Whispering Back (6 page)

But it was on a trip to Wales the autumn after we had graduated that I came to realise the full extent of Nicole’s single-minded focus. Taking only mild interest in the castles and hill forts I had thought we were planning to visit, she came up with ‘a much better idea’. Looking up from a sea of books and maps spread out on the table, she said, ‘Did you know, Lucy Rees lives somewhere in North Wales. Perhaps we could go and find her on the way to one of your castles?’

From photos, diagrams and descriptions in two of Lucy’s books, Nicole had narrowed down the location of her house to somewhere in the vicinity of a mountain called Cnicht, in the heart of Snowdonia.

In those days, our options for holiday destinations were severely limited. However, living as we were with Nicole’s parents, the idea of some time to ourselves held a lot of appeal, especially as most of our friends had gone off to Thailand, Australia or Japan. We hardly had enough money to fill a car with petrol, let alone buy one, and an overseas adventure was completely out of the question. We decided to visit a friend who lived at the foot of Cader Idris. His cottage, built with stones from a nearby castle, the last stronghold of Welsh nationalists, which had been comprehensively demolished by the English in 1283, made up exactly half of the houses in Llanfihangel-y-Pennant (excluding the church). The hamlet nestles into a perfect valley near the coast, and is overhung with crags echoing to the calls of buzzards and red kites. Its claim to fame is as the only village in the country with twice as many letters in its name than it has inhabitants. Clearly it was not going to be accessible by public transport.

A friend from Cambridge, my old schoolmate Dom, had got himself into the unenviable position of owning a clapped-out Ford Escort estate, which needed constant repairs to keep it on the road, and for which he did not possess a licence to drive. It was almost old enough to be a collector’s item, except that nobody in their right mind would collect such a desperately unstylish car. Nearly a year before, it had somehow passed an MOT test, but this did not necessarily mean it was roadworthy. In any case, it had been sitting outside Dom’s flat for months, quietly detracting from Cambridge’s tourist attractions, and utterly redundant. Therefore it was not terribly difficult to persuade him to let me borrow it, and I took the bus over to Cambridge and drove it back to MK to pick up Nicole for our ten-day trip. It was a rusting death trap, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure that Dom was doing me a favour when it failed at first to start. He sounded unusually sober as he wished me good luck and added, ‘Take care.’

Unable to reach 60 mph, the car only just made it to Milton Keynes and the brakes were decidedly dodgy, so we held off a couple of days until they had been fixed. Although our extremely limited holiday budget had not included the costs of repairing Dom’s car, this was, in retrospect, probably the best money I have ever spent. We set off across the English Midlands, following the Roman road, Watling Street, which runs from almost outside where we were living, right to the middle of Wales. From here, we found ourselves struggling to get up the steep inclines of the Welsh mountains, even though we remained on A roads. The traffic built up behind us as the Escort toiled up to the crest of each ridge, at one point needing to be put into first gear as we urged it on like cheerleaders, looking desperately for a roadside parking space to let the long line of cars past.

We managed to reach our destination, and from there, a few days later, decided to make an excursion to see one of Wales’s magnificent strongholds. Or, as it turned out, Lucy Rees’s house, ‘on the way’. After an hour’s drive, we left the main road and headed for a village that appeared to be in the right area. Of course we got lost, although to say we got lost implies that we actually knew where we were trying to go, which we did not. After many embarrassing conversations with local shepherds and shopkeepers, we came across a couple of farmers who were standing by the side of the road. They seemed to know who we were talking about, although we found their accents almost impossible to interpret. ‘Up that road,’ one of them pointed. ‘Go past the village Lleffiddillich bllah bllah and then when you come past a house, go left, Ddyllian lleyn bllah bllah and she’s the second house llan Gw liar the valley.’ Having asked him to repeat himself once, we pretended to understand, thanked him and set off.

For those who may not have visited the charming vicinity of Cnicht, there are not many roads, houses, or villages, but still we managed to take a wrong turning. We came to a house, expecting there to be a drive. There was a muddy footpath leading through some trees. I suggested we park and have a look down it.

