Whispering Back

by Adam Goodfellow

  ‘Nonsense,’ Nicole stated, so firmly that anyone might have thought she knew what she was talking about. ‘Where’s the driveway? It must be up there,’ she said, indicating a stony track which continued beyond the house. ‘She does say in the book that she lives halfway up a mountain.’

  Ignoring the voice in my head, which was getting a touch uneasy about this little jaunt, I turned the car up the track, which was not immediately too steep for a mountain goat. As we came out of the trees, however, all I could see ahead was a barren mountainside, strewn with rocks, the odd scrap of vegetation clinging to its near-vertical face. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked, knowing full well that she wasn’t. ‘I don’t see how she could possibly live up here.’ I glanced across the car towards the valley in which two other houses could now be seen. ‘Perhaps it’s one of those.’

  ‘Look, let’s just see if it’s round the next corner.’

  But the next corner led only to more bleak cliffside, and the gradient of the track was now so steep that the car was having trouble climbing any further. So was I, as my ears popped with the altitude and my vertigo began to make me feel that I was about to veer off the road and down the precipice that loomed just inches from the passenger side wheels. Oblivious to the danger, Nicole was humming cheerfully. By now, I was starting to pray that our destination would be just around the corner, because hopefully there would be somewhere to turn around, and I would not have to go down this slippery track backwards.

  ‘Look,’ I said as calmly as I could, ‘this is ridiculous. How could anyone live up here and not die from exposure?’

  ‘Well, why do you think there is a track, if nobody lives up here?’

  Nicole had a point, although I found it hard to believe anyone would build, let alone buy, a house stuck on the side of a precipice when there was a perfectly cosy valley a few hundred feet below. I agreed to keep going and look around the next corner, and then the one after that. Reversing was the only option, anyway, as the track was only just wide enough for the car. With a cliff going down on one side, and up on the other, I was seriously toying with the idea of abandoning the vehicle, escaping on foot and making up a story as to what had happened to it. I was just thinking up my excuses when, around the next corner, we came to a passing place, cut out of the rock on the side of the track. It looked just big enough to turn the car around, and I pulled in.

  ‘What are you doing, it can’t be here,’ Nicole protested, but I categorically refused to drive any further, and as she didn’t have a driving licence, there was no arguing with me. ‘It’s probably just around the next bend,’ she protested. ‘Well, then, we’ll know when we get there,’ I said, turning off the ignition and getting out. The air was cold and clear, and although I wouldn’t let myself go closer than 5 feet from the edge, I could see we had gone a lot higher than I had thought.

  ‘Aren’t you going to lock it?’ Nicole said as I put the keys into my pocket. ‘It isn’t our car, after all.’

  ‘If anyone is stupid enough to steal it, they can have it,’ I replied, remembering that Dom had said exactly the same thing to me when I left Cambridge. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  So we continued round that bend, only to see another one a few hundred metres ahead, beyond which we couldn’t see. We continued walking until we reached that, to find yet another stretch of road that led around a corner. Nicole was beginning to accept that this wasn’t likely to be where anyone but a mad hermit would live, or possibly a buzzard or two, but having come this far, we were curious to find out where the road led. It seemed impossible that it didn’t go somewhere, as it had clearly taken a huge effort to build it out of the solid granite mountainside. Eventually, after we had climbed about twenty minutes, we came around the final bend. There in front of us, behind large gates imposingly blocking the path, was a disused slate mine, perched on top of the cliff with a long chute leading into the valley, down which the quarried stone must have been thrown. There was no sign of any Welsh mountain ponies, nor anyone to ask where a woman called Lucy lived.

  It turned out, when we actually did find her house, that she was in Portugal, buying Lusitano horses.

  ‘Never mind,’ Nicole said cheerily, ‘at least it was fun trying to track her down. Wasn’t it great going up that hill?’ I looked at her sharply, trying to detect sarcasm in her voice, but there was none. ‘Maybe next time we could bring Sensi to Wales, and ride her up to the very top.’

