TWO
Nicole falls in love
(Nicole)
I watched as the battle developed between the
horse and the human. The horse stood at nearly 17 hands high, bold
and strong, bright bay in colour. The rider was a young man, tall,
but slight. Recent heavy rain had caused the bridleway in front of
them to flood, and the horse was refusing to go through the muddy
water. He couldn’t see the bottom, and although another horse had
stepped through just ahead of him, he seemed determined to find
another way around. There wasn’t another route, however, and the
man seemed equally determined to persuade the horse through.
He started by kicking his legs against the horse’s
sides. The horse ignored him, and tried to move away from the
puddle. Each time he turned away, the rider pulled his head roughly
back towards the water, and kicked him again. The more he was
pushed, the less confident the horse seemed to be. Eventually he
took a tentative step forward, and the man dug his heels into the
horse’s side, urging, ‘Go on!’ The horse backed away suddenly,
getting further away from the obstacle. The man lifted his
whip.
A light smack across the horse’s side, and the
horse jumped forward, stopping suddenly just at the edge of the
water. The rider hit him again, harder this time, and the horse
bucked in protest, tipping his rider forwards. He whipped the horse
for bucking, but he bucked again. Another smack, and the horse
reared this time. Again, he was punished for this disobedience. The
rider seemed more determined than angry. The horse looked
resentful. It had become a battle of wills: if the rider stayed on
and forced the horse across, he would win. If the horse could get
rid of the man on his back, he would be the victor. As the man
continued to hit him, by now with all his strength, and the horse
plunged and squirmed in an effort to get rid of this aggressor, I
couldn’t keep quiet any longer.
‘Come on, Adam!’ I cried. ‘Show him who’s boss!
Don’t let him get away with it! He’s got to do what you ask. Put a
bit of effort into it. Get angry!’
‘Get angry, Nicole!’ was what my riding instructor
would repeatedly shout at me throughout my childhood. I was often
timid and ineffectual, and spent many a lesson spectacularly
failing to get the pony to do what I wanted him to. My instructor
would exhort me to greater effort, and when all else failed would
threaten to hit the pony herself if I didn’t start ‘giving him a
good wallop’. I wanted the pony to do what I asked, but not because
I forced him. If I couldn’t demonstrate that I could achieve my
goals by fair means, then I would be told to ‘get tough’.
Sometimes, hitting the ponies did work, and they reluctantly
submitted to my clumsy requests. Often it didn’t, and I would end
up on the ground, unceremoniously dumped by a pony well practised
in the art of child disposal.
It was years ago that I told Adam to get tough with
Wilberforce to get him through the puddle, and I really believed it
was the right thing to do. We’d followed the advice from the
hundreds of horse books I’d read: we’d asked him nicely, we’d tried
to get him to follow another horse, we’d ‘encouraged’ him with a
bit of stick, and we’d stayed true to the maxim ‘never let the
horse win – make sure he knows who’s boss’. As a result, we’d
naturally progressed, in this instance and in others, from gentle
requests to brute force. We were following Monty’s father’s way:
‘Do what I say, or I’ll hurt you.’ And we were doing it with the
approval of just about every horse institution in the country, if
not the world. I didn’t feel angry that Wilberforce was disobeying
Adam, I just believed that if we let Wilberforce ‘get away with
it’, he would have no respect for us at all, and would never obey
us again. I didn’t like seeing him hit, but I believed it was an
inevitable part of every horse’s life. Without the insights and
strategies we later gleaned from Monty Roberts, it was almost the
only way we had of communicating. Far from ‘whispering’ to our
horse, we were screaming. We had no idea that Wilberforce was
trying to communicate with us. We were only interested in telling
him how it was.
Wilberforce went through the puddle in the end, and
we had the good grace to reward him with much patting and praising.
We took him backwards and forwards across the water a few more
times, to make sure he no longer had a problem with it, and he soon
walked through as if it had never been an issue. He was a
tremendously forgiving, almost thick-skinned horse, and seemed to
bear Adam no grudge as we completed our ride, despite still bearing
the marks of the whip on his flanks. I’d like to think that even
then we had some ability to ‘read’ a horse. It wasn’t right to hit
Wilberforce, but we knew it wouldn’t deeply traumatise him, as it
might so many other horses. (We had generally managed to avoid such
bullying tactics with Sensi, our first horse. Once, in a similar
situation, we went for pure stubbornness: asking her to cross a
ditch, and waiting patiently for two hours before she made the
decision to comply. But with Wilberforce we were out of our depth,
the strategies we had used to good effect with Sensi failed, and we
tried to intimidate him into submission, largely because we felt so
intimidated by him.)
