Whispering Back

by Adam Goodfellow

  Matt was also unreasonably good-looking and a superb rider, but with quite a lot less experience on the rodeo circuit. Being shorter than Zane, he tended to ride the smaller starters. He had the most astonishing blue eyes, with the thickest, black lashes, and almost none of Zane’s scruples. He was a lot harder to shock, but he looked on with horror the first time he saw baked beans being eaten for breakfast.

  ‘But you’re cowboys,’ we reminded him, our illusions lying in tatters. ‘You eat these things straight from the tin, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied with an affronted dignity, ‘but not in the morning. That’s just disgusting.’

  Matt and Zane caused a stir wherever they went. They almost never removed their hats, which was probably just as well as the straight line etched in their hair by the rim of their stetsons was not particularly fetching. Whenever we went into a pub they’d be greeted with ‘Yee-haw, ride ’em, cowboy!’ or ‘Howdy, pardner’. They always seemed surprised by this attention, and would respond with quizzical looks, and a polite hello. It was as if they couldn’t work out how anyone knew they weren’t from ‘around these parts’, wherever ‘these parts’ happened to be.

  One of the biggest challenges on one of Monty’s early tours was to hold a demonstration at London Arena. With a huge capacity, this could be a fantastic opportunity. On the other hand, with no purpose-built facilities, and no stabling, the logistical problems were considerable. Horses would have to stay in their own lorries or trailers on site, and somehow have to be decanted into the round pen, for which we would have to provide our own surface. And being located in the East End of London, with an entirely urban local population, there was a definite possibility that if we couldn’t sell enough tickets, we would be making a considerable loss. But if we could even approach a full house, it would be the biggest event of its kind ever held in the UK. Kelly took this challenge on with typical zeal and determination, but even so from the moment she decided to undertake the task until the night itself, some twelve weeks or so later, she never had a good night’s sleep.

  The cavernous arena was like a huge metal box, lined with high stands of seating on all sides, facing a square of grey painted concrete floor. Dean, a student on the course, had assured Kelly that he would be able to make a suitable surface for the pen. It simply involved shipping in tons of dirt, placed on a temporary chipboard floor, and then topping this with several more tons of sand. ‘Rake it smooth, and Bob’s your uncle.’

  Sensi. ‘She peered at me from under her forelock and I fell in love.’

  Linda riding Rupert bareback over what had been his greatest fear. (Photo: Colin Vane)

  Opposite:

  Sensi, proprietress of the smallest riding school in the world.

  Sensi and Wilberforce on the ridgeway.

  Adam receives his Monty Roberts Preliminary Certificate of Horsemanship from Kelly Marks.

  Off-side at last – and the ‘Misty hug’ is born.

  Finn showing the Chief who’s boss, Long Street, 1998.

  ‘To lead her, put on a saddle, or ride her seemed out of the question.’

  ‘Yard to let – Cotswolds. Idyllic location. Ten minutes Cirencester.’

  ‘Even to my unbiased eyes, Karma looked very peculiar.’

  Maybee, the first pony we trained at Moorwood.

  Adam and Karma sunbathing by the round pen.

  Opposite

  Nicole exploring the best spots to scratch Karma.

  Amber with Jo, Brian and Adam.

  With Monty and Kelly.

  Opposite

  Joe.

  Finn demonstrates the correct way to canter.

  Moor Wood in the snow.

  Sky being long-lined by one of his devoted fans.

  The gang relaxing in their pasture.

  ‘And afterwards?’ Kelly asked dubiously.

  ‘We simply put it back in the lorries and take it away. No worries.’ Kelly was still a little unconvinced. If the premises weren’t completely cleared and vacated by 1 a.m., there would be a £10,000 fine.

  In the event, a record four and a half thousand tickets were sold, the horses were a tremendous success, and Monty said the surface was amongst the best he’d ever worked on. What he did next, then, was perhaps a little unkind.

  Kelly, Monty, Dean and Dido (another student and later a teacher on the courses) were just relaxing for a moment at the end of the demonstration, waiting for the lorries and diggers to come into the arena to start clearing the surface.

