Whispering Back (28 page)

The harder we tried, the more stressed Sensi became. Eventually the husband reappeared and started ‘helping’. I don’t remember the details, only how much we all disliked him, and that he was definitely in a hurry. The more he hassled her, standing behind, the more focused she was on the people outside, the less on the space in front of her. She was getting more and more uptight and resistant. Eventually (after about a minute), he said we should put a long-line around her quarters, and went to get one while Nicole and I looked at each other, feeling uneasy and impotent.

I was standing behind Sensi, telling her to move on, while he attached the lunge line to one side of the trailer, then passed it through the other, and dropped it down over her tail. ‘Go on, girl!’ he shouted, pulling sharply on the line as it tightened above her hocks. I watched her tuck her legs beneath her as she looked back with white in her eyes and, through the noise and commotion, I had a sudden and powerful intuition that I ought not to be standing just there. I took a deliberate step back, and a second later, the space where my head had just been was punched by Sensi’s back hooves. I saw the dull gleam of the metal of her shoes, frozen in the air for an instant, less than a foot from my face.

I’m not saying that a lunge line around the quarters doesn’t work, and applied well, I don’t see anything wrong with it. But we didn’t get her in, needless to say, until the man stopped helping and went away in his truck.

Possibly the most shocking intervention happened when Nicole took Sensi to the vet, to have a kicked leg X-rayed in case it had a star fracture. Sensi loaded perfectly on the way there, but having been sedated so that she wouldn’t trash the X-ray machine, she was not really very with it when it came to loading her to go home. The vet was keen to lock up the yard before going out on her rounds, so she didn’t want to leave Nicole to wait for Sensi to wake up more. With a ‘Come along, old girl’, she slapped her cheerily on the backside a couple of times (the vet, that is, slapped Sensi), and gave her a few concerted heave-hos, but when that had no effect, went off to fetch a whip and a Chiffney.

‘I felt so helpless,’ Nicole told me later that evening. ‘I knew she’d be all right if we could just give her half an hour, but the vet wouldn’t let us wait. I’ve no idea why they call it an anti-rearing device, because the first thing Sensi did when she felt the pressure in her mouth was to rear straight up. She tried to run through the tiny gap between the trailer and the fence, and nearly crushed me in the process.’ Nicole rolled up her sleeve to show off an impressive bruise. ‘She scratched her face, too. The vet was standing behind her with a whip. She didn’t hit her really hard, but she did hit her. I’ve never seen Sensi like that, she was terrified. But also, because of the sedative, sort of far off, too. She kept rearing, and barging past me, and her mouth was all open and twisted. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing with the Chiffney, and all I could think of was how she would blame me for it. Her mouth’s cut and bruised and sore.’

Her leg, as it turned out, was absolutely fine.

I knew from the beginning that if I was to work with problem horses I would come across many bad loaders. But, despite having seen Monty and Kelly working with umpteen cases, and having done several at home under supervision from Nicole, I still was not fully prepared for my first real solo job in the summer of 1999. I had never worked alone, away from home, before.

The loader in question was a beautiful young 16.2 hands high chestnut mare called Cassie. As I took the details over the phone, she didn’t sound too bad – the owner could eventually get her onto a lorry, but if anyone tried to put a trailer ramp up, she would fly out backwards. She sounded pretty easy so I decided to go alone. As I was doing join-up, I was told a very disturbing story about some partitions falling down and trapping her in the box and also a harrowing account of how she had been beaten into the trailer when the owner had bought her, not long before. ‘Oh,’ I said, a little daunted, ‘so she’s actually quite badly traumatised.’

‘You don’t need to tell me, I know!’ the owner replied.

I resisted the urge to ask why she hadn’t told me on the phone.

