Whispering Back

by Adam Goodfellow

  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.

  THREE

  Starting Sensi

  (Adam)

  Looking back on it, it was madness. Or at least, naive optimism, for me to have any involvement in ‘breaking in’ a young horse. By now I just about knew one end of a horse from the other. But I had never taken the time to consider quite how powerful, heavy and easily frightened any horse – especially a young one – can be. This might seem an obvious fact, but my education had not always been of the most practical nature. Had I been fully aware of what we were taking on, I would not have made such a careless remark in that field in Cambridgeshire.

  Although Nicole had a great deal of knowledge and experience of riding ponies and horses, she had never been involved in starting a youngster. However, there were three factors in her favour: Sensi was as wi
lling and intelligent as any horse could be; Nicole had plenty of time to spend (if one ignored the work she was supposed to be doing for her degree) and she already had an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of every conceivable fact known to man on the subject of horses, except, as we were to discover so much later, the ones you really need to know. On the other hand, she had no facilities to work with, and was to be assisted by me, an incompetent, extremely amateur, fair-weather enthusiast of someone else’s hobby.

  The most useful of Nicole’s books was Lucy Rees’s The Horse’s Mind. I remember being shown pictures of horses demonstrating various facial contortions with descriptions of what emotions they denoted. Even back then, when horses weren’t yet my hobby, just my girlfriend’s obsession, this really did appeal to me, much more than the difference between various types of nosebands, bridles or bits. I was intrigued by the idea of what was going on in a horse’s mind.

  Thanks to Nicole’s patience, and the guidance of Lucy Rees’s book, Sensi’s early education was successful. During the summer break, we moved her to a field near Milton Keynes. Nicole took Sensi out for a lot of walks in hand, to see the countryside, and gradually expose her to traffic, dogs and all sorts of other sights and sounds. By taking her time, Nicole reduced the stress of each new procedure so much that nothing seemed remarkable to Sensi. I can hardly remember the first occasion when she put on a saddle it was so uneventful. Some time later, Nicole backed her for the first time, one baking hot summer’s day in a friend’s little paddock.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ Nicole asked me. ‘Does she seem calm?’

  Sensi was so hot and full of grass that she was having trouble not falling asleep.

  So I gave Nicole my expert opinion. ‘I’d say she’s on the verge of losing consciousness.’

  Nicole got me to lead Sensi up to the fence on which she was perching precariously. She patted Sensi’s back a couple of times, sort of hugged her around the neck, leant across her back, and finally scrambled on. Still lying low on her neck, she stroked her gently. Sensi turned her head lazily, and sniffed Nicole’s ankles. Nicole’s face was just one ecstatic grin. Bareback and with just a headcollar, it was hardly a conventional backing, but it worked and we were happy. At least Nicole remembered to wear a hard hat, although I probably didn’t.

  In our final year we moved Sensi to a yard near Cambridge, where there was a tiny riding manège, fenced off in the middle of the field. She was not very well co-ordinated and found it difficult going around it, even in trot, as it was so small. One afternoon, Nicole arrived to find that Sensi had let herself in by limbo-dancing under the cross-rail, and was practising the work they’d been doing the day before! By making everything they did together so positive, and always ending on a good note before Sensi got bored or tired, Nicole had brought out the best in her, preserving her enthusiasm and the essence of her character.

  We left Cambridge in 1991, with honours degrees in Social and Political Science, and were therefore unemployable. Nicole had switched from Engineering after one year, and I had left English after the second year, but I suspect it wouldn’t have made much difference what our degree subjects had been. It was the height of the biggest recession since the 1930s, with unemployment amongst university graduates standing at 90 per cent. This was just as well, since neither of us really wanted a job. Nicole had already achieved her life’s ambition, and mine – that of being the next Jimi Hendrix – was unlikely to be served by getting a conventional job. We signed on and moved to Milton Keynes, staying with Nicole’s parents, who had by then moved back to England from Canada. It was now clear that living with Nicole was going to involve horses. ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’ was the only option, I felt. I tried to sell myself for a price, though, and eventually we came to a reasonable compromise. I would learn to ride; she would learn the guitar. She mastered a few chords, even a song or two (probably ‘Mustang Sally’ and ‘Wild Horses’), but her enthusiasm petered out after about a month. Perhaps things would have been different if there were more popular songs about horses.

  Even at this early stage, however, it was already clear that I had a close affinity to horses – at least, they seemed to like me. A year after we had graduated, I went to a house party in Norwich, leaving Nicole to look after Sensi. The day after the party, my friends and I went to a pub for lunch and were walking back through a field, home to three huge Shire horses. One came over and wanted some attention, probably used to being offered treats by people using the public footpath through his paddock. He was so big that I practically had to stand on my toes to scratch his wither. He loved it, sticking his nose into the air and wibbling the end of it around, showing clear evidence of the evolution of the elephant as he stretched his lip out in ecstasy, mutually grooming the space in front of him and turning to nuzzle me, asking me to scratch harder. My friends had moved off, but as they turned to tell me to come on, they all burst out laughing at the sight of this huge animal as he contorted his face comically. Or so I thought. His belly was so big, it filled my line of sight and it was not until I had walked a few metres away that I could see just why they were all laughing. My new friend liked me so much he had let down his undercarriage and was standing on what appeared to be five legs, wistfully looking at me as I left.

  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.