by Melanie Reid
Not being in possession of five thousand acres of Wyoming, I had to sell Indiana two months later because I couldn’t afford her keep. After that, I got semi-sensible. I waited until I was in possession of a husband and a house with a field and a stable, and, then, conscious how book-learnt I was, enrolled on a part-time basis at a prestigious riding school nearby until I passed the British Horse Society exams up to assistant instructor level. I was going to make up for lost time and do things properly.
Thirty years of fun followed; numerous horses owned; foals bred and broken; horses despatched; riding clubs run; shows organised; competitions entered; lessons taken; rosettes won. I was never a serious player, because I was not rich and had neither time to spare nor money for expensive horses; I had a full-time job and a little boy; but what I managed to do I enjoyed greatly, always trying to improve, always taking safety seriously and doing things properly. It was only after my son had gone to university, and I had a little more time and money, and was fitter than I’d been for years, that I decided to go for one of my dreams: proper affiliated eventing. There is indeed no fool like an old fool.
In hospital after my accident, I had the unnerving experience of being contacted by a teenager, fourteen or so, who asked me if she should carry on cross-country jumping. Help. What does one say? Stop? And while you’re at it stop cycling on the road, travelling in cars, eating polyunsaturated fats, going near building sites, breathing diesel fumes, walking in the hills or drinking alcohol. Your life may last until you’re a hundred and fifty, but it won’t be everyone’s idea of fun. People ask for my views on whether they should continue horse-riding, as if my risk analysis is somehow refined as a result of my experience. Should I tell them to carry on? I advised the girl to discuss it with her parents and a professional trainer; to be sure her horse was suitable for the job; and I said that for Christmas she should ask for an air safety jacket, which inflates if you leave the saddle. Also, learn how to fall. I told her that if she wasn’t enjoying it, despite the precautions, she should stick to dressage. While I was in the spinal unit, I received a visit from one of my long-standing heroes, the event rider Lorna Clarke, who lived in the south of Scotland. For me, it felt like a visit from royalty, only much better. She was fun – wry, to-the-point, supportive, and very kind. Lorna, possibly one of the toughest eventers of all time, once rode three horses around Badminton. She was expert at calculating risk.
One never escapes it. Living is intrinsically dangerous. And horses, for all their gentleness, are intrinsically deadly just to be around. Probably as many people get hurt on the ground, kicked or crushed, as do from falling off them. Some years ago an academic called David Nutt was forced to resign as chair of the Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs after saying that taking ecstasy was no riskier than ‘equasy’, a term he invented to describe people’s addiction to horse-riding. He may have been tongue in cheek; he was also spot on. The debate is about choice and freedom; about balancing risk with sensible precautions. Even after my experiences I would defend to my last breath the right of anyone to choose life, excitement, sport and adventure. Accidents happen. I could have broken my neck tripping over a kerb. I used to console myself that at least my accident happened while I was doing something moderately exciting, however much, in the same moment, I wished to God I had been wise enough to give up jumping when I turned fifty and stick to dressage, where the odds of injury are lessened. I used to be a little scared doing cross-country jumps but the thrill was always bigger than the fear. Because it brought that sense of being alive, properly alive, pushing and scaring yourself; examining that implicit contract with the devil which tells you you’re willing to accept the risks and suffer the consequences. As ever, the best piece of advice in life is the one you could have given to yourself, but chose not to.
One of the most moving letters I have received came from an experienced horsewoman, a stranger, who believed I had saved her life. ‘Who would have thought that as my life flashed before my eyes it would be your name that was in my final thoughts?’ the woman wrote.
‘I followed your remarkable story from the silly fall onwards. I told people about it. I gave up hunting because of you. But at fifty-four I still felt that I was the right person to rehabilitate old racehorses.’
She told me one horse had retired and she got another. ‘On a dull hack, out of nowhere, he produced the kind of monster buck that is the stuff of nightmares. Amazing how much time there is whilst in the air, even at speed, to work out the likely prognosis. But one thing I wasn’t going to do was drop onto my head, and all because of the story you wrote about your fall. Every fibre made me twist and turn and take up those final moments to fall with my weight spread as much as I could onto my shoulder. And there was that moment of – ‘“Can I move? Oh dear I have got to try.”
