Whispering Back (16 page)

The hell with this, I thought, I’m going to teach him a lesson. I changed my body stance completely and deliberately sent him further away from me. His head came up immediately, and he started to trot directly away from me, as I raised my hands and came after him, looking him squarely in the eye. He broke into a canter and started to wheel around to try to get on the other side of the herd. He was soon back in amongst the other horses, and got them running too, until I was sending all of them around the 4-acre field they shared. Realising that I would have to adapt what I’d seen Monty do in a pen, I remembered how he had learned to do join-up by observing the interactions of wild herds, in which the lead mare would exile the misbehaving youngsters from the group. So I kept my eye firmly on Finn, and did my best to single him out, getting between him and the group whenever possible. After a while, Sensi began to realise that it was Finn who was causing her to miss her brunch, and she began to lower her head and eat. The next time he got away from me, and ran towards her, hoping she would protect him, she turned on him with teeth bared. No longer so welcome in the group, Finn was running out of options. I tried again the softly-softly approach, keeping my eyes on the ground and approaching in as non-threatening a way as possible.

But he was still a long way from running out of steam, which could not be said for me. I was dripping with sweat, for the sun was by now really beating down, and my lungs were burning. I could not run any more, but I wasn’t going to give up that easily. With a snort of triumph, Finn settled back to grazing with the herd again, ignoring Sensi’s irritated flick of the tail as he disdainfully watched me walk back to the gate. Little did he know I was fetching my secret weapon.

When he saw me come back in with my mountain bike, however, his head came straight back up. Nostrils flaring, he looked across as I juddered along towards them. He was soon back off round the field with the others, but now I was able to keep up much better, and for what seemed like a very uncomfortable eternity, we went back round again. Although the field was not muddy, the impressions of the horses’ feet had left it quite bumpy. Unable to sit on the seat for the vibrations, I sweated along, wondering if this was such a good idea after all, my shaky toil on the bike contrasting with the grace of the horses floating across the grass. In spite of being rather more elegant than myself, Finn was noticeably less well suited to this strategy of flight than the rest of the horses. The free movement of their legs were not matched by his choppy strides, and while they could simply trot, he was obliged to canter hard, his stubby legs hardly seeming to bend at the knees at all. When they were in the most bottle-necked area near the gate, I eased off a bit, hoping that they would settle there, but they kept running until I began to feel this join-up thing might not work with Exmoor ponies after all. And then, Finn did the last thing I expected. As the herd came to the bottleneck, he suddenly stopped.

I slammed on the brakes so hard that I nearly flew over the handlebars. Somehow managing not to crash onto the ground and send them all running off again, I struggled to take up as passive a stance as one can when holding a bicycle. He stood like a rock. Panting, sweat seeping through his dun flanks, he kept stock still as I approached. He let me get really close, then I hesitated, thinking he was about to move. But he turned his head towards me. Lowering my eyes and retreating a step, I knew I was getting somewhere as I heard him run his jaws over each other. I reached out a hand to touch him, and heard him catch his breath as he tensed against my touch. I walked away in a circle and he began to follow-up, as I had seen him do with Nicole. I stopped, and he remained close enough for me to stroke him on the forehead. I scratched his withers and he began to relax. But then, as I stroked along his back, he decided to walk off again.

Lots of people tell me that their horse takes the mickey out of them, and it seems to me that they are often misinterpreting what is going on. When you think it’s happening to you, though, it can be hard not to see it that way. I reminded myself that horses do what they are allowed to do, taking what they can get. There are so many mistakes we make, so many important things happen that we don’t even notice. Had I given an unintended signal, moved too fast? I knew that by giving up so easily on other occasions, I had taught Finn that I was easy to get around. If he persisted, I would go away. Maybe he was just testing my resolve.

It was back to the bike and the juddering. But I knew I would get another chance, and sure enough, about the third time they came to the bottleneck, Finn put in another sudden halt. Again, I stopped immediately and took off all the pressure. He let me go straight up to him and put on his headcollar, and I have never had trouble catching him since.