I didn’t notice anything unusual until I was leaving the indoor school, having completed join-up and the usual halter training. As we passed through a wide door, Cassie flew through it at an incredible pace, barging me out of the way. I don’t know why I hadn’t picked this up on the way in, but she definitely had a problem with going through even quite a large gap. Worried that something was going to hurt her, she belted through as quickly as possible. Of course, this would only increase her chances of being hurt, making her more likely, for example, to bash her hip on the doorframe. It took over an hour, before she could stop and stand still in any part of the doorway, calmly enough not to rush. Eventually I got her to the point where I could reverse her through in both directions. It was a massive phobia for her, but the owner hadn’t mentioned it, perhaps not thinking it was relevant to her loading problem. When I felt she had got over her phobia of the doorway, I phoned home.

‘How’s it going?’ Nicole asked, a little anxiously.

‘Great! We’re doing really well. I’m about to take her to the horsebox now.’

There was a tactful silence at the other end of the line. I’d already been there for two and a half hours.

Having come so far already with such a major phobia, and having built a bond in the process, I was confident that the box would pose few problems, but when Cassie came round the corner and saw it she panicked. Unable to contain herself, she started trotting on the spot, literally shaking with fear. So I moved her away from it, and worked her on the halter again, asking her to move backwards and forwards many times, rewarding her for every effort, until she was calmer and more focused. Eventually I worked her round to the bottom of the ramp, where I spent even more time moving her around. By now, the wind was blowing briskly, and the doors flanking the entrance of the horsebox were flapping loudly against the sides of the ramp, in spite of our efforts to secure them with string. She was managing to cope, but the stress of the beating she anticipated was clearly visible in her eyes. As calmly as I could, I walked up to the ramp and stepped on it.

She snorted and backed away, while I held on to the lead rope for all I was worth. At first she lifted me up and pulled me towards her, but when I held on she came forward as I had taught her, so I immediately released the pressure. I was still asking too much, so I got off the ramp and asked her to keep backing up and coming forward some more. As the space opened up between her and the ramp, she became calmer and more concerned about having to respond to me and come forward off the pressure, than she was of the idea of loading. I asked her to go on the ramp again.

She couldn’t have made a better effort, for she leaped up and put both front feet squarely on the ramp, and stood, heaving, obviously expecting that I would insist that she continue to come forward and finish the job. Instead, I loosened the halter, rubbed her forehead and then asked her to step back off again. We walked around for a moment to give her time to think about it. The next time I asked she came a lot further up the ramp. I rewarded her again by asking her to step back off, and you could practically see the cogs turning in her head.

The next time I approached, she did not hesitate and got all her feet on the ramp, so her head was in the doorway. I hesitated, unsure whether to ask her to come forward. If she pulled back and hit her head, protected by a poll guard as it was, she would frighten herself and confirm all her worst fears about me. Tentatively I put a tiny amount of tension on the line, then released it and moved to the side, making a big space for her to move into. She walked straight in. I felt a flood of relief, gratitude and joy as I stood and gently stroked her neck.

She could hardly believe it when I immediately asked her to unload again, instead of the ramp being slammed shut as quickly as possible. She gave me her all after that, and within minutes was following me in with no lead rope on her at all. She seemed extremely pleased with herself, proud of overcoming her trauma, and it felt as if her whole attitude towards humans had changed too, no longer based on distrust and resentment. Within an hour the owner could load her with ease, put the partitions up, with or without other horses, close up the ramp and turn on the engine. I had spent over three hours preparing her and it had taken no more than four minutes to get her in.

Loading jobs never seem to be as straightforward as you might expect, and I learn something new from every one. An interesting horse I trained was an extremely posh Andalusian, owned by the Duchess of Richmond and Gordon, who lives at Goodwood near the south coast. It was easy to find, since it was clearly marked on my road map, as well as at every junction for miles. But when I arrived, I began to regret not paying more attention to the directions she gave me for what to do after I reached the estate, for I promptly got lost somewhere between the golf course, the motor racing circuit, the enormous palace, the woods and several huge stable blocks. I eventually was sent about a mile up a road in the opposite direction, past another large stable yard, school and house, to a wonderful little mansion set in a picturesque rolling valley. This dip had saved the cedar trees in this area from the worst of the 1987 hurricane, which had destroyed 30,000 trees on the estate, and left many of the huge old cedars that dominate the grounds as shattered hulks, scarred by the loss of massive boughs and often with no tops left at all. I was filled with dread at the prospect of what a similar storm could do to Moor Wood. But it was still a magnificent setting and the Duchess, who was very friendly and asked me to call her Sue, had a horse to match. Wisps of creamy mane curled down his handsome face and neck, and he was in superb shape, gleaming with health.