‘It’s been seven weeks and my broken shoulder is healing well, and I can’t wait to get the strength back to ride again. But it won’t be a thoroughbred, I am afraid, it will be a quieter native pony. It is very possible that it is only because of your story that I can even contemplate this.’
And so I sat within my ghost body, and tried to advise people to be sensible but also, whatever they chose to do, to do it with a light heart. They shouldn’t worry or fret. One of my favourite quotes remained that of Sir Sydney Smith, 1771–1845. ‘One great remedy is to take short views of life. Are you happy now? Are you likely to remain so till this evening? Or next week? Or next month? Then why destroy present happiness with distant misery, which may never come at all, or you may never live to see it? For every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making.’
That was the idea. Try as I might, though, my thoughts kept coming back to what wasn’t there any more: action. The cruel dreams, the night-time liberation of the mind from the paralysed body, had not stopped when I left the spinal unit. One night I dreamt I was organising a ski race, not on a mountain but in a snow-covered car park, and the female contestants were all girlie types who shrieked and wobbled, teetering on the fall line afraid to let themselves go from the starting gate. Eventually, it was my turn; I launched myself, arrogant, able-bodied, but something went desperately wrong and my skis were sticky and my legs disobedient and I lurched, unwieldy as a novice, snow-ploughing to the finish. I also had a recurring dream where I was leading a horse in order to turn it out in a field. My dream walks were always slow and deliberate, methodical, but the critical thing was the fact my legs were working. That dream had variations; it featured different horses, some familiar, some unknown. One morning I dreamt I was leading Fergus, talking to him, walking shoulder to shoulder, his great head lowered to listen, and immediately upon waking I burst into inconsolable sobs, so strong was the sense of loss, of comfort snatched away. The reality of yet another morning shrink-wrapped to the bed was too much to bear.
How to begin to describe Fergus? Not easy. Horses are like boyfriends: memories of a very few stay with you all your life; the rest are a blur, inconsequential, names and faces faded. Some, the embarrassing ones, deliberately so. Just as you wince at the memory of kissing some frogs, so you try to forget some of the horses you gave house-room to, the ones which wouldn’t box or stand or clip or eat or perform; the barger who you got impossibly cheap; the monsters like Horrid Dan with lousy feet who you bought despite yourself because he loved to jump and that was really, really, really what you wanted to do. But Fergus was epic, a huge presence; one of the chosen. He was also a minor national treasure, a police horse who came to me from the charity World Horse Welfare after doing nigh on twenty years of unbroken public service on the streets of Glasgow. He lived to thirty-six, setting the record (I believe) for the greatest longevity of his kind. I loved him to bits, as did the cops he served. They called him the banker, the one that never let them down.
Fergus, a 17.2 part-bred Cleveland Bay, understood most things. He looked at you with ineffably wise eyes that had seen everything; he obeyed without quest
ion. You could lead him without a rope or – though we never did – bring him in the house. Under saddle, meticulously schooled in the old cavalry school of policing, he could go backwards and sideways as fast as he would go forwards. He was an extraordinary mixture of boldness, courtesy and caution; a lion of a horse who was scared of absolutely nothing but would also, if necessary, test the ground with each foot before he put weight on it. Other horses deferred to him instinctively; they knew he was king. His iron will was forged through the heavy civil protests of the late 1970s and 80s: the miners’ strike, the poll tax riots, student marches; the vicious cauldron of Glasgow football riots, all in unpaid service to mankind. He was like the eponymous hero in Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘The Maltese Cat’, one of those few horses everyone got truly sentimental about. The police, who should have put him down when his tendons went, aged twenty-three, instead patched him up for retirement. That’s when he came to me. He was never an affectionate horse – after so many years of having to endure Rangers and Celtic fans and Glasgow drunks blowing whisky fumes up his nose: ‘Haw, Trigger, gie’s a kiss’ – but his intelligence made him an honour to have around. He was also a supremely good listener. That’s the magic of horses: they soak up human pain; they pass no judgement; they are a leaning post and a sounding board and solace for the soul. And thus, in my dream, as I walked I confided in him about my accident, about my stupidity in falling off, about the crushing guilt that burdened me.