It’s very easy to judge others, and to despise them
for resorting to violence. Like many horse owners, we used
excessive force in this instance because we rapidly ran out of
options, had ineffective methods at our disposal, and felt that any
evasion had to be confronted and defeated at any cost. Conventional
tools such as the whip were so easy to abuse. We often remember the
ordeal to which we subjected Wilberforce. We loved him, and we
treated him badly. There’ll never be a chance to make it up to
him.
As Adam mentioned, my parents didn’t buy me a pony
when I was a child, not because they were being mean, I now
realise. At the time they had no idea how long-lasting my interest
would be. As the obsession grew, they worked out the ramifications:
if I had a pony, would they ever be able to get me to go to school
again? What about family trips away? I already resented being
dragged away from my local stables for the occasional weekend visit
to relatives. And what would happen as I grew older? Would I be
able to bear selling an outgrown pony? Obviously, I would rather
sell my brother. There was also the issue of cost. ‘Not just the
initial outlay,’ my dad patiently explained, as I challenged him on
the vast sum he had just spent on a state-of-the-art Bang and
Olufson music centre, ‘but the upkeep. The stereo really won’t cost
much to maintain, you know, and it’s something we can all enjoy.’
It was no good arguing that I could get a job (not much work going
for eight-year-olds, and besides this idea didn’t make my promises
about keeping up the school work sound any more plausible), nor
insisting that everyone could enjoy the pony. Both my parents had
watched me being bitten, kicked, trampled on, and thrown off far
too often to believe that there was any enjoyment to be gained from
being anywhere near horses, let alone being ‘saddled’ (this sort of
cruel pun went straight over my head) with the responsibility of
actually owning one.
No, they had worked out all the downsides, and
decided it simply wasn’t practical. No amount of pleading,
manipulating, or laying on of guilt on my part had any effect. As I
got older, they gradually convinced me that I didn’t want to spend
the rest of my life shovelling horse muck (although strangely, they
were proved wrong in this . . .) and that I should
concentrate instead on getting a good education. ‘As a doctor, or a
lawyer, you’ll have lots of money and you’ll be able to keep your
horse in absolute luxury in a livery yard somewhere.’ It seemed to
make sense, though I knew even then that I wouldn’t want to be a
‘weekend owner’, and have someone else looking after my horse. As
the years passed, my obsession grew, fuelled by the mountains of
horse-related information I avidly consumed, ingrained more deeply
with every precious hour I snatched at my local riding school. At
eleven years old, I thought I knew everything there was to know
about anything.
‘You know,’ I announced loftily, ‘I think the
importance of a good education is vastly overrated.’
‘You could be right,’ my dad said, ‘but you’ll only
be in a position to judge that once you’ve actually got one.’
Then we moved to Canada. ‘You see,’ they pointed
out, ‘what would we do now if you had a pony?’
I couldn’t understand their point. Obviously, I
would stay behind with it. Or, if they really insisted we come with
them, they could pay the very reasonable few thousand pounds it
would cost to transport it across the Atlantic. What problem?
I was devastated at leaving my weekend ‘job’ and
all my favourite ponies, not to mention my best friend, Ciara, who
shared my obsession. From 7 a.m. until 6 p.m. every Saturday and
Sunday, and each day of every school holiday, we would work at the
riding school, and then hand over our pocket money for one lesson a
week. And when I say worked, I mean worked. We would muck out
stables, empty wheelbarrows, sweep yards, rake the school, fetch,
groom and tack up the horses and ponies, fetch bales of hay and
straw, fill haynets, scrub feed buckets and water drinkers, wash
doors, clean tack and do any other job we were asked – and we loved
it. We felt it was a privilege to be allowed to spend time on the
yard, and we were extremely grateful.
Our weekend experiences would sustain us through an
entire week of school, and when we weren’t talking about horses we
were pretending to be horses. Neighing to each other when we
met, cantering over the log seats at school, and prancing around an
imaginary dressage ring in the playground earned us a reputation
for being ‘different’, and of course we came in for a fair bit of
stick. We filed our fingernails into sharp points, and literally
fought tooth and claw until we were left alone. In the evenings
after school, we forced our dogs endlessly around courses of fences
and through dressage tests. (Actually, I didn’t have a dog and had
to borrow a neighbour’s, who could never work out why he was so
tired after his ‘walks’.) When it was dark, we knitted rugs for our
plastic toy horses, and even knitted miniature horses. Ciara
constructed the stables, and I knitted the saddles for my
show-jumping hamsters (her gerbils were considerably less
compliant). I couldn’t imagine finding another friend like
her.
