Whispering Back

by Adam Goodfellow

  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.

  Sensi was unsettled that night, looking at her belly, and pacing around the stable. Her teats were waxed up, and every time I went out to check her, I wondered if there would be eight legs instead of four in the box. But each time there was just Sensi, looking enormous and gorgeous, but definitely alone. When the first light of dawn crept into the stable, I decided to let her out: we would be able to find her in the field now, and she’d either give birth imminently or leave it until the next night. I went back to bed.

  Less than two hours later, we were awoken by one of Sarah and Peter’s liveries banging on the door. ‘The sac’s showing! I’d get out there soon if I were you, or you’ll miss it!’

  We arrived just in time to see two forelegs and a head poking out, quickly followed by the rest of the foal’s body. She was born on a hill, in a pool of mud, and by the time she’d worked out which way was up and where her legs were, she’d tumbled quite a way from Sensi, who was looking over at this scrawny creature with fascination. We decided to call her Karma.

  It was a cold morning, and Karma was shaking and shivering. Sensi ambled over and licked her, and we gathered round, cleaning off bits of mucus and amniotic sac. Although Karma was still too weak to stand, we decided we should try to get her inside as it was starting to rain. As per the usual foaling instructions, I tried to tie up the placenta, but discovered it was extraordinarily slippery and deftly managed to untie itself no matter what I tried. In the end, I simply carried it behind her somewhat like a bridal train while, under Sensi’s watchful eye, Adam gathered up the foal, and found she was just light enough to carry. Staggering slightly, he brought her back to her stable, where he sat down and leaned against the wall. After she had suckled a few times, Karma joined him on the floor. She lay next to him, and he hugged and stroked her all over, moving her little feet around until she was happy to accept him handling them. Finally she put her head on his lap, and they fell asleep together.

  It was Monty’s birthday, 14 May 1999.

  I’d like to say that Karma was the most beautiful foal I’d ever seen, but even to my biased eyes she looked very peculiar. Her face was extraordinarily long and thin, and her sticky, scrawny body hardly fitted the fluffy vision I was expecting. Her legs looked like a spider’s, ridiculous in their comical length. However, almost by the minute, she began to look more normal, until, just one day after her birth, she was so completely gorgeous I almost couldn’t bear to leave her to go on tour.

  In the end I compromised and missed one demonstration near the end of the tour that had a day off either side of it, and thereby was able to spend an extra three days at home with Sensi and her foal. This also gave me more time to prepare for the imminent riding clinic.

  So on a Friday evening, one year almost to the day that we’d moved to Moor Wood, six horses and their riders descended on our yard for the weekend. With our six stables thus filled, we arranged with Sarah and Peter to move the horses we had in for training into their yard. We worked out a rigid timetable so that we wouldn’t be hogging the school all weekend, and managed to squeeze all the cars into our yard. We did our best to turn the studio into a lecture room. The bright blue tarpaulin hanging down from the roof with the weight of the water it had collected looked quite festive. It was clear that six students and three tutors (Adam, Julia and myself) wouldn’t physically fit in the annexe, so we set up a couple of kettles in the studio, setting by several large containers of water, and an ample supply of chocolate biscuits.

  Having overall responsibility for the entire clinic was nerve-racking, and during the introductions and first lecture on Saturday morning, I was acutely aware of how important it was that everything went really well. The nerves, however, melted within the first few minutes of having the first pair riding in the pen. It was a sultry, sunny day, and the horses were all settled and steady, helped I think by the fact that the pen, only recently surfaced, was still rather deep, in spite of hours of rolling to try to firm it up. Adam was filming, Julia and I were teaching, and almost before we knew it, we were through all three pairs, and it was time for lunch.

  In the afternoon, we had scheduled long-lining. We included this on the course because we feel it’s such an incredibly useful skill, very much ‘riding from the ground’, so much more educational than lungeing, and yet so rarely practised in this country. The first horse and rider combination, Suzanne Marshall with her horse Trojan, were in the pen, and about to start when Adam looked out across to the west and said, ‘There’s a storm approaching. I think perhaps we should take cover.’

  I looked up at the sky immediately above me, which was blue and clear. Then I cast my eyes across the valley from where the wind was rising, to the ominous wall of thick, dark cloud he was indicating, and stated confidently, ‘Oh, I’m sure it will blow over.’

  ‘Yes, it will blow us over. Don’t you think we should go in before we get wet?’

  ‘Oh, we’ll be fine,’ I said, and started teaching. I had been reading quite a lot of self-help, positive thinking books at the time, and felt that if only Adam wouldn’t keep drawing everyone’s attention to the imminent hurricane, it would simply go away.

