Whispering Back (20 page)

Misty’s former owner put us in touch with a new client called Marianne. I’m not sure if her decision to send us her beautiful chestnut Trakehner stallion had anything to do with the mud. More likely it was about getting him up and running for the summer season. In any case, we were encouraged by the prospect that she had other horses she would want starting, and also by the fact that we had a couple of small ponies arriving for training too. Emboldened, we decided to invest some money that Nicole’s dad had recently given her in a round pen. He had suggested that she might like to put this down as a deposit on our right-to-buy council flat, but she had somehow managed to argue that a round pen would be more useful than a roof over our heads, and he had resigned himself to this fate for his hard-earned money.

So one fine Saturday in mid-January, Jane, Jenny, Julia, Nicole and I moved our five horses the twelve miles to Long Street, taking it in turns to ride Sensi, Major and Cobweb, and to lead Misty and Finn. A bridleway led right from our field to Hanslope, with only the last mile or so on roads. Misty was slightly worried by this part, being anxious about vehicles approaching from her off-side, but sandwiched in the middle of the string, she coped admirably. Julia and Nicole had spent the day before bedding down the barn with forty bales of straw, and our horses viewed the sight with approval, seemingly particularly impressed by the huge wooden hay racks stuffed to overflowing with good quality hay. They appeared unperturbed by the move, and settled in immediately. Jane rode Jasper over a few days later. He had a stable in the main yard, and seemed happy. I suppose alarm bells should have rung, however, when we discovered we couldn’t turn our horses into a field as a group, as had been discussed when we’d looked round the place with Leslie. ‘That ought to be all right’ had suddenly become ‘out of the question’. Our horses would have to go in with the others, mares in one field and geldings in another, whether we liked it or not.

The reaction to the round pen was less than favourable, too. An imposing metal structure, it looked enormous in the outdoor school. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Leslie was having a lot of difficulty breaking in an Arab he’d bought, I think he might have asked us to take it down, and only assemble it when we used it. As it was, he discovered just how useful a small enclosed space can be when riding a difficult horse, although it didn’t help him much when his horse threw himself to the ground with Leslie on board!

So Marianne’s chestnut stallion duly arrived at the end of January, accompanied on his journey by two Dartmoor fillies from the same part of Oxfordshire. Being two-year-olds, they were coming for some general handling. In fact, one of them, Kim, had been with us the summer before. Nicole had put on her first headcollar and taught her to lead for her owner, who had rescued her from being exported to France for meat. A dockers’ strike had delayed her departure for two weeks, and she had spent all that time locked in a crate. Let loose in a field, she had understandably decided it was probably best to avoid humans, and her new owner had been unable to get anywhere near her. She had been lured into a trailer to visit us the first time by following a handsome Shetland gelding. She was doing really well back at home, and her owner just wanted her to be exposed to traffic and brought on a little. Her companion, Kit, would accept having a headcollar put on, but was otherwise fairly wild, not leadable, and very averse to having her feet handled.

It was quite a sight watching the three of them come off the horsebox. The ponies stomped down the ramp, looked around them, gave a shrill neigh, and then tried to go in search of grass. Leslie, who had fetched the horses in his lorry, was holding Kit, and looked astonished when he gave a little pull on the rope and she responded by locking her neck against him and carting him across the yard. We managed to get her into her stable by having her follow Kim. The ponies moved in that straight-legged, economical way so typical of Exmoors and Dartmoors. The stallion, by contrast, bounced down the ramp, as if powered by enormous springs, and trumpeted his greeting to the yard in a most proprietorial way, immediately earning him the nickname ‘The Chief’, although Tigger would have been just as appropriate. Installed next to Jasper in the barn, he settled down immediately, completely unfazed by the fact that the horse on the other side of him was a mare.