He is now my favourite horse, and I get more of a kick out of riding him than any flashy Arab or thoroughbred. I just love being able to sling a headcollar on him, hop on, and bomb around bareback. And if you can ride Finn, you can ride almost anything, including a pneumatic drill.

Although this experience and many others convinced me of the power of Monty’s methods, I had no particular thoughts of taking it any further. I went back to work that autumn, while Nicole continued to get more and more closely involved with the course.

So it was that on one rainy night in October 1997, I found myself driving back to Milton Keynes from Kent. Monty was on tour again and Nicole was with the team, rushing around the country in a motor home. It had been another astonishing demonstration, and I was ruminating on the contrast between my job and Nicole’s work for Kelly and Monty. The latter was so inspiring, so rewarding, so full of possibilities, whereas just the thought of going in to work at the Japanese school filled me with anger and frustration.

I enjoyed teaching, having a great rapport with my students, who were all Japanese, aged sixteen to nineteen, and to whom I taught a total of six subjects (history, contemporary and British studies, economics, English language, guitar and, later, horse riding). I sympathised with the students in having to endure similar conditions to those I had hated so much at school and I tried to make my lessons as fun as I could. Given that the students had so little in the rest of their lives, I took them out as much as possible and tried to make them feel part of the community. I taught them about fashion, bad language, and the Beatles, often teaching them songs or watching videos with subtitles so they could get a grasp of real English, phrases they could actually use. I did a lot of extra private lessons in which I was able to get to know some students very well.

Life in a boarding school is indescribable to anyone who hasn’t been through it, but is instantly and vividly memorable to anyone who has. The degree to which the institution dominates the lives of those within it is almost complete. It may not be possible to control your behaviour, but the school still dominates your every moment. You can’t escape the system. You can be classed as a good student, or as a rebel, but you can’t avoid being classed.

As a student you are not aware that the teacher is actually in a very weak position. When you find yourself standing in front of a class, however, and one of the students refuses to do something, you suddenly feel it. You are essentially powerless in the face of any direct refusal to co-operate. Yet the only real power you can have as a teacher is the respect of the students. And you have to earn that, just as you have to earn it from a horse.

I only once had a direct refusal to co-operate. It was in the video room. I wanted three students at the back to move further forward so they could read the subtitles. There was an empty row in the front so I asked them to move there. I had forgotten to take into account the obvious fact that sitting at the back is cool, whereas sitting at the front is very uncool. Too late, I realised I was not just asking them to move to the front to understand the lesson more, but to lose face in front of their peers. One of them said they didn’t want to, and then said no, and all of a sudden, a hush descended.

This was a shock, as it was more usual for students not to express an opinion about anything, and I asked them politely again. But, although one of them shifted his weight, another one said something to him in Japanese, and then explained again that they didn’t want to. Finally, they said they just wouldn’t move, and didn’t.

I felt the ego and adrenaline rising inside me as the battle line was drawn. They were obviously ready for a major showdown, but I wasn’t going to blow up. I wasn’t going to back down either. This was just like Wilberforce and the flooded bridleway. But the confrontation didn’t need to happen. I decided to sit for a minute and think about it. I needed to find a compromise that we could all regard as some kind of victory. I knew that it was wrong to continue to raise the stakes. So I just didn’t put the video on. Doing nothing kept the pressure on both parties, but also gave us some time to cool off. We all sat for some minutes, then I told everyone to go back to the classroom and we continued reading a textbook. This was obviously not the preferred class activity, so I had given the boys reason to regret being so rude to me, not least because their classmates were unimpressed at having to read rather than watch a film. The next time we went to the video room, I was careful to get the whole class to sit further forward and fill up all the gaps, as they came in. That was that, and the rebels never gave me any trouble again – in fact we got on particularly well, just as before.

