Whispering Back (25 page)

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.

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 as 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.

Forrest was a comparatively straightforward starter, a big bay four-year-old whose only real foible was Elliott-like tendencies. Several times he had got away from his owner when she’d been leading him on the road, and what had particularly unnerved her was that he’d done this when she’d been leading him off the bit, too. She had honestly believed it wasn’t physically possible for him to do this, and was quite shocked when he showed her it was.

Polly, the other resident in training at the time, was a gorgeous Highland mare who had gradually become more and more worried about being ridden, to the point where she regularly bucked people off. Her owners came and rode her at Moor Wood, and were delighted with her progress. Weeks later, we were dismayed to hear that she’d thrown someone off again, but not surprised when we heard the circumstances. Due to problems acquiring a new saddle, they’d given her three weeks off when they got her home, and then chosen a blustery day to get on her – bareback. The person leading her had her on such a loose rope that she got it caught around her front feet and panicked. Although we didn’t feel this was our fault, we were so upset that we gave the owners back a significant portion of the training fee.

So we had our hands full. But by far the most exciting thing about May was that Sensi was due to give birth. By my calculations, she was due on the tenth. When she didn’t deliver that night, I thought perhaps she was holding out for my birthday, the twelfth. When that came and went, I began to get worried. I was going on a ten-day Monty tour that started on the seventeenth – what if she didn’t foal before then? The idea of leaving her at such a time was heartrending, to say the least. I was trying to work out the practicalities of commuting to the venues so I could return home and sit up with her, but it wouldn’t be particularly easy. I’d been checking her every night since the eighth or so, but I didn’t get the feeling she was particularly imminent. But on the night of the thirteenth, things started to look more promising.

I was in two minds about how to handle the foaling. I had a strong sense that she’d prefer to foal outside, particularly as she was used to living out. On the other hand I was, of course, terribly anxious lest anything go wrong. Horses have so little margin for error when giving birth, and I didn’t think any vet would fancy the prospect of trying to sort out any complications whilst she was lying in the mud in a dark field. I knew I probably shouldn’t wait up with her. Many mares wait until they’re on their own before giving birth – in fact, in the teaching stud colleges, there’s an astonishing number of horses that give birth at nine o’clock in the morning, after the night watching shift has finished! In the end, I decided to compromise – I’d leave her in the huge foaling box, check her every forty-five minutes or so, and let her out as soon as it got light.