The Chief was all horse. At 16.2 hands high and growing, he could be quite a handful. When he went into Tigger mode, he seemed to grow a hand, and Nicole often looked rather small beside him, or on top of him. We put him out in the round pen with Finn, and they would tussle endlessly, with Finn giving at least as good as he got. The stallion would chase Finn and mount him, taking chunks out of his mane and coat, and you’d be just on the point of going to rescue Finn when the Chief would get distracted by a mare in the field and then the cheeky bugger would turn around and nip him hard on the knees (which were more or less at Finn’s nose height). Another round of chasing and rearing would ensue. Allowed this free expression for his natural exuberance, the Chief was better able to contain himself and concentrate when asked to. We were so fortunate that Marianne was happy with this arrangement, and not worried by the odd bite mark. On the thankfully rare occasions that Leslie decided no horses were allowed out (on account of the weather), the Chief would be climbing the walls. On other occasions, when he was out on his own, he would try to play with us. He was inevitably always disappointed that we wouldn’t rough-house with him.

The Chief’s training went smoothly enough, and Nicole was delighted to have such a quality horse to work with. Being a stallion, he muscled up extremely easily. The second time he cantered under saddle, even coping with the slope of the school, he was already far better balanced than Sensi was after five years of riding.

Then Pinky, another of Marianne’s Trakehners, arrived. She was 17 hands high, and seven years old, and had never been started. She’d bred a couple of foals, and had been saddled and long-lined, but Marianne had never had a rider for her at the right time. Becoming a mother can often make a mare have more of a mind of her own, with different priorities. Also, with a couple of what we saw as ‘false starts’, where she’d been prepared for backing, but had never gone through with it, she could have been quite difficult, but, in fact, she was surprisingly easy. She was also fully mature, strong and straight, so she could easily handle the weight of a rider. I was surprised when I heard people talking about starting them young, before they got too big and strong. It was so much easier to work with her than an immature three-year-old, and the fact is, if we’d been trying to start her using brute strength, she would have already been too strong by the time she was one.

It was around this time that we worked out a fantastic arrangement with the Japanese school. They wanted to extend the curriculum and offer interesting alternative activities, and decided that horse riding would be a good option. The arrangement was good for us in that it meant steady money, and although we were only charging the going rate, the number of students involved meant that it was, to us, very lucrative. Even better, it didn’t involve weekends, and so didn’t interfere with the normal riding teaching that Nicole was doing. By now, Sensi’s School was no longer the smallest riding school in the world, but we still only had a few horses we could teach on, so we suggested to the school that they might like us to include horse care and management in the curriculum. This was very popular with them as it made the activity seem much less frivolous. We already had the licence, the insurance, and now that we’d moved to Long Street, the facilities. We were set to go.

So it was that I took the first group of students up to the yard to introduce them to the horses one day in April 1998. Nicole was away on tour with Monty at the time, so I faced the prospect of dealing with the first days without her. It was raining very hard when I drove down to the school, which was not the plan, as I knew well the fortitude of this generation of Japanese. Rather than ‘
Samurai
’, the first word of Japanese I picked up was ‘
Samui
’, ‘I’m cold’. It was pointless to even consider working a horse outside in rain like this, but I had in my rucksack a box of doughnuts. Putting on a headcollar or picking up a foot would be about the limit of what we could do, but there would at least be something to fall back on, to make the first horse activity special. The six students – five girls and an extremely brave boy, all sixteen years old and fresh from Japan just two days before – met me in the lobby. They were accompanied by a Japanese teacher called Nori, a jovial and friendly man of about thirty-five, with very good English. As he also taught history, we had worked together for several years on a unique Second World War reconciliation project. Now, as the school was falling apart around his ears, he was being promoted into the void left by the best members of staff, and put in charge of redesigning the school curriculum to make it more attractive for parents. One of his main proposals had been to introduce several non-academic activities, of which horse riding was a star attraction, being a very exclusive activity in Japan due to the incredibly high cost of land. I knew a lot of his credibility was riding on this.

So I was not overjoyed when I discovered that the kids hanging around in the lobby in school uniform were actually my riding club. Several of them did not have any kind of coat, and none had outdoor footwear. I sent them off to get better equipped, knowing this would take ages, and went off to find some umbrellas. When the kids finally reappeared, they were still woefully ill protected, for the rain was still bucketing down outside. We clambered into the school minibus, which rapidly filled with steam as we drove the 10 miles or so to the yard. The students started out with a lively chatter, until one of them asked, ‘Does it always rain like this?’

