August Epp’s account of the Hyde Park protest joins political dissent to an act of care: amid a mass demonstration, he took a panicked police horse out of the crowd, gave it water, and brought it back to Wandsworth. The episode, which he later tells Ona Friesen, becomes both a story of resistance to state authority and a measure of what imprisonment costs him: his friends leave, and he never sees the horse again.

The protest and the law

August describes a communal life in Wandsworth, where he and others lived simply, built structures from salvaged materials, held concerts, and tended gardens. Hundreds of people belonged to the community. They went together to Hyde Park to protest the Criminal Justice Act, which authorized increased penalties for conduct labeled antisocial. As August explains it, the law outlawed raves and gatherings and restricted music characterized by a succession of repetitive beats. The protest drew more than fifty thousand people, a scale he says they learned about later.

The horse in the crowd

During the protest, a police officer drove his horse into the demonstrators. Other protesters pulled the officer off, leaving the animal riderless, panicked, and rearing and stomping amid the crowd. August mounted it and rode away from the crush, past the crowd and other officers, to a pond with a fountain. There he let the horse drink and cool off, speaking to it in what he hoped was a soothing voice. The crowd paid no attention to the two of them.

August rode the horse all the way back to Wandsworth and kept it as a friend, not merely as an animal removed from immediate danger. He named it Frint, a Plautdietsch word meaning friend. The relationship also became part of the community’s daily life: Frint carried wood and other materials, in keeping with the expectation that every being contribute, and August describes the horse as exceptionally well-trained and fit.

Arrest and loss

August was eventually arrested for stealing Frint, a serious crime because the horse belonged to a police officer. He was sent to Wandsworth Prison. The account makes the punishment personal as well as legal: he had no visitors, his fellow squatters were driven from their land and moved away, and he never saw Frint again. When Ona asks whether he was beaten in prison, August says that the beatings were daily.

The story told to Ona

August recounts these events during a conversation with Ona on the roof of the wash house. His story moves from the protest’s public scale to the intimate fate of one horse and then to the isolation of prison. By setting the horse’s rescue beside his own punishment, the recollection shows how an act of compassion can become a criminal charge under the authority being resisted, while the consequences reach beyond the person arrested to the fragile community around him.