  ‘Have you given any thought as to how you’re going to separate the sand from the soil?’ Monty asked Kelly conversationally.

  The colour drained from Kelly’s face as she asked, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the soil arrived in a different truck from the sand, didn’t it? Obviously they need to be separated out before being taken back. I was just wondering how you planned to do it.’

  Kelly looked beseechingly at Dean, who was nodding matter-of-factly. ‘Yeah, they won’t take it away if it’s been mixed up.’

  Kelly looked at the surface, with clumps of soil appearing through the sand, looked at her watch, and then looked at the team, clearly wondering if we had enough spades. Then she looked at Dido, who was taking Monty firmly by the arm, saying ‘Monty, no, that’s not fair, don’t be so unkind . . .’

  Monty retreated quickly. Trying unsuccessfully to hide from Kelly behind Dido, he protested, ‘Now, now, violence is never the answer.’

  ELEVEN

  Long Street to Moor Wood

  (Adam)

  By the beginning of 1998, it had become obvious to us that the little paddock in Milton Keynes where we had already spent so many hours training Misty, and several other horses, and where we had taught many a riding lesson, was not going to be suitable for the volume of work we were now getting. We had already looked into surfacing an area for the riding school, but as we were only renting the land from the Milton Keynes Parks Trust, we were unwilling to invest much money. A round pen in a field overlooked by a number of rather expensive houses was unlikely to be popular with the council. The prospect of having more horses prompted us to look for somewhere else to use as a training yard.

  Scanning through the local equestrian magazines, we came across an advertisement regarding a medium-sized yard in a village called Hanslope, on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. ‘Long Street’ seemed ideal. Having just been taken over by new managers, it only had a couple of liveries in as yet, and the chances were we would be able to take on as many extra boxes as we liked, at least in the early days, on an ‘as and when’ basis. It had an outdoor school, which, although it was built on quite a significant slope, and had a less than perfect surface, seemed like luxury after so long doing without a school at all. Best of all, it was large enough to accommodate a round pen and still have room to ride around, so Leslie and Karen, the couple managing it, were happy for us to install one there when we eventually got one. The yard was also located just about a mile away from the Milton Keynes Eventing Centre, which meant we would be able to hire their indoor school and other facilities if the need arose. With the optimistic view that Nicole would be spending all day every day training horses, it made sense for our lot – Sensi, Misty, Finn and Cobweb, and our friend Jenny’s ex-Police horse, Major, to be on site. Jane, our friend who knew Lucy Rees, and who kept her horse, Jasper, near ours, decided to come too. What really clinched the deal was that there was a large barn available for our horses to stay in, so they wouldn’t have to be stabled.

  When we worked out the sums, it turned out not to be much more expensive than the cost of the paddocks we were already renting. I still had one more term to finish at the Japanese school, so at least we had a steady income for a few months. Even so, it was a worrying commitment, particularly as Nicole had just given up her job with the police at Christmas. Knowing that she needed to concentrate fully on the business and not spread her energies too thinly, the decision felt right, but January is a notoriously bad time
of year for many businesses, and perhaps particularly so for horse trainers. Everyone feels the pinch after an extravagant Christmas, but with months of mud and rain ahead, the average horse owner tends to shrink into survival mode. ‘Doing’ the horses every evening becomes some sort of endurance, assault trial. Head down, battling against the elements, knee-deep in mud, hands red and raw and deeply lined with dirt, feet frozen and numb, they search a rain-sodden field for their mud-drenched equine by the light of a torch, carefully checking that the horse is warm enough under its state-of-the-art, arctic, breathable, self-righting, lightweight rug. Risking life and limb, they lead their four-legged friend through the wellie-snatching, slithering mire, extricating it from the gnashing teeth and flying hooves of the hungry mob at the gate, to a stable knee-deep in straw, haynets and feed waiting, water buckets filled to the brim, all having been prepared at some bone-chillingly cold, dark hour of the morning, before the owner rushed home to change for work in order to be able to pay for all this pleasure. Occasionally, inspiration will strike, and the wise will pack off their horse, and its numerous rugs, lotions and potions and feed supplements, with careful instructions for hay soaking, feet scrubbing, and feed mixing, to someone like us, while booking themselves a fortnight’s holiday in the sun, re-mortgaging the house if necessary.