All the same, we moved to Quebec, where I
immediately encountered a difficulty. I couldn’t speak French.
Worse, I had to learn it. With liberal amounts of help from my
parents, a dictionary, a table of verbs, and a lot of hard work, I
scraped through my first year.
I didn’t think much of Canada. The winters were too
cold (minus 20°C), the summers were too hot (plus 30°C), and the
riding was different. For a start they called it ‘horseback riding’
– as if there was any other part of the horse you would ride on!
The chocolate tasted weird, and they didn’t have smoky bacon
crisps. A washout, as far as I was concerned. The only good thing
was that Dad worked for Air Canada, which meant regular free
flights back to England.
I was on a riding holiday at my old stables, during
one summer visit to England, when my parents came to see me, saying
they had something very important to discuss. My heart skipped a
beat. Perhaps my riding instructor had told them how well I had
been getting on with the horse I had for the week – a 16.2 hands
high gelding by the name of Bank Robber. I could just see it: ‘Yes,
Mr and Mrs Golding, they really have built up a very strong bond,
and in such a short time, too. Quite unusual. I think it would
really be very much the best thing for both of them if you were
simply to buy her the horse.’ Surely they couldn’t turn her
down?
In fact, it was the next best thing – they were
thinking of moving back to England. At least, Mum and I would
return; Dad and my brother might have to stay in Canada. We’d still
be able to see each other all the time, because of the free
flights, and this way I’d be able to go to an English university. I
wasn’t listening to the details: I was just glad I’d be able to go
back to my old stables.
The effort involved in learning French to the
standard required in Quebec had given me a real taste for learning.
I found time for one riding lesson a week, but otherwise I
transferred my equine obsession to an academic one. My state
school, which was considered almost dangerously radical, was
extraordinarily accommodating, and arranged the timetable to allow
me to do all sorts of extra exams, and to earn the sort of grades
that impressed the entrance committee enough to earn me an
unconditional offer from Cambridge to read Engineering.
I was nineteen, free and single, studying at one of
the best universities in the world, but I had lost track of my
purpose in life. I was further than ever from getting a horse, and
I hardly even rode any more. Strangely enough, it was a skinny,
musical intellectual, who didn’t know one end of a horse from
another, who changed all that. When I went to Cambridge, I didn’t
mean to find a ‘husband’ and settle down. It had been more my
intention to take full advantage of the very favourable male to
female ratio, and enjoy being single. I thought I’d give it another
ten years or so, and then start looking for a serious partner. But
as ‘Golding’ and ‘Goodfellow’, Adam and I were standing next to
each other for the Matriculation photo, and so I suppose we were
bound to meet, although, on that particular morning, we were both
too hung-over to take much notice of each other.
Adam was charming and intense, prone to quoting
long passages from King Lear, and with a disarming interest
in what people really thought about the ‘Meaning of Life’. To my
mind the ‘what’s it all for, anyway?’ questions are answered very
conclusively with reference to the existence of chocolate, tea, and
horses. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of me, either.
We had our first all-night conversation mid-way
through the second term. I was due to go rowing the following
morning. Adam clearly thought I was mad when I began to get ready
to go, particularly as it had just started snowing, but when you
row as a team you have no choice but to turn up. The Cam is never
too warm at six o’clock in the morning, but on a sleeting February
morning the chill goes right into your bones. The strenuous effort
of rowing warmed me up in a superficial way, but the very core of
me stayed frozen.
I went straight to an Engineering practical
afterwards, and cycling back to college on roads that had become
treacherously icy, I had my mind full just trying to stay upright.
When I started climbing the stairs to my room, however, I surprised
myself by hoping that Adam was still there. He was, and after that
we more or less moved into the same room together, which
considering that the rooms were just big enough to fit a single
bed, a desk, a chair and people only if they were on top of those
pieces of furniture, was quite remarkable.
It was a chance encounter that re-ignited my
passion for horses. Adam and I were in our second year, and living
together in a village outside Cambridge. One fine day in early
spring, I decided to go out for a bike ride and since Adam stared
at me wordlessly from the sofa in utter disbelief when I suggested
we go together, I set out alone. A couple of miles from home, I
noticed a horse in a field. In fact, there were two, but I only had
eyes for one, a bay mare. She was beautiful, young, and
inquisitive. She had that bold-shyness typical of a young horse –
she wanted to see what this new person was all about, but was not
quite confident enough to come right over. She peered at me from
under her forelock, her black-edged ears flicking backwards and
forwards, and I fell in love. Eventually, I was able to stroke her
neck from over the gate, and feed her handfuls of grass. I cycled
home, wistfully, filled with that old familiar longing.