  Returning to Cnicht didn’t appeal to me, but the thought of going there with Sensi made the prospect much more inviting. It was absolutely wonderful to have the companionship and love of this beautiful creature in my life, and Sensi had already done us a great service by preventing us from drifting into London along with most of our other friends. Instead, we had settled for living in Milton Keynes, where we rented a little flat, close to some paddocks where Sensi could live. Through her, I had begun to appreciate for the first time the beauty of the English countryside, for seeing nature from the back of a horse is a very different experience than travelling on foot or by bike. Above the level of the hedges, I could see so much more. And I soon discovered that wildlife viewed me in a different way when I was on top of a horse – not so much as a fearsome predator, but more as a fellow creature, and I spotted foxes, deer, hares and birds at much closer quarters than ever before.

  But it was not a good combination, a complete novice learning to ride on a recently started young thoroughbred. With characteristic grace Sensi put up with me banging about on her back, farcically bouncing as I tried to sit to her trot. Sensibly, I got some riding lessons at the local school where Nicole had learned as a child.

  Like most English riders, I religiously carried a whip at all times, although I did not find with Sensi that I needed it for its original purpose, getting her to move forward, which she was always keen to do. In fact it would have been of more use to me if it had been capable of getting her to stop. In my first emergency situation it did not help me in the slightest when, on a blustery day, she cantered off with me down a bridleway. I had asked for a trot but was soon out of control, as, with the wind under her tail, she headed for a narrow gap in a line of trees, through which the bridleway ran. Nicole, on foot behind me, could do nothing but watch helplessly and wince as I was unceremoniously dumped when Sensi shied just in front of the gap. I too had known intuitively that she was not going through, and despite having already learned that much of good horsemanship is ‘anticipation and feel’, this was of little help to me. Although I could ‘anticipate’ that she was going to stop suddenly, this did not prevent me from having the unmistakable ‘feeling’ of having a bridleway in my face. Sensi seemed very surprised that I had decided to get off and worship her so suddenly. She stood a few yards away, sniffing the earth in case I had found something worth eating. Shocked but not injured, the first thing I saw when I looked up was my whip. When she saw me reach for it, Sensi decided it might not be in her best interest to stick around, and ran off half a mile across the field, eventually to be retrieved with the help of a friendly gardener and his carrots.

  This was my first fall, and I learned a lot from it, but was only slightly comforted by Nicole’s words.

  ‘Well,’ she said knowledgeably, ‘at least you’re not a complete beginner any more. They say you aren’t a good rider until you’ve fallen off seven times.’

  I replied that if this was what was required, I would just as soon never be a good rider. And anyway, surely a really good rider wouldn’t fall off even once!

  Of course, Sensi was just young and inexperienced, and could not be blamed for what had happened. But as time went on, and she continued to spook at lots of things, such as plastic, paper, leaves, flowers – in fact, everything except the one really dangerous thing she came across, cars – I began to get frustrated. I also had another, very nasty fall in which, cantering down a bank, I lost my balance and flew straight over her head when she put in her characteristic duck out to the side. As with my tirst fall, I knew I was g
oing to come off a long time before I did, but lacked the ability to do anything about it. It was probably a good thing that I was resigned to my fate and did not try to stay on, for doing so might well have been fatal. I flew through the air for what seemed like ages, and landed on the top of my head like a human cannonball, feeling a sickening jolt go up my spine. My first thought was, This is what it’s like to be dead. Then, lying still, I realised that it was remarkably similar to being alive and I was able to feel my fingers and toes. I stood up, leaving a helmet-shaped imprint deep in the earth, and got back on my bemused mount. Unbelievably, I was not seriously injured, as the ground was very soft following several months of constant rain, and the force had gone directly along my backbones in a perfect line. Otherwise I would have been, at best, in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I was incredibly lucky. Of course, this accident was also my fault entirely. But after that, I was anxious about having another fall and was less patient with Sensi. I started to tap her neck with the whip when she spooked. At times, this was relatively successful, as it could bring her attention back to me, but if I was in the wrong mood, I would sometimes use it inappropriately, antagonising her and making her more nervous, simply because it was there in my hand and I didn’t realise how many other tools were at my disposal. I never considered how Sensi must have viewed the whip.