There is an amazing equine life-saving story which involves Fergus, one that defies anthropomorphism, one I would not have believed had we not witnessed it, although I have since read about other remarkable incidents where horses have intervened to help their companions. When Fergus was nearing the end of his life, a frail old soul of thirty-four (human equivalent, about a hundred), he lay down on the side of the hill. It was something he did a lot, enjoying the sun, the freedom, the view. Only this time he made the mistake of going down the wrong way, with his legs facing up the hill. When he wanted to get up, he couldn’t get the purchase to fold his back legs under his haunches. My husband saw him struggling and rushed to try and help, but as he got close he looked up to see my other horse, Horrid Dan, charging at him, ears flat back and teeth bared. Dan – the aforementioned crib-biting, flat-footed eventer – was a bad-tempered sod, talented but aggressive and extremely threatening towards humans, given half the chance. Dave, non-horsey but streetwise, did the only sensible thing and hurried away.
The fit young sports horse proceeded to attack Fergus. At least that’s what it looked like. He pawed and nipped at him repeatedly on the ground, ripping his rug with his teeth. When Dave tried desperately to intervene, waving his arms, shouting, Dan threatened him again with bared teeth and heels. My husband retreated again, in shock, thinking he was about to witness murder. Would you call it equicide? Friends arrived to help and to their amazement realised they were in fact watching the opposite. Dan was in instinctive life-saving mode – he knew, as a fellow creature of flight, that being stuck on the ground meant death. He was determined to get his companion back on his feet. When the pawing and nipping didn’t work, the younger horse did something remarkable. He grasped Fergus’s ear in his teeth and then reversed, like a dog pulling at a stick, until he had dragged the stricken animal down and round, through ninety degrees, so his legs were pointing downhill. Horses’ ears are particularly sensitive. Fergus squealed with pain, but as soon as his legs were facing the right way, he heaved himself to his feet and shook himself off. The two horses, both saver and saved, touched heads and then, cool as you like, wandered off to graze together.
Horrid Dan ate fences the way he ate people …
That was the kind of magic that horses could give you, a depth, a fascination, which lay beneath the thrill of riding. How was I now, cerebral-me and useless-rest-of-me, to give this up? How did I deal with a love affair with horses? It was like being asked how you felt about the man you adored who had betrayed you and ruined your life. Do you see him again? Do you even start to explore your feelings at all? Do you stalk him on Facebook, and humiliate yourself by begging his friends to tell you who his new woman is? In the early days in hospital the horse issue was blanketed by shock and emotional numbness and I think I was a little bit like that deranged loser in love. I had a subscription to the weekly magazine Horse & Hound; Dave brought it into hospital and I read it, even quite enjoyed it, passed it on to another patient, a riding instructor who had had a spinal tumour. Besides, I had been so touched, after my accident, to receive a card signed by the staff at the magazine wishing me well. In much the same way, I saw paralysed motorbikers reading bike magazines; young paralysed women reading fashion magazines. Several friends asked me, hesitantly, what my attitude was to horses, hedging around it, trying to find out if it upset me to talk about it; or whether I wanted to ride again, should such a thing be possible. Other people assumed I would slam the door on the horsey world. My big brother, seeing me reading Horse & Hound, gave me the incredulous stare of he who visits the asylum and leaves in despair and bewilderment at the madness he finds.
‘I don’t like to say anything … but how can you enjoy that kind of stuff now?’ he said.
Dear rational Andrew, the gentle giant who had suffered such distress when his beloved little sister, who he’d mentored all his life, had hurt herself so gravely. He lived on the West Coast of America and had been unable to reach me for weeks after my accident, because of the ash from the Icelandic volcano. Now he crossed the globe frequently to support Dave and me in any way he could. But he wasn’t horsey, and he was very logical and sensible, and he struggled to see me still interested in horses. He had a very valid point. Untouched by the passion. I suspected Dave, too, loathed horses now, but was keeping a tactful silence.
