Whispering Back

by Adam Goodfellow

  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.

  THIRTEEN

  Always know the direction of true north (Adam)

  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.

  I asked David about his army training. ‘Surely they tell you the answer to that before you can get to be in the Israeli special forces, Rambo.’

  David grimaced and made as if he was going to spit, perhaps remembering long days and nights trudging all over Israel as he learned how to use a compass. Or the ones in Lebanon where it really mattered whether he had learned his lessons well. ‘No, they only told us to know the direction where to point the bazooka. But of course, I know how you can tell where north is without a compass.’

  I waved my hand. ‘You look at the sun. It rises in the east and sets in the west.’

  ‘Even if it’s cloudy or night-time and you don’t know what time it is?’

  That shut me up.

  ‘You look on the trees or rocks. No direct sunlight reaches the north side. Moss can grow there.’

  I thanked him for this helpful tip and told him I’d remember it if I was ever stuck, lost in the wilderness, without a compass. Around the parts of England I was intending to be, even if you were completely lost, you never had more than a few miles to go in any direction before coming across a perfect little village with a phone box and a pub at which to wait for your taxi.

  This was all very interesting, but it wasn’t actually helping us find even the first of our three reasons why we should always know the direction of true north.

  ‘Well, you might get lost on a hack and not have a compass,’ piped Tim.

  We stared at him. All along he had been hiding it, but he was a genius. In spite of the fact that a compass wouldn’t be very much use without a map, and you were unlikely to have one of those if you’d forgotten your compass, you couldn’t argue with his logic. It was a solid start. But beyond this reasonably obvious scenario, we could only come up with variations on the theme – getting lost on a long-distance endurance ride, getting lost driving to the stables . . .

  ‘I know,’ Julia suggested. ‘It means you shouldn’t have to rely on technology. You should be self-reliant.’

  Great. So we had two compelling reasons why we should know the direction of true north. I was even starting to convince myself that I should make sure I actually did, by getting a compass. I still didn’t really trust the moss method.

  As I looked down at the sheet, I had a nagging thought. ‘What if it doesn’t mean only what it says? What if true north isn’t the physical direction towards the pole, but the direction towards a goal, the truth, some sort of holy grail?’

  David looked at me as if I had lost my mind. ‘Holy gril, what is holy groiled?’

  ‘It’s what a holy man seeks. True north, maybe it isn’t just the actual direction north, maybe it’s like a metaphor for a perfect existence, the best way to live, or train horses and share your life with them or whatever. Like making a Garden of Eden, finding the holy grail of horsemanship.’

  Tim and Julia looked like they thought this might be halfway credible, but of
course David had to stick a spoke in the wheel.

  ‘OK, so you know the direction of true north, that still doesn’t mean you know where you are. Or where you want to be. So it doesn’t help you get there.’

  I hadn’t bluffed my way through all those supervisions at Cambridge for nothing. I had learned that if you say something positively enough, you just might come to find meaning in it.

  ‘Yes, but if you don’t have anything to refer to, you can’t even find a destination,’ I replied. ‘Perhaps it means, always seek to know where you are, where you want to be, how to get there. You may not be heading directly north, you may not be able to, but you can know whether you should turn left or right – maybe you could have more of an idea of where to go.’

  Julia added, ‘Maybe true north is perfection, or the perfect horse. Always seek to make the perfect horse. Anyway, if you don’t know where north is, how are you going to ever find your place? The horses do, they know their place, although they may not have words for it, or notice the moss on the trees unless it gets in the way of the grass.’

  By now I was really warming to the idea. If only horsemanship – and life – had such clear, reliable, easy pointers as a compass, or even the moss on a tree. It would be so easy to know whether what you were doing was taking you closer to where you wanted to be, or further away. Too many people are aware that they have made huge compromises in their lives, that time is running out and that the left-overs from their history will never let their slate be wiped clean. I’d hate to be thinking, I know my life shouldn’t be like this, as I drifted from day to day in the sort of career in which I could so easily have found myself. But it’s hard at times to imagine what could make it better. Always easy to see what’s wrong in someone else’s picture, it’s so hard to see what’s wrong in your own. Perhaps we each decide the direction of our own true north, and make that the destination we seek in life. For the world around us has so clearly lost its direction. What David was involved with in Lebanon is testament to that. It is easy to see why people seek answers in religion, and why extremist religious and political views are on the increase all around the world. For we all seek to live with a sense of ‘true north’. Everyone needs an ethical framework. And I believe, whatever your religious belief, the most important thing to do is to get violence out of our lives. If we do not, we will destroy ourselves and probably, all other life on earth.

  David screwed up his mouth sceptically. ‘Sounds like bullshit to me. Anyway, if you think you can explain that to anyone, go ahead.’

  I tried, at least.