‘I’ve just met a couple of really nice horses,’ I
said when I got back.
‘Uh.’
Adam and I were both struggling with what can most
politely be described as ‘lethargy’ at the time – bone idleness
might be more accurate. I guess he was probably meant to be writing
an essay, so any diversion was welcome. There being no chance of
getting him to use a bicycle voluntarily, we got into the car his
parents had lent us and drove back to the field. The horses had
moved away, but came over when they saw us, keen on the idea of
more hands picking them grass. There was a public footpath running
through the field, so we went in. The two horses followed us.
Reaching a high bank on the far side of the field, we clambered up
it. They came too. As we ran down again, they broke into a canter
and the gorgeous bay leapt off the bank and cavorted around us,
bucking and leaping with excitement before running off with her
friend. I explained to Adam, ‘They’re only young – I don’t suppose
they’ve been broken in yet.’ (I’d had a quick peek at their teeth.)
‘They’re nice types, too, although this one is much better put
together, and a lot more friendly.’ Having long given up on the
idea of having a horse, I was simply making idle conversation of
the type horse people simply cannot resist. We started walking to
the car.
‘Well, how much do horses cost?’ asked Adam.
‘Perhaps we should buy her.’
I was dumbstruck by this idea. Then it became
clear: I was living with a genius!
‘Although, I suppose they must be quite expensive
to keep?’ he retreated, gripped by an unusual sense of
practicality.
I thought back to all the long conversations I’d
had on this topic with my parents: the vet’s bills, the feed, the
bedding, the shoes, the insurance, the saddle, the tack, the
transport, and all the things I didn’t know much about:
chiropractors, massage therapists, dentists, not to mention riding
lessons.
‘Oh, no.’ I flicked it all away with a contemptuous
wave of my hand. ‘Not really. They just live off grass. A bit of
hay in the winter, a set of shoes now and again, nothing much.
Besides, I could use the horse to teach on, and she’d earn her keep
– might even bring some money in.’
I wasn’t being deceitful. I really believed
it.
The next day I set off resolutely to track down the
owner. There was a large mansion overlooking the field, and I
cycled tentatively down the long, winding drive. There were
peacocks and statues everywhere, but no sign of any human activity.
I was secretly relieved, left a note, and carried on.
The next property was located on the river that ran
along the edge of the horses’ field. The owner was a bright,
cheerful man, and he directed me a couple of miles along the road
to a house on a corner. ‘There’s a couple of horses in the field
next to the house – you can’t miss it.’
As I drew nearer the house, I grew increasingly
nervous. It was all very well, as an abstract idea, to fulfil a
lifetime’s longing, but as the prospect of actually discovering the
identity of the filly’s owner grew nearer, I began to panic that my
dream would never turn into reality. Until I found out one way or
another, there was always the possibility that my dream might come
true. Finding out for certain could mean the end of my hopes. It
was probably best not knowing, I decided.
I was wrong about that, though. It turned out that
the field owners were not in. I bumped into the postman who
informed me they were away. I left a detailed note, describing
precisely the location of the field, more than a mile from their
house, and asking if they could give me the name of the horse
owners who rented the field from them. I then waited for them to
come home. It turned out to be ten long, agonising days.
Of course, we should have done the sensible thing
and not visited the horses until we knew one way or another.
Instead, we went every day and fell deeper in love. We visited late
one night, ‘on our way’ back home from college. It was a wild,
windy night, with a full moon. We stepped to the gate, and called
out, and almost immediately there was a thundering of hooves and
two horses materialised out of the darkness. They were restless and
stopped only a moment to say hello before hurtling off around the
field again. I couldn’t bear the idea that all this might have to
stop, that someone might take this perfect horse away, and I might
never see her again.
The call came the next day. ‘Yes, I know the mares
you mean. Two in a field together, one with a star and a sock, the
other without any markings. Two bays. That’s right. No, I’m afraid
they’re not for sale. Old favourites of mine. Sorry.’
I couldn’t trust myself to speak. The man by the
river must have been wrong. She did own the horses. There couldn’t
be another pair to match the description. I mumbled my goodbye, and
burst into tears. There was nothing to be done.