  Of course, my early years of riding were peppered with incidents in which I nearly came to grief. One of the more memorable happened when one of my old friends, Ben, visited with his future wife, Louise. We had taken Sensi with us to the pub, half a mile from her field, one balmy summer’s evening when Nicole was away. She was all tacked up, and seemed to be enjoying visiting the pub, where we sat on the benches in the garden. Ben had bought her a pint of beer, thoughtfully presented in an old ice cream tub, which she sniffed, slobbered in and then ignored while she began to tuck in to the lawn. The scene was one of absolute peace. The type of situation that any horse can turn into an emergency in the blink of an eye.

  Standing nearby was a bin, which consisted of a steel cylinder held within a frame, made up of vertical strips of metal that ended in decorative curls. Smelling the salt from packets of crisps, Sensi began to investigate by sticking her head in. Before it even happened I knew she was going to get her bridle caught and I leaped up to disentangle her, too late. Feeling a jab on her mouth, she lifted her head sharply, only to find the bin came up with it and bashed her in the face. Panic set in immediately as she tried to get rid of these rather cumbersome blinkers. She reared up, with the bin still hanging off her mouth, banging up and down within its holder, showering her face with rubbish that only added to her shock. She wheeled round as fast as she could in an attempt to escape, while I held on to the reins, and was lifted bodily into the air, until I found myself flying round her in a circle, parallel to the ground.

  Thankfully the bin somehow fell off her face and we stood there, shaking, while Ben and Louise, their faces ashen, emerged from under the table to check that we were OK. The rest of the pub’s clientele, being English, pretended that nothing untoward had happened, and they had not, just seconds before, been in danger of having a man, a horse and a large bin fly into their laps, or through the huge plateglass window they were sitting next to.

  But, otherwise, things went very well with Sensi until she reached the age of about five. It was then that Nicole, encouraged by textbooks and peers, decided it was time she moved on. This meant getting her to ‘work in an outline, on the bit’. In theory this would mean her using her hindquarters more, and keeping her nose vertical. Common advice was to ‘push the horse forward from the leg into a restraining hand’ – seven pounds of pressure in each hand, according to the only book that quantified what a ‘restraining hand’ should be. In practice, this meant desperately trying to kick her every step of the way, and pulling her mouth all the time. She disliked this, as well as the side reins we bought her, and would constantly move her head around, trying to get rid of the pressure. It also made her mouth less sensitive, which in turn led to her being harder to slow down, although she remained amazingly forgiving and never really threatened to bolt. The crazy thing was that Sensi had previously been working really well – using her back and actively engaging her hindquarters. She was responsive, reasonably balanced, and obedient in every way. She just didn’t have her nose on vertical. Sensi quite literally got all in a lather over this dubious ideal, which she resolutely refused to submit to.

  At around this time, we gradually began what would probably have been the smallest business in the country, except that so many businesses were already evaporating in a sea of bad debt, for it was the early 1990s. Trading under the name ‘Sensi’s School’, at first it was only Nicole, having taken her BHS Stage 1 and 2 exams, who gave lessons to a few children. Then my godfather kindly offered to buy us another horse, and this was when we bought Wilberforce, the bay hunter with a dislike for puddles, who was far too large for most of our clientele, which strangely did not include a large percentage of heavy adult males. Much more suitable was my godfather’s next gift, Cobweb, an old palomino schoolmaster, 14.2 hands high, very pretty and popular with young girls. He never put a foot wrong in the whole time he worked, and is the only one of our horses who could possibly be said, on balance, to have actually made any money for us. By this time I reckoned I could say, ‘Sit up straight, heels down, now ask for a working trot along the far side’ as well as the best of them, so I started giving the odd riding lesson myself, to beginners. At times my Cambridge degree definitely came in handy as I not only had a nearly inexhaustible ability to pontificate on any subject (regardless of lack of knowledge), left over from the days of discussing and writing at length about books I had usually not read, but also the arrogance to pretend I actually knew what I was talking about, which was not often the case.