‘Nonsense,’ Nicole stated, so firmly that anyone might have thought she knew what she was talking about. ‘Where’s the driveway? It must be up there,’ she said, indicating a stony track which continued beyond the house. ‘She does say in the book that she lives halfway up a mountain.’

Ignoring the voice in my head, which was getting a touch uneasy about this little jaunt, I turned the car up the track, which was not immediately too steep for a mountain goat. As we came out of the trees, however, all I could see ahead was a barren mountainside, strewn with rocks, the odd scrap of vegetation clinging to its near-vertical face. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked, knowing full well that she wasn’t. ‘I don’t see how she could possibly live up here.’ I glanced across the car towards the valley in which two other houses could now be seen. ‘Perhaps it’s one of those.’

‘Look, let’s just see if it’s round the next corner.’

But the next corner led only to more bleak cliffside, and the gradient of the track was now so steep that the car was having trouble climbing any further. So was I, as my ears popped with the altitude and my vertigo began to make me feel that I was about to veer off the road and down the precipice that loomed just inches from the passenger side wheels. Oblivious to the danger, Nicole was humming cheerfully. By now, I was starting to pray that our destination would be just around the corner, because hopefully there would be somewhere to turn around, and I would not have to go down this slippery track backwards.

‘Look,’ I said as calmly as I could, ‘this is ridiculous. How could anyone live up here and not die from exposure?’

‘Well, why do you think there is a track, if nobody lives up here?’

Nicole had a point, although I found it hard to believe anyone would build, let alone buy, a house stuck on the side of a precipice when there was a perfectly cosy valley a few hundred feet below. I agreed to keep going and look around the next corner, and then the one after that. Reversing was the only option, anyway, as the track was only just wide enough for the car. With a cliff going down on one side, and up on the other, I was seriously toying with the idea of abandoning the vehicle, escaping on foot and making up a story as to what had happened to it. I was just thinking up my excuses when, around the next corner, we came to a passing place, cut out of the rock on the side of the track. It looked just big enough to turn the car around, and I pulled in.

‘What are you doing, it can’t be here,’ Nicole protested, but I categorically refused to drive any further, and as she didn’t have a driving licence, there was no arguing with me. ‘It’s probably just around the next bend,’ she protested. ‘Well, then, we’ll know when we get there,’ I said, turning off the ignition and getting out. The air was cold and clear, and although I wouldn’t let myself go closer than 5 feet from the edge, I could see we had gone a lot higher than I had thought.

‘Aren’t you going to lock it?’ Nicole said as I put the keys into my pocket. ‘It isn’t our car, after all.’

‘If anyone is stupid enough to steal it, they can have it,’ I replied, remembering that Dom had said exactly the same thing to me when I left Cambridge. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

So we continued round that bend, only to see another one a few hundred metres ahead, beyond which we couldn’t see. We continued walking until we reached that, to find yet another stretch of road that led around a corner. Nicole was beginning to accept that this wasn’t likely to be where anyone but a mad hermit would live, or possibly a buzzard or two, but having come this far, we were curious to find out where the road led. It seemed impossible that it didn’t go somewhere, as it had clearly taken a huge effort to build it out of the solid granite mountainside. Eventually, after we had climbed about twenty minutes, we came around the final bend. There in front of us, behind large gates imposingly blocking the path, was a disused slate mine, perched on top of the cliff with a long chute leading into the valley, down which the quarried stone must have been thrown. There was no sign of any Welsh mountain ponies, nor anyone to ask where a woman called Lucy lived.

It turned out, when we actually did find her house, that she was in Portugal, buying Lusitano horses.

‘Never mind,’ Nicole said cheerily, ‘at least it was fun trying to track her down. Wasn’t it great going up that hill?’ I looked at her sharply, trying to detect sarcasm in her voice, but there was none. ‘Maybe next time we could bring Sensi to Wales, and ride her up to the very top.’

