Whispering Back (10 page)

Solving this riddle took her down some seemingly tangential routes. She studied the Alexander technique, Feldenkreis bodywork, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, martial arts such as Tai Chi, dance, massage, anatomy, sports psychology and Educational Kinesiology. She discovered how the body worked, how people learn, how to communicate. And she also decoded the horse-rider interaction: how what the horse does affects the rider, and how what the rider does affects the horse.

In essence, she discovered the language of riding, Equus on horseback, and, in my opinion, her revelation was as significant to the world of riding as join-up is to the world of ‘breaking’. And just like Monty, she has struggled for years to have her methods recognised and accepted.

In real life, she was just as she appeared in the book: small, intellectually formidable, focused, articulate.

‘If you have a goal you wish to achieve,’ she said, ‘you need to know where you’re starting from, where you want to get to, and the steps involved to take you there.’

Blindingly obvious, perhaps, but it was the first time I’d heard this information presented in this way, and to me at the time it was revelatory. The idea that there are different ‘maps’ of riding, and that some of them are more useful and accurate than others, had never seriously occurred to me. Applying this model to life, and recognising that adapting your approach to its different challenges could fundamentally change your experience of the world, was very exciting.

‘If you want to navigate around New York, it will help to have a street map. But if your map is of Chicago, it won’t help you at all. If you never notice that you’re equipped with the wrong map, you’ll be doomed to confusion and frustration, and if you ever get to where you want to go, it will be purely by chance.’ She went on to remind us of the joke about the traveller who asks an Irishman, ‘How can I get to Dublin?’ The Irishman replies, ‘If I were going to Dublin, I wouldn’t be starting from here.’

About halfway through the course, in November, another student, Sarah, and I were working with Candide, one of the horses that had been started during the first week. Sarah hadn’t had much to do with this particular horse, and as she rode her around the pen, she exclaimed with pleasure, ‘Oh, she’s really sensitive. I think it would be really quite easy to teach her bridle-less riding. Why don’t I teach you how to do it, then we can show Monty when he comes back next week?’

This seemed reasonable. We knew Monty was coming back for a couple of days, and would be seeing some more students work in the pen. We only had a week to work with the horse, but we weren’t expecting to achieve that much – we could just show him what we’d been doing so far.

I got on the horse, and Sarah told me what to do. I tried to keep in mind my Mary Wanless knowledge, too, making sure I stayed aligned over the horse’s centre of gravity, not pushing her off balance by leaning over too far on the turns, and trying hard to keep my body as stable as possible. By the end of that first session, we had taken off her bridle, and were able to get her to halt just from the pressure of a rope tied around her neck. We could also turn her quite reliably, changing direction across the middle of the pen. She was a bright horse, and seemed to find this new game fun.

‘Let’s ask Kelly if we can be the only ones to work with her for this week,’ suggested Sarah, ‘but let’s make it a surprise to show everyone at the end of it.’

I didn’t think there would be a problem with this. In fact, Candide had started off as quite a ‘sour’ horse – she had quickly grown tired of the pen, and although she picked up a great deal when we started to hack her out, she still tended to drop off the bottom of the list of horses to be worked if we ran out of time. On the Tuesday after a three-day weekend, we asked Kelly if we could work on Candide in secret, in the afternoons after the course. Kelly agreed, intrigued. Then one of the other students who hadn’t been very active on the course suddenly decided she’d like to ride her in the afternoon. Candide came back quite hot (she was unclipped and it was a lovely, surprisingly warm, November afternoon), and we decided she would probably not be in the right sort of mood to do more work. Never mind, there was still Wednesday and Thursday. We were confident.