I made light of it, but it wasn’t until we started to get out of Milton Keynes that I realised there was actually something pretty serious going on with the weather. The roads in MK were all so new and well made that you hardly noticed the volume of water on them. Once we got off the main road into the countryside, it was clear this was going to be a flood. Roadside ditches were already overflowing, and torrents of water were gushing out of gaps in the hedges and from gateways on the side of the road. The only time I had ever seen rain like this was in Africa. It was thumping down on the roof in great blobs, and the windscreen wipers, working at full throttle, could not cope. We descended into a wide valley, and found ourselves going along a narrow raised causeway between fields usually full of sheep, already completely flooded. By the next day the road itself would be submerged in more than 2 feet of water, and impassable for over a week.

We made it to the yard, however, and Jane met us in the car park. She had kindly volunteered for the job of assistant tutor, and as soon as the kids saw her smile, I knew they would get on well. But she couldn’t hide the anxiety in her voice as she told me, ‘You’d better drive down to the barn. You couldn’t walk it. The track’s under water.’

So, rather than stop in the car park, I drove down the flooded track to the barn where I knew the horses would be. As we drew round the corner, however, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The area outside their barn had turned into a fast-flowing stream about a metre wide. The students would have to leap across this to get into the barn, unless I carried them. Wails of protests and exclamations of ‘
Samui
!’ greeted me when I explained what they would have to do. They hardly noticed Sensi and Major, standing behind the waterfall pitching off the roof between us. Putting up my hood, I stepped out into the rain.

I found the horses warm and dry. With a deep bed of straw throughout the barn, and mangers all round stuffed with hay, they had little to complain about. But they seemed to have an air of dejection about them, which I could not put a finger on. Surely for once, they must be grateful not to have been out in the rain. I beckoned to the students. ‘Look, all you have to do is jump over this,’ I said, pointing at the torrent of water that ran between me and the barn, on a normally dry path. ‘As soon as you get inside, there’s dry straw.’ It was a big jump but I leaped forward confidently towards a big hummock of straw just inside the entrance.

As I landed on it, it was all I could do not to fall
unceremoniously onto my backside, for the hummock turned out to be an island floating on a bed of water about 4 inches deep. No wonder the horses were looking so miserable. The entire barn was flooded. The students, complaining every inch of the way, shrieked and exclaimed as they negotiated the short distance between the van and the barn, while Misty cowered in the corner, terrified of the noise they were making. But as soon as they were inside, trying to find a lump of straw big enough on which to stand without being immersed in the water, the magic of horses took over, and their shouts and cries gave way to hushed tones and expressions of wonder. ‘
Cho kakoee
!
Misty wa ee desho
! I love Misty!’ I looked at Nori, who was smiling for the first time all day.

It wasn’t long, however, before the thrill of standing in a dark, flooded barn began to wear off, and it was clear my bag of doughnuts was going to prove invaluable. Leslie had assured us he had plans to build a proper tack room, but for the moment there was only an old shipping container, a long, windowless steel box with a naked light bulb suspended in it, and more importantly, a kettle. This was not exactly a quality venue for a school excursion, but it would have to do, and the mention of coffee and hot chocolate perked the children up immediately. We said
sayonara
to the horses and jumped back across the stream as best we could, and I drove back to the top of the yard.

There wasn’t a great deal of room, or a sufficient number of mugs, and all the kids were cold and wet, but as I had anticipated, the sight of a fresh doughnut made it all much better. I began an impromptu vocab lesson, in my most enthusiastic manner, trying to explain to them the difference between hay and straw, when Leslie suddenly appeared around the doorway. Interrupting me, with a face transparent with rage, he asked if he could have a word with me, and it was clear he meant to do so without delay. I stepped outside, leaving Jane and Nori to fill the silence as best they could.