Once upon a time, a park by the seaside was famous for it's rocking horses. A row of beautiful, strong wooden horses stood together just inside the gate of the childrens' playground.
There were 5 horses: 3 'big' horses and 2 'foals'. Each horse had it's own personality: their colours were different, their faces unique and all the children who came to the park loved them. Most children had their own favourite, and would run towards their horse as soon as they got to the park, to be sure to ride him before anyone else got there.
What were they called? They had no names - or they had a thousand. They were whoever the child on their back wanted them to be.
The children who first rode on the horses grew up - had children of their own who came to the park and rode on the horses their mummies and daddies had loved. More time passed - and soon the next generation of children were riding the horses too. Children who met the horses when they came to the town for holidays, eventually brought their own children and grandchildren on holidays here just to ride the beautiful horses.
Then, one dark dark night, a terrible thing happened: wicked people came in the night and stole the horses away!
The next day children came running into the park - and the beautiful horses were gone! Nobody could believe it. The police came, the newspapers told the story, they even put 'Wanted' posters up all over the town. Everybody looked high and low for the beautiful horses - but they were gone, never to be found and the children and their parents and their grandparents cried and cried for the lost rocking horses that were lost forever...
... except for one.
One little foal had been off colour and was taken away a few days before that dark and terrible night to be made better. Now it found itself all alone: the rest of the band was gone and nobody knew what to do with the left-behind rocking horse.
The little horse was taken from place to place - sometimes locked away in dark cupboards, sometimes in the light.
You can visit the little foal. You can stroke it's neck and rock it gently where it sits, cherished but alone in a corner of Bexhill Museum. There's a sign on its back telling children to keep off. It's paintwork never was repaired. The scuffs on its back were put there by the feet of many children as they clambered on its back all those years ago, when it 'rode' with it's family in the park, just a few hundred yards from where - now - the last of the rocking horses sits alone and forgotten...
Well not quite.
We've remembered it.