Whispering Back (24 page)

‘Don’t worry if she seems a bit depressed, she’ll probably be in a lot of pain. She’s likely to have one hell of a headache. I don’t want to give her too much for it, in case she does keep the foal. The biggest worry is that she gets some kind of bone infection. That could be very serious. We really have to put her on antibiotics, because an infection on this sort of site could be fatal. I’ll give her the first injection now. Will you be all right to give her the others?’

I agreed, possibly too readily, as she subsequently proved very hard to inject. It turned out that we’d been given the wrong needles, ones too fine for the thick penicillin, and it took about a minute to get the damned stuff into her muscle. This must have been very uncomfortable for poor old Sensi.

‘The other thing is, we must keep the flies off the wound. She’ll have to stay in for at least a week.’

That posed more of a problem. Most horses don’t take to box rest like humans take to bed rest. They take to it like humans take to prison.

Sensi watched me intently as I busied around, making a stable comfortable for her. Her eyes were bright, her ears were forward, and she seemed to be wondering what all the fuss was about. As I settled her in her box, I was suddenly overcome with a blinding headache. She started munching her haynet contentedly as I staggered back to the annexe, hardly able to see. I felt very much like I’d just run head first through a metal gate. She obviously felt fine.

When I got to work that afternoon, the shock of it all suddenly hit me. I could barely fill Adam in on the details, so close was I to falling apart, and Julia later told me that looking at my face she had to fear the worst.

When Adam and I got home that evening, I showed him the accident scene. What had happened was clear. Sensi and Major had been on opposite sides of the electric fence. Major had for some reason charged through it, and Sensi had found herself surrounded by the fence, and had to run to escape it. When they got to the field boundary, Major (more or less) jumped the metal fence, buckling it completely out of shape, but causing only a minor injury to his leg. The end of the electric tape was still draped over the top bar. Sensi, on the other hand, heading for the gate, had tried to stop. There were skid marks nine feet long leading up to and straight through the gateway, and no sign at all that she had attempted to jump it. Indeed, she must have had her head right down, balancing herself in her attempt to halt. She had burst the antique wrought-iron gate open, bending it dramatically in the process. She could have killed herself.

Sensi took to box rest surprisingly well. It could have had something to do with the numerous small treats we took her, the hours spent grooming and massaging her, the fresh grass we picked, and the night-time walks we took her on to avoid the ravaging flies. If she’d had a bell, she would have rung it incessantly. As it was, she didn’t need one. If we spent too long indoors, or walked through the yard without stopping at her box, she would neigh imperiously. She even started insisting that we got up earlier in the morning, and on one occasion I was convinced she had surprised me into dropping my toast so that she could have it.

So all in all, it was perhaps not the smoothest possible start to life in our ‘picturesque country idyll’. We loved the place, but, having two sets of landlords – Sarah and Peter, and Henry – we always felt like we had to creep around, and were perpetually worried about saying or doing the wrong thing. We needed to surface the round pen, and do something about the leaky roof in the studio, but Sarah and Peter had been adamant that as sub-tenants, we weren’t to bother Henry directly. ‘He’s categorically stated that he’ll only deal with us,’ they told us. So not only was the surfacing of the round pen not a foregone conclusion, but even the right of this large, metal, not so picturesque structure to be there was under question. They seemed loath to bring anything up with him, and clearly felt that they were using up favours to address any of our issues.

In addition, there was the small problem of money. We didn’t have any. The rent was £750 per month, plus £75 per month for the studio. This was not exactly the sort of sum we had in mind as a ‘peppercorn’, but without the studio we couldn’t have lived in the annexe. Not that it would have been a bit cramped, we simply wouldn’t have fitted, not unless we put most of our stuff into storage. I was being paid about £12 per hour by the college, which seemed reasonable, but at only ten hours per week it didn’t add up to much. Kelly was paying me generously for the weekend courses, but again, there weren’t that many. Adam, as a student on the course, had an income of exactly zero. We were still receiving a little money for the courses we had designed for the Japanese school, but the person we had franchised them out to had driven a very hard bargain. So when we were offered an unrideable pony to train, we jumped at the chance, even though the terms were not at all favourable.

Although she was the first horse we took in at Moor Wood, Maybee’s story was quite typical of the horses we’ve trained. Her owners, a woman called Doris and her ten-year-old daughter, had started to break her in themselves, and all went well the first couple of times she was ridden. Then on the third occasion she simply exploded, bucking off her young rider, and careering across the field in a mad panic. They tried sitting on her a few more times, but she was getting worse and worse. They decided to leave it for a while, and breed a foal from her, but when they tried to ride her again, eighteen months later, she was just as bad. They tried getting professional jockeys to ride her, but Maybee managed to get through three of them before they decided to call it a day with that particular option. She’d had a few months off, but her owners were anxious to do something with her. She was a bright, friendly pony, perfect in every other way, and still quite young, at seven years old. They’d broken in many Arabs, and were by no means inexperienced, but Maybee had them stumped.

In spite of the fact that we were offering a money-back guarantee, and only charging our increased but still modest rate of £80 per week, Doris was only prepared to let us have the pony for two weeks. She told me later that she really didn’t think I’d be able to help, and that even though she was prepared to give the pony one more chance, she didn’t want me to waste any more time than that, or risk traumatising Maybee further.

She was only about 13 hands high, but no less dangerous for that. In addition, when she arrived, she was covered in show sheen, a silicon-based substance that made her extraordinarily slippery. Round as a barrel, she needed no help on that score. She was kind-hearted and generous, however, and although she was clearly terrified at the prospect of being mounted, she worked hard to overcome her fear. As she was so small, I didn’t need anyone to give me a leg-up, and so I was able to practise jumping up and down beside her, and leaning across her, without having to do all the sessions in the evenings after the course with Adam.