  Misty’s former owner put us in touch with a new client called Marianne. I’m not sure if her decision to send us her beautiful chestnut Trakehner stallion had anything to do with the mud. More likely it was about getting him up and running for the summer season. In any case, we were encouraged by the prospect that she had other horses she would want starting, and also by the fact that we had a couple of small ponies arriving for training too. Emboldened, we decided to invest some money that Nicole’s dad had recently given her in a round pen. He had suggested that she might like to put this down as a deposit on our right-to-buy council flat, but she had somehow managed to argue that a round pen would be more useful than a roof over our heads, and he had resigned himself to this fate for his hard-earned money.

  So one fine Saturday in mid-January, Jane, Jenny, Julia, Nicole and I moved our five horses the twelve miles to Long Street, taking it in turns to ride Sensi, Major and Cobweb, and to lead Misty and Finn. A bridleway led right from our field to Hanslope, with only the last mile or so on roads. Misty was slightly worried by this part, being anxious about vehicles approaching from her off-side, but sandwiched in the middle of the string, she coped admirably. Julia and Nicole had spent the day before bedding down the barn with forty bales of straw, and our horses viewed the sight with approval, seemingly particularly impressed by the huge wooden hay racks stuffed to overflowing with good quality hay. They appeared unperturbed by the move, and settled in immediately. Jane rode Jasper over a few days later. He had a stable in the main yard, and seemed happy. I suppose alarm bells should have rung, however, when we discovered we couldn’t turn our horses into a field as a group, as had been discussed when we’d looked round the place with Leslie. ‘That ought to be all right’ had suddenly become ‘out of the question’. Our horses would have to go in with the others, mares in one field and geldings in another, whether we liked it or not.

  The reaction to the round pen was less than favourable, too. An imposing metal structure, it looked enormous in the outdoor school. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Leslie was having a lot of difficulty breaking in an Arab he’d bought, I think he might have asked us to take it down, and only assemble it when we used it. As it was, he discovered just how useful a small enclosed space can be when riding a difficult horse, although it didn’t help him much when his horse threw himself to the ground with Leslie on board!

  So Marianne’s chestnut stallion duly arrived at the end of January, accompanied on his journey by two Dartmoor fillies from the same part of Oxfordshire. Being two-year-olds, they were coming for some general handling. In fact, one of them, Kim, had been with us the summer before. Nicole had put on her first headcollar and taught her to lead for her owner, who had rescued her from being exported to France for meat. A dockers’ strike had delayed her departure for two weeks, and she had spent all that time locked in a crate. Let loose in a field, she had understandably decided it was probably best to avoid humans, and her new owner had been unable to get anywhere near her. She had been lured into a trailer to visit us the first time by following a handsome Shetland gelding. She was doing really well back at home, and her owner just wanted her to be exposed to traffic and brought on a little. Her companion, Kit, would accept having a headcollar put on, but was otherwise fairly wild, not leadable, and very averse to having her feet handled.

  It was quite a sight watching the three of them come off the horsebox. The ponies stomped down the ramp, looked around them, gave a shrill neigh, and then tried to go in search of grass. Leslie, who had fetched the horses in his lorry, was holding Kit, and looked astonished when he gave a little pull on the rope and she responded by locking her neck against him and carting him across the yard. We managed to get her into her stable by having her follow Kim. The ponies moved in that straight-legged, economical way so typical of Exmoors and Dartmoors. The stallion, by contrast, bounced down the ramp, as if powered by enormous springs, and trumpeted his greeting to the yard in a most proprietorial way, immediately earning him the nickname ‘The Chief’, although Tigger would have been just as appropriate. Installed next to Jasper in the barn, he settled down immediately, completely unfazed by the fact that the horse on the other side of him was a mare.