The Wednesday session went well, but we made a real error of judgement. In her enthusiasm, Sarah tried to teach me how to move Candide sideways along a pole, a standard move in Western training. I was too uncoordinated to explain to the horse what we wanted, and the three of us got quite frustrated. We were sensible enough to recognise our mistake, and went back to working on the simpler things – transitions from trot to walk, and trot to halt, changing direction, and cantering. I’d ridden without a bridle before, in the way that many people do – riding a pony down to the field in just a headcollar as a child, and on one memorable occasion during a riding holiday when we jumped on some ponies in the field. (Mine had taken great exception to this arrogant intrusion, and promptly bucked me off.) I’d also hitched a lift with Sensi across the field a few times, but I had rarely cantered on her without her bridle, at least not intentionally. It was exhilarating to be deliberately cantering in the pen with nothing but a rope around the horse’s neck. I enjoyed the feeling that although she couldn’t go very far, equally I couldn’t really control her if she decided she didn’t want me to. It felt strangely liberating after all the hand-dominant instruction I’d been given as a child. We finished the session in high spirits.

Even more exciting was the prospect of meeting Lucy Rees. Kelly had asked for a volunteer to collect her from Oxford train station, and I had jumped at the chance. I don’t consider myself much of a celebrity buff. I don’t read about the lifestyles of the rich and famous, for example, and am not particularly impressed by ostentatious displays of wealth, power or influence. I am, however, impressed by achievement, and love watching people who are masters in their field, whether that’s comedy, acting, singing, or horse training. I’d always felt surprisingly little desire to meet any of my heroes, partly through a fear that they might not live up to my expectations, and partly through a sense of unworthiness. What could I possibly have to say to these people that they would find interesting? What did we have in common? Now, five years later, I feel completely different. If John Cleese wanted to come on a course, I’m sure he’d find us all perfectly charming, amusing, interesting. Should David Bowie suddenly develop an interest in horses, I’m sure we’d be able to help.

Now, Lucy Rees is not exactly as famous as David Bowie. Not even everyone in the horse world has heard of her. But she had been the single most important influence in my life with horses before I met Monty Roberts. As a teenager I had stumbled across a documentary on TV, in which she and another person were breaking in two mustangs. He was using traditional methods of force and violence, and she was using her own unique blend of patience and ingenuity. Initially, he seemed to be making much more progress than her – he already had the saddle on his horse before she had even managed to touch hers. But ultimately, his horse never really accepted being ridden, while Lucy just hopped on hers in a stream and went straight out across the Arizona desert. That she was a woman operating in the macho world of cowboys made this achievement all the more remarkable. I couldn’t wait to see what she was like in the flesh.

‘I’m sorry I’m so horribly late. Are you the poor student they’ve sent to fetch me?’

She was tall, slim and strikingly good-looking, with wild, long blond hair. The sort of person you might call eccentric.

‘That’s right. I mean, no. I volunteered. I’m a big fan.’

We headed out to my (dad’s) car, and I tried to think of something to say. I didn’t want awkward silences, but on the other hand I didn’t want to appear inane. At times like these, Adam is brilliant. He always can think of something to say, and has a whole range of manners, from condescending (he’s not very good with children) to courteous, and every shade in between. The more I tried to think of something intelligent to say, the more paralysed I became by my own thoughts.

‘So what exactly are you expecting me to say?’ she asked.

I was startled. This thought so mirrored my own I thought perhaps she was reading my mind.

‘I mean, what do you want me to talk about? Is there anything specific? I don’t want to go over anything you’ve already heard about.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, Monty’s here this afternoon, and also tomorrow. It’s Thanksgiving, and there’s a cake and everything. I think the idea is that we have a fairly free-roaming discussion. Questions and answers, lively debate. Differences as well as agreements, that sort of thing.’

‘OK. So tell me a little about this Monty, then.’

A hint of scepticism? Professional jealousy? I pushed the thought from my mind and enthused about Monty, Kelly, the course, the horses, what I’d been learning.

She interjected the odd question, then said, ‘Of course, none of it’s new, you know. This sort of thing has been going on in the States for decades, centuries maybe. I’ve seen Monty work, and he’s an extraordinary horseman, but it’s not as revolutionary as you think.’