  In our discussion afterwards, Kelly confessed she had always ribbed Monty about how it wasn’t the Wild West any more, nobody really needs to know that kind of thing these days and it’s more important to be able to read a road sign. I guess Monty had told her stories about how his compass got broken when he was out in the wilderness catching mustangs.

  A year later, in the midst of the Kosovo campaign, when the roar of B-52 engines burst the air over Moor Wood as they flew in to nearby RAF Fairford, I was surprised to hear Monty publicly criticising the bombing. He is, after all, American, and very patriotic. ‘Violence is never the answer,’ he repeated every night to the audiences in cold English barns, while in the Balkans American bombs exploded.

  But I had to question whether it was right never to fight. What else could those victims of ethnic hatred and violence do? And should we not support them in their efforts to be accepted? Is it not right for a horse, if it is pushed beyond the limit, to kick out? I was glad I never got into a political discussion with him over it. Because, as usual, I found out more by pondering the answer myself. Violence may seem, it may even be, the only alternative – but it is never the answer. The horse that fights back – the ‘vicious’, ‘aggressive’ animal that, pushed too far, injures its owner – is the horse that gets a bullet in his head. Towards peace, surely that is the direction of true north. And horses, in their manner and nature, can help to point the way.

  FOURTEEN

  Riding doctors

  (Nicole)

  When Kelly mentioned that she’d like me to run riding clinics as an optional extra to the Preliminary Certificate, I was astonished. She said it in such a matter-of-fact way, and as if we’d discussed it already, but it was a complete surprise. ‘Put together a syllabus,’ Kelly said, ‘and I’ll add it to the course details. Let’s just see what sort of interest there is.’

  It was a particularly busy month, May 1999, when we held the first clinic. We’d been at Moor Wood for just one year, and everything was going well.

  We had several challenging horses in for training, including Duncan, a bottle-reared colt. I’d gone all the way to Grimsby to meet him, just to see if we’d be able to help him at all, since he sounded so unruly and dangerous when his owner, Judith, whom I’d met at a demonstration in Market Rasen, described him to me.

  He’d been a twin, and rejected by his mother, and the odds on his surviving were considered poor. Judith hadn’t put a headcollar on him for years, and used to bring him in from the field by opening all the gates from the field to the stable, putting his feed in the box, then calling him and scarpering. To get him back into his field, she simply did the reverse. The last time she’d tried to lead him anywhere, he’d knocked her over and broken her hip. Underneath it all, he was good-natured and affectionate but still very difficult to handle, all teeth and hooves and tossing head. Like so many orphan horses, he was also prone to tantrums, and more than once resorted to throwing himself on the ground (occasionally with me on top) when he couldn’t get his own way. He arrived a tight bundle of hard muscles and jangled nerves, and when he went home, he was soft as butter. Adam drove him back and stayed for a day to make sure he remembered his manners, and spent some time teaching Judith how to handle him. He was immensely gratified to watch Judith’s young granddaughter ride him in perfect safety, like a reliable old family pony who’d been doing this for years.

  We also had in an enormous cob called Elliott, who objected, perhaps reasonably enough, to having his poll clipped, but as he was hogged out (his mane completely shaved) this represented quite a problem. His neck was enormous, you could hardly circle it with your arms, even at the top, and it joined on to a set of shoulders that put you in mind of a rhinoceros. He had learnt that he could easily go wherever he liked, with or without a human in tow. He was perfectly good-natured about it: he would never dream of kicking you, for example, if you ended up being in the slipstream of his back end as he went about his explorations, but he didn’t see why he should pander to someone else’s whims about where he went. I’ll never forget the sight of Adam waterskiing along behind him on the day he arrived, as Elliott gave him a thorough but quite unnecessary tour of Moor Wood. I was so helpless with laughter I couldn’t have given him a hand, but I don’t think having two of us on the end of the line would have slowed Elliott down. Teaching him to lead was just an added extra to his training, ‘money for old rope’, as his owner put it, but it didn’t feel like that when Elliott tried to take off. The prospect of persuading this huge horse to stand still enough to clip his poll without accidentally taking his ears off at the same time was daunting to say the least. I don’t think it could have been done without the use of a pressure halter, but what probably made the most difference was teaching him that if he got worried, he could back away, and we would give him breathing space. This was by far a preferable alternative to his previous tactic, of going straight over the top of you and out through the door, whether it was bolted or not.

  Chesley could not have been more different. A slightly built Arab, badly scarred both physically and mentally from years of neglect and abuse, she was so sensitive that even the merest pressure on her headcollar would stop her dead in her tracks, and if she had found herself towing someone along behind her, she would probably have had a heart attack! Scared of her own shadow, she was completely unsuitable for her two novice owners, one of whom was far too heavy to ride her, particularly a
s Chesley was so badly put together that her back barely looked strong enough to carry a saddle. The best we could really do was to teach them how to handle her, and build up her trust. In the end, they were rewarded with a friend who really enjoyed their company and was a credit to their patience.