  The Chief was all horse. At 16.2 hands high and growing, he could be quite a handful. When he went into Tigger mode, he seemed to grow a hand, and Nicole often looked rather small beside him, or on top of him. We put him out in the round pen with Finn, and they would tussle endlessly, with Finn giving at least as good as he got. The stallion would chase Finn and mount him, taking chunks out of his mane and coat, and you’d be just on the point of going to rescue Finn when the Chief would get distracted by a mare in the field and then the cheeky bugger would turn around and nip him hard on the knees (which were more or less at Finn’s nose height). Another round of chasing and rearing would ensue. Allowed this free expression for his natural exuberance, the Chief was better able to contain himself and concentrate when asked to. We were so fortunate that Marianne was happy with this arrangement, and not worried by the odd bite mark. On the thankfully rare occasions that Leslie decided no horses were allowed out (on account of the weather), the Chief would be climbing the walls. On other occasions, when he was out on his own, he would try to play with us. He was inevitably always disappointed that we wouldn’t rough-house with him.

  The Chief’s training went smoothly enough, and Nicole was delighted to have such a quality horse to work with. Being a stallion, he muscled up extremely easily. The second time he cantered under saddle, even coping with the slope of the school, he was already far better balanced than Sensi was after five years of riding.

  Then Pinky, another of Marianne’s Trakehners, arrived. She was 17 hands high, and seven years old, and had never been started. She’d bred a couple of foals, and had been saddled and long-lined, but Marianne had never had a rider for her at the right time. Becoming a mother can often make a mare have more of a mind of her own, with different priorities. Also, with a couple of what we saw as ‘false starts’, where she’d been prepared for backing, but had never gone through with it, she could have been quite difficult, but, in fact, she was surprisingly easy. She was also fully mature, strong and straight, so she could easily handle the weight of a rider. I was surprised when I heard people talking about starting them young, before they got too big and strong. It was so much easier to work with her than an immature three-year-old, and the fact is, if we’d been trying to start her using brute strength, she would have already been too strong by the time she was one.

  It was around this time that we worked out a fantastic arrangement with the Japanese school. They wanted to extend the curriculum and offer interesting alternative
activities, and decided that horse riding would be a good option. The arrangement was good for us in that it meant steady money, and although we were only charging the going rate, the number of students involved meant that it was, to us, very lucrative. Even better, it didn’t involve weekends, and so didn’t interfere with the normal riding teaching that Nicole was doing. By now, Sensi’s School was no longer the smallest riding school in the world, but we still only had a few horses we could teach on, so we suggested to the school that they might like us to include horse care and management in the curriculum. This was very popular with them as it made the activity seem much less frivolous. We already had the licence, the insurance, and now that we’d moved to Long Street, the facilities. We were set to go.

  So it was that I took the first group of students up to the yard to introduce them to the horses one day in April 1998. Nicole was away on tour with Monty at the time, so I faced the prospect of dealing with the first days without her. It was raining very hard when I drove down to the school, which was not the plan, as I knew well the fortitude of this generation of Japanese. Rather than ‘Samurai’, the first word of Japanese I picked up was ‘Samui’, ‘I’m cold’. It was pointless to even consider working a horse outside in rain like this, but I had in my rucksack a box of doughnuts. Putting on a headcollar or picking up a foot would be about the limit of what we could do, but there would at least be something to fall back on, to make the first horse activity special. The six students – five girls and an extremely brave boy, all sixteen years old and fresh from Japan just two days before – met me in the lobby. They were accompanied by a Japanese teacher called Nori, a jovial and friendly man of about thirty-five, with very good English. As he also taught history, we had worked together for several years on a unique Second World War reconciliation project. Now, as the school was falling apart around his ears, he was being promoted into the void left by the best members of staff, and put in charge of redesigning the school curriculum to make it more attractive for parents. One of his main proposals had been to introduce several non-academic activities, of which horse riding was a star attraction, being a very exclusive activity in Japan due to the incredibly high cost of land. I knew a lot of his credibility was riding on this.