Returning to Cnicht didn’t appeal to me, but the thought of going there with Sensi made the prospect much more inviting. It was absolutely wonderful to have the companionship and love of this beautiful creature in my life, and Sensi had already done us a great service by preventing us from drifting into London along with most of our other friends. Instead, we had settled for living in Milton Keynes, where we rented a little flat, close to some paddocks where Sensi could live. Through her, I had begun to appreciate for the first time the beauty of the English countryside, for seeing nature from the back of a horse is a very different experience than travelling on foot or by bike. Above the level of the hedges, I could see so much more. And I soon discovered that wildlife viewed me in a different way when I was on top of a horse – not so much as a fearsome predator, but more as a fellow creature, and I spotted foxes, deer, hares and birds at much closer quarters than ever before.

But it was not a good combination, a complete novice learning to ride on a recently started young thoroughbred. With characteristic grace Sensi put up with me banging about on her back, farcically bouncing as I tried to sit to her trot. Sensibly, I got some riding lessons at the local school where Nicole had learned as a child.

Like most English riders, I religiously carried a whip at all times, although I did not find with Sensi that I needed it for its original purpose, getting her to move forward, which she was always keen to do. In fact it would have been of more use to me if it had been capable of getting her to stop. In my first emergency situation it did not help me in the slightest when, on a blustery day, she cantered off with me down a bridleway. I had asked for a trot but was soon out of control, as, with the wind under her tail, she headed for a narrow gap in a line of trees, through which the bridleway ran. Nicole, on foot behind me, could do nothing but watch helplessly and wince as I was unceremoniously dumped when Sensi shied just in front of the gap. I too had known intuitively that she was not going through, and despite having already learned that much of good horsemanship is ‘anticipation and feel’, this was of little help to me. Although I could ‘anticipate’ that she was going to stop suddenly, this did not prevent me from having the unmistakable ‘feeling’ of having a bridleway in my face. Sensi seemed very surprised that I had decided to get off and worship her so suddenly. She stood a few yards away, sniffing the earth in case I had found something worth eating. Shocked but not injured, the first thing I saw when I looked up was my whip. When she saw me reach for it, Sensi decided it might not be in her best interest to stick around, and ran off half a mile across the field, eventually to be retrieved with the help of a friendly gardener and his carrots.

This was my first fall, and I learned a lot from it, but was only slightly comforted by Nicole’s words.

‘Well,’ she said knowledgeably, ‘at least you’re not a complete beginner any more. They say you aren’t a good rider until you’ve fallen off seven times.’

I replied that if this was what was required, I would just as soon never be a good rider. And anyway, surely a really good rider wouldn’t fall off even once!

Of course, Sensi was just young and inexperienced, and could not be blamed for what had happened. But as time went on, and she continued to spook at lots of things, such as plastic, paper, leaves, flowers – in fact, everything except the one really dangerous thing she came across, cars – I began to get frustrated. I also had another, very nasty fall in which, cantering down a bank, I lost my balance and flew straight over her head when she put in her characteristic duck out to the side. As with my tirst fall, I knew I was going to come off a long time before I did, but lacked the ability to do anything about it. It was probably a good thing that I was resigned to my fate and did not try to stay on, for doing so might well have been fatal. I flew through the air for what seemed like ages, and landed on the top of my head like a human cannonball, feeling a sickening jolt go up my spine. My first thought was, This is what it’s like to be dead. Then, lying still, I realised that it was remarkably similar to being alive and I was able to feel my fingers and toes. I stood up, leaving a helmet-shaped imprint deep in the earth, and got back on my bemused mount. Unbelievably, I was not seriously injured, as the ground was very soft following several months of constant rain, and the force had gone directly along my backbones in a perfect line. Otherwise I would have been, at best, in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I was incredibly lucky. Of course, this accident was also my fault entirely. But after that, I was anxious about having another fall and was less patient with Sensi. I started to tap her neck with the whip when she spooked. At times, this was relatively successful, as it could bring her attention back to me, but if I was in the wrong mood, I would sometimes use it inappropriately, antagonising her and making her more nervous, simply because it was there in my hand and I didn’t realise how many other tools were at my disposal. I never considered how Sensi must have viewed the whip.