When I went to do join-up in her round pen, though, I immediately noticed that he didn’t think a great deal of humans. He kicked out several times to make sure I wasn’t going to get too close, and was difficult to join-up with. After I got follow-up, he broke away several times, and he did a great line in pretending I wasn’t there. I knew that the Duchess and her stable staff were very kind and took good care of him, but I had the feeling that whatever I managed to achieve that day, it might be a long time, if ever, before humans would appear to him as anything better than a necessary evil. The loading issue was only the most obvious manifestation of a deeper lack of trust. It was not as if he flinched or expected to be hit. But somehow, it seemed that perhaps his upbringing was not all it could have been. An example of this was his previous boxing experiences. The last time he’d been on a horsebox had been when he came to Goodwood from Leicester – a journey of eight hours. But he had been bred in Spain, and so it’s quite likely that his introduction to loading was being hustled onto a vehicle and subjected to a journey of many hundreds of miles by road and ferry. In his experience, going up the ramp did not just involve trusting people sufficiently to go into a very confined space. It also meant travelling for between eight and up to about forty hours. Why would any horse, having been through that, ever consent to go in a box again? Why would any human expect not to have created a bad loader by the end of a journey like that?

I got him to load pretty easily but couldn’t bear to take the risk that he might not follow me in without the lead rope. Even though the nearest open road was miles away, the estate was so huge we would have been searching for weeks if he’d gone AWOL, and this horse was probably worth more than my insurance company. We took him for some short drives, stopping to reload him a number of times, in the hope that he would gain confidence when his average journey time went down so dramatically.

I was exhausted but elated when I got back home and showed Nicole the cheque I had earned. I was particularly glad that it had been me who went, given the potential for disaster generated by Nicole’s subsequent question: ‘It says here the cheque’s from the Duchess of Richmond and Gordon. Who’s Gordon? Her husband? Doesn’t he even have his own cheque book?’

I had met the Duke briefly in the corridor and been unable to think what I should call him, but at last I managed to stammer out, ‘Are you Sue’s husband?’, which was probably not quite the appropriate etiquette but at least would not have disgraced me quite as much as asking him whether he was Gordon!

Funnily enough, although I have now succeeded in curing every other one of dozens of extremely bad loaders for other people, the last horse I could not load was our own Sensi. Looking back on it, it was probably a very good thing that I didn’t, as it quite possibly saved her life.

This was about a year before I visited the Duchess, for I had just recently finished my ten-week course. It was about two months after Sensi had given birth to Karma, and Nicole had gone to Kent, with Julia, to do a riding clinic. Sensi decided to do her usual trick and protest against this great injustice by making the vet come and attend to yet another medical emergency.

Now Sensi is well known to most of the vets in North Gloucestershire, and every other part of the country she has ever lived in. Although she has a very strong constitution, heals miraculously quickly and has hardly had a single day’s lameness in her whole life, she seems to have systematically worked her way through most of the veterinary textbooks. I can’t understand how her insurance company remains financially solvent, and would like to take this opportunity to apologise to any members who might have found their premiums going up in recent years.

Just in the eleven months when she was pregnant with Karma, she had broken her nose by running through the metal gate in the middle of the night, had laminitis, and then cut a four-inch gash in a hind leg while climbing down the muck-heap in a midnight escape from the stable yard. This last injury, while not quite in the right place to cause permanent lameness, nevertheless meant spending the last three weeks of her pregnancy standing on three legs, which seriously compromised the straightness of her spine and pelvis, as well as badly damaging several ligaments, which were softening in preparation for the birth. But despite the seriousness of all these incidents, she was in a far worse condition when she went down with a severe colic that summer evening.