‘I’ll go to see her,’ Adam volunteered, desperately
trying to find a way to stop me crying. ‘Try to change her
mind.’
‘She sounds pretty sure about it.’ It felt like my
life was falling apart.
With the gallantry for which I have always loved
him, he insisted. ‘I’ll do my best, but don’t expect too much,’ he
warned. ‘It’s not like we have unlimited funds to offer.’ He added,
under his breath, ‘God, this is going to be embarrassing.’
He came back half an hour later, a half hour that
seemed the longest of my life. I knew as soon as I saw his face
that it was no good. He put his arms around me, but I was
inconsolable.
Some hours later, my mood had still not improved.
In an attempt to find a way of breaking the gloomy silence, Adam
spoke, hoping to make me laugh but worried that I might hate him
for ever if he didn’t.
‘But I thought you said you knew a bit about
horses,’ he offered tentatively. ‘You said that they were
thoroughbreds, and young, about two years old. It turns out that
they’re New Forest ponies, that the oldest one is eighteen, and
she’s eleven months pregnant – just about to give birth, in
fact!’
I looked at him through my tear-bleary eyes as he
waited nervously for my reaction.
‘Oh, my God – she’s got it wrong!’ I shouted.
‘I don’t think so, Nick, I think she’d know her own
horses . . .’
It took me some time to make myself understood.
‘No, she’s talking about the wrong horses – she means the ponies
next to her field, not the ones at the end of Long Drove. She
didn’t read my note properly! Call her up, and tell her not those
bloody horses!’
On reflection, it was hardly surprising she’d
thought I’d meant the two mares next to her house, as they matched
my description almost exactly. I watched intently as Adam spoke
politely to this woman, who seemed quite unperturbed about the fact
that she had nearly killed me with grief.
‘Sorry to bother you again, I think there’s been a
funny misunderstanding.’ I harrumphed loudly in the background.
‘Did you think we meant the ponies next to your house? In fact
there are some others, in a field a couple of miles away. Yes,
that’s right. They’re not yours? I wonder if you could possibly
give us the number for the person who owns them. That’s terribly
kind of you. Thank you.’
I snatched the number from his fingers, and had
started dialling almost before he had hung up. I got through to the
owner straight away.
‘You’re interested in the older of the two? Well,
no, she’s not really for sale. I was going to break her in myself
and sell her afterwards. But I suppose I could let her go, if
you’re really interested. When would you like to meet?’ I looked at
my watch, I could be there in five minutes. ‘Would Wednesday suit
you?’
Wednesday! That was two days away! But I didn’t
want to seem too desperate, and agreed.
I must have been hell to live with for those
forty-eight hours. I was worried about the cost. Adam had kindly
offered to liquidate his Post Office account, paying me back as
he’d demolished my savings from my ‘year out’ working, but he only
had £500. Would it be enough? If not, how could I get more?
Prostitution, robbery, drug trafficking? There had to be a
way.
I tried to appear non-committal when I met the
owner, Wendy, but it was a difficult position to maintain. I had
clearly gone to a lot of effort to track her down, and it didn’t
help that the horse – we’d already named her Sensi, the Japanese
word for ‘teacher’ – was clearly fond of me, and wouldn’t leave us
alone. I couldn’t pretend that I’d only noticed her in passing. The
owner wanted £800 for her, and I managed to negotiate down to £750.
That still left me £250 short. I would have to call my
parents.
They were both living in Canada again, so I had to
wait until it was evening over there, Montreal being five hours
behind England. They were taken aback, not having heard this
familiar request for nearly three years, but they tried all the
usual objections.
‘Well, I’m going to get one as soon as I graduate
anyway, this is just a little sooner,’ I protested. No, of course I
didn’t think getting a horse in my second year would distract me
from my work. ‘If anything, it will keep me fresh – stop me getting
too intense.’
They didn’t sound convinced, but promised to call
me back the next day. I could, however, detect a hint of
resignation in Mum’s voice. I was no longer asking for permission
to buy the horse, just the loan of some money. She was worried
about how else I would raise it, I guess. I knew she could talk my
dad around, and I was delighted, but not surprised, when they
phoned back the next day to say they were sending a cheque over.
And, as is so typical of their generosity, they never asked for it
to be paid back.
It took a month to release Adam’s funds from the
Post Office, but I put down a deposit, and took over paying for the
field. I got a job cleaning a house nearby, just a few hours a
week, which covered the field rent of £6 per week.
On my twenty-first birthday, 12 May 1990, Sensi
became my first horse, and I became the happiest person
alive.