get of there.

         I’m not sure exactly how two young children managed to out-run a horse but I guess maybe all those chemicals coursing through his veins may have slowed him down somewhat. We didn’t go back in the field after that.



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The next time I was back in Dunromin was a few months later. Kensa and Auntie Julie were there again and I thought it might be nice to go and see Duncan again. I thought maybe he was feeling better and would want to be friends again. Then I got the news. Gran told me Duncan wasn’t alive anymore, that he’d died a week after we’d left last time. My Gran took me out into the garden and pointed to a patch of long green grass on the otherside of the field; ‘that’s where he went away,’ she said.

         Uh-oh, I was thinking. I wasn’t really sad –I mean yes I’d probably been partly responsible for the death of a horse, but it wasn’t our horse and at least it wasn’t my grandparents’ cat Charlie or anything. Nevertheless, there was a dark cloud of guilt above my head. Was it me? It was me! God! I killed him! I killed Duncan! But at the same time I tried to convince myself it wasn’t our ‘Duncan treat’ that had killed him off. He might have been really old like Granny was, or he might have been ill anyway. Of course I didn’t tell anyone we might have had something to do with it; there would have been hell to pay. I didn’t want the reputation of horse killer just yet. I was still a kid for Christ’s sake. No, I just hung my head and pretended to be sad. It wasn’t really my fault thought was it? I mean I was just a young boy. I didn’t know that mixing BabyBio and pesticide and God knows what else could create a lethal horse-killing combination. It was all George’s fault, with his bloody magic medicine enticing boys to try and create monsters, only to end up killing them in the process. Now at least I know in real life you can’t make a mutant without years of practice and a PhD in some sort of microbiology or something.