  About three minutes later the sky blackened, the wind whipped up and the heavens opened. Trojan immediately drop
ped his head to his knees, turned his backside to the wind, and resolutely refused to move. The watching group stood poised, uncertain whether to obey their instincts and run for cover, possibly causing offence, or to stay and watch and get soaked. I was still clinging firmly to the belief that it was only a shower and would stop at any minute. But the drops of rain were as large as golf balls, and falling thicker and faster than most waterfalls.

  Finally Adam came up with a compelling argument. ‘Think of the horse, you can’t ask him to work in conditions like this,’ he begged, at which I relented and allowed him and the rest of the soaked participants to flee to the studio.

  We got Trojan rugged up and back in his stable just in time to hear the first claps of thunder booming out across the valley.

  With most of the group now thoroughly drenched, Adam handed around some towels and plugged in the electric heater. Shivering, we settled down to watch a Mary Wanless video, and I put the kettles on. Three seconds later, this excessive load on what turned out to be a botched electrical supply, shorted out the circuit, and we were left in darkness. ‘It’ll just be a fuse,’ we reassured each other, but when we examined the fuse box, by the light of a handy torch, we found fuses that looked nothing like what we were used to. Luckily, Peter turned up about ten minutes later, and happened to have a spare. We were back in business.

  At the end of the next day, we piled back into the studio and studied the video of the lessons. Everyone, without exception, had improved enormously, and here was the proof right in front of their eyes. We handed out student evaluation forms, and everyone was really positive, the only negative comments being about the rain. Studying the forms later, over a glass of chilled champagne, we realised we had organised a good course and were immensely proud. But we were acutely aware that without the pioneering work of Monty Roberts and Mary Wanless, we would have had almost nothing to offer. In particular, it was Mary’s research into how to actually teach that made the biggest difference. Her years of work in decoding and defining the fundamental, underlying principles of riding were the sole reason we could enable such rapid transformations in other people’s riding. The first time I heard someone say, ‘I’ve learned more about riding on this weekend than I have in the last ten years,’ it took my breath away. But then I thought back to that first assessment I’d received from Mary when she lectured on my ten-week Monty course, and how I’d learned more in that thirty minutes than I ever had before. It is a privilege to be able to pass on this knowledge. In particular, I was delighted that Suzanne Marshall, who is a BHSAI, was so intrigued with this ‘new approach’ that she signed up to the next available Mary Wanless course and also the Monty Roberts Preliminary Certificate of Horsemanship. She is now a credited Ride With Your Mind coach, was one of the first Intelligent Horsemanship Recommended Associates, and runs a successful teaching and training yard in Kent.

  Suzanne was a real pleasure to have around – always smiling and enthusiastic, and a very fast learner. Her parents had come up with her, towing Trojan with their brand new Subaru people carrier, to take advantage of a few days in the Cotswolds, and they were just as lovely. So much so that they didn’t even complain when we set fire to their car.

  It wasn’t deliberate, of course. It’s just that at the time we were the frustrated owners of a monster green horsebox, which had decided, not for the first time, that the conditions were not optimal for it to start. We think it had strong astrological tendencies, and would only burst into life when Aries was ascending, or something. Sadly, the particular cosmic conditions it required seemed to coincide lamentably rarely. In addition, if there was any suggestion of cold or damp in the air it would need to dry in the sun for several weeks before it could cope. Unfortunately, in the Cotswolds, these weather conditions only happen once a century or so. I guess the downpour on Saturday had depressed it too much, and the fact that it had had a couple of days off meant that it couldn’t possibly hold the charge in its battery.

  The upshot was that it wouldn’t start, the Subaru was just sitting there, and we happened to have a pair of jump leads handy. Suzanne’s dad, being knowledgeable about these matters, confidently volunteered for the job.

  We set them up and Suzanne’s dad switched on his car, and then revved the engine. From time to time, Adam turned the ignition switch, and although the noises coming out of the box were slightly more encouraging, it still wasn’t firing up. Instead, small flames and a lot of smoke were appearing from under the bonnet of the Subaru. With the engine switched off and the flames subsiding, we stepped over to inspect the damage.

  The hole the fire had produced was quite small, considering, and as he pointed out, only in the battery. ‘That’ll be all right, I should think a small piece of gum or something would seal that up.’ So saying, he produced a small wad from his mouth, but when he placed it over the hole in the battery, it promptly fell through and sizzled quietly in the battery acid. ‘Perhaps I’ll need two sticks,’ he said, beginning to chew again.