  I had already discovered, of course, the extent of Nicole’s shocking cover-up on the costs of keeping horses. Making any money from the business was implausible to say the least, but the income from lessons helped to offset the ridiculous overheads. But I was not sure my godfather was doing us a favour by buying the new horses, for it meant there were yet more expenses involved. Nicole got a part-time job as a cashier at a building society, which paid some of our basic expenses. At a time when we did not have the money to go to the pub or cinema, the six-weekly shoeing costs alone were appalling, particularly given how infrequently either of us would get new shoes for ourselves.

  The only sense in which we found the horses to be naturally productive was in creating massive quantities of manure. This endless disposal problem, however, led me to a lifelong interest. Until that time I had never had any appreciation of plants and would just as soon have watched paint dry as visit a garden. It all began because one of the old boys from the local allotments came and asked if we would mind him taking some manure away. As we gathered it frequently to combat parasitic worms, but had nowhere to put it, we were more than happy to let him take all he wanted. This led to Nicole making a throwaway comment of similar magnitude to the one I’d made in Sensi’s first field a few years before.

  ‘I wonder where the allotments are? Perhaps we could get one, and grow some potatoes or something with all this muck?’

  Within a year we had four, very well-fertilised allotments, producing dozens of varieties of vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers, as well as billions of well-fed, happy slugs. At first, I literally didn’t know a radish from rhubarb. We set to work digging up the thick clay in a vain attempt to destroy the invading hordes of couch-grass and nettles, plastering chemicals on the insects and slugs that devoured most of what we planted. It was hard work, but when we had our first harvest of ten, fresh sweetcorn, it was all worth it.

  We began to discover new ways of gardening, and eventually abandoned the traditional methods of soil preparation for a no-dig, organic approach. This did not come easy to Nicole, who had by now got into the almost endless task of turning the soil to knock back the weeds, which someho
w always seemed to thrive more than any expensive, vacuum-packed seeds bought in the shops. We could almost hear the old boys tut-tutting as they continued their time-honoured practice of digging the heavy clay, while we would simply empty a barrow of nearly-rotted manure onto the surface of a bed, and sling a carpet over the top to stifle the weeds until spring, when we would lift off the cover to find abundantly healthy soil, ready for sowing, with the manure mixed in by worms who had been working hard all winter. The warm, dry micro-climate produced by our carpet mulch also encouraged beetles, who gradually reduced the number of slugs to a manageable level. Our favoured method in the end was to raise plants in biodegradable pots on the tiny windowsill of our one-bedroom flat, before planting them, pots and all, through holes in the carpets, using a bulb-planter. This gave us amazing results for much less effort. It was not the last time we would find that ‘alternative’ ways of doing things actually made the most sense. However, the old boys got the last laugh. They generally had wives back at home who would prepare a meal from the hard-earned fruits of all their labour. Nicole and I were usually so exhausted by a day riding, shifting muck, planting and harvesting, that if we had the energy to bring some produce back up the hill from the allotments, it would usually begin the long, slow process of rotting in our fridge, before eventually being taken back down to be composted. Meanwhile we would scramble to shove some bread into the toaster and a tin of baked beans into the microwave, to stop ourselves fainting from hunger. This was our contribution to nature’s never ending cycle of growth, decay and renewal, which, although immeasurably satisfying, rarely put a decent meal on our table.

  And so it was that one afternoon, I came in from the allotment with a bunch of ill-fated, optimistic vegetables, to be told by a breathless Nicole, as she fumbled a tape into the VCR, that there was this amazing guy on TV. He could get a horse to follow him around without a lead rope, and put on the first saddle, bridle, and rider in about thirty minutes. They called him ‘the man who listens to horses’.