‘Well, it’s new to me,’ I said, perhaps a little petulantly. ‘I understand that people have known about advance and retreat since the days of the Native Americans, and the concept of the release of pressure is well understood in the States, but to almost everyone in this country, this stuff is new. People may have noticed certain things happening in the round pen or on the lunge – ears locked on and head lowering, for example – but it’s Monty who’s taken it to the next stage, who’s worked out what to do with the information, as a structured way of communicating with the horse, and he’s brought it to the attention of large numbers of people.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ she conceded. ‘But I was doing this sort of thing years ago. We didn’t need some flashy American to come here and show it off.’

I couldn’t think what to say. ‘Well,’ I started, as gently as I could, ‘the reason this has suddenly become so popular is because it’s exactly what so many people have been waiting for. For years and years people have been looking for a kinder way to deal with horses.’

Maybe Monty finally found himself in the right place at the right time. But it hadn’t always been that way. Even just a few years previously, when the Queen, astonished by his skill, had arranged for him to tour the country to demonstrate his techniques, audience numbers were small. It was clear, too, that Kelly had been enormously instrumental in Monty’s UK success. But I could sympathise with Lucy. She was an exceptional horsewoman, who had been working with problem horses for almost as long as Monty. She had written books, appeared on TV, and lectured at colleges, but she was experiencing nothing like the recognition that Monty was receiving. I could understand her frustration, but I also wanted her to appreciate the frustration that many horse riders had been experiencing, too. If there had been a ten-week course on Lucy Rees’s horsemanship, I would have been the first to sign up. To hear that she had been doing lectures that I hadn’t even heard about was no comfort at all.

I was dispirited by this conversation. Kelly had said that Monty was particularly keen to meet Lucy Rees, and it was a pity if she didn’t feel the same.

In the end I needn’t have worried. Once Monty and Lucy were in the same room, conversation flowed. Lucy had some controversial revelations about stallions and their behaviour in the wild. It turned out that ‘rival’ stallions would often come to quite amicable agreements about wife swapping, and that quite often two stallions appeared to share groups of mares. This fact was often missed by observers, she said, because they would see one very well-muscled stallion, and assume he was the only one. People usually saw what they were looking for, I couldn’t help thinking. If scientists, who receive a certain amount of training in objectivity, couldn’t even be open-minded enough to spot a second adult stallion in a herd, then how likely were we to ‘read’ each horse we were training? How could we ever know if any of our assumptions were correct? It’s a question that’s bothered me ever since, and it always worries me when people state, ‘Oh, I know he’s not really frightened because . . .’ I’ve become almost politician-like in my reluctance to state categorically the reason why I think a horse doesn’t want to do something. I guess Stantonbury, my old school, is partly responsible for this. If someone hadn’t done their homework, lack of motivation was considered as good a reason as ‘my cat died’. The teachers would look for a way to inspire motivation, rather than blame the student for being awkward.

Another shocking revelation of Lucy’s was that much of the ‘documentary’ footage of stallions fighting comes about as a result of the documentary makers driving one group of horses into the territory of another. So many of those vicious encounters are simply avoided in real life, but can easily be set up for the cameras. Horse life is actually pretty dull: eighteen hours a day of steady munching, sex once or twice a year, and only the occasional bout of spectacular aggression.

I had previously discovered that one of my horsey friends from the ‘pony paddocks’ in Milton Keynes knew Lucy Rees. In fact she had spent large chunks of her childhood in Wales with Lucy, learning to ride on nearly wild Welsh mountain ponies. Lucy didn’t have any concrete plans for that evening, so I suggested she might like to come to Milton Keynes to meet her old friend, since I was driving that way anyway. I was immensely thankful for my pretty reliable ability to remember a phone number having only rung it a few times, and I called Jane. She was (unusually) at home, and delighted at the prospect of seeing her old teacher again. We just had to nip out to the stables first, and do a little training with Candide . . .

We’d arranged with the college staff for the key to the tack room to be left somewhere accessible. When we got there, it was nowhere to be found, and we couldn’t get the lights to work. Bridle-less, bareback, and in the dark? Maybe not. We spent some time with the nervous pony, then Lucy and I headed for Milton Keynes.