Maybee progressed brilliantly, and the only thing she ever did under saddle was to once do a helicopter impression – spinning around several times on the spot. I may not be able to sit more than a few jumps of a bucking horse, but years of Sensi’s shying had improved my ability to deal with very sudden turns. After that, Maybee never really had another issue under saddle again. Knowing that, against our advice, she hadn’t yet had her teeth checked, we took the precaution of only ever riding her in a headcollar, which certainly contributed to our success, for the owner discovered later that she had a cracked wolf-tooth that would have caused her considerable pain, had it been knocked by a bit. When Doris came to see her, she was overjoyed with her progress, and let us have her for another week so that her daughter would be able to ride her confidently when they took her home. She said something that provided a useful insight into a very frustrating phenomenon. Owners often say to us that their horses are unrideable, dangerous, only worth a bullet, and that this is their last chance. Then when the horse is ‘fixed’, they say it wasn’t so bad in the first place, and complain that the canter isn’t very collected, for instance. (I heard this said by someone at a Monty demonstration who had brought a bucking horse that no one had successfully ridden for five years. He was cantering around smoothly and happily after half an hour, having bucked like a rodeo horse initially, and she said, ‘But look at how loose those reins are, he’s not trying to collect the horse at all. No wonder it’s not bucking.’) Doris said something that made me realise this sort of comment isn’t mean-spiritedness. She said, ‘If I hadn’t seen her be so bad, I would almost believe I was making it up, or exaggerating. Seeing her this good makes it really hard to believe she was ever difficult. I really would doubt my memory, if I didn’t have the photos to prove it.’

That single comment has always made it easier for me to deal with owners moving the goal-posts.

Maybee arrived mid-June, and ten days afterwards we had Sonny, a comparatively straightforward starter that we’d met through Julia. A month after that, Harry arrived, a lovely, talented, but quite difficult Arab starter. We had one horse on short-term grass livery. A slow trickle of work for which we were very grateful, but hardly enough to pay the rent, let alone the other numerous expenses involved in keeping horses, or ourselves. The ten-week course was ending, and although there were plenty of five-day and weekend courses, we were stumped. But we had one trick up our sleeves, one event we were pinning all our hopes on. Adam was hoping for a settlement from his former employers, the details of which cannot be divulged. It came through in November, just in time to pay the rent, which otherwise we couldn’t have covered. It was enough to surface the round pen properly with quality materials, buy an ill-fated horsebox, some seriously good winter clothing, and our future. For a short while, we were safe to build up our business, free from the anxiety of falling into debt.

The best news of all was that Sensi managed a remarkable recovery – astonishing the vets with her ability to deal with necrotising fragments of bone, which were simply reabsorbed into her rumpled face – and she kept the foal. We couldn’t have been more excited if we’d been expecting the baby ourselves when we saw the image on the ultrasound. And in spite of her somewhat altered profile, Sensi maintained an air of dignity and grace that seemed to prove beauty really is only skin-deep.

I was more than halfway through my course and despite the obvious potential for my high expectations to be unfulfilled, I had enjoyed every minute of it. As well as getting practice in the pen, it was good to feel that I was filling in a lot of holes in my knowledge.

The group I was with got on really well and there were several truly exceptional people among them, such as David Grodek, born on a farm in Argentina, whose grandfather had strapped him onto an unhandled horse at the age of six and left him to break it in. David had later served in the Israeli army, called by some the Israeli Defence Force, when it invaded neighbouring Lebanon. Not surprisingly, the violence he had experienced and meted out made it difficult to fit into society afterwards and he had spent years working with horses in a remote area of Israel, having little contact with people. He had learned to hate violent horsemanship as a child, but his response to seeing it had not always been non-violent. He had, for example, once broken a man’s arm for beating his horse with a whip. David had then met and married a British woman, which was how he had arrived in the UK, as well as coming to terms with his past.

For him as for all of us, it seemed that the horsemanship and our shared sense of mission brought out the best in us, and there was a general air of camaraderie. We all shared a distrust of the equestrian gadgets man has invented to force his will upon the horse – starting with the rope, and continuing with devices like whips, side reins and spurs. At the end of the twentieth century, after so many technological advances, devices and aids, here we were, studying a training system that starts with taking off every last bit of tack and using the original tools to connect with the horse more strongly than any gadget ever will.

Unlike David, for whom English is his fourth language, I didn’t find it hard to learn all the medical and technical information we were taught in the morning classes, although it wasn’t quite as enthralling to me as it had been to Nicole. The afternoons were brilliant, being spent working with horses, and on projects. I worked with David and others, comparing different techniques of ‘spookbusting’, which has been very useful since. But the best thing about the course was Kelly’s horse psychology classes. Everything she talked about made me realise how little I had really understood about how a horse thinks and experiences life – and how this is the key to effective training.

One hot morning, we eagerly assembled around small tables in a stuffy little room. Kelly handed out a paper with several sentences typed on it, each separated by an expanse of blank page. I immediately recognised several of Monty’s stock phrases, those little nuggets of wisdom, which make it so much easier to remember his ideas. Kelly began to assign one of the sayings to each group of three or four students. We had to interpret its meaning and find three examples of how it could be applied in horsemanship. Most of these phrases were already familiar to me, but my confidence suddenly evaporated when Kelly gave our group a question.

‘Explain three reasons why you should always know the direction of true north. I’ll give you all a few minutes to discuss it before we begin.’

I looked at my three table-mates. Julia looked a bit bemused, and Tim, a lovely but very shy young Scot who had endeavoured to say as little as possible in every public forum since we began, didn’t seem likely to chose this moment to blossom into a confident contributor to the debate. David kept asking me to explain the question, certain that he couldn’t have understood what Kelly meant. But I didn’t, either.