Try as I might to avoid it, the issue managed to ambush me. When I was on a weekend visit home from hospital my dear friend Kate, who has since died of a brain tumour, offered to help sort out my clothes. She brought bags of them down from the upstairs bedroom where they had been stored for nearly a year and she and I had begun the by-then-familiar game of Keep-or-Throw when, unexpectedly, the next item in the pile was a pair of riding breeches. She held them up and she and I stared at each other wordlessly for what seemed like a long time.
‘I just don’t know,’ I said eventually. Another long silence. ‘Shall we keep them just now and see what happens? You could put them right down on the bottom shelf out of sight.’
She nodded, carefully expressionless, and did as I suggested. Ordinary clothes were bad enough, beset with loaded imponderables. At that point I hadn’t a clue what fitted my shrunken, sexless, uncooperative frame or what it might one day be capable of. What kind of trousers could I wear – and how did I find out, other than an exhausting lying-down trying-on session? But riding clothes were another league altogether of poignancy. Bad enough the acute bereavement for jeans and smart pumps, lost for ever; but the sight of breeches and jodhpurs and riding jackets, the unattainable desire of that small girl in the back of a car forty-odd years ago, craning at a shop window, was profound.
At that point I simply didn’t know what I felt or what I wanted, so I equivocated, telling people I’d like to reach the stage where I had a choice about whether or not to ride again. Only when I had the potential would I choose. Part of me yearned to be close to a horse again, to bury my face in its neck and inhale that sweet, heady smell, just as you would your ex-lover. But the hurt, the sense of loss and powerlessness, the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again meant the idea was terrifying. And besides, I felt it would be utterly selfish to put my family, after what they had already endured, through the additional worry of seeing me mount a horse again.
Addicts are so called because they’re addicted. They go on the wagon, but then they lapse because they are left with a void which needs to be filled. My void in the beginning seemed all-encompassing. When I got home reminders of a horsey lifestyle were all around: the stables, the riding a
rena, the empty fields, the vanity pictures of me jumping hanging on the kitchen wall. If I wanted to escape memories of horses, then the only thing to do was live elsewhere. Like a big fat weevil in my brain, the relationship between dangerous sport and its retribution bored away. It posed a deeper question, too, one I had difficulty addressing. Could paralysed people ever find real beauty and compensation elsewhere, once movement has been taken away from them? Despite everything, that was still what I craved.
That’s the glorious obsession of all risk sport; the degree of passion held; the capacity for madness within us all. People who crash fast cars want to drive again. Lone sailors who capsize return to sea. Mountaineers can never resist the lure of mountains. Nobody stops wanting to be liberated. And such people can be really cavalier with fate. I am reminded of my friend Ian, a climber, high on Denali, Mount McKinley, in Alaska, who made the decision not to go for the summit because he knew he would lose his fingers to frostbite. And who watched, in horror, as others went on, and did so. Later, back in the frontier town nearest the mountain, he had a distressing encounter with one of them, an elderly Czech climber, who held out his rotting hands, too far gone to save, and begged for help.
On the good days, when I was feeling strong, I started to contemplate riding again. I wanted to revisit that old lover, see his face one more time. I told Dave and he shook his head and smiled wryly. He was aware how strong the addiction was. Months earlier, the chief executive of the charity Riding for the Disabled Association had emailed me, offering to help facilitate this should I ever want it. Now I wondered if it was physically feasible. Did I have enough torso strength to support myself once in the saddle? Could I be hoisted onto a horse again? Apart from anything else, someone had told me that the walking action of a horse was said to stimulate the core muscles and hips of riders. And on days when my bravado was high enough to allow a daydream, I contemplated doing paradressage. I had heard of another former inmate of the Scottish spinal unit who was now a successful dressage rider, using Velcro pads to keep her legs on the saddle. My friend Annie was less keen on the idea of disabled riding. After the glory and the speed of whizzing cross-country, she said, she didn’t fancy going back to plodding around a dusty indoor arena on an old cob, held in the saddle by helpers. That was true; I didn’t fancy that either, but I wanted to go there to find it out for myself.