Page 82 - IT'S A RUM LIFE BOOK FOUR Volume 1 "Northcote 1984 to 1998"

I took great delight in informing him that our original agreement for payment and interest
had become void the moment he took me to court for what was owed to him.

It eventually took Ruth and myself 10 years to clear all the amount owed to our creditors
following that dreadful time in 1993/4.
But we survived and my help from regular conversations with our Creator were our saviour
without any shadow of a doubt.

EXTRA HELP AT LAST

In the late 1990’s I was helping our regular vet one day with some routine work on the
horses and mentioned that I was getting very tired and could really do with some serious
help with the stables.
He mentioned that he knew of a young lady who worked at the stables near Horncastle
where his wife kept her own horse.

Terena was duly contacted and began to come regularly to help in mornings. We managed
to find her some ‘petrol money’.
Eventually she came to live on the site with her husband, young son and three dogs all
living in a Romany barrel top caravan.
(She was much younger then and very shy. Today she is not the same person, she is
outgoing and authoritative and now in 2010, Terena is in charge of the whole centre.)

I had spent all my time from 1989 until about 2003 working for no pay, living on Ruth’s
earnings. It just seemed the right thing to do to look after the horses.
The Centre is very fortunate that Terena feels the same way, from when she arrived in the
late 1990’s she could have been working elsewhere and earning a good wage but she
chose to care for the horses instead.

When I began to write this piece in 2007, we only followed the way GOD devises.

We still do not really know where the next penny is coming from or how we are going to
survive the next 12 months. Our future and the future of all the animals in our care are truly
in the hands of the Lord.

Terena being on site helped Ruth and I when Ruth was taken ill in 2001. She had to stop
work and eventually take retirement. We had no wage earner then for ourselves, so I
started lorry driving at night to bring in money for Ruth and I to live on. Only because
Terena was there could I take the time to be away.

A further example of how faith can work was from September 2006.

Ruth and I were about to take our annual leave at the beginning of the month, August had
turned out to be the worst on record for visitors.

Our normal takings used to be in the region of £10,000. It was the only month when we
took a large amount. This would normally pay the bills until early December.