An abandoned white horse has been spotted in a 5th floor window at Ipswich School Book Depository.

Many children from divorced families will know the feeling of waiting for dad to arrive on a  Saturday afternoon to take them to the park, a football game, or a day trip to Calais, etc. However, it is a terribly sad fact of life, that oftentimes, with absent fathers being too busy enjoying life with their new wives and families, often living as far away from the first round of children as possible, the children of broken homes are made to feel unloved or unwanted, or both. Such feelings are unmerited of course, as they are usually only partially true.

Stories of children waiting patiently at front room windows, listening and watching for dad’s car to arrive outside the house, often end with dad not bothering to turn up at all. On such occasions, the overlooked children of jettisoned former wives, are, left with nothing do to except slowly write the word ‘misery’ with their little fingers in the steam-covered windows their tear-covered noses have been pressed against – for hours.

Saddle but true

But what of abandoned horses? Horses have fathers too. And feelings (?). What becomes of the horses forced to grow up in single-mare families? Until now, no-one really knew. 

Harry Grayson is an amateur photographer from the small village of Ramsholt in East Suffolk – meaning he has a phone. Last Thursday, as Harry commuted to work on the No.15 from Ramsholt to his job as a used shoe polish tin recycler in Ipswich, he spotted and snapped a scene that will tear at the hearts of the millions of abandoned children of East Anglia, or wherever.

Abandoned horse waiting for visitor

Gazing brokenheartedly from a 5th-floor window of the Ipswich School Book Depository, was an abandoned Camarillo White Horse. The lamentable scene, captured in a split second (although a decent photographer would probably have got five or six shots away), brought back painful memories for Harry, as he too was abandoned as a child by his father, and subsequently his stepfather, and also the one after that, the third one, whatever his name was.

Grayson told the Suffolk Gazette “It was like going in back in time. There I was on the bus with my nose pressed up against the window, which was steamed-up from the condensation caused by the hot air coming out of my nose. It was just like when my three dads abandoned me and never visited. And what was I looking at? A horse which had also been abandoned, just like me, with his nose pressed against a window too. I must admit, I had a lump in my throat. It was a Strepsil Orange with Vitamin C lozenge.”  

The poignant scene of double abandonment (actually quadruple) was fleeting, and before Harry could send the anonymous horse a message by writing “?K.O. UOY ERA” in the steam on the window, the bus had moved on. 

Aaaaaaah.

We pay top rates for all good horse abandonment stories. If you know the abandoned white horse, or if you are the bastard stallion who deserted it, please contact the Suffolk Gazette.