Although I found it immensely rewarding to work with the students, I discovered that, as a ‘foreigner’, I had to accept some unpleasant facts. A lot of my politically correct, egalitarian philosophies had trouble standing up to the realities of life as an employee in what seemed to me the smallest of Japan’s islands. For a variety of reasons, it was also clear that the school was a sinking ship. It had become very depressing to work there.

As I drove along the empty motorway to Milton Keynes that October night, rain lashing against the windscreen, it suddenly struck me. If there was no reason why Nicole couldn’t be a ‘horse whisperer’, why couldn’t I?

When I was seventeen, I decided to run away from school and get expelled. It was a decision I made in a flash, which led, almost inevitably, to disaster. But it was the best decision I had ever made. In a moment I found myself penniless, busking on the streets of Paris, but I also began to find my identity. In the next weeks and months I learned more about myself, and the world, than I had in all the years before, when I’d studied so much and yet been so insulated from real life. Having fourteen O Levels, I discovered, was not of much use on the street. I had to rely on my judgement, which was, unfortunately, not very reliable. I had gone to France largely because of a friend, who lied to me and betrayed me (and nearly kicked my head in too) before I decided to haul myself back across the Channel, having nearly been arrested yet again. All of a sudden I went from being at a top public school, heading for one of the best universities in the world, to washing dishes for £2.30 an hour. I found out what it is like to be at the bottom, exploited by the NHS, by taxpayers, by an employment agency that earned more than I did from my labour, and sometimes even by co-workers. But finally I was free. I was no longer overprivileged and unappreciative. I had learned something.

I wanted to work for myself. I wanted to work for horses. I decided then and there, driving through the rain on the M25, to give up my job, go on the course and get my Monty Roberts Preliminary Certificate of Horsemanship.

‘Nick, it’s Kelly. Listen, I’ve got some news for you. I hope you won’t be upset, but I’ve decided not to go on the tour this time.’

‘Oh! Why not?’

‘Well, there’s just so much to do here. You’ll all be fine without me. But you’ll have to take my place – and introduce Monty.’

‘No.’ I don’t often say no to Kelly, but then again she doesn’t often make preposterous suggestions.

‘Good, I’ll take that as a yes.’

It was hard to imagine a tour without Kelly. She often joked that she didn’t do anything on tour except drive Monty from venue to venue and keep him stocked up with Diet Coke, but in fact she was the driving force behind it, keeping everyone happy and holding the whole troupe together. It was going to be very hard without her. But either I was going to leave the country or I was going to have to stand in the middle of a round pen, speak into a microphone in front of hundreds of people, and introduce Monty Roberts.

The tour was starting in four weeks, and although I did get some sleep, whenever I woke up, I only had to think ‘I’ll be introducing Monty’ to be instantly wide awake. Kelly had looked over the wording of my very brief speech, and proclaimed it suitable, but I was still terrified that she was showing a profound lack of judgement in choosing me for the job. True, I could speak confidently to a roomful of students about the principles of join-up, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t make a run for it when faced with numbers in excess of 1,200. There had to be someone else better suited to the task.

‘No,’ she reassured me, just the slightest hint of irritation in her voice, ‘you’ll be fine! Just don’t mention the mane killer.’

We laughed at the memory of Kelly’s horrendous gaffe. On a previous tour we had been promoting a gadget that could shorten and thin a mane painlessly, without the need of pulling the hair out by its roots. Many people were sceptical about its effectiveness, thinking it would damage the hair. Kelly meant to refer to it as a humane mane puller, but somehow managed to say humane mane killer. The manufacturers were less than pleased with this endorsement. Yet I was confident I had the potential to outdo Kelly’s faux pas. I had certainly witnessed far worse. At the end of one of our more memorable university seminars, my Director of Studies stood up to express her appreciation for the guest lecturers, who had spoken on Freudian Feminist Psychoanalysis. ‘I’d like to spank our speakers,’ she said, before turning various shades of crimson as the auditorium erupted in laughter.