  The car was so new it was more or less still in its wrapper, but they wouldn’t hear of us buying them a new battery. In fact, they kept apologising to us about the fact that their car had failed to start the box! We should already have known by then that it wasn’t a question of mechanics. The vehicle we had bought was perfectly mechanically sound. It just had an attitude problem, and if it didn’t want to start, it wasn’t going to be forced to by some upstart trailer-towing vehicle.

  We ran seven clinics that summer, including two in Kent. Julia, who was by now teaching regularly on Kelly’s courses, had more or less moved onto the sofa in the annexe. If we’d thought the annexe was small for two people, it was astonishing that all three of us managed to squeeze in. Perhaps more surprising was that we still had so much to say to each other, and on the drive to the course, Julia and I continued to talk incessantly.

  Towards the end of the summer, we sensed something was in the air with Sarah and Peter. For one reason or another, they’d had a pretty rough time since they’d been at Moor Wood. We thought perhaps they wanted to leave, but we couldn’t work out how it could possibly make sense for them to do so. We knew we were already paying more than half the rent, and this together with the money they received from another tenant and their livery clients meant that they were living in this fantastic place, and keeping their horses and ponies here, for about the same cost as a one-bedroom flat in Milton Keynes.

  At the same time, we weren’t sure if it would be good or bad news if they left. On the one hand, it would be fantastic to have the place to ourselves. On the other, we didn’t know if we would be able to afford it. It wasn’t even clear that we would have the opportunity to take the lease on, since we weren’t direct tenants of the landlord, Henry, only sub-tenants. We pondered the situation for several weeks, trying to work out what was going on.

  So when one evening towards the end of August they asked if they could see us both, we weren’t sure quite what to expect. And even though we’d been considering the possibility for some time, it still came as a shock when they told us that they’d already informed Henry that they were going to leave. Sarah had signed a five-year lease when she had moved here with her previous husband, and it still had more than twelve months to run. Henry was well within his rights to demand that they either sit out their commitment, or pay him the rent for the remaining time, but he let them off. The biggest shock was that they were leaving as soon as the current month’s rent ran out. They had already signed a lease on another property. This meant that in just a fortnight we would either be moving out of the annexe and into the bigger part of the house, or we would have to leave Moor Wood and find another place for us, our two cats and by now seven horses, the round pen (and its 100 tonnes of surface) and horsebox (if it would start) to live.

  It was one of those decisions that wasn’t really a decision. The chances of finding a similar place locally – or at least, within reasonable distance of Witney – in two weeks were unlikely to say the least. We couldn�
��t simply stick around and see if the next tenants would want sub-tenants. The prospect of going back to our little flat on an estate in Milton Keynes was not enticing. There was still the problem of finding somewhere suitable in Milton Keynes to train the horses we would take on, let alone the issue of what we would do with the training horses we currently had in at Moor Wood.

  We hardly had to discuss the matter. We were staying. We would just have to find a way to make it work.

  The most frightening aspect was that the rent was such that we couldn’t simply borrow some money from either of our families to cover it if we were stuck one month. It wasn’t the sort of money that anyone we knew could simply draw out of their current account and not really notice. In fact, even if one of us were to get a reasonably well-paid full-time job, it probably wouldn’t cover the whole amount. We would simply have to be successful. We calculated that if we had x liveries at y pounds per week, and z number of horses in for training, we should be all right, but we were still acutely aware of the fine line that existed between success and failure. I kept thinking of that well-known joke: ‘How do you make a small fortune in horses? Start with a large one!’ It didn’t seem so funny any more.

  Sarah and Peter informed Henry of our decision to stay, and he came down to the annexe to discuss the details. We’d only really been on waving terms before, and we were curious to find out what he was actually like. Sarah and Peter had given us the impression that Henry and his wife were rather snooty, that they lived the high life of the propertied classes, hardly having to work, income just rolling in from every direction. This image fitted in nicely with our preconceptions, but we’d already noticed that for someone who lived a life of leisure, Henry Robinson appeared to be working extremely hard. I often saw him out on his tractor in the fields, on my way to work in the early mornings, and at certain times of year we could hear the drone of the combine harvester at all times of the night and day. Henry and his right-hand-man Les, the only full-time employee on a farm of 1,500 acres, worked almost constantly to hold the farm together in a climate of great uncertainty. Even the income from renting a number of cottages in and around the estate was not without its drawbacks, for with this seeming bonanza came the huge responsibility that every last Cotswold stone used to build it was listed at grade two or higher, meaning Henry had no option but to keep all the buildings in a state of good repair using antique materials, regardless of their financial viability. We began to realise that owning a lot of property could be as much a liability as an asset, and didn’t necessarily guarantee a lot of spare income.